Dorothy Collins - the demure blonde star of Hit Parade and the Lucky Strike commercials | TV Guide Chicago, 17-23 April 1953

DOROTHY Collins is now riding the crest of success and she did it all without one use of the "go-getter" formula.

"The only time I ever really tried for anything," the demure blonde star of Hit Parade and the Lucky Strike commercials said, "I didn't get it."

It was about the darkest hour for the 26-year-old singer who is now one of America's best-known women. The Raymond Scott Quintet, with which she had been a featured vocalist in Detroit, had disbanded. Scott had come on to New York to direct the Hit Parade orchestra, succeeding his brother, the late Mark Warnow. Dorothy was at loose ends.

"I auditioned for a job in one of the New York night clubs," Dorothy said ruefully. "It was the first and only time I ever went after a job. And I didn't get it.

"I just didn't know what I was doing. They didn't want me. They wanted someone like . . . well, like Marilyn Monroe or perhaps Jane Russell."

But in two weeks from that dark day, she had landed one of television's most coveted jobs, without ever dreaming it was possible.

"Raymond had been commissioned to write a jingle for the Lucky Strike people," she related. "He asked me if I would sing the words on the sample recording he was making. My name wasn't mentioned. It was just a way of getting the lyrics across.

This was the first of the new jingles for the cigaret firm and the basis for the idea of staging commercials with all the trappings of a musical comedy.

But the agency people liked that anonymous voice as well as they did the jingle. They signed Dorothy Collins to introduce it. When Hit Parade was introduced on TV in the summer of 1950, she was featured in the care- fully staged commercials.

Her winsome charm caught the fancy of TV audiences across the nation and she was moved up almost immediately to be one of the Hit Parade principals, along with Snooky Lanson and Eileen Wilson.

Dorothy's recipe for success is now this simple: "Just be around when lightning strikes."

Interviewed in the brain factory of Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn, which handles the American Tobacco Co. account, Dorothy proved as sincere and unaffected as when she was plain Marjorie Chandler back in her native Windsor, Ont.

She is still able to giggle on occasion and to say, after revealing that she likes to do "sad love songs" best:

"It's the first chance I've had to do dramatics. I guess it's gone to my head."