French Belter

Many a U.S. crooner, what with wailing and moaning and gnashing of teeth, sings like a man who learned his style in a concentration camp. Robert Clary actually did. He spent three years in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. and whiled away some of the time by singing for his fellow prisoners.

That background may in part account for one of the eeriest styles yet offered to a U.S. audience, and for the fascination Singer Clary exerts over audiences at Broadway's New Faces of 1952, in which he sings a few songs, and at an after-theater nightclub where he does two shows a night.

The first things about Clary that startle an audience are his broad shoulders, pint size (5 ft. 1 in.) and graphic homeliness. An audience may expect almost anything from such a fellow, but never fails to be surprised by what it gets--a "belt" by one of the biggest voices now at large in a nightclub. Said one guest: "I never heard anything so big come out of anything so little." Hitting on all decibels, and mugging like a young chimp playing Maurice Chevalier, Robert mows them down with Lucky Pierre (first in French, and then with an English translation). Then he plows them under with a number entitled Don't Put a Dent in My Heart (but "hit me, beat me, slap me around"). He also does a lavish imitation of that well-known grief machine, Johnnie Ray.

Offstage, Clary is a mild and sensible enough fellow. He was born in Paris in 1926, the son of a piecework tailor. In 1942, when Robert was 16, he and his parents and one of his sisters were deported to Germany as Jews, and sent to Auschwitz. Robert alone survived, and later was transferred to Buchenwald. There, with half a dozen other Frenchmen, he began to give a little show. "I was very young," Robert recalls, "and, really, I did not understand." Nevertheless, he says, "I learned about life in there. I learned that all kinds of people are the same. Everybody just has to--come through."

Robert came through in show business after the war. He changed his name from Widerman to Clary, as friends in concentration camp had suggested, and started work in a rundown boite in Paris' Place Pigalle, doing a blackface turn a la Jolson. In 1949, Clary was brought to the U.S., but "I wasn't very good." It took him two years in the cellar circuit to get good.

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