Perry Como was making $40 at the age of twenty. This was the height of prosperity around the Como home in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, where his father earned $175 a month. Perry's mother prophesied: "Some day you'll be making $60 a week." This was, of course, the peak of prosperity through the eyes and aspirations of the comfortable, warm little immigrant Italian lady who still can't quite believe that Perry is making more than $60 a week, even though he has the most popular television program on the National Broadcasting Company network, sells records as if he invented the old saw about hotcakes, has a home in stylish Sands Point, Long Island, complete with swimming pool and three children, and lives a life of almost unbelievable normalcy in the midst of all this tangible proof of his position as one of the all-time idols of the American public.   His recordings are dear to his heart, more even than his television appearances, although he never neglects the latter. He never neglects anything nor anybody connected with the decent progress of his career. He is a disc jockey's delight, for not only does he turn out successful recordings with a lovely regularity, but he keeps in constant contact with the gentlemen of the nation's turntables by means of personal tape recordings. Perry has always felt that his basic success rests on music, that his music's popularity was placed in the hands of the deejays, and that the deejays did right by 01' Per' through the seasons since 1944 when his career really started to careen along toward Fort Knox. Therefore no week goes by that Perry isn't sitting down at the microphone in his office in Radio City to sound off a few pleasantries the disc jockeys might turn into personal messages from Perry to their audiences.   There are stars who don't take the time any more, once they've hit the heights, to attend to old friends, some of whom they'd never met but had been befriended by over the years. Not Perry. His memory is long. Perry manages to satisfy two segments of the public who sometimes are slightly at odds: both the folks who admire the popular music styles, and musicians who want their sounds impeccably presented. Perry's singing has at its base something he has freely admitted-an ancient admiration, since his barber shop days, for Bing Crosby. There also is a respect for the Bing-like sounds of the late Russ Columbo, having met that rich-timbred baritone back in his early Cleveland days. From these, Perry seems to have found a firm basis for musical reference and, from that early and frank respect for Bing and Columbo, broadened out to a style of his own, even as writers who take out after their heroes and their excellent styles, finally touch areas of performance all their own. Of course, Perry has something few singers in the history of the popular muses have enjoyed-a rich, thick voice with the combined softness and sturdiness of a piece of fine, pliable leather. There is strength and thorough manliness in every note. There also is a sweetness of character in romantic ballads, in the emotional simplicity of inspirational songs, in the gentleness of music for children. Then there is the attitude of musicians toward Perry: he is an intuitively meticulous vocal musician, coupling his natural phrasings and understanding of both songs with a beat and ballads with what lots of onlookers never suspect-a will to work very hard. He does rehearse his songs until he knows them, and many times at TV rehearsals when everyone else is off taking a breather, Perry quietly stands with his conductor, Mitch Ayres, going over and over his music. Many times the simplicity of the performance hides a great complexity of practicing, for Perry's "style" has the misleading flavor of Joe DiMaggio chasing a ball impossible for anyone else to catch-except Joe. Perry fairly drenches himself in the music he must perform until it comes out of him with the spurious simplicity his audience finds so refreshingly casual. "Make it look easy"-the old admonition of the professional performer-is summed up in Perry. His intuitive "feel" for a pop song plus his serious addiction to its rehearsal and performance are what make his musicians respect his highly professional place in the public eye. In brief, a real "pro." The legends are leaping around Perry, as grow the marks around the perennial redwood trees, and his career is taking on more than a similarity to their permanency. He has a considerable personnel around him now. Several hundred persons owe their respectable livelihood to Perry Como's career. It is fortunate he stays so healthy and wise, as well as wealthy and popular. He has, in fact, two offices, one in Radio City for his own personal preoccupations such as music and another, only an amble across Fifth Avenue, where his large crew of television technicians do their durndest. His days are full, his evenings full of his family, for he spends virtually every evening with them. He is one star never seen in the bright Manhattan palaces who is not a recluse, a miser nor a neurotic. The opposite of all three, Perry has the soul of an artist with the inclinations of a junior executive dashing home to see the kids off to bed. Recently the Friars Club, a large fraternity of show business citizens, tossed Perry a huge testimonial dinner in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. This huge pile of gilt has seen lots of banquets tendered lots of celebrities, from Presidents of the United States on down. As a newspaperman it has been my duty over the last couple of decades to cover many of them, and to attend others as a guest. At none have I witnessed such strange behavior as that of the personalities involved in this big $50-a-plate program. Some of them grew misty-eyed in contemplation of the success of the lad in the center of the dais. Others waxed sentimental about his supremely admirable example as the definitive "nice" show business representative. Not a person in those extravagant premises could summon the tiniest exception to any of the compliments usually reserved for retiring persons of more decorous trades, such as the cloth or the classroom. The terribly complex thing about Perry Como is his lack of complications, of emotional or business variety. He is a simple man, placid as the lake from which his surname derives.   His aplomb is frightening, and it is not a pose. Each Saturday evening the dress rehearsal of the Perry Como Show finishes around 6:30 p.m. Thereafter there is a final scurrying of producer and director and guest stars and makeup men and technicians to attend to whatever loose ends may have escaped their earlier notice. But off in the star's dressing room at the Ziegfeld Theatre, while everyone else is deep in the anticipation of TV's tension to come, Perry Como quietly lies down on a couch and goes directly off to sleep. No tension, no worries, no complications, no anxieties. It was said that when Miltowns get nervous they take Perry Como. This is no coma, but relaxation of the purest form. It is recognizable in his demeanor on camera, when he refuses to be hurried into the normal hysteria existing in TV, the most hysterical medium in the history of panic. Nothing much throws him. He can be vastly amused by any comedian except those who use the blue or dirty material. The rest, to a clown, kill him. But they do not swerve Perry from the slow completion of his appointed rounds. I have been present several times when some of the more frantic members of the entertainment craft have attempted to "break him up." This is possible only when Perry wishes to be broken up. If he is in the middle of a rehearsal, this is a dubious experience. Once a comic arrived to make plans for a brief walk-on at the tag end of Perry's show, to plug some future appearance of his own on TV. Most folks arriving at the Ziegfeld Theatre take seats and await the proper moment to join in where they are expected. It happens that the famous comedian is not one to wait, and marched directly to the center of the great Ziegfeld stage, where Perry was singing during dress rehearsal. As Perry sang, he went into a series of convulsive grimaces and pantomime, once even literally, standing on his head. But this was not the precise moment wherein Perry Como was willing to be broken up. There were 120 persons working on stop watches and lights and cameras, curtains and other important minutiae of a Perry Como show. To halt his songs at that precise moment to indulge a guffaw, however polite, would have meant a galvanic confusion of backstage plans. This Perry refused, automatically, to do. He simply smiled indulgently at the upended clown as he might at any precocious brat and continued to deliver his rondelays in the tempo and spirit of his earlier rehearsals. It was a terribly deflating moment for the comedian, but a deep and telling insight into the respect Como has for his craft.     His subordinates are never pushed around. No executive of his show turns nasty in his hearing, nor out of it if Perry can anticipate it. He is an amazingly direct and simple person who has attained a remarkable position in the affection of the public, far beyond the limitations of his latest recording, far deeper than the impact of his ratings. His fans range from bobby sox to rocking chairs, from saloon to church, and literally around the globe.   Recently when the estimable Claire de Lune by Claude Debussy was to be given a musical editing and American lyrics by Mitchell Parish, lyricist of Star Dust, the reins on its presentation were held tightly by the publishers in Paris. All the way from France, therefore, came the insistent request that the world premiere of the popular version of this classical sweetness must be performed by no one but Perry Como. The ramifications of this simple little international flattery were considerable, for Mitchell Parish had promised the world premiere of the piece to the star of another TV show. Therefore, it took a great deal of diplomacy between France and Tin Pan Alley, between Parish and the man of his impulsive promissory whim, and between the latter and Perry, who rarely makes a guest appearance on any TV show. This was accomplished by as vast a complexity of meetings and diplomacy as might open the Suez to Israel, the Iron Curtain to Eisenhower. When it was done, it was done simply, as Perry does all things. But such conspiracy! Needless to note, the conspiring was done by all the rest; when it came to Perry he simply agreed, and showed up to sing his song, and everyone from Broadway to the Champs Elysees was enchanted. Also happy. Perry's most oft-quoted description is "Nice Guy" or "Mr. Nice Guy." Even the cynics who hoot at the very notion that anyone could be nice and decent and uncomplicated, except possibly a few clergymen and perhaps a milkmaid or some such midwest "square," now agree on Perry's basic simplicity. One magazine writer sought to locate even the slightest chink in Perry's amiable armor; he found none, and that was the point of his piece. Another tried to prove Perry isn't as relaxed, as calm as he appears. The writer had almost pure awe in his typewriter as he proclaimed that here was the definitive uncomplicated human being. Perry's weaknesses? Casual clothes. Loud ones, casual slacks, colorful cardigans, sports shirts, loose jackets, looser shirt collars. He loves golf, bets comparatively small amounts and loves to win. He seldom loses. He loves to play poker, and loves to win; he seldom loses. Recently we flew to Florida and Perry pulled up to the table at the back end of the DC-7 and for four hours amiably flipped the spotted paste boards with his pals. He won. "He always wins," shrugged Mitchell Ayres, his orchestra leader. These are mild stirrings leading to some understanding of the character of Perry Como. He loves to win. That he does in almost everything he tries is the amazing marginal note. Some observers suspect he has sort of drifted uphill to success, but this is not the case. There is a lot of structural steel in Perry, which is covered nicely by his handsome, tweed-thatched facade. Nothing much gets past his notice that is bad for his show, his career, or his reputation. Perry's resistance to the tasteless and the blue material which occasionally seeps into TV is legendary around his show. When a young comedian was hired and turned up with a monologue subtly suggestive in some of its parts, Perry blew no top, screamed no orders, merely told someone to pay the young man his full fee for the show and take his shabby suggestions elsewhere. As far as the "apprentice Bob Hope" was concerned, he may have figured the show was running too long as the routine went down the channel. But it didn't go on Perry's TV air, nor do plunging necklines or topical shafts of purported wit based on what makes Jayne Mansfield tick. There is a homey cheerfulness to the shows which have grown into the public's affection and respect as sturdily as the oak on the front lawn. This vastly simple citizen is forty-five years old. He was born May 18, 1912 in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, seventh son of a seventh son, first of his parents' thirteen children to be a citizen of the United States by birth. Perry often cites the seventh-son-of-a-seventh-son statistic as an indication of the "luck" which he says guides his destiny, but there is plenty besides pure luck to it. By now of course it's a show business joke that Perry was a barber; lots of the fun at his expense has to do with barbering, 'and by a strange coincidence the biggest rating received his first year on TV in the hour-long format came when he shaved off the beard of movie star Kirk Douglas, an event heralded good-naturedly in advance. And Perry is not using barbering as a point-stretching attempt to be a member of the common clan; he actually was a barber-his old friends say a pretty good one.   His Italian parents, Lucia and Pietro Como, who settled in the small Pennsylvania town, considered barbering a proper profession for any fine, handsome young Italian lad, and from his thriftily husbanded $175 a month, Poppa Como set his son up as a man of the scissors and chest cloth. At ten Perry was apprenticed to Steve Fragapane and started the sturdy ambition to be the best barber in Canonsburg, which title Steve Fragapane then held. By the time Perry was fourteen, he opened his own shop as a means of making money after school. With two assistants and a guitar he turned it into a nice little money maker.     "Those miners like barber shops before they start celebrating Saturday nights, and they tipped good, too," Perry remembers.   After graduation from high school it became his full-time career, but he didn't realize he would find more of a future because of the guitar, standard equipment in any Italian barber shop, than because of the shears. Finally Perry boosted his little business past his mother's $60 weekly dreams, and the miners, black with coal dust but eager to be tidied up as they fled the mines for their big weekends, helped Perry climb to the point where he was turning a neat little $125 profit weekly. Net.   He knew everyone, and everyone knew he could sing, and no one urged him to shut up as he crooned along with razor and shears for rhythm. Life was good, business was better, he was the local talent in the community — and in 1933 Perry went off to Cleveland for a well-earned two-week vacation.   In Cleveland there was an orchestra led by one Freddy Carlone, familiar to Ohio dancers. Perry's friends urged him to sing a song or two with Freddy's band and Freddy was willing. It turned into an audition, for a few weeks later Carlone sent an insistent summons for Perry to join the band. It was the sort of decision sports writers call "crucial." Here he was earning $125 a week, in his own shop, his future fairly well secured. Still, he loved to sing, and he might be paid more for singing one day after he had learned as much about the crooning profession as he had about the barber's. There were several complications, the major consideration being the lovely young girl he loved, Roselle Belline. Roselle didn't urge Perry to take the safe way, but encouraged him to do what his musical heart desired. Perry and Roselle were married July 31, 1933, and he joined Freddy's band, earning $28 a week to start.   During the next two years Perry became a local celebrity around Cleveland. He had a lot to learn-poise, phrasing, selling a song. The strange all-night hours were the toughest to learn; in fact he never quite was reconciled to them, and now never is a member of the night life brigade.   Perry's idols were Bing Crosby and Russ Columbo; he met the late great Columbo in Cleveland, never knowing that the then-famous singer's big hit Prisoner of Love some day would be a Como recording selling in fantastic amounts. Life was good, if not exciting nor overly portentous of things to come, when in 1936 Ted Weems heard Perry and offered him $50 a week.   Bands were hot. Casa Loma had started it, Benny Goodman had picked up the beat and swung it, Artie Shaw was beginning the Beguine, Glenn Miller vying with the Dorseys and Mal Hallett and Jimmie Lunceford and such. Ted taught Perry to dislike one-nighters, though he didn't think in terms of dislike at the moment. Ted Weems had a touring band, but it also was on the radio, and made records, and Perry's name finally was on a label as "vocalist." There were the usual girl singers; one was "Marvel Maxwell," who later changed her given name and became the first of the Red Hot Marilyns. Perry even played the Strand Theatre on Broadway, where the star was Ann Sheridan. This was his new version of the Big Time.   Well, along came a war, and the finish for the moment of touring bands. Glenn Miller went into khaki, Artie Shaw into Navy blue. Ted Weems went into the Coast Guard and broke up his band, leaving one Perry Como to take stock of his fortunes, which were nonexistent in 1942 when Weems' men blew off in all directions. There was the little matter of beautiful Roselle and a son, Ronnie, born in 1940. They had tried to travel with Perry for a time after Ronnie was born, but that proved impossible, no way to raise a boy by Perry's strict family standards. Therefore Perry's eye strayed again to the warm protection of Canonsburg, and he went home to engage in negotiations with real estate agents for the lease on a local store, therein to build another barber shop, wherefrom never to stray.   It was not too many hours before Perry was to have signed on the dotted line that Tom Rockwell, head of General Artists Corporation, telephoned with a firm offer of $100 a week to sing on the Columbia Broadcasting System. Rockwell also had an RCA Victor recording contract, and great plans.   Always the conservative, Perry was about to turn down the offers when Roselle changed his mind.   "You can always get another barber shop if it doesn't work out," she urged.   So Perry shuffled off to Manhattan. Frank Sinatra was the new rage. Perry was booked into the Copacabana, the elegant sub-basement hard by Fifth Avenue, and he stopped the show each night. Word of the appearance of another singer, suitable for enshrinement in the hearts of bobby soxers and their elders alike, got about and before you could say Fort Knox, Perry was a star.   He played theaters, made records, did wonderfully at both. His first RCA Victor hotcake, Goodbye Sue, was released in 1943. By 1945 he was a favorite and his Till the End of Time struck that gold lode called "a million copies sold." In a single 1946 week 4,000,000 Como recordings were turned out. As of the moment, eleven Como waxings have sold more than 1,000,000. Lots of others have been smash hits just short of the million-mark.   No corner of show business escaped Perry in those years. He went to Hollywood and made four films. His radio years with Chesterfield as his sponsor started in 1944 (his old CBS show had run a year without a sponsor but with a rising tide of clamoring fans) and Chesterfield stayed with Perry eleven years. He started five nights a week, fifteen minutes an evening, changing later to three shows a week. In 1950 came full-time television, and Perry's personality, tidy appearance, handsome face and just plain niceness began to be a byword wherever the humanities were being appreciated. His quarter-hour TV show became the biggest in the business, and in those days of fewer TV sets and even fewer TV stations, his voice went three evenings a week into an average of 15,500,000 homes. This was considered fantastic. Recently his TV ratings indicated his Saturday night hours were sifting into some 49,000,000 pairs of ears. No doubt about it, Perry Como now is an American institution, like the hot dog. In 1955 came the end of the 15-minute shows and the start of the $15,000,000 NBC contract. Now a bit past the age wherein most singing favorites can catnip the kids, Perry remains the love phenomenon; at the moment this typewriter strikes this paper, one of his recordings (Round and Round) is Number One on the list of most popular recordings as compiled by Variety, the show business bible. Where does all this leave Perry? Oh, in a way, very busy, but not so busy as to keep him from going home every night to be with Roselle, Ronnie (born 1940), David (born 1946) and Terri (born 1947). He is recipient of one of the highest lay honors in the Roman Catholic Church (Knight of the Holy Sepulchre) and refused to have that honor publicized. He is five-nine-and-a-half, has a tweed effect in his graying hair, says he's not so nerveless as everyone insists, but has patience and a true fondness for his fans. He still calls the Carlone boys, who gave him that first Cleveland band job, on holidays, birthdays and anniversaries. He drives a Cadillac and a Thunderbird, has a swimming pool in his back yard and a lovely home not nearly so impressive as those of many of his entertainment pals. He hires his staff and then has complete faith in them, chooses colleagues and friends with equal deliberation. Then he doesn't waver. He hates to wear a necktie, and even worse, hates dinner jackets, stemming back to his absolute necessity of wearing a tuxedo in the days of stand-up collars when he was with Freddy Carlone and Ted Weems. Recently when he was honored at the Friars Club dinner, he had to go out and buy a whole new dinner suit. He shaves with a straight razor, even as he shaved the miners in those good old $40 and S 125 weeks. His greatest embarrassment was introducing ]ulie London on TV as Julie Wilson. His greatest thrill was having Bishop Fulton]. Sheen on his Christmas 1956 program. Perry, Roselle and the kids live in a rambling home on Sands Point, Long Island, where he dearly loves to cook and eat spaghetti but doesn't do it too consecutively lest he tip the scale. He doesn't tip the scales in almost any way but popularity; his charities are un publicized, his private life is indeed private, though not by any yardstick cloistered. It took him seven years after he was certain he could afford it, which meant he could have afforded it several years sooner than that, to build a swimming pool. His major recreation is watching television nights, golfing days when he doesn't have to work. One of his joys, accepted with some disbelief, was Canonsburg's decision to change Third Street to Perry Como Avenue. When the Canonsburg street-changing was scheduled, the mayor, the Pennsylvania governor and other surrounding brass turned out for the occasion. Perry just told a few people he was taking a brief trip and only recently Perry revealed this municipal secret in an interview. Similarly, in Boston, the Christopher Columbus Community Center was built in the middle of a congested tenement section. Perry advised a few people he was off to Boston on a private matter and it was only later it was learned he was there for the dedication of the Community's new "Perry Como Gymnasium." Perry's mother still lives in Canonsburg. She refuses to consider Perry's huge income and takes pride in all her boys. "Any man who makes $75 a week steady, that man makes a good living," she said, in gentle rebuke to what she honestly believes was the rest of the family's exaggeration of Perry's success. As for the rest of the world, no exaggeration is necessary. This Is an RCA Victor "New Orthophonic" High Fidelity Recording. It is distinguished by these characteristics: 1. Complete frequency range. 2. Ideal dynamic range plus clarity and brilliance. 3. Constant fidelity from outside to inside of record. 4. Improved quiet surfaces.   Printed in U. S. A.   Compilation notes and graphics for this 1957 collection were contributed by Matthew Long, England