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June Lockhart has made a change from star to salesman, but she has remained on the same show. She used to be big in the Lassie series, of course, but when a change of format eased her out of the narrative, she simply did a 60-seconder for Kool-Aid, the show's sponsor, and earned $30,000 for it. She also talks to schoolchildren about Crest Toothpaste. This, says her agent, "keeps her mother image intact."
The eye-filling Edie Adams, appearing for Muriel Cigars, says: "Why don't you pick me up and smoke me some time?" Eva Gabor mixes sex with cinders, too, offering a pipeful of Masterpiece tobacco to a fellow, scarcely seen on the screen, who is presumably worthy of her favors. Phil Silvers extols Pream. Mamie van Doren, with a kind of exactitude of casting, appears in a $39.98 dress covered with glittering beads for a Los Angeles discount house. She also works for Aqua Velva. Joseph Cotten discusses the miracle of Bufferin, and so does Arlene Francis, for which each was paid $50,000. Imogene Coca appears for Armstrong Cork. Louis Jourdan, surprisingly, appears for Prell Shampoo. The Lustre-Creme seraglio has included Jill St. John, Juliet Prowse, Jeanne Crain, Jane Powell, Sandra Dee and Stella Stevens.
New Vegas. Old Aunt Tilly, in the wonderful skits for Lay's potato chips, is Bert Lahr, shawl and all. Even semi-show-business people like Mickey Spillane are doing commercials. Mickey dashes out in the dead of night and jumps into a waiting car that contains a remarkable blonde. "Wherever this man goes, he packs a .38," says the announcer. Then Spill ane holds up a bar of Lifebuoy soap, which is advertised as giving "38-hour protection."
And celebrities who are relative aliens to show business are eager to plug things too. Rocky Graziano, displaying a container of Breakstone Cultured Yoghurt, says, "Ya wanna be helty, goils?" All they have to do, he says, is eat the cultured yoghurt. He eats some himself. The next line he delivers has intonations so cultured that it might have been rehearsed at Brasenose or Balliol. "Breakstone is the more cultured yoghurt," he says beautifully.
"I don't know whether people are going to come to their senses or whether they have decided that this is the new Las Vegas—how to make $100,000 the quick way," says Stan Freberg, the nutty satirist who was one of the first performers to get into the commercial field in a major way. "But I believe that someone, somewhere, has enough money to make Elizabeth Taylor pick up a can of Maxwell House."