Teen-Age Crush

When he was seven, Thomas Adrian Sands, scrawny, black-haired son of a Russian-born piano player, used to sit at the radio on a little farm near Shreveport, La. and listen to the moaning and wailing of his favorite hillbillies. "Mamma," he would cry out to Grace Sands, "it's Jimmy Davis! Mamma, it's Harmie Smith! Listen to the guitars. Oh, Mamma, if only I could have a guitar, I'd be so happy." Grace Sands went out one day and made a $10 down payment on a $65 guitar. Tommy taught himself to play and sing. He never amounted to more than a $52-a-week hillbilly bawler for a Hollywood TV station--until one magic night last January, when a single hour on a TV network turned him into the U.S. teenagers' latest rage.

Before 1957 is over, good-looking, 19-year-old Tommy will earn more than $100,000. Yet he is still barely aware of the scope of his success, hardly knows what he is scheduled to do next or what he will receive for it, gets $25 a week in pocket money from his shrewd managers, his mother and a Hollywood hillbilly impresario named Cliffie Stone.

Hep Dee Hootie. "When Kraft TV Theater last January scheduled a play about a rock-'n'-roll singer called The Singin' Idol, they wanted Elvis Presley for the part. Presley's manager, an ex-carnival barker called Colonel Tom Parker, said Elvis was too busy, instead touted Sands, who had traveled with Parker's road shows across the cow country. Kraft producers in New York flew Tommy in from Hollywood, where he was working on a TV show called Hometown Jamboree, and were pleased with his lush, throaty voice and easy acting style. After his job as the Singin' Idol, he began playing the title role in real life.

Some 8,000 fan letters bombarded Kraft; offers came to Sands from twelve movie companies and the major networks. The two songs from the show, Teen-Age Crush, an insipid ballad-with-a-beat that relates in sobbing tones something about young love misunderstood, and Hep Dee Hootie ("Cutie wootie, you're all rootie with me"), sold as fast as they could be scratched onto disks. Crush, says Capitol Records, has sold 1,160,000 copies to date, and in the two weeks since Sands's first LP album, Steady Date, was released, some 225,000 copies have been sold.

As a singer, Sands mixes hoot and hush, moo and moon eyes. He is a sort of cleaned-up Presley. He enunciates better and grinds less, is less vulgar in sound and manner, also less able to turn on the excitement that Presley can frequently generate. But Tommy is doing fine without wriggling up to Elvis' loftier heights. In the three months since the Kraft show, Sands has taken the bathos treatment on This Is Your Life, sung on five network shows, screen-tested for a role in Marjorie Morningstar. He gets about 2,000 fan letters a day, has pulled several thousand youngsters into Tommy Sands fan clubs.

My love Song. This week Tommy helps Kraft TV celebrate its tenth anniversary in a drama called Flesh and Blood, in which he sings My Love Song, a tired, trite, bronchial number far out of Sands's usual rock-'n'-roll line ("But I like all kinds of music"). He also opens a three-week, $30,000 engagement at Manhattan's Roxy before going back to Hollywood to make The Singin' Idol for 20th Century-Fox, with which he has a seven-year contract.

As uncomplicated as most of the songs he sings. Tommy neither drinks nor smokes, lives with his mother in a four-room Hollywood apartment, drives a red Ford convertible and, he says, reads philosophical and religious books "to find out what makes people tick." Tommy explains, his brown eyes watering: "I think all religions are the greatest." Slight and boyish, he is modest about his overnight notoriety. "I still don't consider myself a real honest success. I'm not polished yet, but life is a wonderful trainer."

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