Word: torm
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Thursday, August 15 The Lively Ones (NBC, 9:30-10 p.m.). Guests include Mel Tormé, Frances Faye and Eduardo Sasson. Host is Vic Damone. Color. The World of Maurice Chevalier (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Television portrait of the ageless entertainer...
...four, Melvin Howard Tormé was a complete nobody. Then he stood up one night in Chicago's old Blackhawk Restaurant and, having spilled his milk, sang You're Driving Me Crazy. It turned out to be one of the few unqualified successes of an unhappy life. When he was 14, he wrote an excellent song called Lament to Love and sold it to Harry James, but James took so long to play it that by the time it became a hit, all Mel's friends had already decided he was a liar. At 21, he made...
Life as a Little Doll. From then on, Tormé patrolled the fringes of popularity, and from time to time slipped into downright obscurity. On the few occasions when he had to sing from center stage, he invariably fell victim to some quirk of personality that cost him friends, fans and jobs. His life, as even he tells it, began to sound like a punk's diary. "I didn't know the word for it then," he says, "but I can see now that I was defensive. I had a chip on my shoulder." To unload it, Torme...
Perhaps because of his weak chin, perhaps because he is unromantically short (5 ft. 7 in.), Tormé realized, he had tried to be frighteningly manly. He made a brave show of it, dated Ava Gardner, collected guns, swooped around town on a motorcycle, swore a lot, got tough with nightclub owners, insulted customers-but all to no avail. "Most women who have dug my music have thought I was a little doll," he says grimly, also recalling that his manager once told him, "With your baby face, nobody cares about your opinions...
...Good Way. Trading on a second-growth tonsil that gives his voice a pleasantly fuzzy purr, Tormé tried hard to be a balladeer. But his syrupy approach to hits like Blue Moon won him the unfortunate nickname "The Velvet Fog," typecast him as a limp crooner, and tempted tricksters to heckle him by slipping the irresistible r into "Fog." "Life was nothing but traveling," he says. "I was very unhappy with my recording career. Everywhere people would give me the 'so-you're-the-cocky-little-kid' bit." Mel's obstinacy never withered...