Pioneer

The new summer season's most fetching musical offering proved last week to be also its weightiest serving of social significance. The program: the Nat "King" Cole Show, starring the tall, courtly $500,000-a-year troubadour who has played the world's plushiest nightspots and sold a staggering 50 million records. Last fall NBC gave 38-year-old Cole a 15-minute weekly spot, making him the first of U.S. show business' numerous and talented Negroes to star as host of his own TV network show. Launching a new weekly series (Tuesday, 10 p.m. E.D.T.), the network last week gave him half an hour to spread his wings.

Cole, a stylist with a voice like a pull of taffy, is still TV's only regular Negro headlines* "I was talking to Lena Home the other night," he said last week, "and she said, 'You know, Nat, with your show going on like it is, maybe some day I'll get one.' I hear other Negro performers are pushing their agents to get them TV shows, but the agents say, 'We've got to wait and see what Nat's show does.' "

Only a Paper Crown. When Nat made his fall debut on NBC, he recalled, "They were kind of worried about our rating in the South, but it's just as good there as any place else." Yet the show is still unsponsored, and Producer-Director Bob Henry believes that the potential sponsors have been held off by unwarranted fears about the color problem.

Born Nathaniel Coles in Montgomery, Ala., Nat dropped the "s" to accommodate the "King" nickname after a nightclub owner put a golden paper crown on his head. He moved as a child to Chicago, where his father became pastor of the True Light Baptist Church and his mother the choir director. He was pounding out Yes, We Have No Bananas on the piano at the age of five, and at 15 he had his own band. It was a nightclub drunk who launched his singing career by insisting that Pianist Cole sing as well as play Sweet Lorraine. Penniless in Hollywood during the war, he put words and music to a parable he once heard in his father's church. The song: Straighten Up and Fly Right. Though he sold it outright for $50, it led to his first Capitol Records disk and helped make his voice one of the most familiar in the land.

Critics Don't Buy. Cole lives handsomely with his wife Marie and two daughters in an $85,000, English-style home in Los Angeles' posh Hancock Park. (When a lawyer for nearby property owners told him bluntly in 1948 that "we don't want any undesirable people coming into this neighborhood," he replied: "Neither do I. If I see anybody undesirable coming in here, I'll be the first to complain.") Though polished and well-mannered, he has a flair for the astringent crack. When critics complained that he had deserted pure jazz for sentimental corn, he said: "Critics don't buy records--they get 'em free." He dubbed Bandleader Lawrence Welk "a musical Ed Sullivan."

Of his CBS opposition, $64,000 Question, Cole says obliquely: "I figure somebody would like to see entertainment once in a while." Last week, with assists from skilled Arranger Nelson Riddle and Guest Frankie Laine, but mostly by just curling his voice around such tunes as Stay As Sweet As You Are and Shadow Waltz, Cole showed how entertaining a half-hour can be. But it is also serious business. "You know," he says, "if this show is successful, the other networks might even try to counterattack by putting other Negroes on opposite me. That's O.K. with me. Come to think of it, that's good."

-Negroes also appear in TV's Amos 'n' Andy (which most Negroes have long scorned as a patronizing comic strip).

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