Teen-Ager

In a welter of superlatives, statistics and beauty contests (to find the country's most beautiful 15-year-old) Lux Radio Theater this week celebrated its 15th anniversary. The oldest and most popular drama show on the drama-heavy air. Lux Theater is billed as being "synonymous with all the greatness and glamour of Hollywood." Producer-Host William Keighley (rhymes with Seeley) calls it "good, solid, clean entertainment" in which "nothing is ever used that might offend."

A Pipe & a Pint. By mixing equal parts of glamour and inoffensive blandness, Lux Theater has won a weekly audience estimated at 30 million. The devotees have heard 500 top Hollywood stars broadcasting skillfully warmed-over movie scenarios. For the anniversary, statisticians reckoned that it all added up to 650 shows, 39,120 pages of script, 14,344 musical cues and 68,460 sound effects (including an imitation of a peacock's cry* by the late George Arliss).

Since the Hollywood studio theater seats only 1,400 people ("We get queues as long as the Radio City Music Hall," says Keighley), only a handful of Lux's devoted audience have ever seen their idols in the flesh. To make it up to the others, CBS has distributed a brochure on the stars' "mike mannerisms" that is jam-packed with nuggety information. Samples: Bing Crosby "always rehearses with his pipe clenched between his teeth, even when singing"; Robert Cummings "reads lines from a semi-crouch, like a boxer"; Joan Crawford is a "microphone-clutcher," while Barbara Stanwyck is a "shoe-taker-offer." Don Ameche (with Loretta Young and Fred MacMurray, he is tied for the record with 21 appearances) drinks a pint of milk before each show "as a sedative." Paul Muni once played his violin right up to curtain time "to soothe his nerves."

Firsts & Fans. Though Lux Theater is careful not to offend, it has its moments of daring. Lux "broke ground in the radio field" by casting such opera stars as Lawrence Tibbett, Lily Pons and Helen Jepson in acting roles. The show boldly signed Radio Comics Jack Benny and Burns & Allen for "their first dramatic parts." And it induced Ronald Colman and Shirley Temple, "long holdouts from radio," to make their debuts on the air.

In 1945, when the show's producer, Cecil B. DeMille, left radio because of a fight with the American Federation of Radio Artists over his refusal to pay a $1 union assessment for a political fund, Keighley got the job. A wartime Army Air Forces colonel in charge of the A.A.F. motion picture services and a Hollywood producer (The Man Who Came to Dinner, George Washington Slept Here), Keighley

*A shrill "kee-oy!"

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