Television: The Sponsor’s Wife

The sponsor’s wife, in life and legend, is one of broadcasting’s most potent forces,* but Mrs. Kathryn Murray, 50, tops them all. Not content with behind-the-scenes power, Mrs. Murray plunged into TV herself as M.C. of her husband’s show, The Arthur Murray Party. Without a smidgen of experience as an entertainer, she tried her hand at songs, dances, fancy patter, pantomime, knockabout acrobatics. The result is even more phenomenal: in seven years Kathryn and the show have become such hardy TV perennials that the bills are now footed by a sponsor she is not married to.

Like It or Lump It. Last week, on NBC for Bristol-Myers (Ipana toothpaste), pint-sized (5 ft., 98 Ibs.) Kathryn Murray catapulted through a sketch as a theater usherette pantomiming a gypsy musical, and rode herd on a typical Party: a swirl of waltzers, a specialty spot by Dancers Rod Alexander and Bambi Lynn, an amateur ballroom-dancing contest between three couples aged five to eleven, and, in the closing moments, an appearance by tall, erect Arthur Murray, 62, in time to waltz his wife away.

This innocuous formula evokes the amateurish fun of a party at the local dancing class. Critics who do not like it can only lump it with the corny appeal of ABC’s Bandleader Lawrence Welk. Yet for the last three summers, the Murrays have won a bigger share of the TV audience than the winter shows they replaced, and last fortnight they out-Trendexed (by 11.6 to 7.8) Bandleader Welk himself, one of TV’s best drawing cards.

Up at 6. Conquering new worlds is an old experience to Kathryn Murray. Her twin girls were twelve before she stirred out of a housewife’s role and joined her husband in running his Manhattan dance studio. Since then, thanks largely to her sparkplugging, the Murrays have built an empire of 450 studios piling up an annual gross of $60 million in the U.S. and six foreign countries. Between running the empire and helping to plan and rehearse the TV show, Kathryn has enough excess energy to rise daily at 6 a.m. in her Park Avenue apartment and bake cakes and cookies for Arthur to munch at the office.

As a TV hostess, Kathryn leaves many a male viewer feeling that her fingers are clutching his lapels. But for sheer limb-risking vigor as a lady of 50 with five grandchildren, she is worth goggling at. In her pantomimic specialty, she has enacted cats, urchins and tramps, done somersaults, cartwheels and pratfalls, careened on roller skates and horses, swung from a chandelier and a trapeze; acrobats used her as a jump rope. Kathryn, an off-screen wit, belittles the on-screen Kathryn: “You just lend your body to anyone you know is strong.” One of her daughters once asked: “Mother, do you think these things are really quite suitable?” Producer Murray thinks so. Says he: “When women see Kathryn on a trapeze, they visualize themselves on a trapeze.” Says Kathryn, “I hear I get a salary, but I haven’t seen it.” Arthur gives it as $1,500 weekly and says that he deposits it in their joint bank account.

* Most potent: Statuesque Soprano Jean Tennyson, wife of the late Celanese Corp. of America President Camille Dreyfus, who sang for years on radio’s Celanese-sponsored Great Moments in Music. Irked stockholders finally sued, said Jean’s warbling cost Celanese $1,000,000 a year. Jean quit, turned to charitable works.