THE CHINA MAIL FRIDAY SUPPLEMENT, JULY 8, 1988
(Right) The Misses Sheila and Mabel Glass, preparing for the Isle of Man Races on July 6, in which they took part. George, their pet tortoise ac- companied them. (Left)-Miss Jili Wyndham, the Australian airwoman, with her co-pilot, Mr. John Kirwan, who competed in the King's Cup Air Race. They, like the Glass sisters, have an odd mascot: "John" weighs 70 lbs.
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McCarthy, had been "dis- covered" by Noel Coward at an Elsa Maxwell party, he and his master had won a following of millions; the dummy's wise- cracks were quoted everywhere, and, in addition to his fat radio contract, he had been signed at $12,000 a week for a Goldwyn picture. He even won' some write- in votes for Mayor of New York in the election last fall.
Charlie has revived world-wide interest in ventriloquism. Forgot- ten practitioners of the art now win applause in metropolitan night clubs, countless amateurs have started on parlour careers; correspondence schools are dig- ging ventriloquism courses out of dead stock; dummy-makers are back at their work benches, and manufacturers are turning out thousands of Charlie McCarthy dolls for children.
The appeal of the talking dum- my is universal, because people delight in seeing and hearing themselves imitated by something inanimate The ventriloquist's- dummy can get off impertinences no human actor would dare utter. He can prick pomposity, jab at false dignity with reckless thrusts that we may think of but are too repressed to utter.
Few current-generation young- sters know anything about ven- triloquism because the art van- ished with the decline of vaude- ville Yet talking dummes pop up in the earllest pages of his- tory. Thousands of years ago they were used by Chinese priests who would hold them against their stomachs and ask them questions, whereupon the dum- mies would answer in deep se- pulchral tones.
The great oracles of Greece, historians suspect, went in for the same sort of ventriloquistic flummoxing of a gullible public. So did the high priests of the Pharaohs, The Louvre has a stat uette of Anubis, the Egyptian god, built along McCarthy lines, mov- able jaw and all.
Charlie McCarthy is famous be- cause his master, a keen wit who graduated from Northwestern University, had the foresight to subordinate his own personality to the blockhead's. That was sound. psychology and - perfect press-agentry. Even in rehearsals Edgar Bergen maintains the pre- tense that his red-thatched dum- my is an individual. Before Char- He is taken out of his valise, studio hands can hear him poreaming profanely for release,