The Perfumed Tar Pit

"Debbie Ishlon has written a novel."

"Crazy, man. Are you in it?"

The fact, the surprise and the question were ricocheting through the pop-music trade last week. Girl Singer (Doubleday; $3.95 ) was in the bookstores, and although the world in general had never heard of Deborah Ishlon, big-time agents, smalltime clarinetists, deejays, artists-and-repertory men, photographers and music publishers were browsing with interest. They all knew her as a 34-year-old former secretary who became the trade's nimblest pressagent and has lately assumed the portentous title of Coordinator of Creative Services for Columbia Records. While it may be less than literature, her novel nonetheless is an insider's impressionistic collage of a tawdry business.

Latter-Day Alchemist. The plot is standard. An ambitious small-town disk jockey makes a tape of a teenager named Anna Lou Schreckengost singing at a country-club dance and sends it to Sid Harper, A. & R. man at Manhattan's Blackwood Records. Anna Lou and her grandmother are flown to New York for an audition.

Although she cannot read music and is so implausibly naive that she describes microphones as "boxes hanging from bent poles," Anna Lou does well--with an audio engineer's help. Harper and a magazine photographer return with her in triumph to New Bethel, Pa., and dredge up material for a cover story. Back in New York, Anna Lou (now Beth Adams) is bathed in fame on a TV show, more fame as singer of the top tune on the charts.

Novelist Ishlon tells her story in a two-part stream of consciousness, first through the oversimplified mind of the girl in a kind of Schreckengost-written prose, then through the hypomanic mind of the A. & R. man, who has abandoned serious composing and now sees himself as "a latter-day alchemist, compounding dross voices with banal notes to produce gold." Novelist Ishlon insists that Anna Lou Schreckengost is no one in particular. She could be an approximation of Cincinnati's Doris Kappelhoff, who--with 1946-3 Sentimental Journey--made famous her new name, Doris Day. But coincidence falls closer to Norma Jean Speran:a, a teenager from a small town in western Pennsylvania who came to the attention of Columbia A. & R. Man Mitch Miller ii 1953, when an ambitious disk jockey sent him a tape. Norma Jean and her sister were flown to New York for an audition.

Her name became Jill Corey. She was soon on the cover of LIFE, on the Garroway show, and on the top of the charts.

Fraudulent Fellowship. As for the A. & R. man, many browsers thought they detected Columbia's Mitch Miller, whose coolness toward the author ("Debbie has to be the whole show") is well known in the record trade. In fact, word is that Miller recently hired his own pressagent because he felt he was not getting enough service from Colleague Ishlon.

At all events, the book is also a portrait of Debbie's calling as she sees it. People from a talent agency (obviously M.C.A.) are "a brood of boned, pruned squabs." Other agents and publishers "shoot their gross cuff links, pat their silver ties with manicured nails, and glide like lizards into the corridors of the night." Theirs is "a hierarchy of parasites. Not an idea in that carload of skulls." Underlings and fawners give "those corporeal salutes, the importuning paw on the arm or back, gestures of utterly fraudulent fellowship. Gritty vapors of the street seem fresh by comparison." The "head-shrinkingly small" entertainment world is one "perfumed tar pit" after another, but "that's show business! An archipelago of egos, savages who watch each other frantically, track every footprint of ambition."

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