Royola

After months of waiting. Disk Jockey Dick Clark--who at 30 is the U.S.'s oldest teen-ager--last week finally was up to his sunny smile in the payola hearings. Standing on the burning deck with aplomb, he assured the House Special Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight that he believed in his heart that he had never taken payola. "But you got an awful lot of royola," snapped Republican Steven B. Derounian, of New York's Nassau County, who was the clear winner of the session's Most Valuable Phrasemaker trophy.

Derounian was talking about royalties and the manner in which Clark, the committee charges, in less than three years earned $167,570 in salary. $409.020 in stock gains. As Clark told it, people were always trying to force money on him. and he had a hard time pushing it away. In one near deal, an old pal named Bernard Lowe came to Clark with a newborn song called Butterfly and an offer to assign 25% of the publisher's royalties to Click Corp.. one of Clark's publishing outfits. "I pointed out that this was unnecessary," Clark explained to the wondering Congressmen. "Lowe insisted ... I again said that it was unnecessary." But royola flowed just the same; after Clark's jockeying made Butterfly a hit, Lowe expressed his joy to the extent of $7,000.

Rumbled Representative John E. Moss: "A very unique thing about this industry --all this brotherly love--people just cannot restrain themselves from giving away their wealth."

Pressing Orders & Fast Talk. Clark was "embarrassed" by another record maker's gift of a ring to him and a necklace and fur piece to his wife (total value: $4,400). But there could be no onus attached to the gift: Clark explained that he had never worn the ring. A freckled, pipe-smoking songwriter named Orville Lunsford told how Clark's subsidiary firms worked. His record All American Boy got a fast ride to the No. 2 position in record sales--but only, he said, after the Mallard Pressing Corp.. one of Clark's interests, got an order to print 50,000 copies. "Almost immediately." said Lunsford. "I heard my song played every other day on Clark's show."

A bustling statistician, Bernard Goldstein, offered 300 Ibs. of data and what the Congressmen clearly considered some unnecessarily fast talk to show "the universe, the population, the very census" of songs played on Clark's American Bandstand TV show. "Let the chips fall where they may," said Goldstein, seeking to prove with a blizzard of figures, algebraic formulae and four charts that could have been rainfall maps of the Pentagon that Clark had jockeyed his own songs and those in which he had no financial interest with fine impartiality. But the chips, obviously, had fallen into Clark's pockets.

Freed & Upper Darby. As the committee got ready for more questions this week. Counsel Robert Lishman leaked the news that ex-Jockey Alan Freed, who himself was spun off the ABC turntables for payola (TIME. Nov. 30), had impugned Clark's purity in closed session. Despite everything, at least one group was willing to stick by its boyman: the senior class of Philadelphia's suburban Upper Darby High School wanted to present Clark with a certificate of honor last week "because he talks to us like we are people." But Clark, talking to Congressmen almost as if they were teenagers, was a little too busy to accept.

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