Radio: The Blonde & the Peers

The London tabloids tried to be helpful.

WANTED—A PEER FOR TV.,the headlines cried. The salary offered: $1,000 a week.

Punch answered irreverently in the name of a nameless lord: "Have Monocle, Will Travel."

It all began when Vicki Benet, a French-born singer from Los Angeles, began a search for a genuine British lord to be master of ceremonies and do commercials on a series of half-hour TV films called Rendezvous with Vicki. Rendezvous is still merely an idea in the active brain of Vicki's friend and manager, Jack Elliott, ex-songwriter and Hollywood producer of TV commercials. Vicki is a 23-year-old platinum blonde whose generous measurements match Gina Lollobrigida's (36-22-35). By the time Vicki got to London three weeks ago, British nobility was forming a queue for the job.

My Lord—or What? No sooner had Vicki's plane landed than David James Douglas, 37, 7th Baron Nugent of Clonlost, presented himself ("Athletic and amusing," said Vicki). Soon after, over cocktails at a London club, Vicki inspected two more candidates, 41-year-old Thomas Percy Henry Touchet Tuchet-Jesson, 23rd Baron Audley ("charming") and Edward Arthur Donald St. George Hamilton Chichester, 52, 6th Marquess of Donegal and governor of Carrick-fergus Castle ("suave"). "I didn't know what to call them—my lord, or what," said Vicki. "They told me the correct way was to say Lord So-and-So, but in a few minutes we were calling each other by first names." That same day an application came from thrice-married Lord Stanley of Alderley, 47, a baron who knows the U.S. well. He endeared himself to Vicki by inviting her to the House of Lords so she could "case the joint," as he put it. When she emerged, having taken in many peers and a spot of tea, she announced: "I saw an awful lot of lords, but I couldn't get near them, and naturally I couldn't ask Lord Stanley who they were because he's after the job, too."

John Raymond Godley, 34, 3rd Baron Kilbracken, from Killegar House in Ireland's County Cavan, invited Vicki for a weekend on his estate, met her at the Dublin airport in a grey cutaway coat and topper with a bouquet of roses and shamrocks, and a coach and four. Vicki proceeded to stay the weekend in the 150-year-old mansion, whose highceilinged, chandeliered gloom has never been desecrated by electricity. "Did you do any hunting?" Vicki was asked. "No," she replied, "but I was photographed with a Black Angus calf."