Hula Queen

Schoolteachers sometimes let go. That's what Clara Inter did. She was a demure young Hawaiian schoolmarm, teaching English grammar to youngsters from the plantations. One day, while singing with a native chorus for some mainland tourists, Clara impulsively stepped out of line and let fly a few lyrics of The Cockeyed Mayor of Kaunakakai, She followed it up with a naughty burlesque of the hula.

The tourists were enchanted. Before she could say Liliuokalani, Clara was the barefoot toast of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and a great tourist attraction. But it took her ten years to catch on with the home-folks. Last week, as Hilo Hattie, Clara was Hawaii's No. 1 radio hit, and the talk of Polynesia.

Grinning, pumpkin-plump Clara, 46, is not the cinema ideal of a hula queen. One night at the Royal Hawaiian, to the distress of the management, she sang and danced a brazen number called When Hilo Hattie Does the Hilo Hop. Composer Don McDiarmid was aghast ("I had in mind a slender, beautiful Hawaiian maiden--and look at you"). But the cash customers wanted more. The song became her trademark, and Hilo Hattie soon became Clara's professional name.

Engagements on the mainland followed. San Francisco thought Hattie was a scream; so did the patrons of Manhattan's sophisticated St. Regis Hotel. During the war, Hattie acted with Jinx Falkenberg and Betty Grable in a couple of sarong-draped movies. In the U.S., she also made some recordings and discarded her third husband (she is currently unmarried). Last year, between mainland triumphs, she went home and took to the air. With a disc jockey program on Honolulu's KPOA and an amateur hour on rival station KGMB, she registered her first solid hit with the natives.

Hattie's scripts are written in English, but she dishes them out in purest pidgin. Sample: ''Dis program we make fo' any kind people who like sing, kani kani pila [music], talk-story. Baby can try, school chiren can try and even if you makule [old] still okay. No need be sham'."

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