CANNY JUDGMENT BOOSTED
BY ROSLIND SHAFFER
HOLLYWOOD—(AP)—Lush –voiced, fast-talking Throckmorton P.
Gildersleeve is the lover every woman dreams of - - if she doesn’t expect too
much. After all, maturity has charms which should compensate for a slight
shortness of breath.
Nonsense aside, The Great Gildersleeve is a terrific Guy
named Harold Peary, I believe, is the suppressed Peary, just as McCarthy is Bergen with the
ice cap off.
Of course, things as pleasantly amusing as “
The Great Gildersleeve” radio program just don’t happen. The show is written by Sam Moore
and John Whedon, but it has been built by Peary himself with a perspicacity you’d
never expect from his air counterpart.
A veteran of show business, and of radio, Peary knows his
medium, and through his almost uncanny ear for voices, he has assembled
characters for the show with voices that exactly express the characters he
works with.
His own flexible baritone voice, developed during years as a
singer, started Gildersleeve on the Fibber McGee and Molly show as a comedy
villain. Popularity of the character brought him his own show in 1941. Having
conceived of Gildersleeve as pompous, self indulgent, inconsistent, sentimental
and incompetent fellow, Peary set about picking the characters to set him off.
He wanted a girl with a cute accent; a fellow like Gildersleeve would go for
that, he figured. Dinah Shore’s redheaded secretary, with a voice dripping with
southern honey, was the inspiration for Leila Ransome, but she was reluctant to
try acting, and Shirley Mitchell, who guaranteed she could drawl as well as any
Dixie belle, got the part. She works on several other radio shows, but her
southern accent is exclusive to Gildy.
To provide a rival for Gildy’s middle aged romancing, Peary
conceived the character of Judge Hooker. Thin of voice and sharp of tongue,
Judge Hooker most frequently sets off the Gildersleeve fireworks. Earle Ross,
veteran actor selected by Peary, doesn’t look the part, resembling rather an
Irish postmaster general; his voice was the determining factor.
The voice of Peavy, the druggist who “wouldn’t say that,”
was memory that Peary had from the Fibber McGee program. The actor; Richard Le
Grande, had retired but was living in California; only clue to his whereabouts
was the fact that he liked to fish. On a chance, Peary went to the biggest pier
nearby, and found his future, Peavy contentedly fishing.
Floyd the barber, played by Arthur Q. Bryan, was invented to
help the plot along, by furnishing the town’s low gossip, and another place for
Gildy to go, to increase the variety of scenes in the story.
Peary wanted a natural hearty negro woman’s voice for
Birdie, the cook. He heard Lillian Randolph, give a hearty laugh, and hired
her.
Comedy about Leroy and Marjorie, his adopted niece and
nephew, is derived from real life; he has such a pair in the home he shares
with his wife, Betty Jourdaine, former dancer.
Only the Jolly Boys quartet was an accident; the reaction
was so good that it was incorporated in the show. Now Jolly Boys clubs have
sprung up spontaneously in different spots. Peary told me he found that in
Memphis, visiting the variety club while on a hospital tour, there was a Jolly Boys crying room.
Peary himself is thinner by some 30 pounds than when he made
four Gildersleeve pictures at RKO in 1943-44. He’s a good-looking man, with a
fine complexion, black wavy hair and big dark eyes just as you imagine he has
when he sings. His laughter is ready and hearty. He talks well, rambles on
every conceivable subject.
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