The Royal Floridians

"You'll have to play faster here, or I don't think you'll make it," said Ernst.

Ernst was the maitre d' at Manhattan's Hotel Roosevelt Grill, and he was talking to 27-year-old Guy Lombardo the night the Royal Canadians opened there. A Chicago critic had called Lombardo's airs "the sweetest music this side of heaven," but still it made Ernst nervous. Lombardo was leaving out the boop-poop-a and just giving the dew. But Lombardo ignored him and kept fogging it into the room--for 33 years--to become one of the most popular and durable performers in U.S. show business. He has sold more than 100 million records, and 6,000,000 people have danced to the live music of his band.

Last week the Hotel Roosevelt announced that Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians will not be appearing there any more. It was like Athens announcing the departure of the Acropolis.

Lombardo, now 60, is not retiring; his band will continue to play all over the U.S. But in the winter season--when he has always been at the Roosevelt--he will be engaged in a new venture in Florida.

With the Murchison brothers of Texas and others, he is building a 2,000-acre island-city off St. Petersburg, a dazzling tropical paradise connected by causeway with the mainland. He is also investing in a $4,500,000 "yachtel" called Porto-O-Call. Its restaurant will seat 1,300 people --but most of them will be up dancing to the music of Guy Lombardo.

Catch 'Em Again. Reminiscing last week about his Roosevelt era, Lombardo produced an eerie lesson in the vagaries of time. Older people at first rejected him.

"They were conditioned to one type of music--the businessman's bounce," he said. "There we were playing something radically different, slow stuff without a beat, snuggle-on-your-shoulder kind of music. The college kids really saved our necks. They liked our style and the Grill became the favorite place for the whole college set."

Ontario-born Guy Lombardo used to play the violin, but he stopped doing that 25 years ago. Nowadays, he just stands in front of the band, signing autographs, smiling, waving his arm as if to a relative at a distant table. Actually, he does not even need to direct. All in the band, including his brothers Carmen and Lebert, have long since worn their own grooves into the Lombardo repertory.

Celebrated Courage. Tall and glamorous, with a long nose and a massive and handsomely furrowed face, Guy Lombardo still resembles a sort of RCA Victor Mature. He is a dignified and straight-forward man, with no more bazazz in his manner than in his music.

His courage is celebrated, having been much publicized in the days when he would sit in the cockpit of his big speedboat, the Tempo VI, in which he won the Gold Cup, national speedboat racing's highest prize, in 1946. In the 1948 race he was thrown 15 feet, broke his arm.

It also took courage to keep on playing his own type of music imperturbably in the face of changing fads. But the college kids who loved him years ago are now captains of industry--and they like to go dancing wherever Guy Lombardo plays. Their own kids wouldn't go there with gas masks, but that doesn't bother quiet Guy Lombardo. "Nowadays we lose 'em in the teens oftentimes, sure," he says, "but we catch 'em again later on."

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