Middle-Aged Siren

"I get an awful lot of mail from women like me," says Torch Singer Roberta Sherwood. "That is, from the women with a middle-aged spread. A lot of them had ambitions that were never realized, and I guess I look as if I am realizin' them." Thus, after bowing demurely to an ovation at Manhattan's Copacabana, Singer Sherwood explained the infectious appeal that in the last year has turned her, at 43, into the nation's biggest new nightclub hit.

Roberta has more than the un-glamour of middle age. to recommend her--an open, frankly sentimental, strongly appealing style. She makes her entrance chanting Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing in a slightly husky, twangy voice. After the applause dies down, she may take off her glasses, pick up a battered cymbal and start flailing it with a wire brush while she launches into a foot-stomping, open-throated jazz version of Lazy River.

Up from Kiwanis. St. Louis-born Roberta Sherwood's career has a strong flavor of soap opera. Roberta's father ran an oldtime touring minstrel show ("He was a real raggledaggle show-business type"), and by the time she was in her early teens, she was out of school and in a song and dance act. Finally she married a sometime actor named Don Lanning, settled down with him in Miami, operating a restaurant. When her husband fell ill of cancer in 1953 and lost his bar concession, Roberta found herself with three boys on her hands (now 16, 13 and 8) and no money coming in. While she was being refused one singing job after another because of her age, she kept the family going with occasional $15-or $25-a-night appearances at Kiwanis Club parties or firemen's balls.

Just a little over a year ago, the owner of a small Miami nightspot gave her job at $125 a week ("It seemed like fortune"). Then Walter Winchell spottec her, and Miami Beach's Eden Roc Hotel hired Roberta at $1,700 a week. Decca Records signed her. Now she makes as much as $5,000 a week.

Much in Demand. Recently Roberta has been arranging her tours so that she is never away from home more than six weeks at a time--her husband Don, now a semi-invalid, looks out for the boys and answers all of Roberta's correspondence from their Florida home. She is working hard because, she says, "I'd like to pay off the debts and get something put aside." Roberta proved such a hit with women viewers when she appeared recently on Ed Murrow's Person to Person that there is talk of signing her for a daily women's show on TV. But if that does not work out, she will be content to go on singing in the clubs, where she is much in demand. Apparently, in a world of perennially slit skirts and plunging necklines there is a real need for Roberta's ample figure, off-the-rack dresses and cardigan sweaters.

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