The singer who co-anchored a legendary Vegas act
Steve Lawrence 1935–2024
As an old-fashioned lounge crooner, Steve Lawrence had plenty of solo success, with 33 songs scaling the Billboard charts, including the No. 1 1962 hit “Go Away Little Girl.” But for generations of fans, he was best known for his duets with his wife, Eydie Gormé. A staple of Las Vegas casinos and nightclubs worldwide, the “Steve and Eydie” act featured standards by Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and others, punctuated by jokey husband-and-wife banter. Their personal and professional lives melded seamlessly—even, they said, when things got rocky. “One of the best shows we ever had was after a terrible argument,” Lawrence said in 1992. “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.”
For Lawrence, born Sidney Liebowitz in Brooklyn, “music was always a part of his life,” said The Hollywood Reporter. The cantor’s son knew what he wanted to do after listening to his first Frank Sinatra record. As a teenager, “he would skip classes to spend his days in Manhattan at the Brill Building,” then the center of the music industry, where he first encountered Gormé. They met again in 1953 as regular singers on a program hosted by Steve Allen that would eventually become the Tonight Show and married four years later. The two had “nearly unparalleled success as a performing couple,” said Variety. Lawrence sometimes pursued independent acting projects, earning a Tony nomination for his portrayal of an amoral Hollywood studio chief in 1964’s What Makes Sammy Run? and memorably playing a salty talent agent in the 1980s film The Blues Brothers. But he always “insisted that his wife was the better singer of the two.”
Lawrence and Gormé spent decades serving up songbook favorites for “audiences that seemed to grow old with them,” said The New York Times. The two accompanied Sinatra on his final tour in 1990 and 1991 and kept on playing Vegas well into the 21st century. Gormé died in 2013; six years later, Lawrence revealed in an open letter that he had early-stage Alzheimer’s disease. “With my beloved Eydie, I had one of the great loves of all time,” he wrote, “and you, my fans, have shown immeasurable love and support in ways I only could have imagined.”