Art & Tires

What it takes to sell an automobile tire to a radio listener is anybody's guess but this season the 33,000 dealers in U. S. Royal de Luxes are stringing along with Hildegarde, a luscious, hazel-eyed Milwaukee blonde who sings the way Garbo looks. For the tire trade and its prospects, glamorous Hildegarde croons smooth new & old favorites like Why Do I Love You? Deep Purple in a pulsing viola d'amore voice while a slick, Roxy-style orchestra conducted by Raymond Paige (Hollywood Hotel, Packard) accompanies her. The U. S. Tire Dealers show, op Men and a Girl, has no gagmen, no cash prizes, no delirium in its Wednesday night half-hours over CBS, but by last week, its second on the air, it had won an encouraging share of the 10 o'clock tuners.

The U. S. Rubber Co. tire dealers choose their own radio salesmen, first of whom was Ben Bernie last year. They pay for the show themselves, pick it through 150 representative tire dealers and an elected advisory committee. A sample program of 99 Men and a Girl (it would have been 100 Men and a Girl if Universal Pictures had been willing to sell the title of its 1937 Deanna Durbin-Leopold Stokowski film) was whipped up and recorded, and the recording auditioned in January by the dealers' representatives assembled in Detroit. They liked it, and the price, about $18,000 a week, seemed reasonable enough when split 33,000 ways. Hildegarde gets $1,000 a week.

In Adell, Wis., Hildegarde is more fully known as Hildegarde Loretta Sell, daughter of a grocer of German stock and his French-Swiss wife. She sold hairpins in a department store in Milwaukee, sang in Catholic choirs, pounded a piano in a cinema, tried vaudeville and song-plugging until Gus Edwards, vaudeville impresario who started Winchell, Cantor, Jessel et al., spotted her in 1932. He pared her name down to just Hildegarde, started her off to London and Paris night spots to acquire international glamor.

Whether the Paige orchestra needs 99 men is a matter of much conjecture in the radio business. Wonderstruck at its "blends . . . colorations . . . interplay," Variety noted one point the first week where "the 24 fiddles came in like roses on the June zephyrs." A less awed viewpoint was economically summed up in radio's gag-of-the-week: "What can you do with 100 men that you can't do with 50 men and a mirror?"

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