Double Life

Ken Nordine is a fortunate fellow who enjoys double rewards for living a double life. Over national TV hookups, as a smooth-talking pitchman for deodorants, detergents and such (Stopette, Pamper Shampoo, Tunis), he earns, he figures, about $80,000 a year. But Nordine has his real fun and finds his real fans on his own show, which pays him practically nothing.

Chapter & Verse. Once a week, over WNBQ in Chicago, tall, hollow-cheeked Ken Nordine recites poetry to a late evening audience. Perched on a stool, with a stepladder full of books beside him, the 34-year-old lowan reads earnestly in a subdued, husky voice, glancing from page to camera like a casual host reading to guests in his library. What distinguishes Nordine's shows from others like it is the flashing telephone by his side. He has adapted the disk jockey's request-format for poetry and made it work. When he finishes a poem, he picks up the telephone, listens to a new request from a viewer, and makes small talk while he leafs through his library to find the poem or passage wanted. Now for Nordine is broadcast after peak viewing hours, yet hundreds of listeners try to phone in every week. Those who fail to get through send in requests by mail. Last week he read, by request: Alexander Pope's "Ode on Solitude," Robert Frost's "Mending Wall," Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "How Do I Love Thee?", Carl Sandburg's "Clean Curtains," I Corinthians 13.

Although Now for Nordine is only a few weeks old, Nordine himself is no stranger to experimental television. For more than a year he has been frightening and delighting Chicago audiences with eerie readings of classic horror tales such as Poe's Pit and the Pendulum, Lovecraft's Rats in the Walls. He calls this show Faces in the Window, plays weird music as he reads and scares his listeners with a bagful of simple but effective tricks. For a story where a man is hanged, he had the camera turn slowly back and forth to suggest a corpse swinging on a rope. Trick lights and a turtleneck sweater make his cadaverous face appear to float in air, and sometimes a zoomar lens moves in until only one glittering Nordine eye fills up the television screen.

The Big Money. Nordine keeps his programs simple because he has no time to rehearse. Each week he records commercials for more than a dozen radio and TV sponsors, acts on soap operas, announces local shows, narrates for Chicago's growing TV film industry.

Nordine's own shows are unsponsored, but he has no intention of making them slick enough to sell. Says he: "Television tries to show off too much. I just want to sit down with people and read poetry." On the practical side, he also wants to stay in Chicago and keep on reading commercials. Thanks to tape recording, he can get his slice of the big-money network shows that originate on the East and West coasts.

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