Fill-in

CBS publicity has a tactful way of wording it: the TV show called Blues by Bargy appears "at various hours" during the week. Tall, limpid-eyed Singer-Pianist Jeanne Bargy, 27, describes her eight months with CBS more bluntly: "I'm a fillin. Whenever they have an odd quarter-hour or when someone is sick, they get in touch with me."

Often she has had the closing program spot, which might mean waiting until the end of an extra-inning night baseball game. Once, ready and made-up at 8 p.m., she went on the air sometime after midnight. "If the image was wobbly it wasn't because of bad transmission," she says. "It was just my make-up blurring." Another night a "deuce" (2,000-watt spotlight) exploded while she was singing a number called Lovers' Gold. Showered by shattered glass from the smoking, spluttering lamp, Bargy didn't miss a single tremulous note. Besides poise, she has developed a phenomenal memory for lyrics, spot commercials and program notes, because she is too nearsighted to read either sheet music or off-camera cards.

The daughter of Roy Bargy, orchestra leader and onetime arranger for Paul Whiteman, Jeanne got into show business at the age of 13 on Toledo's station WSPD ("It was pretty much the same show I do now"). After graduating from New York University, she scored a modest success touring the Midwest, playing and singing in cocktail lounges. Then she married Salesman Sid Landau ("I can't understand why people always laugh when I tell them Sid sells zippers") and moved to Brooklyn.

What no one--including Bargy, her husband and her friends--was prepared for was the astonishingly tender look which TV's normally harsh eye gives Jeanne at the piano. A tall, earnest girl with no pretensions to beauty, Jeanne Bargy on television somehow becomes small, sadly romantic and nicely sexy. Her songs (the blues in Blues by Bargy refer more to her voice than her repertory) are plaintive ballads; her delivery and pace are a restful contrast to TV's frequently scratchy and perfervid fare, her touch on the keyboard deft, efficient and unobtrusive.

This week the Bargy formula began to pay off. She got a sponsor (the Duffy -Mott Co.), at least one settled time spot (Tues., 10:15 p.m.), and was hailed by Columnist Walter Winchell, who gushed that she was "new and refreshing . . . soft, sweet and dreamy." Mildly surprised by success, Jeanne Bargy said: "I'd been thinking of adding guest stars and things like that to my show. Now, I guess I'll keep it as it is."

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