Music: How to Croon

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"Picture in your mind's ear the mayhem that a lusty soprano of the oldtime concert stage can commit on that poignant last line of Kiss Me Again. You may think she has screamed as loudly as human lungs can manage all the way through the chorus, but you're wrong: she still has something special left for a flag finish. Here she goes. (Eyes glare.) 'Keesss—uh

— mee — uh! (puff) 'Keesss — uh — meee —uh! (Takes a stance now, pauses dramatically, then lets drive) 'Yuuuh-gay-ay-ay-nuh!' Now, I ask you, gentlemen, if the proposition were put up to you in that fashion — would you?" Ever since he whanged the piano in Harvard's "Gold Coast" dance band a dozen years ago, Hollywood's Charles Henderson has felt that a ditty is no place for a diva. When he got out of Harvard, Charlie Henderson started studying the business of crooning in earnest, as Rudy Vallee's pianist. When he got to Hollywood in 1936, Henderson knew so much about putting over a song that he was hired to teach Deanna Durbin how to do it. Last week, in collaboration with Fiction-Writer Charles Palmer, he published a book about it.*

First treatise on the U. S. art of crooning, Henderson and Palmer's book will cause no Flagstads to sprout. But its canny appraisal of the ins & outs of popular song-singing may well make it the aspiring mike-moaner's Bible. Do you want to make big money singing songs for the U. S. radio and cinema public? Then stay away from highbrow vocal teachers, never mind your high C ("Many girls have made fortunes without ever coming within an octave of it"). Concentrate on naturalness and intimacy. Learn how to act at auditions, how to win fans and influence producers.

When chubby, 30-year-old Henderson first got together with lantern-jawed Writer Palmer, they planned a short, 100-page pamphlet. But, they explain, "Our civic pride got the best of us. ... So in stead of writing a little, book in a month, our civic pride cost us 15 months." Says Author Henderson privately: "We wrote it in every bar in town except the new ones which have just sprung up."