Kate Jr.

To make herself look older, the fat girl who looked like Kate Smith's daughter borrowed her roommate's black hat, coat and spectacles. But the big agency executive took one startled look, blurted: "My god, it's a baby!"

Thus, three years ago, Jean Holloway sold her first radio script--a play about Catherine Howard and bluebearded Henry VIII--to the Kate Smith show. She was 20.

Last week it was Radio Row's safe guess that smiling, apple-cheeked Jean Holloway had proved her point with one of the fleetest careers in radio. Until June the mainstay of the Kate Smith show (for which she wrote Kate's speeches, all song lead-ins and dramatics), Jean's prolific output includes a free-verse drama about Davy Crockett for Walter Huston, a biographical extravaganza about Composer Claude Debussy with a 70-piece orchestra for background, an all-Negro romp called Jubilee, special shows for Madeleine Carroll, Edward Arnold, Gertrude Lawrence, many another top-flight star, not counting 200-odd stars who have spoken her lines on the Kate Smith program.

For her new show, Mayor of the Town series (CBS, Wed., 9:30 p.m. E.W.T.), Jean is under contract at some $600 a week. Tired old Lionel Barrymore, its central character, declared that its first episode contained "one of the finest speeches it has ever been my pleasure to read."

But Jean has failed utterly in the ambition nearest her heart. She is a frustrated radio actress (her incorrigible girth had long ago relegated her to radio's invisible stage). She has vainly tried to write herself into a part. Once pulling out all the stops, she wrote a play about "a girl who wrote a play with a part for herself and nobody would let her play it." The word Destiny came to appear more & more in her scripts.

The fact that Jean became generally known as "Kate Junior" got her nowhere nearer microphones than before. Radio Playwright Norman Corwin, her "greatest ideal in writing," raised her hopes highest. One day he called and said he had a part for her in his Pursuit of Happiness series. "Beaming all over my fat face," she rushed to the studio, where Corwin put her through a grueling two-hour rehearsal that ran the gamut of emotions from fear to insanity. Her part finally consisted of one word: "Kidnapped!"

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