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Last spring Hollywood Director Gregory Ratoff, in Manhattan on a talent hunt, filmed a few sequences of Entertainer Scott at the piano, took them back to Hollywood to insert in a new Jack Oakie-Don Ameche picture, Something to Shout About. Columbia officials saw the sequences, quickly revamped the film, wrote in a fat part for her, brought her out to Hollywood. Then Ratoff discovered her dusky singing voice.
"Why didn't you tell me you could sing?" demanded Director Ratoff in his unreproduceable dialect.
Replied Hazel: "You didn't ask me."
Now back in Manhattan, Hazel Scott is leading the life she likes best: three appearances nightly; daytime hours in & out of her new stucco house in suburban White Plains, where she sometimes grubs in her Victory garden, more often listens to recordings.
Her ambition: to play the classics straight. In five years, she believes, she will be ready for a strictly long-hair Carnegie Hall recital. But no one else thinks for a minute that Hazel Scott could ever play a whole evening of absolutely straight piano.