Song & Dance Man

Donald O'Connor thinks, with good reason, that television is wonderful. After 14 years in Hollywood, his movie career had tobogganed to the point where he was playing second lead to a talking mule in the Francis pictures. But after one guest appearance on TV with Jimmy Durante, Donald was signed as one of the rotating stars (the others: Martin & Lewis, Abbott & Costello, Eddie Cantor, Bob Hope) of the TV Comedy Hour (Sun. 8 p.m., NBC). Even Hollywood took another, longer look at its perennial adolescent. O'Connor began to get good song & dance jobs in such top-budget musicals as Singin' in the Rain and Call Me Madam.

Circus Leaper. As O'Connor sees it, the reason for his TV success is that television closely approximates the conditions of vaudeville, and vaudeville is where he learned all he knows about show business ("I had my first walk-on part when I was 13 months old"). His father was a County Cork strongman and circus leaper who could spring from a trampoline over the backs of four elephants. His mother was so determined a trouper that she kept on performing until three days before Donald was born, 27 years ago. With his parents and six brothers & sisters, Donald toured the U.S. three times before he was out of knee pants. He didn't see the inside of a school until he was ten and enrolled in a Hollywood kindergarten. By then, death had begun to stalk the O'Connor family. Today only Donald, his mother and his 47-year-old brother Jack are still alive. Donald, who is separated from his wife, Actress Gwen Carter, has a six-year-old daughter named Donna.

Hopped-up Pace. Last week Donald was working harder and more happily than ever before. He spent two days shooting Walking My Baby Back Home, took three days off to put together this week's Comedy Hour (he revised all the dances in the show, wrote part of the skits, ad-libbed additions to his routine with Sid Miller, and sang a ballad, Dreaming, for which he wrote the music and Miller the words). In spare moments throughout the week, he met with his associates in Donald O'Connor Enterprises, Inc., dozed through the Hollywood premiere of Call Me Madam ("After all, I'd seen the show before"), conferred with Cartoonist Gene Cibelli, his collaborator on a book satirizing life in Hollywood, and listened to new tunes submitted to his music-publishing house of O'Connor & Miller.

This hopped-up pace, which gives him an income of about $150,000 a year, would flatten many a man more robust than 135-lb, O'Connor. But, except for a tendency to colds, Donald seems to thrive on it. In addition to becoming a TV fixture, he has signed contracts with Fox, Paramount and Universal-International to do six movies during the next two years (one of them: White Christmas, in which he will co-star with Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney). Says Donald with satisfaction: "It's great, being busy. After you spend 26 years entertaining people it really gets to be part of you; it's your life."

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