Eye & Ear Specialist

Dorothy Dandridge is the most strikingly good-looking Negro singer to come along since Lena Horne. Hollywood discovered that fact last year, when Dorothy sang in Sunset Boulevard nightclubs; then London got a look and quickly agreed. But "everyone" told her she still had to prove she could be a success in New York. Last week Singer Dandridge proved it emphatically. The management of Manhattan's La Vie en Rose could not supply tables enough for the customers who crowded in.

Swathed in a cocoonlike gown of gold lame, she came wriggling out of the wings like a caterpillar on a hot rock. At the mike, still undulating, she launched into a typical Dandridge patter song called Love Isn't Born, It's Made. Sample:

Love isn't born on a beautiful April morn.

Love isn't born, it's made. And that's why every window

Has a window shade . . .

Slipping into low gear, she cooed another one called Blow Out the Candle ("So there won't be any scandal"). By the time she had pleaded Talk Some Sweet Talk to Me, in a furry and insinuating tone, she had the fans goggle-eyed.

A rather earnest and demure woman offstage, Dorothy, 29, is modest about her talents. "I have a nice voice and it's pleasing. It's got a lot of soul in it. Besides, people just seem to like to look at me."

A trouper since she was five, Cleveland-born Dorothy has waited a long time for people to start looking. As a child, she toured the South in "a kind of package show" with her mother (Ruby Dandridge of the Beulah and Judy Canova radio shows), sometimes singing hymns and "sweet songs," such as The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise, in churches. At 16, she was singing with her sister in Jimmie Lunceford's band at Manhattan's Cotton Club, but nobody paid much attention. In 1942, she got married; now divorced, she has a daughter, Harolyn, 7.

Dorothy got started on the road to success when the practiced eyes of Pianist-Arranger Phil Moore lit on her at Hollywood's Mocambo. Moore, who coached Lena Horne, wrote some new material for Dorothy, gave her some hints on how to use it. Her big trouble at first: "I was too inhibited to give strangers sexy looks."

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