G.I.s' Disc Jockey

For G.l.s who like jive and pin-up girls in about equal proportions, the Armed Forces Radio Service hit upon a neat solution: wrap up both and deliver them in a single package. The package is a pretty ex-movie starlet named Rebel Randall, the disc jockey of Jukebox, U.S.A., whose face and statistics (36 in. bust and hips, 24-in. waist) are every bit as appealing as her throaty voice.

By last week, brunette, green-eyed Rebel Randall (who was born Alaine Brandes 29 years ago in Chicago) was a top radio and pin-up attraction on such far-flung military networks as the Mosquito (Guadalcanal), the Far Eastern (Japan and Korea), the Jungle (New Guinea) and the Bedside (military hospitals). Her five-day-a-week show is beamed to more than two million members of the armed forces and some 80 million foreign listeners-in. She gets 1,000 letters a month from G.l.s, asking for pinups, making requests for favorite records and offering her everything from marriage to captured North Korean rifles. Last week a sergeant in Japan called her in Los Angeles to say he was sending an oil painting for her bedroom. Another soldier wrote that she reminded him of "a marshmallow in a cup of hot chocolate."

Rebel knows enough music to play the piano and sing passably, but she has had to learn or invent a whole new vocabulary while spinning records for hep soldiers. Now a saxophone is always a "goldenrod," playing a trumpet is "scraping the ceiling," drums are "kettles" and violins are "angel music." When not talking about hot & sweet records, Rebel tries to strike a fine balance between sentiment and bathos, because "our purpose isn't to make them lonesome, it's to make them happy."

Though she still makes an occasional movie (her most recent is a quickie called Danger Zone), Rebel hopes that the Armed Forces Radio will let her keep her disc jockey show on the air as long as there are U.S. troops overseas. Adds Rebel, who has three brothers of her own in service: "I guess that will be a long time."

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