Radio: Dizzy Broad

The two major networks resumed their old, over-ballyhooed Sunday-at-8 fray this week with two new opponents: Groaner Elvis (“The Pelvis”) Presley, 21, v. Musicomedienne Mary Martin, 43—the two biggest audience-pullers today. Elvis, doing the second of a $50,000 trio of shows for CBS and Ed Sullivan, posed a fancy threat, but Mary, starring in Born Yesterday (Hallmark Hall of Fame, NBC), was still TV champion. There were no hard feelings backstage either. “Elvis is jus’ darlin’,” drawled Texas-born Mary. “Besides, I can’t be mad. My mother’s name was Presley. We might just be kinfolks.”

Walk Like a Girl. As the eager, unlettered Billie Dawn of Born Yesterday, Mary sashayed through her first comedy role without a live audience, and, as before with Peter Pan, gave one of the rare performances of the TV season. With a mincing, floozy strut, she sparkled (with $1,000,000 worth of Harry Winston jewels, two Maximilian minks and five Main-bocher originals) through that hilarious old gin-rummy game, and asked a visiting U.S. Senator’s wife: “You want to wash your hands or anything, honey?” She also marked the beginning of her social awakenings by defining “peninsula” as “that new medicine.” As Harry Brock, the bullying baron, of junk who tries to buy the U.S. Senate, Paul Douglas was again, as he was for 1,642 performances on Broadway, superbly irascible and boorish.

“There are Billie Dawns everywhere,” says Mary, “in Texas, Ohio or anywhere in the world. My biggest difficulty was getting my accent back—after struggling 16 years-to lose it.” Mary also had trouble getting her elfin feet back on the ground. “After all those flat-footed roles, I’d forgotten how to walk like a girl. I didn’t get that Monroe slouch—which ain’t bad, honey—but I don’t know how.”

After nearly four years on Broadway and a successful movie run, Garson Kanin’s ragtag yarn was an eventual certainty for TV. It also marked Kanin’s first crack at TV directing. He was surprised at the prissiness of TV censors: four of the several references to Billie as a “broad” had to go. Anything that might be construed as a reference to mental illness was also cut: “crazy broad” became “dizzy broad.” “Off her nut” became “blow her stack.” Suggestions of physical impairment were primly deleted, viz., Billie, trying on her glasses, to Harry: “What’s so funny? That I’m blind practically?” Network censors thought the most offensive line was Billie’s explanation of Harry’s objection to her work as a chorine: “He likes to get to bed early.” The TV version: “He likes me to get to bed early.”

Strip All the Gears. With Born Yesterday, Mary Martin became the highest-paid performer on TV: it marked the first of six shows she will do for NBC under a record half-million-dollar contract. (Other possibilities: Annie Get Your Gun, and a tribute to the late Vincent Youmans, in which she would sing still-unreleased songs written especially for her and found four years after Composer Youmans’ death.) Currently Mary and Producer-Husband Richard Halliday are huddling with network, U.N. and State Department brass on a projected round-the-world junket with Peter Pan, culminating with a U.S. tele-showing Easter Sunday. “I’ve always wanted to do it for as many children as possible,” says she. “But I’ll have to strip all the gears in my head to lose my Texas accent again.”