One for Harry

While they waited for the little czar to arrive, nine headliners from the Metropolitan Opera House were marking time in Victor's Studio One (formerly a horse auction barn). Some of them clustered at the piano and timidly tried out the unfamiliar words of the oldtime fox-trot I'm Just Wild About Harry. The 11 1/2-month-old recording ban was over (see BUSINESS), and RCA Victor publicity men had chosen as Victor's first record a Christmas message for Harry Truman.

Shortly before 5, an hour & a half late, a stumpy little figure in dove grey hat and black overcoat came through the frosted glass doors from the street. Flanked by his lawyer and RCA's David Sarnoff, J. Caesar Petrillo, boss of the union musicians, had arrived.

Pretending to be awed by the crowd of longhairs around him, Petrillo clapped Sarnoff on the back and cried, "We are the proletariat." Everyone was in high spirits; both the record companies and Petrillo were, happy that they had found a way around the law, so that Petrillo could once again fatten his union's welfare fund with record royalties (TIME, Jan. 26).

Little Mr. Big started the proceedings by reading "Christmas Greetings to the President." He muffed his first try, and blamed it on the blondes present. The singers banked themselves once more behind the keyboard, the control room buzzed for silence and this time Jimmy read his little speech without a slip. Then the stars from the Met, helped out by pop singers Perry Como and Fran Warren, did their little turn.

When the gag was over, Perry Como rushed into Studio Two, where an all-string orchestra awaited him. A few moments later they were lurching through the Missouri Waltz, a Truman inauguration special which was Victor's first commercial disc.

The green baize turntables whirled far into the night. Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra hopped over from the Cafe Rouge at 2 a.m. Phlegm-voiced Vaughn Monroe, who had been among the last to record last December, tried desperately to get back from Ohio to be the first, but arrived too late. By noon the next day, Como's Missouri Waltz was on sale on Broadway.

At Columbia Records, there was much less hoopla. Their new Manhattan recording studio, a converted church, was as sparsely peopled as an English cathedral at evensong. A hundred-odd lights, suspended like enormous inverted flowers from the beamed ceiling, illuminated a small group of bored musicians, engineers and minor officials. A poker game was started, and Arthur Godfrey, who had been called in to cut some corn named I'm Going Back to Whur I Come From, "noodled," as he called it, on the studio organ. When word came that the ban was over, Columbia, undistracted by bigwigs and publicity gags, got to work on their first record half an hour before Victor.

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