Show Business: Boudoir Bob

Around the Manhattan headquarters of American Airlines, one corridor gag is that "More women have gone to sleep with Bob Hall than with any other man in the world," and that's probably true.

Bob Hall is a 41-year-old radio veteran who once played the lead in the Green Hornet and dutifully goes home every morning to his wife and child. Yet he really operates during the witching hours. From 11:30 p.m. until 5:30 a.m. five days a week (and until 7:30 a.m. the sixth), he is the Manhattan-based disk jockey of CBS's Music 'til Dawn, sponsored by American. Hall's silky phrasing and boudoir baritone earn him $40,500 a year, are emulated (on producer's orders) by the eight other Music 'til Dawn deejays.*

Through its nine strategically placed stations, the show covers the U.S. during the sleeping hours like—well—a blanket. Last year 20 million Americans tuned in, many of them every night. Besides having Boudoir Bob, the show's Hallmark is that it plays classics and pop standards that appeal to affluent, educated audiences more than do the big-beat or hot-line interviews on competing stations. A market survey showed that 60% of the listeners were late-working students, technicians, professional men and executives—just the kind of people who most use airlines.

It was just one of those executives, American's present chairman, C.R. Smith, who conceived the show in 1953, after a frustrating night of "flipping the dial on my radio and not finding anything worth listening to." Recalls Smith: "I don't usually let personal preferences enter into business decisions, so I guess this was an exception." He met with CBS President Frank Stanton, discovered that Stanton was "something of a night owl himself." CBS and American jointly formulated the music show. Its records were to be, in Smith's words, "on a high, not necessarily highbrow, level." The commercials were to be soft-sell, the disk jockeys positively pianissimo, and everything uniform nationwide.

The show's producer, Lyman Clardy, a Harvard Business School graduate ('36), prescribes the records for all nine stations. He even decides the order: Mantovani on early, when the audience is biggest; heavier music for the wee-hours elite; then progressively lighter as the milkmen switch on. Hall and the other deejays only announce the selections, rip and read the news, voice the commercials. Sometimes, when a big commercial plane crash is in the news, there is a moratorium on commercials.

Such simple programming may not be anything to write home about, but Music 'til Dawn gets a remarkable 15,000 letters of gratitude annually. This year it won a Peabody Award "for unique contribution to the culture of America."