THE JUKEBOX: Tuneless Tiger

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Bob Marcucci was in trouble. His little Philadelphia recording company (Chancellor Records) had been cashing in on the slim voice of a skinny, second-rate Sinatra named Frankie Avalon. But now Avalon was 17 and beginning to outgrow his appeal for the jukebox set. Busy as he was with his search for a replacement. Bob Marcucci took time to rush to the home of a South Philadelphia neighbor when he saw an ambulance drive up. Policeman Domenic Forte had suffered a heart attack, and Bob stuck around to help. Suddenly he had a vision. He turned to the sick cop's 14-year-old son Fabian and asked: "How'd you like to be a singer?" The kid shuddered. "You crazy?" he snarled. Next day Fabian went back to playing basketball and football at South Philadelphia High and $6 a week as a stock clerk in a drugstore.

But Marcucci persisted. He saw in the round-shouldered boy with the smooth olive skin and the sharp, ducktail haircut just the sort of all-American appeal he was looking for. He made Fabian go to a voice teacher—three voice teachers, in fact, before one was willing to keep him as a pupil. Then Fabian made a couple of records that were duds. Undaunted, Marcucci embarked on a publicity campaign. He sent Fabian on a road tour, got him shots on local disk-jockey programs, and ran trade-paper teasers that screamed in big black type, "Fabian is coming!" "Who is Fabian?" Then came the clincher: "Fabian is here!"

Now, two years later, Fabian is leaving them for dead at the jukeboxes. His voice, when it can be heard at all over the artful work of his accompanying musicians and the studio sound engineers, suggests mournfully that he is trying to imitate every rock-'n'-roller on record. Yet the noise sells. His rendition of Turn Me Loose was high on the charts for weeks, sold more than three-quarters of a million copies. Tiger, his latest, a song that Columnist John Crosby observes is "enormously improved by total unintelligibility," is climbing fast. Its popularity helps 16-year-old Fabian earn up to $12,000 a night, gets him TV appearances with Perry Como, Ed Sullivan, and other TV bigwigs.

Last week the tuneless terror blew into Hollywood with a $35,000, ten-week contract to make his first movie, Hound Dog Man. In the tradition of his trade, screaming hordes of bobby-soxers were on hand to greet him at the airport (where they broke a car window and almost put out one of his eyes) and at a concert in the Hollywood Palladium. All of this leaves Bob Marcucci, 29, feeling like a waxworks Pygmalion, but without worries about the future. When Fabian grows old—18 or 19, that is—he will still have the movies. The boy's notion that he might like to have a crack at college is something Marcucci should be able to handle. There is only one danger that may yet spoil a potentially brilliant career: all of a sudden, Fabian has decided that he would really like to learn how to sing.