Crooner did it all in long show-business career
VIC DAMONE /
Vic Damone, the postwar crooner whose intimate, rhapsodic voice captivated bobby-soxers, middle-age dreamers and silver-haired romantics in a five-decade medley of America’s love songs and standards, died Sunday in Miami Beach, Florida. He was 89.
Ed Henry, a family friend, said the cause was complications of respiratory failure.
Damone suffered a mild stroke in 2000 but recovered and retired in 2001 after a farewell tour that included appearances at the Hollywood Bowl and Carnegie Hall. He came out of retirement a decade later to give one last performance in Palm Beach, Florida, where he lived.
For anyone old enough to remember the age of phonograph records, the velvet baritone of Damone was an unforgettable groove in a soundtrack that also included Frank Sinatra, Perry Como and Tony Bennett, singers who arose in the big band era and reached peaks of popularity in the 1950s.
Many critics and colleagues said Damone had the best natural gifts in the business: a voice and style that made emotional connections with an audience, especially in nightclubs, with sensitive renditions of songs like “In the Still of the Night,” “You’d Be So Easy to Love,” “I Don’t Want to Walk Without You” and “Come Rain or Come Shine.”
After winning on the radio show “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts” in 1947 and serving in the Army from 1951-53, he recorded some 2,500 songs over 54 years. He had his own radio and television programs, made movies, survived rock ’n’ roll and its noisy offspring and became a mainstay of the Las Vegas Strip nightclubs, where audiences were so close he could almost reach out and touch them with his voice.
Along the way, he made millions, entertained presidents and royalty, refused a part in “The Godfather” (nightclub singer Johnny Fontaine), married five times (including to actress Diahann Carroll from 1987-1996), had four children and underwent analysis. He also survived a brush with the mob, four divorces, a custody fight over his only son and the suicides of two former wives. And he was still working as the millennium turned, with a voice that critics said had not lost its mellow subtleties.