Rudy's Girl

What Rudy Vallee needed was a big-nosed redhead who could take a verbal pratfall. A year ago, when his music & gag show started skidding badly, Rudy got the girl. Comedienne Joan Davis accepted a two-week guest spot on Rudy's program.

Joan stayed on as a regular.

Presently the Vallee show (NBC, Thursdays, 10 p.m. E.W.T.) began revolving almost entirely around thin (118 lb.), good-looking (except for the nose), redheaded Joan. Simulated muscle woman, wrestler and weight lifter, irrepressible Joan took the toughest punishment and bobbed up for more.

Once, while playing a jealous woman, supposed to threaten to pull Guest Star Constance Bennett's hair, Joan ad-libbed: "I'll pull your blonde hair out by its black roots."

When last week's script called for Joan to kiss Vallee, Rudy started to make the usual hand-to-lips sound effect, Joan yelled: "None of that! I've waited over a year for this." Resoundingly she smacked the blushing Vallee while the studio audience roared.

A lesser lady than Joan might be unnerved by the verbal shellacking dished out to her by the Vallee scripts. Joan says she finds solace in a whacking pay check. Her income from radio and movies (prior to the $67,000 limit): about $100,000 a year.

Now 30, Joan Davis is the daughter of a St. Paul train dispatcher. At nine her voice was already strained from an amateur overload of singing, reciting, quipping. When her parents moved to Los Angeles, Joan signed for three years on the Pantages vaudeville circuit. Her partner (in a vaudeville act of unalloyed corn) was Si Wills, who soon became her husband. Quitting the road in 1936, Wills & Davis settled in Hollywood. In the next six years Joan graduated from cinema bit parts to featured parts.

When she asked Columbia Pictures if she might renovate her crooked, overlong nose, they replied: "Nope, that's the face we bought, and that's the face we want."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.