When she was 24, Arlene Francis Kazanjian, lithe, brunette daughter of an Armenian portrait photographer, auditioned her way into radio as a dog, a cat and a witch—all for one show. After 24 erratic years in show business, ambitious, Massachusetts-born Arlene Francis, now a taffy blonde, is still playing the all-purpose professional lady.
As editor of Home, NBC's do-it-yourself TV "magazine," Arlene has coxswained a varsity crew, gone down in a diving bell and up on a "cat cracker" (oil refiner), and ridden a camel at the Bronx Zoo. She also showed Homemakers how to make cream puffs and raise chimpanzees. She was the first woman ever to open the New York Stock Exchange ("I blew the whistle and all these men came charging out of their offices and started making money"). When the gadget-ridden Home that Pat Weaver built closed up last month after 3½-years on the air, Arlene was heartbroken ("I sat home and cried all the time").
Last week Arlene was again being plugged in like an electric toaster by 6,000,000 housewives.
Cooked Spaghetti. Cheerily resigned to her new home-away-from Home, The Arlene Francis Show, she staged a salute to woman suffrage, told fairy tales, dueted with Comedienne Elaine Stritch, interviewed General Carlos Romulo, chitchatted with Actor Cyril Ritchard, and delivered a spoof of Marlene Dietrich's seductive See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have. Only a fractured heel, which she got hopping over a low railing on Home, kept her from dancing. As always, Arlene's personal didos were gay, frolicsome and deceptively casual. "Sometimes," she explains, "the cozy, casual chums of TV are all as relaxed as cooked spaghetti, but most of what you see is the result of arduous, careful preparation."
A lifetime of just such preparation, plus a shrewd sense of utility, has established Arlene as the first lady of TV—and probably the highest paid. Toughest hurdle was Papa Kazanjian, who bundled Episcopalian Arlene off to a Roman Catholic convent when she was seven, later put her in Manhattan's flossy Finch School for proper young ladies. In a final, futile effort to steer her clear of the theater, he bought her a gift shop on Madison Avenue (Studio d'Arlene), which closed in the Depression. Soon a toughened veteran of the soap-opera circuit (Big Sister, Aunt Jenny), Arlene went on to mysteries (Mr. District Attorney), musicals (Phil Spitalny's show), and THE MARCH OF TIME. In her 20-odd Broadway roles, most of them undistinguished, she played everything from a Russian sniper to the Virgin Mary; but when Hollywood cast her as a prostitute in Murders in the Rue Morgue, her father shot off a hot wire: "Have just seen you half-naked on the screen. Come home." She did.
Back in Manhattan, hard-driving Arlene hit pay dirt with a radio show called What's My Name?, which gave her the reputation of saying, as she does on CBS's What's My Line?, anything that pops into her heart-shaped head. Once she blurted, "Oh my God," then broke the studio's stunned silence with: "Oh my God, I can't say 'Oh my God' over the air!"