Welk did set up a generous profit-sharing plan for his performers while giving them freedom to appear on other television shows and to make personal appearances. “For one thing, there was no other place where a musician could get such a steady job,” said one cast member.
When we told him we’d stay if he’d pay us double scale, he told us, ‘No act is worth a penny over scale to me.’ ” “After that he agreed to pay us solo scale, $210 a week. “We worked at group scale, which was $110 a week, for 10 years,” Kathy Lennon recalled. Still others left the show over money disputes with Welk, who paid the minimum union scale to his cast. He listened to his audience,” Lennon said. “He came to us with those letters and said, ‘I told you!’ And he told the wardrobe people never to put us in bathing suits again.” “That’s what kept Lawrence Welk on television for so many years. Welk got more letters than you could believe afterwards from people asking him how he could have allowed our legs to be shown on television,” Lennon said. Kathy Lennon recalled the time the sisters insisted on wearing bathing suits-albeit modest, one-piece suits-for a pool scene taped at Welk’s resort near Escondido. The Lennons left Welk in 1968, to the bandleader’s dismay.Īs with Lon, costumes also were a point of contention with the Lennons. He wanted to give people music he thought they could understand, and he didn’t think they could understand Beatles songs or Stevie Wonder songs.”
“As we got older-into our teen-age years and then into our 20s-we wanted to do more sophisticated, more popular music,” said Kathy Lennon, who was 12 when she and her sisters joined the show in 1955.
The singing Lennon Sisters-Janet, Kathy, Peggy and Dianne-said later that they felt working for Welk put them in a time warp. and that got to be a problem when he started working with a younger generation of people in the music business.” “There was a dress code that everyone had to live up to,” said Sam Lutz, Welk’s long-time manager, “.
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