Her Nibs

"You can't build a show around a female singer, honey," says Georgia Gibbs. "Look at the way they axed Ginny and Dinah." But next week torchy Songstress Gibbs contradicts herself by stepping into a show, the first that has been tailored to her tiny (5 ft. 1 in.), alluringly tough measure. Georgia is the summer replacement for Eddie Cantor (NBC, Thurs. 10:30 p.m., E.D.T.).

Despite the "honeys" that sugar-coat her talk, Georgia is no Southern belle. She began life as Fredda Gibson in Massachusetts, and sang her first notes in a Worcester, Mass, orphanage. At 15, she drifted to Boston, divided her evenings between waltzing in a dance studio and warbling in a nightclub.

In 1936 she took to the road with a touring orchestra and played one-night stands up & down the country ("It was hell, honey: 18 men and me"). One night in Ithaca, at a Cornell prom, Fredda got a call from Orchestra Leader Richard Himber: he had heard her recording of I'll Never Tell You I Love You, and wanted to try her out in a radio show. Fredda borrowed $10 from the band manager and lit out for Manhattan. The orchestra hasn't heard from her since.

Himber took one look at her plain little face and groaned. But she got the job, sang on Himber's Studebaker Champions program for 13 weeks. Then a song plugger told her about a big audition at NBC. Like the songstress in Frederic Wakeman's The Hucksters, she was cautioned to sing "loud and fast. . . and on the beat." About 150 other girls were trying out, too ("An acre of mink and silver fox, honey, and me in a little old suit"). But Lucky Strike's late George Washington Hill liked Fredda's hep style, and she got the contract. For the next two years she was the unsung singer for the Lucky Strike Hit Parade.

Fredda soon found that she was typed as "that fast-singing Lucky Strike girl." One day, after a tough stretch, she decided to remodel herself, shuck the Hit Parade mannerisms, get a new name and a new agent. It turned out that her lusty, slower-paced new-style singing was a good complement to radio's comedians. Georgia drifted into a period of stooging for most of the top funny men: Hope, Durante, Frank Morgan, Milton Berle, Danny Kaye. She practiced her comedy lines and learned to "get into the show." She also picked up some brassy publicity tricks: one night Garry Moore called her "Her Nibs, Miss Georgia Gibbs." The title stuck--to Georgia's belts, cigaret lighters and anything else that could be engraved, embroidered or rhinestoned with the catch line.

Georgia thinks her hard-won comedy sense will help bolster her singing; the summer show will point up her comic gifts. Meanwhile she has both brown eyes sharply fixed on a Broadway musical for next season.

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