Janis Paige was born Donna Mae Jaden in Tacoma, Washington, on September 16, 1922. She was caught up in a bitter fight between her parents. Her father, a paper hanger, left home under a cloud when she was five and her sister four. Her mother (Mrs. Hazel Jaden) worked to supporther daughters. “Wenever had much,” Janis said. “I had a great uselessness as a child. We never went hungry, but we always had to fight to make ends meet. We never had white clothes because cleaning was expensive.”

Donna was a child musical prodigy who began singing and dancing in public at age five at local amateur shows. There was never enough money at home for singing and dancing classes, “so I settled for singing.” Later, when she was a teenager and had a voice oftwo and a half octaves, she was introduced to opera by her mother. For this she paid her a singing teacher with the intention of fulfilling her own ambition through her daughter. The lessons stopped when her teacher had to join the armed services.

During her school years, she studied with Clayton Johnson, who taught music at Stadium High School. By the age of 15 she had developed an unusually beautiful soprano voice, and Johnson cheered her on with enthusiasm. She was quickly building a reputation for herself that would carry her far toward her goal.

In November 1939, aged 17, she was auditioned for inclusion in a Tacoma Philharmonic concert atthe Knights of Pythis hall. With Clayton Johnson as director she sang the leads oftwo high school operettas, Sigmund Romberg’s Song of the Desert in March 1940, and Franz Lehar’s The Merry Widow in March 1941, organized by the senior class at Stadium High School. She also sang as a member of the Stadium Trio with Gwendolyn Lobdell and Betty Heidinger (later replaced by Francis Hegerson), who appeared on 100 Girls and a Man on January 9, 1941, an original script in the form of a radio show.

In June 1941, during the ceremony of her high school graduation, she was heard in two vocal solos, “Seguidilla,” from the opera Carmen, and “One Fine Day” from Madame Butterfly. That year she was voted “class vamp” of her Tacoma high school class.

After she graduated in 1941, Janis, her mother and sister moved to Seattle. To help pay for vocal lessons, Donna started working in a plumbing shop at $15 a week. She kept books, stocked the furnace, and did quantities of other things for her plumber boss. Those were in the days when Donna Mae was trying to earn money enough to be a professional singer.

Donna’s first professional engagements were brief appearances in Tacoma,to where she used to make short trips back and forth from Seattle, to sing on radio shows and some shows. On May 16, 1942, she was the guest soloist with the Stadium High School Symphony Orchestra directed by Clayton Johnson to sing at the school auditorium. For the concert Donna sang “Songs My Mother Taught Me,” Dvorak; “My Hero” from “The Chocolate Soldier,” Oscar Straus; “Miss You,” Tobias brothers; and “I Remember You,” Schertzinger & Mercer.

For a time, Donna worked as a stenographer. Finally, in September 1942, her mother took her and her younger sister to Hollywood, seeking a great opera career for Donna. A girl with Donna’s appearance and apparent talent could not go unnoticed for long. While she was working in an aircraft plant during the war, she got a job in the snack bar at the Hollywood Canteen,the popular servicemen’s recreational center for servicemen stationed on the Pacific coast during World War II.

One night, a scheduled spot on the show was vacant because Ginny Simms didn’t show up. Then, Donna pulled off her apron, dashed out, gave the orchestra the key, and launched into a medley of popular tunes. “That’s how I happened to show up atthe Hollywood Canteen,” she said, and from there on things happened fast.

On Saturday night, May 15, 1943,the pretty 20-year-old Tacoma girl, while singing she was noticed by M-G-M talent scout, who offered her a screen contract without the usual formality of a film test. The next day she was on a studio payroll. “They pay me $200 a week…” but with little to do, just to sit and wait.

In August 1943, Donna Mae Jaden was ready to sail on a film career after formal ‘launching’ ceremonies at Hollywood Canteen. There, a thousand cheering servicemen watched a fellow soldier kiss Donna and bestow upon her the film name of Janis Paige. The kiss and a war bond were awarded to Private Jules Levy for having selected the winning name in a contest. Levy said he selected the “Janis” part of the starlet’s new professional name in tribute to actress Elsie Janis, who became famous as an entertainer of American troops in World War I. The surname Paige came from her grandmother.

Janis Paige sang at the Hollywood Canteen every Friday evening and was about to start a Hollywood career.In February 1944 lifelong ambition of Janis became a reality when she joined the M-G-M school for starlets. In her initial film role–in the Red Skelton and Esther Williams comedy Bathing Beauty– her singing was limited to strictly sizzling ditties with the Harry James and Xavier Cugat Orchestras. Janis warbled and played Johnny Green’s “You Take the High Note, I’ll Take the Low Note” for her first screen song.

The words were all right, butthe music was poor, for Janis was on the payroll for 11 and a half months with only two weeks before the camera. “The family was eating now but I wasn’t getting anywhere.” So, immediately after completing Bathing Beauty, she decided to leave M-G-M. After a year in the studio, she’d saved a little money, so she quit and started concentrating on her opera career again at the Metropolitan and working as a secretary. That lasted about a week, when she was steered by Marty Weiser, publicity executive of Warner Bros, who much impressed by Janis charm and ability. Three days later she walked into the film plant. She passed her screen tests with flying colors, and Warner offered her a seven-year contract.

In less than a year Janis swept herself into a promising screen career, picked up a legion of fans at the Hollywood Canteen and attracted scores more during a series of California army camp appearances. At Ford Ord alone she made 29 appearances in 48 hours.

Janis’ characteristic energy was indifferent to efforts. Where many entertainers were satisfied with a single camp appearance, Janis called no halt until sheer exhaustion forced her hand. In 1944, during one week’s swing through a dozen army posts, she gave 30 separate shows. The red-haired, green-eyed Janis was awarded more honorary beauty titles than perhaps any other girl in Hollywood, including the names Miss America of Pin Up Girls, and Miss Atomic Energy.

Trained for opera, she’d never gotten a break. “Opera is out for me now,” she said. “I wantto become a successful dramatic actress. But I’ll not neglect my singing voice.” She recalled that, “I couldn’t convince my mother I’d actually given up my opera career,” she said. “So I finally had to change my whole voice to prove it to her.” And that was no easy thing to do. If you are a dramatic soprano to begin with you must taper off from Wagner to light opera. Then come ballads.If you’re voice doesn’t crack on those you’re ready for the blues. “That’s me now. I’m a hot blues singer and nobody’s more surprised than me, unless maybe it’s my mother.”

Warner then began work on Hollywood Canteen, a film based on the activities of the famous men’s military center. The director Delmer Daves needed a girl for the messenger part and asked members of his crew if they had seen a screen test of a starlet who could do the part. An electrician suggested Daves check out a test Paige had done. Daves saw the test and immediately cast Janis in the role. That was the young starlet’s most important break in motion pictures. She was Warner Bros’ screen newcomer known to the boys in the South Pacific as the “Black Widow Girl.”

Next came another second lead, and strangely enough she was picked for a straight dramatic role, playing the nice girl, Sally in Of Human Bondage, which caused a lot of talk. Only in a short, I Won’t Play (1945) with Dane Clark, she was given a singing part. Other film roles were immediately lined up.

Almost overnight, she became the nation’s fourth most popular movie star–a status conferred by a fan poll–and lived it up to the tune of a Cadillac, a $14.500 bank account, and a marriage to and divorce from Frank Martinelli Jr., a San Francisco restaurateur. She had been featured in such films as The Time, the Place, and the Girl, Two Guys from Milwaukee, Her Kind of Man, Romance on the High Seas, Cheyenne, Winter Meeting, Wallflower, Love and Learn, One Sunday Afternoon, and whole lot more.

Janis was given more titles than any other starlet in pictures. She was “Miss Wing Spread” of 1946 at the Cleveland Air Races, “Queen ofthe Page Boys of America”, and “Golf Queen of the Los Angeles Golf Tournament.” She was one of the six pin-ups requested by U.S. bomber crews on Saipan.

In no time, Janis turned the former Donna Mae Tjaden of Tacoma, Washington, into a girl who made it big in Hollywood, but was nonetheless not thrilled with how her career was evolving. Hollywood didn’t satisfy Janis when the quality of her roles began to deteriorate. “When I couldn’t get a decent part,I walked out,” she said. She wasn’t getting roles that gave her a chance to show her real talent. The main roles in her Warner Bros. movies used Paige to ‘puppy-dog’ alongside Jack Carson and Dennis Morgan in a series of simple-minded musicals. “I was terribly introverted and uncomfortable,” she recalled.

Things were slow in Hollywood following the 1947-48 recession. Then, in 1948, suddenly she and the studio decided to bid each other a more-or-less fond adieu. The Younger Brothers, a western film directed by Edwin L. Marin and starring Wayne Morris and Janis Paige, was her last film at Warner Bros.

She bought up her studio contract, sold her Cadillac, renounced Hollywood, hitthe road like in the night club song-and-dance single, and plunged for two years into obscurity. Instead ofthe $1,000 per-week paychecks she had been receiving at Warner Bros., she found herself drawing $150-odd a week in nightclubs and theaters. “For a time it looked as if my whole life was broken up. I had become so accustomed to Hollywood studios, I was really drifting,” she said. Janis finished taking stock ofthings, decided to stop worrying and start working toward a new and even better Janis Paige.

Then, in 1949, she decided to get even farther away from Hollywood. “I went to Italy and spent six months there. But war-torn Europe opened my eyes to how inconsequential my life had been before. It amazed me to see the difference in life and I realized that most actresses in Hollywood are tremendously spoiled woman. I made a film, Fugitive Lady (The Dark Road). They are just releasing it now and I’m not proud of it.

When I got back in Hollywood, I was without a job.I went home–I was still married then–and started a tour of personal appearances with the Jack Carson show. I went also into his film, Mr. Universe. That’s one of my last films, except for Two Gals and a Guy with Robert Alda, which was released just recently and which Ilike as well as any of my pictures. Maybe it’s the best.”

“I guess 1949 and 1950 were the hardest years.I was really broke.I was a has-been at 25. I had to wake up. I began to work in nightclubs. I learned a lot. Been doing it again, lately. It’s the hardest kind of work. You have to be able to getthrough–to project yourself–through the smoke, the talk, and the drinks. You begin to find yourself as a person, working up an act.”

“I was,” she recalled in 1956, “unhappy with everything. In spite of success, I went around for years feeling ugly and ignorant. I started waking up in 1951. Until then, I was still a little kid.” Janis picked 1951 because it was the date of a physical collapse from which she was rescued by her personal friend and manager, Ruth Hughes Aarons. Ruth convinced her she should do a nightclub act. So, Janis left Hollywood fully determined to make a career of singing. “Ruth did a lotfor me, besides writing good material. She taught me how to regain my self-confidence.”

After playing theaters and supper clubs, in March 1951 she was singing at Boston’s Hotel Statler Terrace Room with Jerry Carr at the piano. In May, after five years of marriage she was granted divorce of Frank Martinelli Jr. The turning point came the night of September 10, 1951, when for the first time in her life she appeared on stage at Boston’s Colonial Theatre in a Lindsay-Crouse comedy called Remains to Be Seen, co-starring Jackie Cooper. She was given the leading role, Jody Revere, “the funny band-singer.”

On her Broadway debut, on October 3, 1951, when she stepped onto the Morosco Theater stage, she conquered theatergoers and critics. “I returned to New York, went for a walk, and breathed deeply for the first time in years.” From then on, Janis was discovered by her audience and, at the same time, discovered herself. Remain To Be Seen did much to rebuild her belief in herself.

“Giving her the part was a canny piece of casting, and she more than lives up to the choice,” wrote Bob Francis in Billboard. And out of Jody Revere emerged something approximating the real Janis Paige. “I fell in love with Jody,” Janis said. “She was a brassy but dedicated, open human being; gullible but with a great acceptance of life.” She professed that this job, while it furnished cakes and ale, and taught her a lot about audiences, interrupted her learning. But after Broadway, she went back to nightclubs and began again.

From February 1953, she played atthe swank Lost Frontier in Las Vegas, and then appeared in Chicago, New York, New Orleans, Reno, and at Lotus Club in Birmingham, Alabama. Her first TV drama was in summer 1953: Baby and Me with RobertPreston, an episode of the ABC Plymouth Playhouse series. That summer she also performed operettas and Broadway musicals for summer stock companies. Her first date was on Annie Get Your Gun in Kansas City Later, in February 1954, he continued with her appearances as a singer. She opened a two-week engagement at the Elmwood Casino in Ontario, and then embarked on a three-month tour of nightclubs, hotels, and theaters from Canada to Texas.

Early in 1954, Janis appeared on a Bob Hope song-and-dancer and with Donald Cook on a drama stanza. From that short-lived show, she was chosen for the long-lived Broadway musical The Pajama Game, penned by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, which opened atthe St. James Theatre, on May 13, 1954. The show, which was adapted from the novel, 7 1/2 Cents, told of the efforts of pajama factory employees to get a 7 1/2-cent wage hike. Janis played the free-swinging Babe Williams, head ofthe union grievance committee, opposite John Raitt. The musical show became a hit, and three months later Janis was its star. Her popularity was such that People and Life magazines gave her the cover, reporting on her newfound fame, and that the Tacoma redhead considered herself a flop in Hollywood with no place to go five years ago before she reached the stardom in the Broadway hit.

For a great many years,the bouncyBroadway gal had been featured in 22 Hollywood films, and, while she was always considered a fine actress, no one thought that she could ever step into a Broadway musical. But she fooled everyone and went on to win the critical acclaim of the hard-boiled New York critics in The Pajama Game.

Early summer 1955, after nearly 500 performances, and even though “Pajama” was still one ofthe hottest shows in town, Janis took the decision to leave her starring role in the Broadway musical hit—being replaced by Pat Marshall—for television work, because “I decided I should try to reach more people.” So, on Saturday evening, September 10, she debuted on the CBS channel with her own weekly TV show, It’s Always Jan,that spotlighted the trials and tribulations of a widowed nightclub singer (Janis) with her eight-year-old daughter and two young women sharing a New York apartment. With this half-hour comedy series, she enjoyed modest success.

On January 18, Janis married Arthur Stander, the producer-director of her TV show, in Las Vegas. Shortly after the last of the 26 filmed episodes of It’s Always Jan, the series was cancelled and Danny Thomas lamented the unpredictable fates of showbiz fortune with the words, “Janis Paige is the greatest untapped talent in show business today.”

Then came time for the movie version at Warner Bros. studio of The Pajama Game. Almost everyone connected with the stage show was asked to repeat his or her jobs…except Janis. She lost out to Doris Day, apparently because the moviemakers wanted a big box-office name.

“I did get a twinge,” Janis admitted. “But I really didn’t care too much. I didn’t worry over it. After all, it’s still the role I created so I’ll always feel it’s mine.”

At the age of 33, the extravagance of Janis Paige’s reactions to life’s greatest and smallest triumphs gave her the stability she was looking for. While her career flourished, Janis had less success with her two marriages, and both ended in divorce. Her last marriage with Arthur Stander would last only fourteen months. She then became engaged to songwriter Ray Gilbert Janis went back again into the nightclub field and “worked harder than I’ve ever worked in my life.” In one year she would make 15 roundtrip flights, performing everywhere from New York to Miami to Las Vegas to Los Angeles, but always she was wondering: “Where am I really going?”

In April 1956, she signed a recording contract with a small new company, Bally Records, in Chicago. Bally president Jimmy Hilliard recorded Janis Paige’s first single for the label, “Surprise Me, Baby,” but it never came out.

Later in July, Hilliard and Bally’s A&R and conductor Lew Douglas traveled to Los Angeles to see Janis, who had been successfully performing since June 21 at the posh Cocoanut Grove, to schedule a recording session with her. The result would be an album of intimate style pop material, with Lew Douglas arranging and conducting. The album, entitled Let’s Fall in Love, was released in December and it would be the first and only one that she ever recorded. Unfortunately, Bally Records went bankrupt at the end of 1957 and Janis’ album remained in obscurity.

Janis interrupted her career as a club singer and, after a six-year hiatus, renewed her film career in 1957 as an MGM artist, in Silk Stockings. She appeared along costars Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, in the comic role of Peggy, an uninhibited movie swimming star who is determined to go dramatic. The film featured eleven Cole Porter tunes and Janis had three comedy songs, “Josephine,” “Satin and Silk,” and “Stereophonic Sound.” Others were sung by Astaire as solos and with Cyd as duets.

In fall 1958, The Bob Hope Buick Show featured “Roberta,” the Broadway musical hit. “Working on TV with Bob Hope in ‘Roberta’ was the show that changed everything in my life.” Since then she freelanced in TV, made nine appearances on Bob Hope shows, and performed in numerous other specials.

Early in 1959, along with actor Harry Guardino, Janis appeared on a telefilm called Chez Rouge, on the CBS Desilu Playhouse series of dramatic presentations. She also starred in Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1960) with Doris Day and David Niven, and Bachelor in Paradise (1961) with Bob Hope and Lana Turner. Then came Follow the Boys and The Caretakers (1963) with Robert Stack and Polly Bergen, and appearances in Broadway productions like Call Me Madam (1966).

She had guest spots in a variety of television shows, including Columbo (1972), All in the Family (1976), Lanigan’s Rabbi (1977), Valentine Magic on Love Island (1980), Baby Makes Five (1983), and Trapper John, M.D. (1985). In the 80s and 90s, she continued her career with roles in soap operas, including Santa Barbara, General Hospital and Capitol.

In 1985, Janis, absent from Broadway since she replaced Angela Lansbury in Mame in 1968, was the wife and mother in the comedy Alone Together. As an arts philanthropist, Paige founded the Sunset Plaza Civic Association in 1983.

After the death of her third husband, songwriter Ray Gilbert, in 1976, she took over his music publishing company, Ipanema Corp., in Los Angeles where she still lives. “I knew I had talent,” Janis admitted in 1989. “My late husband Ray Gilbert didn’t believe talent could be taught. He’d say ‘You have to have discipline, but if you get too technical, the life goes out of a performance. When you lose that spark, that fun, it never comes back.’”

Now, as Janis Paige approaches her 100th birthday, the reissue of this album, Let’s Fall in Love, will remind us of her years as a nightclub singer. Congratulations!

—Jordi Pujol (From the inside liner notes of FSRV 135)