Television: What Makes Howard Spin

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In the Groove. Miller sometimes spots hit records even before they are made. Last year when Cinemactor Tab Hunter visited Chicago, Hunter went for a ride in Miller's 45-ft. cabin cruiser, Disk Jockey. "I wanted to do something for the kid," recalls Miller, "so I told him to make 'a record." "I can't sing," said Hunter. "I don't care," Miller assured him. "You can sneeze and it'll sell." When they got ashore, Miller called Dot Records and set up a recording contract for the actor. Hunter cut a disk called Young Love (TIME, March 25), and Miller started playing it before release. Crows the jockey: "In Chicago alone, it sold 250,000 in the first three weeks. Now, nationally, 2,000,000."

The son of a Chicago judge, Miller entered radio as a soap-opera actor soon after his graduation from Knox College, Galesburg, 111. in 1938, and after three years in the World War II Navy, became program director at Chicago's WIND, soon switched to disk jockeying and became an immediate success.

Immortality. "I'm overly ambitious," Jockey Miller admits. He blames his two divorces, one from Singer June Valli, on his lust for his career. He feels the pangs of his "hunger for immortality" as he stares out. of the window in his eight-room apartment overlooking Lake Michigan. "I wish I could be a lawyer, a great stage performer, a John Gielgud, an archcriminal. I would love to plot the strategy of a great bank holdup. I frequently plotted one and never carried it through." Then Miller's pleasant voice hits a note of deadly earnest. "I can think of no higher honor than of being asked by the citizens to be mayor of Chicago. I have certainly indicated an interest to a nucleus of people whom it is important to tell first before I tell the electorate."