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No Cupids. Gottlieb's two partners, if not ready for chairs at Harvard, also have backgrounds creditably academic. Hassilev, 28, a handsome, international polychrome, was born in Paris, the son of a Russian civil engineer, and was eventually educated at the University of Chicago. Yarbrough, 31, who looks like a Bavarian bobsledder and sings in a Dennis Day tenor, was educated at the Great Books college, St. John's in Annapolis. The two met in the folksinging circles of small New York nightclubs. Gottlieb, who had helped pay his graduate school expenses as one of San Francisco's Gateway Singers, heard them on the West Coast in 1959 and suggested that they form a trio.
Now they can work almost anywhere. In New York until early July, and off to Los Angeles after that, the Limeliters will appear in 29 cities before Christmas, but they are so sensitive to the environment of their performances that there are some places they try hard to avoid, such as 1) any auditorium with cupids on the walls, although "Bobby Darin might not mind it," says Gottlieb; 2) Las Vegas, a place "I would gladly join an organization to eradicate"; and 3) the Jack Paar Show, which "is like listening to a Methodist minister who has had four martinis."