Word: banding
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This year, Harvard students can count on a platinum-selling band to get them through this “semi-charmed kind of life...
...Betty was jealous of her sister right from the start," Mrs. Thornburg told TIME in 1950. "She was always in my lap, always after affection. She would stand on her head, do cartwheels, yell or do anything to attract attention away from her quieter sister." Marion would become a band singer of moderate repute under the name Marion Hutton. She never achieved her sister's volcanic success. Yet it was Betty whose career was one long, desperate plea for the love she felt she never got at home...
...Preternaturally restless, Betty left home at 15 and came to Manhattan, hoping to be noticed by people who could get her into show business. By 17, she had hooked up with Vincent Lopez' decidedly demure band, to which she immediately brought verve and volume. One night when impresario Billy Rose was in the audience, did her madcap routine, picking up the elfin Lopez and carrying him about. That stunt earned her roles in the Broadway musicals Two for the Show and Panama Hattie, where, she later said, her one number was filched by star Ethel Merman on opening night. Betty...
...hard to find a Hutton equivalent among her contemporaries, let alone now. Danny Kaye poured comic pizzazz into his tongue-twisting tunes, but had a hard time with ballads. Martha Raye did a lot of broad comedy, but without Betty's fresh-scrubbed glamour. Doris Day was another band-singer blond gone Hollywood, but with a more conventional softness. Only Betty had the whole package. She was vivacious, pretty, a Nobel-dynamite-winning thrush, an appealing actress who excelled in comedy and, if a director could just tamp down her pile-driving instincts, drama. TIME, searching for the portmanteau...
...That's not an unwarranted exaggeration about a performer whose forte was unwarranted exaggeration. She came out of the big band era but thrashed about like a rock star. What Elvis Presley did with his hips, Hutton did with her entire body. She didn't stand behind the mike; she ran amok across the stage, once torpedoing off it and landing on the drummer in the orchestra pit. (Rim shot.) Life with Hutton was just as perilous in Hollywood. She cracked three ribs getting tossed about by acrobats in the movie Incendiary Blonde. Her exuberance often injured her co-stars...