Steve Lawrence, 88, crooner who performed with wife Eydie Gormé
Steve Lawrence, a creamyvoiced pop crooner who popularized the standards “Go Away Little Girl” and “I’ve Gotta Be Me” and formed a crowd-pleasing act with his wife, Eydie Gormé, for more than five decades, died Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 88.
The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, said his son David.
Often billed as “Steve and Eydie,” Mr. Lawrence and his wife were a ubiquitous presence on records, television variety shows, and in nightclubs from Las Vegas to the Catskills. Mr. Lawrence, with his boyish good looks and self-assured grin, and Gormé, with her raven bouffant and beaded, feathered dresses, projected an appealing playfulness. They would finish each other’s sentences and rib each other in their sharp-tongued repartee.
In their later years, Steve and Eydie were regarded as the last of the “tux and gown” acts, staunch interpreters of popular standards who eschewed rock and contemporary popular music. Their TV specials, such as their Emmy Award-winning “Steve & Eydie Celebrate Irving Berlin” in 1978, were often songbook-themed.
Among their best-remembered duets were “Make Yourself Comfortable” (1954); “We Got Us” (1960), a Grammy Awardwinning album of jazz-pop-Tin Pan Alley standards; “I Want to Stay Here” (1963); and “I Can’t Stop Talking About You” (1963).
Meanwhile, each maintained a substantial solo career. Record companies tried to market Mr. Lawrence in a clean-shaven teenidol image with early hits such as “Pretty Blue Eyes” (1959) and “Footsteps” (1960). Mr. Lawrence’s signature song was the million-selling Gerry Goffin-Carole King composition “Go Away Little Girl” (1962), in which the singer halfheartedly pleads with a woman to stay away so that he will not betray his steady girlfriend. He also received a 1961 Grammy nomination for the ballad “Portrait of My Love.”
Together and apart, the couple’s presence on the charts began to wane amid rapidly changing musical tastes. But Mr. Lawrence soon found his forte as an interpreter cut from the Frank Sinatra mold with a series of albums produced by big band arranger Don Costa.
Mr. Lawrence premiered the standard “I’ve Gotta Be Me” from the 1968 Broadway musical “Golden Rainbow,” in which he and Gormé co-starred. The show ran for nearly a year despite middling notices, and the song was later recorded by Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.
Mr. Lawrence had earned greater critical attention on Broadway with “What Makes Sammy Run?” (1964), a musical adaptation by composer Ervin Drake of Budd Schulberg’s scathing novel about Hollywood and ambition. Reviewers lavished praise on Mr. Lawrence’s portrayal of the amoral powerseeker Sammy Glick. The performance brought him a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and a Tony Award nomination.
Sammy Glick, with his hardscrabble New York City background and attitude, seemed tailor-made for Mr. Lawrence. He was asked to audition for the role three times, which he found insulting. He said he got the role only after telling a casting director, in a fit of pique worthy of the mercurial Glick, “Listen, I get a lot of money when I sing. I’ll audition any time you want, but it’ll cost you $10,000.”
“There’s a line in Budd Schulberg’s great book that there’s a little Sammy Glick in all of us,” he told the New York Post in 1964. “But it’s the amount that counts. In me, there’s a drive that wants to be successful, but I’m not going to step on anybody — at least not consciously.”
Sidney Leibowitz was born in Brooklyn on July 8, 1935. His father, a house painter, was a cantor at the family’s synagogue, where Mr. Lawrence joined the choir at age 8.
His aspirations soon changed from religious to popular music, and he created his professional name by combining the names of two of his nephews. At 15, he won top honors on the TV program “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts” and was awarded a week’s appearances on Godfrey’s morning radio show. He became so preoccupied with his promising career that he did not complete high school.
In 1952, Mr. Lawrence made his recording debut with a bolero arrangement of “Poinciana” that sold more than 100,000 copies. He soon was performing on a local New York program, “The Steve Allen Show.”
A few years later, when NBC rebranded the program as the national late-night “Tonight Show,” he became a regular cast member, along with Gormé. She was five years older and already an experienced band singer.
“That show was about the best basic training in the world,” Mr. Lawrence told the Los Angeles Times in 1996. “We were called upon on that show to do everything. I mean everything — sweep floors, do sketches, help write, help build the sets, move them around. There is no way you could do that today.”
With rock music ascending, Mr. Lawrence and his wife were approached about changing their style.
“We had a chance to get in on the ground floor of rock ‘n’ roll,” he recalled in a 1989 interview. “It was 1957 and everything was changing, but I wanted to be Sinatra, not Rick Nelson.
“Our audience knows we’re not going to load up on heavy metal or set fire to the drummer — although on some nights we’ve talked about it,” he joked.
His relationship with Gormé, who was born to Spanish-speaking Sephardic Jewish parents, blossomed backstage over the objections of Mr. Lawrence’s mother. They married in Las Vegas in 1957. “She said she’d put her head in the oven if Steve married me,” Gormé told The New York Times in 1992. “To the day his mother died, she said I wasn’t Jewish, but Spanish.”
Gormé died in 2013. Their son Michael Lawrence died of a heart condition in 1986 at age 23. In addition to his son David, of Thousand Oaks, Calif., Mr. Lawrence leaves a brother and a granddaughter.
Mr. Lawrence’s occasional forays into film included the role of booking agent Maury Sline in “The Blues Brothers” (1980), a role he reprised in the sequel, “Blues Brothers 2000” (1998).
He and Gormé both said they found an occasional public marital spat to be good medicine — and good theater.
“One of the best shows we ever had was after a terrible argument,” Mr. Lawrence told The New York Times. “It was jugular time. The orchestra was starting to call divorce lawyers. Who knew what it was about? We went on the stage so hostile. Clenched teeth. I was saying everything a husband always wants to say to his wife. I mean — venomous.
“And the more we snapped at each other, the more the audience loved it. After the show, we were fine. It was like therapy.”