Sheik of the Accordion

Dick Contino is one of the few men in musical history who have ever squeezed big money out of an accordion. When he steps out into a spotlight and flashes a smile almost as wide and white as the keyboard of his stomach Steinway, his lady fans go limp, men smile wanly, and the management gets ready to peel off up to $4,000 a week.

At 21, Contino is not the world's greatest accordion player; others have the same flying-finger technique. But none has ever surpassed his showmanship. "When he digs into a tune," one admirer puts it, "he becomes as passionate as a sailor on his first night ashore." Says Erskine Johnson, Hollywood columnist: "He looks down his accordion the way Gilbert used to look down Garbo."

Last week Contino was looking down his accordion at the Mark Hopkins and giving San Francisco night life its biggest lift of the season.

On opening night, husky and handsome in a midnight-blue tuxedo, he first stepped briskly into the spotlight and bared his wisdom teeth. Then he skittered into a fast, tricky arrangement of China Boy, letting a small smile play on his face, as if to cue the audience to the right light spirit. In Bewitched, he swayed like a stalk of wheat, closing his eyes and opening his mouth to cue in deep ecstasy. From there he went to Duke Ellington's hot, blaring Caravan. Then he took off his tie, loosened his collar, and launched into a friendly little story of his life. His applauding fans seemed to like that almost as well.

Contino likes to tell how his father came to the U.S. from Sicily and set up as a butcher in Fresno. (At this point, he usually produces papa, and papa sings in Italian.) His mother's brother, christened Raffaele Giordano but better known as Young Corbett III, onetime world welterweight champ (1933), thought young Dick would make a good fighter; he has big hands. But from twelve on, Dick has wanted to sing and play the accordion.

He got his first big chance in 1947, when he won Bandleader Horace Heidt's cross-country "Youth Opportunity" contest. Last summer, free of Heidt's contract, he started out for the big money at the Waldorf.

Dick admits, "I'm very ambitious. I want to do everything I can with my music and find new ways and mediums for it." But, above all, he would like to build "a beautiful church right on the corner where I was born in Fresno. If I could do that, I'd really think I'd done something."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.