Cackleklatsch

From her dressing room, Virginia Graham, the hostess of an all-girl TV cackleklatsch, slyly eyed her guests of the day as they paced the studio.

"They're smelling each other," she smirked to her producer, "like three bitches at the Westminster dog show."

Then Virginia patted her Clairoled pouf, pinned on a diamond as big as a blintz, and walked out to plant her guests around the living-room-style set. As soon as the four of them had adjusted their on-screen smiles, the TV tape machines began to roll. "Hi everyone," chirped Virginia, "and welcome to Girl Talk."

In her six years on the air, Virginia Graham has brought on girls of such luster and bluster as Ilka Chase, Pearl Buck, Betsy Palmer, Marya Mannes, Cornelia Otis Skinner and Hermione Gingold -- all of whom have variously contributed to Girl Talk's success as the brightest female panel discussion in television. Last week, at the urging of her ABC packagers ("They thought the show needed a little goosing-up"), Virginia introduced her first male panelist, David Merrick. The show bombed (Merrick was positively fatuous), and at its close, Virginia asked for a mail-in referendum on further gentlemen callers.

Cocktail Tapings. Now syndicated five half-hours a week in 83 cities, Girl Talk draws an average audience of 2,000,000, ranging from a Hollywood scriptwriter who listens for the flavor of women's dialogue, to, on at least one occasion, Lyndon Johnson. Most of the viewers, though, are women and of an age that leads Virginia to privately retitle her program "The Menopausal Romper Room."

Girl Talk is telecast in most areas during the day but is taped at the cocktail hour "because," says Virginia, "women talk better then. The later the show, the more the barriers are down." And the dudgeons up. Once Actress Natalie Schafer greeted Columnist Sheilah Graham (no kin to Virginia) with: "Oh, I'm so glad to meet you. You were the cause of my divorce." Sheilah was also clawed by Zsa Zsa Gabor, who suggested that the columnist was too old to write about love.

Gabor got hers on a subsequent show when Society Chronicler Suzy explained that "Zsa Zsa has an age complex, and she has a right to one." After all, continued Suzy, wasn't she "Miss Chicken Paprika of 1910?"

Stage Tizz. Hostess Graham credits the zest of her show to Producer Monty Morgan's "infallible casting of the wrong people who will be right together." They turn out right only because she is there as catalyst and referee. A onetime Chicago Tribune reporter and soap-opera scriptwriter, Virginia, 55, describes herself as the one "who looks like two June Allysons," the one with "the perfect face for radio." She is also the one who gushes too much, as in her introduction of Guest Muriel Humphrey: "You're so beautiful it's ridiculous! It looks like you were hired by central casting!" She can be alternately flip and flibbertigibbet but generally plays angel's advocate.

When Rex Harrison's daughter-in-law (the wife of Actor Noel) spoke glowingly of her premarital pregnancy, Virginia went into a stage tizz. She is always gasping: "I'm going to have a stroke!" On one show, she publicly chastised Starlet Diahn Williams for her "little affairsy-pie" with a Frenchman. "This is the most revolting thing," scolded Virginia, though, of course, she was the one who brought up the subject in the first place. As Showbiz Pro Graham has long since discovered, the lower the girl talk, the higher the ratings.

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