Those of us who listen to classical music on New York City radio have long loved the supremely feminine voice of “the disk jockey” Clayelle Dalfares. I first heard her on WNCN, which occupied 104.3 fm, four decades ago. When that channel switched to rock music, Clayelle moved to its former competitor, WQXR, which aired her, until recently, regularly on weekend afternoons and occasionally at other times. When she introduces a recording, she usually has something unique to say about it; and she rarely makes mistakes in pronunciation.
I witness the trick she employed to get an acoustic “purr,” as she called it, was putting her mouth closer to the microphone those most radio announcers would do, while disciplining herself to eliminate distracting mouth noises. So remarkable is her speaking voice that I can remember playing a tape of it, along with some other NYC announcers, for my producers in German radio who were awed by her alone. “Who is she?” they asked.
I can recall a Lesbian friend telling me that she “gets off” hearing Clayelle’s voice. When I reported this erotic praise to Clayelle, she responded that she had already heard that encomium as well, though adding that she wasn’t Lesbian. Since I never met her with anyone else, my hunch, perhaps a fantasy, was that Clayelle had secret lovers.
Since few pictures of her are publicly available, the common question is, “What does she look like?” Well, surprise, not what you imagine. She is short, sometimes a bit round, and informally dressed. So slight is her physical presence that, notwithstanding her unique voice, she could pass unnoticed in any crowd. Whenever we try to meet, she sees me before I see her.
Her hobbies are movies, which have been plentiful in the Lincoln Center neighborhood around her apartment, and baseball. Since the former mostly put me to sleep, I’ve instead gone with her to games in both the Bronx and Staten Island. Always she knew more details than I did. Privately, she wished she could have been Suzyn Waldman, who has been since 2005 the “color commentator” for the New York Yankees radio broadcasts.
Even when she pronounces it clearly, her last name is too unfamiliar to be immediately understood. Dalfares is Portuguese, and some of her relatives has been prominent in her native Louisiana. The website Ancestry.com says that, “Louisiana had the highest population of Dalferes families in 1880,” identifying 46 at that time, incidentally noting that all Americans with that surname resided in Louisiana. Her father, Clay Louis Dalfares, owned an eponymous cigar company. She might well be the only Dalfares residing outside of her birth state.
She once told me that when she entered Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart in Westchester in the mid-1950s, she was advised that it was an Irish Catholic school. So she changed her student name to “Louise Clay,” which could pass, so to speak. Not unusually for accomplished women of my generation, she went to a “girls’ school” before coming to New York City to be a stage actress. Not unlike others with similar ambitions, Clayelle found something else worthwhile to do.
Generous she’s always been, volunteering to be one of the off-camera voices in my four-hour film Epiphanies (1988) and later coaching me through a recording of my voice. She is also good company. When a Mormon high school classmate came to Manhattan for 18 months of widow’s service at the LDS center near Lincoln Center, I introduced her to several people here. Only Clayelle did she befriend. In person, as Clayelle Dalfares is as earnest and lovely as she sounds.
Even in her mid-80s, her voice recently sounded as it always did. If not for macular degeneration and flights of stairs to her walkup apartment, she would have continued letting us hear her presentations of classical music.
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