
In fact, she was Hildegarde Loretta Sell of Milwaukee, Wisc. Her persona was almost total fiction, concocted with the aid of her friend and agent, Anna Sosenko. Sosenko was relentless in promoting her, creating stories of her escapades and feeding them to a hungry American press. She had learned to sing in French, Russian, Ital-ian, and German, as well as in English: she developed "a precise diction which made every word clearly audible and which reduced her accent to an unidentifiable exotic flavoring of speech."
She had already appeared on American radio (the Ed Wynn show, Believe It Or Not, and the 1939 NBC series Ninety-Nine Men and a Girl) and had substituted for Red Skelton on a revamped Beat the Band in 1943. She was so popular in the summer Skelton slot that she was brought in as his full-time replacement when Skelton went into the service in 1944. Her Raleigh Room immediately drew ratings in the upper teens, ten points less than Skelton had been carrying but quite acceptable for a fill-in. On the air, she exhibited such bubbly energy and good humor that her act was infectious. She reached for a nightclub atmosphere, setting the studio with tables where special guests (Deems Taylor, Bert Lahr, and Georgie Price on one broadcast) might be found sitting. She worked her audience well, snatching people at random and thrusting them before the microphone. She was still doing well when Skelton returned, so Raleigh continued both shows, shifting Hildegarde to Wednesdays in 1946. But her rating dropped, so Raleigh dropped her. Campbell Soups picked her up for a final season. Again she displayed her courageous good nature by allowing guest Jackie Kelk to sing her theme, Darling Je Vous Aime Beau-coup, on her air. Kelk, according to Radio Life, gave a riotous impersonation of the chanteuse. John Dunning