New Little Flower

Newbold Morris, onetime president of the New York city council and close friend of the late Fiorello H. La Guardia, walked into the star's dressing room after a performance at Manhattan's Broadhurst Theater and said: "Mr. La Guardia, we met for the first time when you were elected mayor in 1933."

In the new hit musical, Fiorello (TIME, Dec. 7), Actor Tom Bosley appears before Broadway audiences for the first time and gives them what they thought they had seen for the last time: the fire, drive and percussion of New York's Little Flower. "I was thunderstruck by the similarity," said Morris. Bosley reads the funnies with a perfect croak, pushes back his coat to place his hands, fingers down, on his hips while speaking, sings in a voice like the one that must have sounded in the shower at Gracie Mansion. He makes the most of his pudgy hands and Little Flower pot, belts out campaign songs in Italian and Yiddish, bursts out explosively at Tammany men with chalk-stripe suits and Shinola in their hair. He has the look of a man who likes fire trucks.

Eight years ago, Actor Bosley was a restaurant doorman. Born in Chicago, he started out there after discharge from the Navy in 1946, worked on local radio shows, did summer stock. Moving on to New York four years later, he picked up small acting jobs off Broadway and on TV, kept up his La Guardian waistline by checking hats at Lindy's (all the cheesecake he could eat). Good off-Broadway jobs came in The Sea Gull (1954), Thieves' Carnival (1955), The Beaux' Stratagem, and The Power and the Glory (last year). Bosley won the La Guardia role over more than 200 other contenders (both Mickey Rooney and Eli Wallach had been considered), prepared himself by listening to recordings, reading biographies and studying still photographs, but he carefully avoided overdoing all that. "I do an impression," he says, "not an imitation."

"I'll give you till you're 30 to make it," Bosley's mother once said to him. When he was 30, she said "31" and the next year "32." This season, at 32, Tom Bosley made it.

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