Radio: Latin Lover

“It’s incongruous that I spend my evenings with you in your apartment while I’m mending the children’s socks and sewing buttons on my husband’s clothes …”

“I’m a dreamer, a romanticist-so I escape to you while my husband dozes on the couch . . .”

“My husband is asleep in the bedroom, and you have put me in such a mood I wonder if the fool realizes what he’s missing , . .”

Though husbands are snoringly unaware, discontented California housewives are writing this kind of thing, and by the thousands, to television’s first Great Lover. He is a suave, six-foot Italian named

Renzo Cesana who, as The Continental, appears twice a week over Los Angeles’ station KNBH. He purrs at his admirers in a sex-laden. Boyer-esque voice, enhancing his determinedly un-American manner with a monocle and ascot tie. He is surrounded by such emblems of the lady-killer as Chinese prints, a library of love lyrics and magnums of champagne.

Perfume & Love Songs. While an organ perfumes the air with strains of I Kiss Your Hand, Madame, Cesana murmurs: “Don’t be afraid, darling, it’s only a man’s apartment.” From this high-voltage start flow 15 minutes of well-turned compliments, sly innuendo, intimate laughs, all floating on oceans of European charm. There are cigarettes and pink champagne, love songs rendered in a throaty whisper (explains Cesana: “I’m the only Italian living who can’t sing”) and, finally, a heartbreaking good night as Cesana gazes deep and soulfully into his loved one’s eyes and breathes: “I haven’t any right to do the things I do.” Cesana reached his goal of TV lover by the usual circuitous route. Jesuit-educated Renzo was precocious enough at 16 to have his first play produced by Roberto Rossellini. He reached the U.S. in 1934 as a writer-actor for MGM, which was then making a series of Italian-language films. He has spent the past 15 years in & out of radio, advertising and publicity. In his few movie bit-parts, he is almost always cast as a priest. As a further comfort to U.S. housewives, he is also whispering his romantic message onto Capitol Records.

Escape for the Ladies. Cesana got the idea for The Continental last year, failed with it on radio before he talked KNBH into giving the show a cautious try on TV. As writer and producer as well as The Continental’s only actor, 39 year-old Cesana insists he plays his part with a tongue-in-cheek seriousness, hopes only “to furnish the ladies with the illusion of an escapade while they remain in the sanctity and safety of their own homes.” j Of the ladies’ husbands, he says handsomely: “American men have such a wonderful sense of humor.”