Television: The Perils of Arlene

When she was 24, Arlene Francis Kazanjian, lithe, brunette daughter of an Armenian portrait photographer, auditioned her way into radio as a dog, a cat and a witch—all for one show. After 24 erratic years in show business, ambitious, Massachusetts-born Arlene Francis, now a taffy blonde, is still playing the all-purpose professional lady.

As editor of Home, NBC’s do-it-yourself TV “magazine,” Arlene has coxswained a varsity crew, gone down in a diving bell and up on a “cat cracker” (oil refiner), and ridden a camel at the Bronx Zoo. She also showed Homemakers how to make cream puffs and raise chimpanzees. She was the first woman ever to open the New York Stock Exchange (“I blew the whistle and all these men came charging out of their offices and started making money”). When the gadget-ridden Home that Pat Weaver built closed up last month after 3½-years on the air, Arlene was heartbroken (“I sat home and cried all the time”).

Last week Arlene was again being plugged in like an electric toaster by 6,000,000 housewives.

Cooked Spaghetti. Cheerily resigned to her new home-away-from Home, The Arlene Francis Show, she staged a salute to woman suffrage, told fairy tales, dueted with Comedienne Elaine Stritch, interviewed General Carlos Romulo, chitchatted with Actor Cyril Ritchard, and delivered a spoof of Marlene Dietrich’s seductive See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have. Only a fractured heel, which she got hopping over a low railing on Home, kept her from dancing. As always, Arlene’s personal didos were gay, frolicsome and deceptively casual. “Sometimes,” she explains, “the cozy, casual chums of TV are all as relaxed as cooked spaghetti, but most of what you see is the result of arduous, careful preparation.”

A lifetime of just such preparation, plus a shrewd sense of utility, has established Arlene as the first lady of TV—and probably the highest paid. Toughest hurdle was Papa Kazanjian, who bundled Episcopalian Arlene off to a Roman Catholic convent when she was seven, later put her in Manhattan’s flossy Finch School for proper young ladies. In a final, futile effort to steer her clear of the theater, he bought her a gift shop on Madison Avenue (Studio d’Arlene), which closed in the Depression. Soon a toughened veteran of the soap-opera circuit (Big Sister, Aunt Jenny), Arlene went on to mysteries (Mr. District Attorney), musicals (Phil Spitalny’s show), and THE MARCH OF TIME. In her 20-odd Broadway roles, most of them undistinguished, she played everything from a Russian sniper to the Virgin Mary; but when Hollywood cast her as a prostitute in Murders in the Rue Morgue, her father shot off a hot wire: “Have just seen you half-naked on the screen. Come home.” She did.

Back in Manhattan, hard-driving Arlene hit pay dirt with a radio show called What’s My Name?, which gave her the reputation of saying, as she does on CBS’s What’s My Line?, anything that pops into her heart-shaped head. Once she blurted, “Oh my God,” then broke the studio’s stunned silence with: “Oh my God, I can’t say ‘Oh my God’ over the air!”

Giddy Gelding. This, fall Arlene will star in a new Harry (Reclining Figure) Kurnitz comedy on Broadway called Once More—With Feeling, to be co-produced by her second husband, Actor-Director Martin Gabel. She will still do both her TV shows, look after her interest in a posh Manhattan saloon called Michael’s Pub, raise some cows, and try to get Cut Purse, the horse that she owns with TV Critic John Crosby,* out on the tracks (“He’s been spoiled for two years. We had to geld him, he was so giddy”). Up at 6:45 a.m., Arlene breakfasts with her ten-year-old son Peter in an eleven-room apartment that she decorated herself, is chauffeured to the studio in a hired limousine (“my only luxury”) for 8 o’clock rehearsals. After her 10-10:30 show, she goes over her fan mail (about 5,000 letters a week), then plunges into the endless round of business luncheons, hairdressers, interviews, benefits, art showings, recording sessions and couturiers (she has 200-odd “changes” filling her five closets). Arlene makes trips to the bank in an armored car, but insists that she likes the work more than the $250,000 annual paycheck she draws. Although the theater is really her first love, she greatly enjoys being a home appliance. “The theater is caviar.” she says. “You can’t count on having it all the time.”

* Whose syndicated column she used last week to flail the electronic monster that created her: “Maybe the brisk climate that prodded our forebears into building a nation has become too well heated to build a network with blood coursing through its veins!”