The Talker

TV's newest fad is conversation. It is based on a new version of the old Hollywood conviction that the opinions of any performer, expressed with or without benefit of pressagent, are worth hearing. TV's talk fad has produced a flock of conversationalists who cheerfully regard themselves as a generation of bright, chatty vipers, convinced that they can turn banality into "frankness" and delight millions by their daring.

One of the chattiest of the word warriors is intimately known to dour Cinemactor James Mason, who for years has been famed offstage for a sort of stunned silence. It was not one of Mason's fifteen cats that got his tongue. Every day, when she rises from her noon bath in their Beverly Hills mansion, his wife, coruscant Pamela Mason, 42, begins talking with the literate sting of a Parisian presiding over her salon. An old friend, Screenwriter Nunnally Johnson, says: "She talks like a woman who was born analyzed. She is happily malicious."

Ultimate Compliment. By last week, Pamela Mason, sometime actress (The Upturned Glass), authoress (A Lady Possessed), had carved such a successful career on her ad-lib shows with her sharp tongue that Comedian Jack Benny paid her the ultimate compliment: a well-rehearsed part as an "ad-lib" panelist in his TV satire on the subject. The show itself proved mainly that Pamela is no straight player. "I've always had a tendency to talk too much," she concedes. "I may as well enjoy it." That she does.

Pamela begins the day by phoning one of her pals to exchange, as she says, "the frightful news on everyone else--who changed analysts, which wife went home crying from what party with whom." She deluges husband James with her daily "report from the jungle," but he simply "sits there with his big brown eyes. He's never made a reply. I can't help wondering if his hearing aid is properly tuned."

Mason might have scrapped the hearing aid altogether if he had grown up with Pamela's family: "There were six of us, and we had to talk fast. My mother was half Irish, half Welsh, and she talked all the time--more than I do now." Pamela's Russian-born father (British Movie Pioneer Sir Isidore Ostrer) was not far behind in his rumpled English. The family stopped talking when Pamela's parents were divorced (she was eleven: "All of a sudden I was sort of grown up"), but her training paid off. Running away from school at twelve, Pamela talked herself into a London movie career, had made her third film when she was married at 16 to Director Roy Kellino (then a cameraman). Later Actor Mason moved in with the Kellinos as a house guest, stayed to say goodbye to Kellino and became Pamela's second husband. For 18 years, he has been listening.

The Masons descended on Hollywood in 1947, and Pamela found it such a "naively pure" town ("Peyton Place was squeamish by comparison") that she has felt compelled to educate it ever since. She has feuded with Columnist Hedda Hopper ("a dreadful person"), constantly popped off with suggestions such as harems for Hollywood husbands in order to prevent "messes like Eddie Fisher and Liz Taylor."

Final Niche. Some of her pronouncements are moved by heartfelt ache over the fate of children in divorces (she is writing a novel about them entitled Hollywood Be Thy Name). Others seem to be just a piece-of-mind psychologizing. Last year she went on the air with a Los Angeles TV show called Ad Lib. To the fearful joy of sponsors, Pamela lambasted monogamy as "unnatural," defended premarital sex relations because "it's absurd to stop just when you're most interested," and called for legalization of homosexuality because "it's nobody's business what two adult males do with their sex life."

Such talks soon made Pamela a public figure, ripe for network display on the Jack Paar show. Her new career seems assured as long as the talk fad continues. Says Oscar Levant, the top word slinger of them all: "Pamela, I think you've finally found your niche--just this side of vulgarity."

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