Mel Torme, 1925-1999

Childhood, Family, and Education

Melvin Howard Tormé was born Sept. 13, 1925, on the south side of Chicago, Ill. His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants; their name was originally Torma but was changed by an immigration official. Tormé was in high school when he added the accent to his name. His parents, movie fans, named him after Melvyn Douglas, and his sister, after Myrna Loy.

His father, William Tormé, owned a dry goods store, and sold butter and eggs from his Model A Ford. His mother, Sophie, played piano, demonstrating sheet music at Woolworth's.

"It's got to be a fairy tale, but my mother swears I sang a complete song by the time I was 10 months old," Tormé told The New Yorker in 1981.

Understandably, music dominated Tormé's childhood. "After dinner, we'd all sit out front on the stoop and sing for the neighbors," Tormé told TV Guide in 1971. "My grandfather would sometimes sing in Hebrew. There were uncles playing their ukuleles, and we'd sing Oh, How I Miss You Tonight and Till We Meet Again, the old songs. I'd sing harmony."

One night, when Tormé was 4 years old, he and his family went to the Blackhawk Restaurant in Chicago to hear the Coon-Saunders Band. The bandleader noticed the boy singing along at the table and, during intermission, asked him if he would like to sing a number with the band. Tormé sat on the drummer's knee and sang You're Driving Me Crazy, and soon became a regular with the band, singing on Mondays in exchange for $15 a night, plus dinner for his family.

Tormé's stint with the band lasted six months. By the age of 6, he was working as a vaudeville performer in local theaters, and in 1933, when he was 8, he won first place in a children's radio contest at the Century of Progress World's Fair. (He sang an Al Jolson song called Goin' to Heaven on a Mule.)

The contest led him to an acting career on radio, which lasted from 1933 until 1941, when his voice changed. He played young boys on such radio programs as The Romance of Helen Trent, Little Orphan Annie, and Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy.

But Tormé's early success was no bed of roses. "The kids in my school resented the hell out of me," he told Newsweek in 1982. "I was very scrawny, and there was one kid who beat me like a gong."

But he knew he was destined for a show business career. "There was no doubt in my mind that that's what I wanted to pursue, he said during a 1988 interview with The Washington Post.

Tormé also played drums in his school's drum and bugle corps, and later played in a high school band that included classmate Steve Allen on piano.

Career

When Tormé was 15, his Uncle Art got him an audition with bandleader Harry James. Tormé sang one of his own compositions, a song called Lment to Love. James considered hiring Tormé to tour with him, but did not want the added expense of hiring a tutor. As a consolation, James and his band recorded Tormé's song, which was a top 10 hit and was later recorded by Les Brown and other bands.

In 1942, when he was 17, Tormé was offered a job as a singer and arranger for the Marx Orchestra, led by Chico Marx. He moved to California on his own to take the job, enrolling himself at Hollywood High. His parents joined him in California the following year.

When the Marx Orchestra's drummer left the band, Tormé replaced him. But the band broke up shortly thereafter.

It wasn't long before Tormé was cast as a singer in the film Higher and Higher, which starred another singer making his film debut, Frank Sinatra. Tormé also appeared in two other films, Pardon My Rhythm and Let's Go Steady, before joining the U.S. Army during World War II. He later appeared in two MGM musicals, Good News and Words and Music (in which he sang Blue Moon).

After his Army stint ended, Tormé sat in as a drummer with many big bands, including those of Stan Kenton and Tommy Dorsey. He also recorded some vocals with Artie Shaw.

In 1945, when he was only about 20 years old, Tormé wrote the melody for his most successful song, The Christmas Song (which begins "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire"), with lyrics by Bob Wells. The song became a huge hit for Nat "King" Cole, and has been recorded hundreds of times since then.

"The song caught on," Tormé told the Chicago Tribune in 1990, "because it was a series of random Christmas images and impressions that touch everybody in one way or another. You should see those royalty checks, even now. Whew!"

He wrote more than 300 songs, but he rarely sang his own compositions in concert. "Actually, I like to hear other people sing my songs, except for The Christmas Song, which I'll do whether it's December, March, or July," he told The Los Angeles Times in 1985.

His favorite singers included Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Fred Astaire. But he did not have a high opinion of the music business. In his 1988 autobiography, It Wasn't All Velvet, he wrote: "It saddens me to say that some of the vilest people I have ever met are those who run and control the record industry. They hold the original patents on 'creative bookkeeping,' and if you think the foregoing is sour grapes, I wish you could be privy to the dozens of horror stories I have heard from musicians, singers, arrangers, and songwriters about the downright scurrilous activities of record executives."

Tormé decided to launch a solo singing career in 1946 and received a great deal of publicity. A New York disc jockey became a big fan and coined several nicknames for him. Two of them didn't stick: "Mster Butterscotch" and "The Kid With the Gauze in His Jaws." But one of them did: "The Velvet Fog."

At the time, Tormé detested the name and continued to hate it for years. Only later in his life did he accept it, and two of his cars had license plates that read "El Fog?" and "La Phog."

Tormé was very popular among the bobby soxers, with such fan clubs as Mel's Belles, Mel's Angels, and The Fogettes. But his performances at New York's Copacabana had a disastrous effect on his career.

"I was over-publicized and crammed down people's throats," he told TV Guide in 1971. "The gangster and garment types who went to the Copa wanted Sophie Tucker or Joe E. Lewis. Instead, they got a punk singer. So they threw ice cubes at me."

In 1947, newspaper columnist Dorothy Kilgallen wrote of those performances: "Mel Tormé is nothing more than an egotistical, untalented little amateur whose only claim to fame are [sic] his dates with Ava Gardner."

Tormé later referred to those years as "that hurtful time." He spent most of it performing in England.

When Tormé returned to the United States in 1951, he got a job on a TV summer replacement series, TV's Top Tunes, which he co-hosted with Peggy Lee. He next hosted a daytime talk-variety program called The Mel Tormé Show, which was one of the first series to be broadcast in color. The show ran for the 1951-52 season.

Tormé also played dramatic roles, co-starring with Mickey Rooney in a 1957 production of The Comedian. He also appeared in two feature films in 1959, The Big Operator and Girls' Town.

In the meantime, Tormé continued his musical career. In 1962, he had his only top 40 hit as a singer, Comin' Home Baby, and was nominated for two 1962 Grammys. But the '60s were a difficult time for him as a singer.

"It was the point at which rock 'n' roll had become the reigning pop musical style," he told The New York Times in 1988. "I found myself playing out-of-the-way joints where I drew as little as 15 people a night. It became very tough to make a living. I decided, 'Okay. If there's no place for me in show business anymore, I'll become an airline pilot and continue my writing'."

But even in his worst years, Torm$#233; never did badly financially. "At the worst of times, there were still six-figure years," he told New York Newsday in 1986. "Now, they weren't huge six figures. But I never, since the Copacabana days [1947], have had less than a six-figure year."

In 1963, Tormé became musical adviser and arranger for The Judy Garland Show. In 1970, after Garland's death, he published a candid book called The Other Side of the Rainbow, relating his difficulties dealing with Garland's addiction to alcohol and drugs. The book sold well and received good reviews, although Torm&eaute; was criticized by some, including Garland's daughter, Liza Minnelli. But she later forgave him.

In 1991, Tormé published a biography of his good friend, drummer Buddy Rich, Traps, the Drum Wonder, on which he and Rich had begun work in 1975. Tormé also helped organize a benefit for Rich's family, since Rich died owing a large sum to the Internal Revenue Service.

Tormé also wrote for television. In 1966, he wrote an episode for the television series Run For Your Life, which included a role for himself. He also wrote an episode of The Virginian, based on his unpublished western novel, Dollarhide.

In 1978, he published a novel, Wynner, the story of a big-band singer turned movie star. He claimed that the story was not autobiographical.

In 1970, Tormé created and was executive producer for The Singers, a CBS television special, and he also produced and starred in a nostalgia-oriented series, It Was a Very Good Year, which ran during the summer of 1971.

In 1976, Tormé's musical career took an upturn. He played at Carnegie Hall with George Shearing and Gerry Mulligan, and after that, he said, "things began to blossom."

He was nominated for four Grammys between 1978 and 1981, and won his first for Best Male Jazz Vocal in 1982, for An Evening With George Shearing and Mel Tormé. His second Grammy came a year later, again for Best Male Jazz Vocal, for the album Top Drawer. Other Grammy nominations would follow over the years thereafter.

Younger audiences got to know Tormé for his occasional appearances on the NBC comedy Night Court. One of the lead characters, Judge Harry Stone (Harry Anderson) was portrayed as a Tormé fan, which happened to coincide with Anderson's admiration for him. "Who could have figured it? I didn't know about it for five or six shows, until somebody called and told me that the judge had my picture on his desk," Tormé told the Chicago Tribune in 1990. "It was crazy. I just called to tell them how grateful I was, and they asked me to do a guest spot, which became an annual thing."

Marryin' Mel

Tormé married his first wife, actress Candy Toxton, in 1949. They were divorced in 1955. His second wife was Arlene Miles, a model, to whom he was married from 1956 to 1966. And from 1966 to 1977, he was married to British actress Janette Scott.

All three marriages ended in bitter battles over financial matters and child custody.

His third divorce was very expensive. The judge ruled that all of his property, including the house that he had bought before that marriage, was community property. In order to buy his ex-wife's share of the house, Tormé sold his antique gun collection, which he began at the age of 16.

"I don't think the phrase, 'Absence makes the heart grow fonder,' is apt, he told The New YorTimes in 1988. "It would be more accurate to say, 'Absence makes the heart go wander'."

After that third divorce, Tormé swore that he would never marry again. But, in 1987, he gave matrimony another chance, with Ali Severson.

Tormé had five children from his first three marriages. "[The children] have all worked out well," he told the New York Daily News in 1987, "and I'm proud of each of them."

Tormé never smoked a cigarette in his life, thanks to three childhood bullies who once forced him to eat tobacco. He rarely drank wine, and he said he never experimented with drugs, adding, "I don't even take aspirin."

He was an avid collector, from old movie posters to World War I fighter-plane parts. He also was a model-train buff, and was a licensed pilot and motorcyclist.