Irish Tenor

The most popular Irish tenor in the U.S. since the great days of John McCormack was in full career last week. Handsome, high-spirited Morton Downey, 43, has been singing before the U.S. public so long that he is widely taken for granted. But not by the millions of women who eagerly listen to the Blue Network five afternoons a week (Mon.-Fri., 3 p.m., E.W.T.). And not by his sponsor, Coca-Cola, which has just given him a four-and-a-half year contract and a $1,000 raise (to $4,000 a week).

Morton Downey, who grosses $250,000 a year from radio alone, has no such fabulous voice as John McCormack's, either for the lyric subtleties of Mozart or the ripe Celtic emotionalism of Kathleen Mavourneen. But Downey has an exceptionally high, sweet voice, which he uses with a redolent Paddyism irresistible to the Ancient Order of Hibernians, Knights of Columbus, Westbrook Pegler and most Irishmen, genuine or occasional. His voice is so high that he says of his choirboy period "in the olden days they would surely have brought me to the vet's."*

Unfrocked Altar Boy. Morton Downey's father was fire chief of Wallingford, Conn. At six, Morton got $1 for singing at a local minstrel show. "That money," says he, "made a terrific impact on me." Since then Downey claims to have gotten "more mileage" out of his voice than any other singer in the business.

Paul Whiteman signed up the cherubic, long-lashed song-plugger when he was 18 ("I looked like an unfrocked altar boy"). In between his songs with the band, Downey sat with the brass section and pretended to blow a horn, although he could not play a note. His salary boiled up to $350 a week.

Downey spent six years singing in Paris, London and Dublin resorts, and in his Club Delmonico in Manhattan. He got cocky: "An Irish boy starts to take a lot for granted when you find out that the Prince of Wales, Viscount Castlerosse or Lord Beaverbrook will talk to you like anybody else." Radio fascinated him. "The mystery of the thing got me because a guy like me had to shut the windows on Sunday because the neighbors complained, and here I was getting mail from Africa."

Joe Kennedy's Client. Around 1939 the mail began to thin out, and Downey soon went off the air. He found a spot in Billy Rose's raucous show at the Fort Worth Texas Centennial, and another at Rose's Aquacade at the New York World's Fair. His comeback was rapid. He is a confessed millionaire, many of whose investments are under the shrewd thumb of Joseph P. Kennedy, but he has never taken himself too seriously. "Success," Morton Downey says, "has gone to my hips."

* An allusion to the custom, especially prevalent in 17th-and 18th-Century Italy, of castrating boys with beautiful sopranos so that their voices would not change. At that time the best castrati were the most feted and prosperous singers of the period. Many connoisseurs preferred the castrati to the finest female sopranos, although a critic in London's famed Spectator once complained of "the shrill celestial whine of eunuchs."

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