P.&P.

Patience and Prudence Mclntyre, 14 and 11 years old respectively, are just like most girls their age except that they have a daddy who is a pianist-songwriter (The Money Tree) and full of bright ideas. One day Daddy--Mark Mclntyre--took them over to a recording studio and played his arrangement of the old Lee David-Billy Rose heart-thumper, Tonight You Belong to Me, while the girls cut a record as a birthday gift for Grandmother. When a musical friend of the family heard the record, "she flipped," and when Daddy submitted the disk to Liberty Records, President Si Waronker flipped too. By now, the record has sold more than a million copies. The next Patience and Prudence effort, Gonna Get Along Without Ya Now, sold 700,000 and made the sisters one of the hottest properties in the unpredictable pop-music world. Last week the sisters were hard at it again, cutting a song called We Can't Sing Rhythm and Blues, written by Daddy.

Nobody is more surprised by their success than Patience and Prudence themselves. ("People say that our names are obviously contrived, but that's what Mamma named us.") The girls never had a singing lesson; their voices are rather shaky, and even Daddy never gave them a second listen until one day, driving back from Malibu, he decided that the crooning girls were making "a good sound." Says Patience, who does the talking for the pair: "It's all a great big accident." Says their father: "It just came out of left field. It sort of sneaked in the side door." Trying to describe the girls' burbly, lilting style of singing, Liberty's President Waronker says: "It's a certain infectious little sound they get. Whenever I hear them sing, I smile."

However their success came about, Patience and Prudence are sitting pretty under the money tree, will gross some $100,000 this year on records alone (Liberty Records, which zoomed into the big time on the unexpected success of Julie London's Cry Me a River, is looking to the sisters for a big share of its 1957 profits). Mclntyre has turned down Las Vegas, movie and TV offers for the girls--except for one from Perry Como. Rumors were about that P. & P. were grown women whose voices had been trick-recorded, and Daddy wanted to show the TV audience "they were really children." Mclntyre is hesitant about letting them get too far into show business ("I don't want to end up with a couple of wisecracking brats"), but the girls would just as soon go on for a while. "It's easy. You just open your mouth and sing," says Patience. "When we grow up and don't get married," says Prudence in one of her rare remarks, "we'll have money and won't have to work real hard."

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