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Show Business & TV profiles British Star Maker Gordon Mills, mentor, manager and name giver to Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck and, most recently, Gilbert O'Sullivan. A more serious name game is being conducted in France, where an unusual set of laws encourages name changes for people whose surnames have unpleasant connotations. World's story tells how the system works. Science, meanwhile, reports on Air Force plans to develop a remote-controlled robot airplane that may one day fly actual combat missions...
...name is Gordon Mills, but it might as well be Midas. In the mid-1960s he transformed a pigtailed Welsh rock belter, Tommy Scott, into the tuxedoed dandy whom the international pop world now knows as Tom Jones (the nom de chanson capitalized on the then-popular movie). Two years later Mills took a nondescript provincial singer, Gerry Dorsey, whimsically tagged him with the name of a 19th century German composer and made Engelbert Humperdinck almost as big a nightclub, TV and recording star as Jones. The musical empire that Mills has built largely on the careers of those...
...Gordon Mills stands at the forefront of what Variety calls "the new strong men of the music biz"-the talent managers, who now wield the influence and prestige once exclusively held by pop publishers, record-company executives and sometimes disk jockeys. Mills is releasing O'Sullivan's songs on his own new record label, MAM, named after the parent Mills company, Management Agency and Music. The original MAM, whose profits are running around $6,000,000 a year, has some 30 subsidiaries that, among other things, own all of Paul Anka's songs, manage the British appearances...
Like Humperdinck, Mills was born in India, the son of a British soldier. Like Jones, he grew up in Wales (after his father returned to the little mining town of Tonypandy). As a young man just out of the army, Gordon began playing a mouth organ in theaters and clubs, eventually becoming the harmonica champion of Wales. He gravitated to London, landed a job with the Morton Fraser Harmonica Gang, formed a vocal group called the Viscounts, then tried his hand at songwriting...
Directed by GORDON PARKS...