The Embellished Waltz

For the last 20 years, while flightier musicians have run off after every new craze in jazz, swing or bebop, Wayne King has stuck tenaciously to the waltz. This week, his single-mindedness rewarded with a whopping $200,000 TV contract, the "Waltz King" began a 40-week show for Standard Oil Co. (Indiana) over a Midwestern network (Thurs. 9:30 p.m., C.S.T., NBC-TV).

Simple Desires. To King, the reward was welcome but not surprising. His sugary three-quarter-time, he admits, has already made him "a little better than a millionaire." It has paid for a luxurious grey Georgian house in Chicago's suburban Kenilworth, a 680-acre Ottawa, Ill. feeder farm where cattle are fattened for market, and a 640-acre hunting reservation in Wisconsin. Last week, puffing thoughtfully on one of his 300 pipes (briars, clays and cobs), King explained why his style is so successful: "There are many people whose musical desires are very simple. We try to play music so melodically simple that they think we are playing just for them--and we are."

Looking back 48 years to his birth in a railroad worker's family in Savanna, Ill., King solemnly says the obvious: "I'm kind of like a Horatio Alger story." King's story includes stretches as newsboy, railway worker, insurance salesman and clarinetist. In 1927 he brought his romantic profile and even more romantic rhythms into Chicago's Aragon Ballroom, and built up a devoted radio audience when he was sponsored by Lady Esther cosmetics. As a radio fixture, he has piled up more than 10,000 programs.

"Do They Like It?" King's detractors complain of his relative musical ignorance and object to his top-sergeant tactics in rehearsing for hours over the simplest phrases. His critics are also bitter because some "original Wayne King compositions" (Josephine, The Waltz You Saved for Me, Lullaby for Latins) are actually the work of several musical collaborators. To objectors King has an invariable answer: "The test is, do the people like it?" So far, they have.

The Waltz King expects to take TV in his stride because "it is the most satisfying medium of production ever known. It puts a premium on sincerity and honesty." To achieve "sincerity," he will rely more on pantomimes for his oldtime songs than on vocalists ("After all, everybody knows the lyrics"). There will also be a good deal of folksy comment from the maestro ("Doggone, here I am jabbering away like . . . like . . . well, a magpie").

All this will be a daring departure from his tried & true radio formulas, but King has thought it through: "For radio, music is the medium in which you dream. For television, music is the medium in which you dream--with embellishments."

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