1950s crooner had “best pipes in the business”
Vic Damone, a pop crooner whose creamy baritone and heartthrob good looks propelled his success at the jukebox and on the screen in the postWorld War II era, and for five decades more in nightclubs and concert halls, died Feb. 11 at a hospital in Miami Beach, Fla.
He was 89.
The cause of death was complications of respiratory failure, said his son-inlaw, William Karant.
Damone lacked the outsized personality of fellow Italian American pop singers Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, but he nonetheless flourished on a rung just below greatness. He made more than 2,000 recordings, as well as dozens of movie and TV appearances, and sold out live performances until he retired in the early 2000s after a stroke.
He made his professional debut at 17, tying for first place on the radio contest “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts,” and his 1947 recording debut heralded an enviable new talent. “If I had one wish,” Sinatra was said to have remarked, “it would be for Vic Damone’s tonsils. Vic has the best pipes in the business.”
Music critic Will Friedwald, in his volume “A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers,” attributed to Damone all the hallmarks of Sinatra’s early romantic balladeer phase — “the beautiful voice, the light clear sound, the precise articulation, the impeccable phrasing.”
What Damone lacked, in Friedwald’s view, was the lived-in vocal shading that Sinatra cultivated over a turbulent life of wine, women and ring-a-ding mischief.
It was not that Damone led a tumult-free life: He had several rocky marriages, including to actress Pier Angeli and actress-singer Diahann Carroll; he was once dangled out of a New York hotel window by a Mafia kingpin; and he struggled back from bankruptcy after being swindled by business partners.
But Damone’s earnest voice could not match Sinatra’s wounded soulfulness or introspective depth, nor did he push the boundaries of the pop form with his sunnily delivered standards, hit-parade titles, show tunes and updated Neapolitan love ballads with syrupy orchestrations.
He never “stood for something beyond a voice itself,” Friedwald wrote. “He was part of an era; Sinatra created one.”
Damone’s early string of hits included “I Have but One Heart,”“Again,”“You’re Breaking My Heart” and “Angela Mia,” but he was especially known for the ballad “On the Street Where You Live” from the Broadway musical “My Fair Lady.” He also had topselling records with title songs from movies such as “An Affair to Remember,” “War and Peace” and “Gigi.”
Damone was signed to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios and appeared in lighthearted early 1950s musicals such as “Rich, Young and Pretty,” “Deep in My Heart,” “Hit the Deck” and “Kismet,” in the last as the caliph who sings “Stranger in Paradise.”
In a rare departure from form, he took a supporting role as a leatherneck in the World War II drama “Hell to Eternity” (1960).