Tax Missionary

In the 13 months since Comedian Ernie Kovacs died in an automobile crash, no one in show business has been busier than his widow Edie Adams. She was left with an enormous, unspecified debt that Ernie owed the Government. Their joint production company also owed the American Broadcasting Company almost $125,000 in unpaid production charges for old Kovacs TV shows. Her pressagent claims that she could have gone into bankruptcy; instead, she went to work. She has done movies, TV appearances, commercials--anything and everything to help pay off the debts that Ernie left behind.

Spine Tingler. "There are some things Edie won't do, but nothing she can't do," said Groucho Marx, introducing her present show at a hotel on the Las Vegas strip. This statement could only be half right, since Edie does have her limitations. She is no Judy Garland. But nonetheless she is an above-average singer who is also an amusing comedienne and a pretty, been-around blonde with a spooky resemblance to Marilyn Monroe. The resemblance is so spooky, in fact, that she has had to drop Marilyn from her repertory of impressions (Jeanette MacDonald, Shirley Temple, Ethel Merman, Marlene Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor). Often she looks enough like MM anyway to make spines tingle all the way out to the gaming tables.

"Actually," she tells her audience, "I'm here on missionary work for the Tax Department." She wears, at times, a skintight gown with a huge rose of ribbon on her derriere. She runs her hands down her sides. "It's about the size of one leg of Jackie Gleason's trousers," she confides. Then she's off into song, with an impression thrown in--of Elizabeth Taylor, for example, singing I Cain't Say No.

Pop Goes the Money. No epic hero would strap himself to a mast upon hearing this sort of thing, but it is good entertainment and it pays the bills. Edie made a little more than $150,000 last year and should do better this year, with a record album, two movies already completed (It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and Call Me Bwana), and two more about to be filmed ( The Yum Yum Tree and Very Important Persons). She has also been offered the lead in a production of South Pacific that is planned for Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House next autumn.

For a 33-year-old widow with three daughters to look after (two are step-daughters), she brings home a fair chunk of sugar-cured bacon. But she always has. She was sister Eileen in Wonderful Town, and she won a Tony award as Daisy Mae in Broadway's Li'l Abner. Early in her show business experience, she was taught how to go for the green. As a dappled-taffy blonde out of rural Pennsylvania, Tenafly, N.J., and the Juilliard School of Music, she appeared on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts years ago, hoping to win the evening with a long-hair practice number selected from a Juilliard textbook. "If you sing that, you will probably win," Godfrey's musical director told her. "But you're a beautiful girl. If you sing a pop song, you'll lose, but you will get all kinds of job offers." That's what she did--and she was off on the nightclub circuit.

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