"Goodness!"

She is easily the No. 1 salesman on the air. Her five-to-ten million women listeners buy any product she plugs. When she told the faithful about Winter Garden carrots, sales immediately leaped from two to ten carloads a day; sales of a soft drink, advertised on her program alone, rose 900%.

Every weekday for the past 12 1/2 years Mary Margaret McBride has brought to the air 45 minutes of what she calls "a good radio voice--the kind that pushes itself up against you." For the first 35 minutes she titters through an interview with a celebrity. In the last ten she really goes into her act--mugging through commercials for 13 sponsors (who pay her about $100,000 a year).

She gets radio awards by the baker's dozen. This week she will get "one of the sweetest of them all." The society of Audubon Artists will honor her for making the most "notable contribution to radio" in the last year. The dividend: her portrait painted free by Maximilian A. Rasko, who has done Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and a heap of crowned heads.

"Basic Dark Blue." The picture will show a well-spread, middle-aged (at 47) spinster, who dresses in "basic dark blue" sacks (designed by Nicole de Paris) and replies to almost any statement by clasping her hands, pursing her lips, blinking her eyes and exclaiming: "Goodness!" But Mary Margaret is a brilliant interviewer. With a well-controlled gush she can "soften up" almost anyone to just the sticky consistency her listeners love. She does it with an air of dithery, appreciative interest that soon has most guests babbling as if they had known her for years. Once she had Jimmy Durante telling such pitiable stories about his youth that, before the program's end, both were sobbing. Last week she interviewed Gallant Bess, The Talking Horse (see cut), who made horse-faces at the mike--and whispered.* The only other participant in these scenes is Mary Margaret's announcer--a 37-year-old Princeton graduate named Vincent Connolly, whom she has been known to buss maternally after the show.

What she calls her "fannies" follow her home with 500 letters a day and truckloads of presents: dolls, fresh eggs, lazy susans, antimacassars, samplers, crocheted towels, doilies, candy, cookies and an emu egg. More than anything else, the fannies send food. Mary Margaret used to finish almost all of it--eating the icing and leaving the cake, sucking the insides out of chocolates and leaving the shell. But for the past year she has watched her diet.

Business Deal. Mary Margaret grew up in Missouri, studied journalism at the University of Missouri, got a job on the Cleveland Press, went on to the old New York Evening Mail, soon crashed the Satevepost with a profile of Paul Whiteman. By this time she put her business affairs in the hands of Stella Karns, a businesswoman as bright and hard as a new dime. Stella muscled Mary Margaret into radio practically on her own terms. She also does as she pleases with Mary Margaret, of whom she snorts: "She chews the rag so much, it's a wonder she doesn't have lint on the lungs."

*Some recent two-footed guests: Eleanor Roosevelt, Dame Myra Hess, Louis Bromfield.

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