Oh, Dinah—Is There Anyone Finer?

THE MILWAUKEE JOURNAL—SCREEN and RADIO          Sunday, April 4, 1943

In a Forthcoming movie, radio’s Dinah Shore will not only sing, she will dance and she will act. Dinah’s a favorite with the soldiers

Oh, Dinah—Is There Anyone Finer?

By Janice Gaines

KNARAVELLA is Dinah Shore’s cool. She receives a salary of $28 a week. She gets all day Sunday off, half day Wednesday, half day Friday and occasionally when she wants to do some shopping she gets a few hours here and there.

“But Knaravella is worth that to me,” says Dinah Shore, the singing radio beauty, “because I’m strictly a home girl and she’s a good cook, and any sort of cook is hard to get these days.” Knaravella has had two raises in three months. She started at $21, mentioned defense work a month later, was raised to $25, was caught looking through the Lockheed want ads, she was jumped to $28. She does not know it set (and you must not send her this column), but Dinah would raise her again at the mere drop of a hint that Douglas Aircraft, for instance, is paying fat wages.

“What I like about Hollywood,” says Dinah, who will soon be seen with Eddie Cantor in “Thank Your Lucky Stars,”—is that it’s more fun to stay home than to go out dancing. I was raised in Nashville, Tenn., where a girl is taught how to cook and how to make a home agreeable, so that she’ll marry carly and get off her parent’s hands. I was considered quite an old maid in Nashville because I was unmarried at 21. But there was no on there with whom I wanted to settle down. So I went to New York on spec.”

This was in 1938, Dinah had been “singing around Nashville, but no one, except my sister, believed in me. I always wanted a radio and records career. I don’t think I’m much good for the stage, I can’t overdo things.”

With $233 that she had “sort of saved,” plus “stacks of letters of introduction.” Dinah arrived in New York and went the rounds of the agents. “But I’d open my mouth and sing and feel so scared that nothing would come out. One man felt sorry for me and got me a job singing on a small network, then my money ran out.

“I lived with a model, and she earned $12 a week. My sister and brother-in-law used to slip me some money now and then. But things weren’t exactly prosperous with me. Came New Year’s eve and I had a singing job for the night. I had to sing all night, but was to get $25. I’d consumed our last strip of bacon, the weather was cold, and I spent my last dime on a bus drive to the place where I was to sing. When I got there they’d given the job to someone else!”

At this point her New York career, Dinah broke down and wept. Then she telephoned her father in Nashville. “I just want money to eat dinner, that’s all,” she sobbed.

“My father was scared,” she says. “He’d opposed my singing career up to that point, but he said ‘If you like to work that much you stay there and I’ll write you some money.’ After that things started moving, and I got a job to sing at the Strand theater with a band for $75 a week.”

But fate had not yet finished tormenting Miss Shore. “Of my first week’s salary, $60 was stolen. But that was still $15 more than I’d earned in New York.”

Dinah came to Hollywood a year ago April with the Eddie Cantor radio program. She now also has her own show on the Blue network. She sings and dances and acts in “Thank Your Lucky Stars,” but of her acting she says, “I don’t think Bette Davis will be fired on my account.” And regarding her dancing, “Zorina hasn’t anything to worry about.” But her singing is in class by itself.

Dinah is still unmarried. She is now 25. “I’m rather too busy for love,” she explains, “although I sometimes date George Montgomery, and I date Jimmy Stewart when he’s here. But I want to look them all over carefully before getting married. I want it to last, and I shall only be a wife once. It’s important to have some sort of pattern to cling to in your mind or you’re likely to be carried away.”

Dinah was perturbed when the group columns had her clopping with Glenn Ford “We were at a bond rally together and he dropped me off on the way home,” she explains. “The next day it was in all the papers that we were madly in love. I was so embarrassed because he’s engaged to Klenner Powell, and I like her. I had to do some explaining!”

The songstress lives in duplex apartment with two girl friends—her secretary, Marian Rufus Crane, and Radio Actress Shirley Mitchell. The three of them were reared together in Nashville. And Knaravella looks after them—when she isn’t having a day off, that is.

Hawk Knows Replies When Others Don’t

Bob Hawk as enlivening his CBS “Thanks to the Yanks” program with the addition each Saturday night of an “unanswerable question” for his studio and air undieneos to ponder over while awaiting the next broadcast.

The first “unanswerable question” put by Bob was: “Have all men and all women an Adam’s apple?” Almost immediately the letters began pouring in with the answers. Bob’s listeners were pretty evently divided with a slight edge for those of the opinion that a woman has an Adam’s apple, even though it is not apparent.

Bob gave the answer on the following werk’s broadcast. Here it is: “Authorities disagree on their definition of an Adam’s apple. Some hold that it exists only where it is visibly protruding. Others insist the term refers to a portion of the throat and exist though invisible. Until authorities agree on a specific definition that question will remain unanswerable.”