Monday, Apr. 12, 1954

Hollywood's Joyful Noises

In Hollywood one day last fall, Songstress Beryl Davis, British-born and an Anglican, persuaded three other well-known Hollywood girls to help out on an evening's entertainment at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church. Her helpers: Songstresses Connie Haines, a Southern Presbyterian, Delia Russell, a Roman Catholic, and Actress Jane Russell, a nondenominational Protestant. Beryl directed the other three in a swingy version of Do Lord, an oldtime hymn. The audience gave them a huge hand, and thereby launched a new U.S. gospel quartet on a promising career.

By last week the quartet's peppy recording of Do Lord had sold 180,000 copies. The quartet (with Rhonda Fleming, a Mormon, now filling in for Delia Russell) has four more recordings scheduled for April, a date to sing on the Colgate Comedy Hour's Easter Sunday broadcast, and a projected movie short. Easter billing: "The Four Girls Making a Joyful Noise unto the Lord."--

Jane Russell, who deplores the sexy PENNY EDWARDS & DAUGHTER The truth was opposite. roles Hollywood has given her ("Nobody knows the struggle I've put up"), last week explained and defended her feelings about religion and the Four Girls' type of hymn -- the fast-moving gospel songs that she remembers from the camp meetings of her youth in Los Angeles. "Our song is joyful, it's scriptural, it's full of happiness. If to some it's noise, that's too bad.

"The way I see it, real church people don't have that terrible, austere fear of God. They feel like they're sitting on their Father's lap; to some he's 'Dad,' to others he's 'Father.' But it's a warm, friendly, loving feeling."

In Hollywood last week, Actress Penny Edwards, 25 (Pony Soldier, Powder River), announced her retirement from the commercial motion pictures to devote herself to full-time church work. Actress Edwards, wife of TV Director Ralph Winters, was baptized a Roman Catholic, will now become a Seventh-Day Adventist. Recently, she said, she had felt a sudden surge of religious faith. "I felt myself bursting with love and happiness. At that moment, I wanted to have a baby. Then, two weeks later, I found I was pregnant." Turning to serious study of the Bible, she found that the truths of Scripture were "just the opposite of the life I was living in show business." Said Penny: "I guess I posed for every kind of cheesecake there is, but now my heart has been changed."

* From Psalm 100:1: "Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands."

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