ON THE AIR TODAY: ZaSu Pitts

ON THE AIR TODAY: ZaSu Pitts, playing the role of Aunt Mamie in the CBS serial, Big Sister, at 11:30 A.M., E.S.T. (rebroadcast at 11:00 A.M., Pacific Time), sponsored by Rinso.

That wistful little lady in Columbia’s Studio Four, eyeing the microphone so distrustfully, is ZaSu Pitts, who Eric Von Stroheim always insisted was the finest dramatic actress in America. She has been in the movies since 1917, and never has appeared on the screen, even in a small role, without bringing a delighted murmur from audiences. She is utterly without temperament or stuffiness, and has a heart as big as Radio City.

She hasn’t given up movie work for radio, by any means. But she isn’t under contract to any one studio in Hollywood, and when the opportunity came along to spend a few months in New York and act in Big Sister it sort of appealed to her, she says. Asked if she has any movie plans for the future, ZaSu doesn’t commit herself. “I’m hoping,” she says. “I’ve been hoping for twenty years.”

Two days after she joined Big Sister, other members of the cast were calling ZaSu by her first name, and kidding her unmercifully about her inability to get through a broadcast without “fluffing”—mispronouncing, getting involved in tongue-twister or otherwise making a mistake—at least once. Fluffing in her pet nightmare, and to make things worse she usually does it on the sacred commercials, not in the dialogue of the script where it wouldn’t matter so much. “Pitts the Fluff, they call me,” she murmurs disconsolately as she wanders away from the microphone after the broadcast. As a matter of fact, she makes very few real slips. Those she does make are so slight you don’t even notice them on the air, but mentally she magnifies them into monumental mistakes.

ZaSu is in New York now, of course, but she has a pleasant home in Hollywood where she lives with her (second) husband, Edward Woodall, and her two children, ZaSu Ann and Donald, both of whom are about eighteen. ZaSu Ann is her own daughter; Donald was the adopted son of Barbara LaMarr, and was adopted in turn by ZaSu when his faster mother died.

The famous hands aren’t much in evidence at the microphone. Oh, they flutter a little, of course—ZaSu wouldn’t be ZaSu if they didn’t—but nowhere near as much as you’d expect. The mournful eyes and the tiny, downward-curving mouth are the same, though, giving the impression of a bewildered soul who finds the world just too, too much for her. A very erroneous impression, incidentally: ZaSu gets a lot of fun out of life.