For the once-robust singer, who died June 5 at age 73 at the UCLA Medical Center of complications from the stroke, it may have been his hardest-earned ovation. For the past two years, Tormé had been confined to a wheelchair and dependent on round-the-clock nursing care. "He didn't have a lot of energy," says his son Tracy, 40, a TV writer and producer (Sliders). "It was very trying for him to sit up, to move or even to talk for any length of time."
Yet for most of his life, it seemed, Tormé had barely paused for breath. In addition to recording dozens of albums, he was an accomplished drummer, pianist, arranger, occasional actor and the prolific author of several books and some 300 songs—most notably "Born to Be Blue" and Nat King Cole's 1946 classic "The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire...)," both cowritten with Bob Wells. But performing remained his first love. "Not only could he scat sing on a level with Ella Fitzgerald," says jazz critic Neil Tesser, "he could even improvise lyrics because he had such an agile mind."
The older of two children born in Chicago to Russian immigrant parents, Tormé was 4 when he made his professional debut at a local supper club. As the band played, its drummer noticed the tot singing along on his mother's lap and invited him onstage. Young Mel's rendition of "You're Driving Me Crazy" turned into a regular Monday-night gig that paid him $15 a week. By age 9, he was acting on local radio serials, and at 15, after moving with his family to L.A and enrolling at Hollywood High School, he joined Chico Marx's band. Dropping out of school a year later, he landed a supporting role in Higher and Higher, Frank Sinatra's 1943 movie and the first of some 20 films Tormé would appear in.
Like Sinatra, he caught fire as a crooner. In the '40s, a New York City deejay nicknamed Tormé "the Velvet Fog," a tag he came to detest. "It was a good description of the way I sang in those days," he told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1985. "But it's now a misnomer. I'm quite a robust singer."
In the '60s, though, his voice was all but drowned out by rock and roll, which ruled the airwaves and concert stages. Tormé, reduced to playing obscure club gigs, at one point thought of quitting to become an airline pilot. But a 1977 Carnegie Hall concert with pianist George Shearing and saxophone player Gerry Mulligan led to a career revival. And in the '80s, Tormé won a whole new audience with his recurring cameos on the NBC sitcom Night Court, whose star, Harry Anderson, a real-life Tormé devotee, had the singer written into the scripts. "We became very good friends," says Anderson. "I just loved his enthusiasm. He had that kind of '50s lingo. I used to tell him that if it weren't for the word 'babe,' he couldn't finish a sentence."
Indeed, Tormé's zest extended to his love life. As a bachelor in the late '40s he had a fling with Ava Gardner, then embarked on marriages to three other actresses—Candy Toxton, Arlene Miles and Janette Scott—with whom he fathered five children (Steve, now 46, Melissa, 43, Tracy, Daisy, 29, and James, 25). In 1984 he wed fourth wife Ali Severson, 59, an attorney. "Mel did sum it up on a couple of occasions," his longtime manager Dale Sheets says of Tormé's divorces. "He'd say, 'Absence makes the heart go wander.' He was traveling a lot."
So much so that son Steve, a swing-jazz singer who was 3 when his parents split, says he began bonding with his dad only 15 years ago. Their father-son duet of "Straighten Up and Fly Right," on Steve's just-released CD, was one of the last songs the older Tormé recorded. "Two weeks ago, I brought it over to his house because he hadn't heard it yet," says Steve. "He sat there with this smile, and he just had tears running down his cheeks. So I think he liked it."
On June 5, Tormé, who'd won a lifetime achievement Grammy in February, began having problems breathing. Rushed to the hospital, he died an hour later, with Ali and his five children at his side. "I used to tell people that he was going to be the George Burns of the music business," says Tracy. When the stroke felled him, "He was going so strong. He hadn't lost any of his voice, and there was no indication that he was going to. That's the real sad irony of the whole thing, that he was cut down right in his prime."
Jeremy Helligar
Julie Jordan in Los Angeles and Kelly Williams in Chicago
- Contributors:
- Julie Jordan,
- Kelly Williams.
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