They Wanted to Know If Dinah Shore Was as Nice As She Seemed On Television
The answer is yes! The southern songster wrapped her audiences “in a cocoon of warmth and love.”
The Washington Star, November 10, 1979: When Dinah Shore makes her entrance on her daily syndicated show, “Dinah and Friends,” waves of applause and love lap over her. She’s smiling, and that smile is for each person smiling back at her, for that person, alone.
Then the soft Southern voice purrs out her appreciation and wraps the audience in a cocoon of warmth and love. Her guests begin to arrive and they, too, are cloaked in welcoming affection.
With Dinah Shore, you feel you’ve known her all your life.
And, in some ways you have, She began singing on the radio in the late 1930s, and she’s been singing ever since on one television program or another. All her own shows. “See the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet!” she sang on the “Dinah Shore Show” variety hour for the entire decade of the ’50s. If you were around then, you were on the receiving end of that big smooch she flung out to the audience on the last note.
When you’re going to interview Dinah Shore, then, people ask you to find out: How does she look up close? Does she have a new man now that Burt Reynolds has moved on? What are her beauty secrets? Is she really as nice as she seems to be on television? Well, here is a report, after a fast interview this week, squeezed in between Washington location taping sessions for “Dinah and Friends.”
“If that was anybody but the real me on television, the audience would know it in a week,” she says. It is not an answer to a question. It is a statement she makes, explaining why it’s easier for her to be herself both on and off camera, “Of course it’s probably harder for comedians,” she adds, thinking it over. They have to be ‘on’ all the time. And I suppose if they don’t put in the right number of jokes at a dinner party, they keep getting moved down one at the table.”
Dinah Shore is warm, is friendly, is kind. But her personal brand of charm is less cloying. She is not a Southern lady charming millions with sweetness and acquiescence. Meeting her woman to woman, one is struck by her poise and dignity,
Dinah is seated at a small table in the Sheraton Carlton Hotel restaurant where moments before she was taping an interview. “It seems funny to be at the other end of the interview,” she says, beginning helpfully to tote up the number of interviews she probably does on her show in the course of a year.
But, no time for statistics. Down to cases. She sits before a single flower in a cut glass vase, a radiantly attractive woman. Her reddish blonde hair is fluffed around her face — in fact, a makeup man comes by to fluff it out a little more as her picture is being taken. She is graciously trying to talk as fast as possible and answer as many questions as she can before she’s whisked away to change her clothes for her next taping,
Does she live alone?
The question — asked rather abruptly early on because of the time factor — makes her start. She looks you right in the eye for several beats. Then: “Yes.” A pause. “Yes, I do.”
Dinah Shore’s romance with actor Burt Reynolds was an object of intense press curiosity because she is older than he is — a circumstance that isn’t nearly as interesting when the man in a relationship is older than the woman. “There was so much speculation about us,” she says. “I never could understand the preoccupation with it. It never occurred to me. It never occurred to him.” Dinah isn’t smiling now. There’s a slight frown on her smooth forehead.
Then, with that full-voltage smile: “A human relationship has nothing to do with chronology. It has to do with chemistry.” Now, she’s laughing a little. “A man is a man is a man,” she says, melodically. “And an attraction is an attraction.” She and Reynolds lived a “comfortable, ordinary life” together and made a pact not to read all the things published about them.” At least 90 percent of it wasn’t true,” she says, her voice just a little plaintive.
Because it hurt. “It was very painful. And we were very protective of each other.” Now they are just friends. And gossip columns are still getting mileage out of their liaison. The fact is that Dinah is more attractive now than she ever was. Her good looks are not classic and maturity becomes her. So, she’s not a kid.
“I am who I am. I do what I do. It’s what I am, not how long I’ve been who I am.” A motto to be embroidered for the boudoir wall. And another: “I’m glad for what I have had, it all adds to the canvas, but it doesn’t change it.”
Dinah’s canvas is wide and thickly painted. After her Chevrolet variety hour, she had a cosy little daytime show for NBC, “Dinah’s Place.” All sorts of people showed up and started cooking or demonstrating how to transplant flowers or carve meat. Some sang. Dinah always did.
In 1974, her new syndicated show, “Dinah!” (Is there anyone finer?) settled into the familiar Merv Griffin — Mike Douglas talk show format, only with more music and — for the younger crowd — a rock act. And now, as her syndicated show gets deep in to its sixth season, it’s been renamed — what else? — “Dinah and Friends.”
The on-camera friends are a group of about six personalities who take daily or weekly turns on the show as introducers and assistant hosts. The Dinah show is traveling. Last week Hong Kong, this week, Las Vegas and — next week, probably — the show’s taped here in Washington. Clearly, producer Henry Jaffe decided it was time for some new gimmicks to jazz up the show. Instead of simply walking on to the set and accepting applause as she did in “Dinah!” there’s the fanfare of music and a razzle-dazzle introduction.
At least for most shows. A couple of weeks ago, however, when Carol Burnett and Joe Hamilton came on the show to talk about their daughter’s drug addiction and how, as a family, it was conquered, there was no music. No fancy introductions. No exchanges of kisses. Just a dignified hour that touched many people, including Dinah who considers it one of the more worthwhile shows she’s done. “If you can help people,” she says, “that means a lot.”
You get the impression that it wasn’t Dinah’s idea to take the show on the road. “I want to stay right in California. That’s my idea of living. But when they say you gotta go, you go. They just point me in the right direction and I do what I’m supposed to do.”
Fortunately, she says, she only tapes three days a week. “‘The rest of the time is mine. I use it judiciously. doing what I want to do.” Jogging, tennis, swimming in the surf which is in the front yard of her Malibu house. “But I’m not part of the Malibu colony,” she adds, quickly. There’s her house in Beverly Hills, too, which she’s had for years And a housekeeper, whom she’s also “had for years and years.”
The women cook together. We collaborate,” says Dinah, who classifies herself, without false modesty, as a very good cook. Rather than go out to Hollywood parties every night, she says, she entertains her friends at home, and feeds them well. Right now, she is doing a great deal of Chinese cooking, using an immense gas-fuelled wok which “scares” her housekeeper. “And I bake bread twice a week, which isn’t so good for the diet,” she volunteers.
The diet. Yes, Dinah Shore has to watch her weight just like the rest of us. “Lemme tell you something. I just gained 11 pounds in seven days in Hong Kong. I ate my way through Hong Kong.” When she got back, she went on the Scarsdale diet. It worked, but she’s gaining again.”I love to eat,” she says in that drawl that she brought from Nashville years ago. Dinah also loves to paint and take pictures with her little Minox. A homebody, Into the simple things of life. “That’s when I do my living,” she says. “The other part is making my living.”
She has two grown children, by ex-husband George Montgomery: Jody (John David) who’s just entered pre-law school, and a married daughter, Missy (Melissa). She thinks they may have missed out by not being able to go to Disneyland as kids — their celebrity mother would have been surrounded by fans. “But I think if you can give them as much caring and devotion as you can muster, and love — that goes without saying — that’s all you can do for them.” She’s getting serious and you know there’s more behind than she’ll say. “There’s no way you can steer another person’s life.”
If Dinah wasn’t in show business, she says she’d be in politics. But she wouldn’t want to hold office. “I don’t have a thick skin,” she says, and by now you’ve come to that conclusion yourself. Then, so softly you have to repeat it she says, with a rueful smile. “I have no callouses.”
Conversation with Dinah: The Real Dinah Shore
