Eydie Gorme is, as everyone who stays up late at night knows, the highly talented young singer on the Steve Allen "Tonight" show on NBC-TV. Her name is pronounced as though it were E.D. Gawr-may, her parents are Turkish, and she was born in the Bronx, where, for some reason or other, she learned Spanish, not Turkish from her parents. She started to sing at the age of three. She was in a department store with her mother and she wandered off and joined a line of other kids while her mother wasn't looking. The line was for kids who were performing on a radio kiddie show. When she got to the head of the line, Eydie sang on the radio to her mother's amazement. When she grew up - but not much, she being only 5 feet 3 now - she sang at William Howard Taft High School where she was voted the prettiest and peppiest cheer leader. Later she sang with Tex Beneke's band, made a lot of records, and then got her big opportunity which raised her into the real big dough at the Copacabana in New York where she made a huge success as the headliner.
"The thing that happened that made me tear down the picket fence with my friend's Thunderbird," said Eydie, "was that as soon as I started the motor, I switched on the radio and a disc jockey said, 'And now we will play Eydie Gorme's latest recording,' and it was such a shock and a surprise that I just got carried away and stepped on the gas and bang went through the fence."
The young man who has stopped talking to Eydie more often and longer than any other young man, probably, is Steve Lawrence, her friend and colleauge on the Steve Allen show. "The first time," said Eydie, "was when we were doing the show in Florida the first time. We were 'way, 'way up on a high diving board over a swimming pool, singing a song. We were supposed to jump in after we finished singing. But Steve looked down and he muttered, 'I'm not jumping, it's too high.' So when the time came, I pushed him and jumped. He didn't talk to me for a week.
"Next year we were in Florida, it was a real cold. We were in a rowboat and when we finished singing our song, we were supposed to tip over the boat. But Steve said, 'I'm not going in the water, it's too cold.' But the director was making frantic motions, so I tipped the boat. One of the oars hit poor Steve on the head, and he got a terrible cut over his eye. This time, he didn't talk to me for five weeks."
Pretty Eydie Gorme sighed. "Anybody can see," she said, "that it's not my fault these things happen, but they stop talking to me anyway." |
