"That's My Boy"

The first two lines of Irving Berlin's Call Me Madam hit, You're Just in Love, came through in fairly standard fashion--in a bouncy, manly baritone, only a little off key.

I hear singing and there's no one there,

I smell blossoms and the trees are bare...

But then a fresh and familiar female voice chirped in, "That's my boy." As the verses went on there was more motherly comment ("Take a bigger breath next time, son") and finally a chummy duet on the last chorus. Last week, following a family-singing trail somewhat haphazardly blazed last summer by Bing Crosby and his son Gary (TIME, Aug. 7), Mary (South Pacific) Martin and her 19-year-old son Larry cut their first records together.

"We had never so much as sung Silent Night together before," explained mother Mary. But Columbia Records' Mitchell Miller was chewing his whiskers over the success of the Crosbys' hit for Decca; Mary and Larry, her son by her first marriage (to Texas Attorney Ben Hagman), were eager to try.

Wearing a sport jacket and horn-rimmed spectacles, and carrying a big package ("It's my old lady's birthday"), Larry bounced into the studio first. When "the old lady" showed up, her cued-in lyrics in hand, they went to work. Larry had had a bit of stock-company experience in the past year or two, but Mary wasn't too sure of his voice: "It hasn't settled enough for anyone to know what it is really like. But he can carry a tune . . ." After three hours of coaching, needling and playbacks, they finished You're Just in Love and Get Out Those Old Records (including a reference to My Heart Belongs to Daddy). By the time they were through, Larry, said mama, had found out "there is more to singing than just singing."

Was she competing with her philoprogenitive (four sons) old friend Bing Crosby? Hardly, said Mary. Even with her daughter Heller Halliday, 9, coming along, "I would run out of kids before he does."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.