DYNAMIC DINAH

In Hollywood Frances Rose (Dinah) Shore packed enough activity into last fortnight to exhaust two or three less dynamic individuals. She started work on her first picture (Eddie Cantor's Thank Your Lucky Stars), broadcast her own show (Dinah Shore in Person), sang in Eddie Cantor's Time to Smile broadcast, and a few times at Army camps, appeared at the opening of Hollywood's "Stage Door" Canteen. For her it was a comparatively torpid seven days. The week before, in one day she put on seven soldier shows.

Like Dinah's drive, Dinah's rise has been more of a trajectory than a career. In two years Miss Shore has become the No. 1 female blues singer. She queens the juke boxes within an inch of Bing Crosby ("than whom," says Dinah, "there is no whomer"). Her extracurricular "honors" have piled up like ticker tape. She was "Queen" of the Brooklyn Dodgers, "Queen" of Manhattan's famed Seventh Regiment, is "Sweetheart" of more Army camps than she can remember. At Manhattan's Butlers' Ball she was named "The Girl We Wish Would Come to Dinner."

What Dinah's voice has that other voices haven't is an incendiary quality that somehow gives each listener the illusion that she is singing to him alone. This quality--once described as "starting a fire by rubbing two notes together"--is no acquired trick, but an act of musical intimacy.

Dinah explains her throaty singing style by saying that blues are "fundamental, instinctive." She has two other explanations: 1) her old Southern mammy exposed her at an early age to Negro spirituals; 2) her voice changed from soprano to contralto due to cheerleading at Vanderbilt University.

After Vanderbilt, the best job Dinah could get in Manhattan was as an unpaid singer on a local radio station. Months later, on a bleak New Year's Eve when she had got down to her last nickel, she almost committed suicide.

Then big things happened. NBC-Blue signed Dinah as jive-diva on its Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street program. She became the darling of le jazz hot. Then Eddie Cantor hired her. She recorded Yes, My Darling Daughter, which sold half a million. A year later she started her own show. Now a minor Big Business (her earnings this year will run about $115,000), Dinah is handled by a board of five.

Dinah, wary of celebrity hunters, declares: "They'll never turn me into a glamor girl." She prefers the armed forces, likes to pass the soldiers' hangout near the Vine Street Brown Derby, greeting soldiers (especially privates) with: "Hi ya, soldier! My name's Dinah. What's yours?" "Once I get them and they get me," she says, "we have a wonderful time." She has stopped her car to sing her head off to a one-man sentry in the desert.

Last March Dinah went home to Nashville to sing at a war rally. She was met by local dignitaries. Crowds cheered as she tripped down a red carpet from the train to the biggest limousine in town. A motorcycle corps escorted her as the procession swirled into Church Street--Nashville's Fifth Avenue. Dinah burst into tears, could not sing a note.

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