The Compleat Diskman

On the album cover is a red sticker emblazoned with the record pitchman's call: "30 Complete Selections on 2 LPs, Regularly $9.98, Special Only $3.98." Inside is a strange mixture of musical candies: Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy singing Indian Love Call, Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony playing the Prelude to Act III of Lohengrin. Perez Prado, Tommy Dorsey and Perry Como rub grooves with Enrico Caruso, Sergei Rachmaninoff and Leopold Stokowski.

The black-eared fox terrier on the cover of 60 Years of Music America Loves Best is a reminder that only the most famous U.S. recording company could have put together such an assortment. But the hit album (last week it was selling 5,000 copies a day) also expressed the Janus headed personality of the man who conceived it--a lanky, Viennese-born ex-advertising man and music critic named George Richard Marek.

The Habit Is Everything. As general manager of the RCA Victor Record Division of the Radio Corporation of America, George Marek, 57, ranks as the world's biggest musical merchandiser. In the fiercely competitive, $400 million (retail) record market, Victor claims 25% of total sales. On the Christmas-trade counters last week Victor was pushing both a new Beecham version of Handel's Messiah and the Ames Brothers, a recording of Archibald MacLeish's J.B. and Elvis Presley's newest but possibly fading wails (see SHOW BUSINESS). Marek himself is a dedicated opera lover (among his books: The World Treasury of Grand Opera, an excellent biography of Puccini), but he is also the man responsible for an album called Classical Music for People Who Hate Classical Music. His conviction: If he can get customers started on "music, any kind of music," they will soon find they cannot do without it. "As the cigarette people believe, the habit is everything."

Shy, scholarly George Marek got the music habit early. The son of a Viennese dentist, he haunted the Vienna Opera as a child, later became a regular standee at the Metropolitan Opera after his parents sent him to the U.S. at the age of 17 to make his fortune. For a time he worked in Manhattan in a millinery house, where he was assigned to the ostrich-feather department. Before long, Marek gave up feathers for advertising, became a vice president of the J. D. Tarcher Agency, spent his days writing copy (Coty, Smith Bros.) and his nights as the regular music critic of Good Housekeeping and House Beautiful. In 1950 he made a pitch for the advertising account of RCA Victor, was turned down, but found himself with a job there as classical repertory chief.

Packaged Snake Oil. Marek promptly decreed that Victor, which had been losing disastrously in the Battle of the Speeds with Columbia, would henceforth abandon 45 r.p.m. disks as a vehicle for serious music, concentrate on 33 1/3 LPs. Anxious to break Victor's long-ingrained habit of leaning lazily but profitably on its bulging vault of masterworks by legendary artists, e.g., Caruso, Rachmaninoff. Fritz Kreisler, Marek threw out such merchandising bait as money-back guarantees, started peddling records in supermarkets and drugstores, signed a raft of top talent: Conductors Pierre Monteux and Fritz Reiner, Pianist Gary Graffman. On the theory that "you have to put your snake oil in a beautiful package,'' Marek substituted color photos for the prosaic old Victor album covers with their dead-grass colors. Recently he hired Dorle and Dario Soria (formerly of Angel) as independent producers to make deluxe-packaged recordings of the classics. He also followed Columbia into the profitable record club field.

The care and feeding of the strictly pop artists in his menage--Elvis, Perry Como, Lena Home, et al.--Marek leaves to his pop artists-and-repertory chief, Steve Sholes. But Marek was personally responsible for bringing in the "mood music" of the Melachrino Strings--a successful answer to Columbia's Kostelanetz and London's Mantovani. With the profits from such enterprises he pushes things closer to his own taste, e.g., a recording of the Berlioz Requiem, the first complete recording of Hamlet, with Sir John Gielgud.

Tired Businessmen. To some customers and critics, Victor's chief failing is that it does not pay sufficient attention to modern music. Marek admits that only a small percentage of the 975 albums in the company's classical list contains works by contemporaries. About 100 classical works account for 85% of Victor's classical sales -- and few of them are modern. Realizing that an RCA classical album has to sell 15,000 copies to get into the black, Marek has decreed that for every three or four records the company issues by choice, there must be eight of "what the public wants." And he adds: "Victor is an elephant. You must not expect an elephant to behave like a gazelle."

One evening last week George Marek sat in his Manhattan apartment and, with his wife serving as stenographer, dictated another scholarly chapter of a book he is writing on the dramatic basis of opera. The gazelle in Marek well satisfied, he turned up early at the office next day and threw himself with equal enthusiasm into another current interest. Marek had learned that George Alpert, the president of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad, is a talented amateur violinist. To Merchandiser Marek, the conclusion was inevitable: an album that might well be titled Music by Tired Businessmen, designed to lure uncommitted org men into the music fold.

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