G.I. Nightingale

The sweetheart of World War II was on her way to another front--the Caribbean. When Frances Langford gets there the next week or so, she can expect the same kind of admiration she has inspired in homesick doughboys from Alaska to Sicily. No other female entertainer in World War II can touch it. "She knows just how much sex to pour and still be dignified," is Bob Hope's explanation. General Eisenhower, who has misgivings about women entertainers at the front, was so moved by her impact upon his North African troops that he thanked her warmly, "especially for the way you've conducted yourself."

As the Elsie Janis of World War II, blonde (formerly brunette) Frances Langford has not reached all of its multi-fronts yet. The physical demands of global entertainment should have strained the 5-ft. 3 1/2 in., no-lb. Langford frame, but they apparently have not. When the Hope troupe's plane was fogged out over Alaska, Frances said to her boss: "If we land okay, there's something I want to tell you." They landed okay (thanks to a dozen searchlights which punctured the fog and a blackout regulation), and she confided: "I was hoping we'd have to jump. I guess I'm crazy, but I've always wanted to."

Pink Sitter. Natural bravado has seen modest, round-faced, contralto-voiced Frances Langford through a routine that would have ruined lesser women. She has ranged heartily from woolen underwear in Alaska to a halter-bra in Africa. During a

Luftwaffe raid on her hotel in Palermo, she sat on the floor in her pink pajamas because falling plaster hurt her feet. She went back to bed before the raid was over.

Air raids fascinated her. "It's an awful thing to say," she says, "but they're the most beautiful things I've ever seen. . . .

They're like a football game. You want your gunners to hit those planes so bad, and you see the tracers creeping up on them, and all of a sudden a plane bursts into flames and comes down. I saw six shot down in one raid outside Bizerte. . . ." Some things have been especially diffi cult for her. One ("The worst moment I've ever had in my life") happened at a hospital in Kairouan. Bob Hope asked her to sing for a young pilot in bed with a sheet tucked up to his chin. He suggested Night and Day or That Old Black Magic.

She chose "something softer": Embraceable You. When she reached the line "Above all I want my arms about you," the pilot averted his eyes but kept grinning. After she left the ward, she found that he was armless.

Florida Peach. Nothing in Frances Langford's 29 years prepared her for her sweetheart role. Daughter of a Lakeland, Fla., building contractor and a concert pianist, she wanted to be an opera singer but not enough - the formalities bored her.

A complicated tonsillectomy during high school dropped her voice an octave, and she began singing the blues. Rudy Vallee heard her and helped her to Manhattan, where she ended up on WOR sustaining after CBS and NBC had turned her down.

After Colgate toothpaste, St. Joseph aspirin, etc., nightclubs, numerous movies and marriage (to Cinemactor Jon Hall), she landed on Hope's Pepsodent show three years ago - just in time for World War II.

She has a voice that combines vigor and edge with romantic quality - she sug gests a man's woman. What the soldiers think of her is well exemplified by a letter (from a U.S. Army officer in Sicily to his New Orleans parents) which Bob Hope has put into a forthcoming book (7 Never Left Home). Wrote the soldier: "We were almost sure Frances Langford had not come, and there were many dis appointed people around. And all of a sudden Bob said: 'Here's Frances Lang-ford.' There was a din you would not be lieve. She was stunningly dressed, though simply. It was good to see a clean, neat American girl who spoke our language and thought like we do. She sang and sang from the bottom of her heart. . . . Every one of those thousands of men there went home to their wives and sweethearts. It was almost more than a man could stand. . . .

"The amazing part of it was that Frances Langford was just a woman with a voice, a marvelous, rich, delicate voice.

. . . She will never know what that did for us. ... For a few seconds we were back in our natural surroundings and completely happy. I could not have been closer to Mary had she been right there holding my hand. . . ."

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