Is There Anyone Finah?

"Live TV has that little element of human fallibility," Singer Dinah Shore once said. "If you make a mistake, you can use that old ham bone and capitalize on it." Last week Dinah almost got knocked off-camera by a playful poke in the ribs from Guest Star Jimmy Durante, but Dinah's ham bone was up to it; gasping with laughter, she bounced back to make it seem a small bonus in an hour of unpremeditated fun. Week to week, just such spontaneity fuses with a haunting vocal talent to make blonde (since 1944) Dinah Shore the nicest musical treat on TV.

Palms thrusting trustingly toward the audience, her head cocked confidently in song, Dinah gives emotional urgency to the tritest lyric; she seems still much the cheerleader she once was at Vanderbilt University (class of '38, sociology major), yet also in tune with life at 40. Last week her velveteen vibrato caressed the lyrics of Sentimental Journey and I'll Be Seeing You, and as she backed offscreen, her sign-off kiss floated out individually, so it seemed, to each of her 40 million or so viewers. A veteran of 444 quarter-hour shows and 14 full-hour revues on TV since 1951, Dinah is toiling now at the most ambitious project of her career: 24 live, full-hour color shows for NBC. Her longtime sponsor, Chevrolet, is delighted to pay the $145,000-a-show bill, considers its link with Dinah to be "one of the most enduring love affairs in TV."

Singer Shore goes about her painstaking rehearsals with the same simple warmth and magnolia-scented vivacity she exudes onscreen, but "deep down," says a close friend, "she's insecure. Everything that's happened to her is so good that she's afraid it will disappear tomorrow. So she drives hard all the time."

"No Glamour." Things were not always "so good," either. As Fanny Rose Shore in Winchester, Tenn. (pop. 3,974), she bridled at schoolmates' taunting puns ("Fanny sat on a tack. Fanny rose? Shore!"). Recalls Dinah: "I tell you, it just made me go home nights and chew my pillow." In childhood she suffered from polio, which for six years threatened the full use of her right foot. After some bleak, jobless days in Manhattan, she spent 3 1/2 years indentured to radio's Eddie Cantor, did poorly in several movies (Belle of the Yukon, Up in Arms), and was fired from one of her first radio shows by the late Tobacco Tyrant George Washington Hill for not singing "loud and fast enough." Self-conscious of her limited looks ("They said I had no glamour"), brunette Dinah had her nose bobbed and a gap in her teeth closed, became a blonde and one of the best-dressed women in show business.

Today she stands surefootedly near the top on TV's slippery star mountain, still manages to live a fairly quiet life in a big Beverly Hills house with her husband, Cowboy Actor George (Lone Gun) Montgomery, their one girl and one boy (and four Chevrolets). Dinah's success, like Perry Como's on the male side, has been responsible for one of the current TV season's most discouraging trends--a mixed chorus of lavish shows built around singers who also have big names but not enough of the mixture of talent and inspiration to produce big entertainment. Says husband George: "No one in the country can touch Dinah as a singer or personality, and I ain't partial, son. I just know."

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