Radio: The Unobtrusive Beauties

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Julia Meade, 28, is blonde, beautiful and alluringly shaped (34-20-34), but she earns $100,000 a year from three sponsors by calling attention to their products rather than her own charms. Julia aims at a sort of well-groomed invisibility: "The dress I wear must have something up here," she says, gesturing at her neckline. "There can't be any cleavage or even a shadow of cleavage." And she adds primly: "I would never wear a strapless dress."

Julia is one of a dozen or so young women on TV who find self-effacement enormously profitable.

Low-Riding Skirt. Mary Costa, another blonde who earns $52,000 a year peddling cars for Chrysler on Climax and Shower of Stars, agrees that a girl spieler should be "good-looking but not too flashy to detract from the product. I try to dress elegantly but simply." Mary's feminine viewers notice her enough to wonder how she can get so gracefully into and out of today's cars. "They write asking why my skirt never rides up. It's a simple matter of placing more weight on the calves than on the thighs, as women usually do." Another bouncy blonde, Mary Dean, has reduced her $30,000-a-year job to a neat formula: "It is most important not to think of yourself. All you should be interested in is the package you're selling."

Julia Meade is a leading moneymaker among the girls, even topping Veteran Betty Furness, who this week begins her seventh TV year for Westinghouse. She is also seen by the most people—an estimated 65 million a week—and she appears on all three networks, plugging Lincolns for CBS's Ed Sullivan Show, Hudnut hair products for NBC's Your Hit Parade, and LIFE on ABC's John Daly news show. Like most of her rivals, Julia started out as an actress. Born in Boston, she was encouraged by her mother, Caroline Meade—who once trouped with Walter Hampden —to go to the Yale Drama School. When she went job-hunting in Manhattan in 1948, the only work she could get was at the Du Mont TV studio in Wanamaker's department store. She moved into network TV on the giveaway show, Winner Take All ("I gave away prizes, acted in sketches and just sort of filled in"), and did her first regular commercials as emcee of NBC's Embassy Club: "I did polite chitchat about king-sized cigarettes."

Ball-Joint Suspension. One of her viewers was Howard Wilson, a vice president at the Kenyon & Eckhardt advertising agency, who thought she looked "awful cool, calm and relaxed," and asked her to do the Lincoln commercials on the Ed Sullivan Show, while Ed continued to deliver the sales message for Mercury. There were some bad moments. Wilson was not sure a girl would be convincing talking about such things as "high torque, turbodrive transmission" and "ball-joint suspension," and there were some fears that Julia might be too gentle to compete with "hard-selling" male announcers. Researcher Horace Schwerin came to her rescue: "No one in our experience has had a higher acceptance with women. We have tested her for voice, appearance and personality, and 90% of the women questioned gave her very high scores."