The Name That Unwittingly Stirred Young Girls’ Passion

I have never found any advantage in being named Jack Smith.

I don’t especially dislike the name. It is plain and unpretentious; easy to spell, easy to remember. It also identifies me as an Anglo-Saxon, which, until recently, was acceptable.

It is of course undistinguished. It has no panache. It is not a name to cause schoolgirls to contemplate life as Mrs. Jack Smith. I happen to know that schoolgirls often practice writing the names of their boyfriends in their notebooks, appending that Mrs. to see how it looks.

I doubt that any schoolgirl ever got a thrill from looking at Mrs. Jack Smith in her notebook. When a girl is thinking of giving up her maiden name, as they used to do, she hopes for something euphonious and romantic, like Mrs. Randolph Coventry. . . .

Besides being pedestrian, Jack Smith often provokes sly humor. When one appears with one’s wife at a motel and signs the register, one is likely to get a conspiratorial look from the clerk.

I’ve always wanted to tell one of these yokels that if I wanted to think up a phony name I could do a lot better than Jack Smith .

In writing recently about the inscriptions one writes in classmates’ yearbooks at graduation time in high school, I said that I had “never inspired any girl to passion.”

I’m not absolutely sure that that’s true, of course. In my day it was thought unladylike for a girl to show her passion, so it’s possible I inspired some without knowing it.

I’m not sure why I wrote that, but I suspect it may have been in the hope of being assured by one of my classmates that I did indeed inspire her with passion. Of course, I suppose she would be rather beyond passion now.

In fact, I have received a lyrical letter from a woman who insists that in 1934 and 1935, when she was 13, I introduced her to romance, “with a definite capital R.”

Since she signs her letter, without conditions, I am free to disclose her name, but I feel that our relationship, however improbable, should be shielded from prying eyes.

At the time I came along, she recalls, she was rather in “solitary confinement,” having moved from New York City to Bronxville, where her “gawky shy attitude and tall hauteur” condemned her to oblivion.

It’s true that I would have been attracted to a girl of “gawky shy attitude and tall hauteur,” but in 1934 I was in Los Angeles, not Bronxville.

She was a latchkey child. Her single-parent mother caught the milk train to New York to her Wall Street coffee shop. She listened to radio shows, especially “Myrt and Marge.”

“But you!, Oh, you, Whispering Jack Smith, you awoke dreams in me, and soft, feminine feelings which were achingly poignant, and impossible to fulfill for another two years. But I tried them out in my fantasies, humming your theme song, ‘My Ideal,’ as I whizzed along the streets of Bronxville on my roller skates. Such a soft, caressing voice, from 5:45 to 6 p.m. five days a week, taught me words to play out my imaginings and prepared me to finally be somebody’s girl.

“I would hate for you to go through the rest of your life with the mundane misconception that you had stirred no girl to passion. Knowing what you did for me leads me to hazard a pretty certain guess that there were many females hearing and enjoying you at the same time as I, but who were simply unaware of the joy it might bring you to know you were sending sunshine into many a young girl’s heart as we wished we could have you for our very own. . . . “

Of course the spell was broken as soon as she said “Whispering” Jack Smith. I have often been asked if I were Whispering Jack Smith, but obviously I’m not. Whispering was a star of vaudeville and radio whose seductive baritone voice on radio and records was popular with American women in the 1930s and 1940s.

I have also been mixed up with Smiling Jack Smith, a radio and motion picture star of recent popularity. My picture was once used with a story about him in a suburban newspaper. He was not flattered.

Once at a Hollywood party I was introduced to a rather haughty woman as “Jack Smith,” and she asked, “ The Jack Smith?” Fortunately I answered no, because it turned out she meant the singer. I have avoided that trap ever since.