THE JUKEBOX: Men Look Twice

The Hollywoods are full of tall. tawny-blonde pinups who have fared better on film than Lola Jean Albright, and the jukeboxes rattle with records made by singers who sell more songs. But when Lola’s latest release, Dreamsville, went out to the deejays last week, its fans were readymade. For Lola is Edie Hart, the slim, smoky-voiced saloon singer, the girl wrho keeps the fires warm for TV’s Private Eye Peter Gunn, the blue-eyed sentimentalist who can whisper into the mike and convince a million televiewers that she is alone with each one of them. The songs may be old—They Didn’t Believe Me, It’s Always You—but the voice comes fresh and insinuating, husky with promise. Under the spotlight, the face may seem sad, even a bit tired, but most men look twice.

Quarters for Corn. Few girls get a break from the jukebox trade these days; the quarters clink in the slot for the grinding corn of Fabian or Frankie Avalon. or the molasses-slow maundering of Johnny Mathis. Lola, who must settle for less, deserves more. She has been learning her trade, scrabbling at the edges of show business, ever since she sang Listen to the Mocking Bird at her home-town Y.W.C.A. in Akron 25 years ago. She was a gawky ten-year-old then, defiant of her parents’ dislike of anything that smacked of entertainment. Today, at 35, she sometimes concludes that show business has been defying her.

Lola has behind her countless different jobs—radio actress, stenographer, switchboard operator, photographic model. She says that she never really wanted to pay the price that Hollywood demands for stardom (“You become everybody’s personal property”), but by 1946 she was there, like a thousand others, sitting around on sets, earning little more than the right to join the extras union. She finally landed a meaty role in Champion, with Kirk Douglas and Ruth Roman. The picture, says Lola, “set up Kirk and Ruth. Afterwards. I couldn’t get a job. I went to New York to look for work on TV. Champion was playing on Broadway. There was my picture out front—all the reviews said ‘Here’s a new star’—and I couldn’t even pay my hotel bill.”

A Hold at Last. By 1949 Lola was back in Hollywood, still waiting for recognition. She suffered from insomnia, and she was beginning to pick up a reputation as an oddball. “I always liked to do kookie things,” she insists, but now, with two unsuccessful marriages and years of unimportant roles behind her, she feels as if she is taking hold. Peter Gunn gave her steady work (though she still lives on vitamin shots and fights insomnia), and the chance to sing gave her a new career. Today, when she walks her dog around her modest Encino home, lonely Lola is beginning to think that the world looks good. And her tentative joy is reflected in the intimate warmth of her songs. “I never had the remotest idea anybody would ever ask me to sing, but Columbia did,” says she, “and I’m especially grateful for one thing: I don’t sound like anybody else.”