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By Marc Leepson
Does the name “Ding-a-Ling” ring a bell? It should,
if you were just a casual viewer of the Dean Martin TV variety
show in the early seventies. The Ding-a-Lings were four gorgeous,
talented young women plucked by the show’s producer
in 1970 from the ranks of Dean’s Golddiggers—the
dancing, singing troupe of women who clustered around their
appreciative host—to serve as hipper, younger versions
of their singing sisters on the show.
“The producer Greg Garrison took four of us out of
the Golddiggers and made us the Ding-a-Ling Sisters,” said
Michelle DellaFave, one of the original fab four. “He
soon dropped the ‘sisters,’” fellow original
Ding-a-Ling Wanda Bailey added. “He wanted to have
a group that could do more funky music than the Golddiggers,” added
Susie McIver, who also was there from the start. “The
Golddiggers sang mostly regular pop. We did songs like ‘Proud
Mary,’ kind of more funky, wild stuff, with the hope
of appealing to the younger generation.”
DellaFave,
Bailey, and McIver will make a special appearance getting
together—for the first time in nearly 37 years,
in fact—at VVA’s National Convention in Springfield,
Illinois, in July. They will perform one of their old numbers
at the Saturday night Awards Banquet and earlier in the day
will take part (with Nancy Sinatra) in the autograph session,
signing copies of photos taken when they were part of the
1970-71 Bob Hope USO Christmas tour that included many stops
in Vietnam.
“We are thrilled and honored that VVA remembers us
and has asked us to come to Convention,” DellaFave
said. “We were happy to do something back then for
our country. We will be in Springfield to thank all of the
Vietnam veterans who served. We’re very excited and
honored.”
What’s in a Name?
Nineteen seventy was a part of another
era—how else
to explain the name that producer Greg Garrison chose for
the group? “He thought the name would be catchy because
it would be something people would remember,” DellaFave
said. “We did a lot of skits on the show and we were— or
at least I was—very dingy.” We “were young
and crazy and dingy,” McIver added.
Not long after the
group formed, Bob Hope chose the Ding-a-Lings to take part
in his annual Christmas tour entertaining the troops overseas.
The tour was a grueling, around-the-world excursion that
began in England, and then went to West Germany, Crete, Thailand,
South Vietnam, South Korea, and Alaska. “It
was the hardest working experience you could imagine,” Bailey
said. “We went from the icy cold of Korea to the jungles
of Vietnam. We made hard landings on aircraft carriers. We
had little or no sleep. But it was also the most rewarding
experience you can possibly imagine.”
As for the Vietnam
segment of the trip, Hope had decreed back in 1968 that it
was too dangerous for his entertainers to spend nights in
country. So the troupe—which that
year also included the Golddiggers, Ursula Andress, Lola
Falana, Miss World Jennifer Hosten, baseball star Johnny
Bench and, of course, Les Brown and his Band of Renown—flew
in and out of the country every day on Chinooks and C-130s
from their base in Thailand.
They experienced more than a
few rough times on those in-country excursions. “Every
time we landed, it was like, ‘Are
we going to make it?’” Bailey said. “We
never knew where we were going until we got there. We did
three bases a day and didn’t find out where we were
till after we hit the ground.”
The Ding-a-Lings played
before thousands at some venues in Vietnam and they played
before much, much smaller groups of GIs. “We once did
a show off the balcony of a PX,” DellaFave
remembered. “We did them off the backs of Jeeps and
the backs of buses.” Wherever “we were and saw
a group of guys, we would do a show,” McIver added.
The entire troupe would end each show, big or small, with
a version of “Silent Night” that never failed
to reduce them to tears. They also visited field and evac
hospitals to pay their respects to the wounded.
“Those were very powerful moments,” Bailey said. “But
I wouldn’t trade that experience for a million dollars.” Added
DellaFave: “Everyone who performed with Bob Hope would
say the same thing, that it was the highlight of their careers,
no matter what they’d done before or since.”
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©2006-
2008, Vietnam Veterans of America. All Rights Reserved. 8605 Cameron
Street, Silver Spring, MD 20910