Rudy Vallee died in 1986 at the age of 84. He had a spectacular career in show business. The unattributed New York Times obituary recalled:
From 1928 through the late 30’s, the insouciant salutation “Heigh-ho, everybody!” introduced Mr. Vallee to radio, theater and nightclub audiences.
A vocalist and saxophone player adored by millions of Americans, most of them women, he was a tall, blue-eyed, fresh-faced, curly-haired Yale graduate whose eager listeners took the song “My Time Is Your Time” so to heart that thousands of them clamored for the tiniest details of his private life and stampeded in the streets to hear and touch him.
A legend in his own time, akin to Frank Sinatra in a later era, “the Vagabond Lover,” as he was known, excited passions. A Harvard critic flung a grapefruit at him; a woman in the Middle West shot her husband dead because he interrupted a Vallee broadcast by demanding, “Why don’t you get something worth listening to?”
Thursday evenings, when Mr. Vallee and his Connecticut Yankees dance band appeared on radio, were a sacrosanct time across the nation. Women swooned and teen-agers shrieked when he played and sang such tunes as “The Maine Stein Song,” “Cheerful Little Earful,” “If I Had a Talking Picture of You” and “Say It Isn’t So.”
Hardly an appearance in those years took place without Mr. Vallee’s singing “I’m Just a Vagabond Lover,” the chorus of which became imprinted on the brains of millions. It ran: “For I’m just a vagabond lover, In search of a sweetheart it seems, And I know that someday I’ll discover her, The girl of my vagabond dreams.”
Apart from his saxophone, on which he was genuinely talented, Mr. Vallee possessed few musical qualities.
“I never had much of a voice, and it was all in my nose,” he once confessed. “But I think one reason for the success was that I was the first articulate singer – people could understand the words I sang. And at least I had pitch.”
I met Rudy in 1966 when he was performing at the Manor restaurant on West 7th Street in St. Paul, a few blocks from where we lived. The Manor is long gone, but you can get a glimpse of it here.
The novelty song “Winchester Cathedral” had become an improbable hit that year. The singing style recalled Rudy’s crooning through a megaphone and led to one of the revivals of his show business career. Running a piano bar and restaurant of his own, my dad was always looking for talent. He took me with him to see Rudy at the Manor.
Speaking together after the show, they instantly hit it off and became friends. I have the copy of Rudy’s 1962 memoir My Time Is Your Time (written with Gil McKean) from my father’s library. It is inscribed “To Lewis — In friendship” and dated “Oct. 1966.” Rudy must have sent it to my father as soon as he arrived back home in Hollywood.
On subsequent trips when Rudy returned to perform (at the Manor again, I think), he stayed with us. To my mom’s consternation, I should add. On one visit, right after I left home for college, he slept in my bed. My mother missed me and cried to see Rudy in my place, or so my father told me.
Seeing him through the lens of the comic role he had played in How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying (music by Frank Loesser, by the way), I had no idea what a star Rudy had been. I thought he was something of a buffoon. I should have known better, if only from his endurance in that Broadway musical. He played the role of J.B. Biggley for three years, a record at the time (of which the New York Times took note in the linked story).
How big a star had he been? You could see him in the 1932 Merrie Melodies cartoon “Crosby, Columbo, and Vallee.”
Or in the 1934 Betty Boop cartoon “Sleeping Cinderella.”
I began to get an idea of the scope of Rudy’s career after I went off to college and saw Rudy in Preston Sturges’s classic Palm Beach Story (1942), with Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert. It was one of the movies included in the Dartmouth Film Society series on screwball comedy while I was an undergraduate. If you are in need of a laugh, please take the time to check it out in the video below.
Rudy’s role in Palm Beach Story seeded his part in How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying. Rudy himself tells the backstory in his memoir, as does Diane Jacobs in her excellent Christmas In July: The Life and Art of Preston Sturges. This is the story as told by Jacobs:
The part of [J.D.] Hackensacker [III] Preston wrote specifically for the radio singer Rudy Vallee. Preston had first seen Vallee that August [1941] when Charley Abramson was visiting L.A., and the two friends set out to catch Ronald Colman’s new film, My Life With Caroline. They arrived in time to see the other half of the double bill, Time Out For Rhythm, which was not especially noteworthy except for Vallee’s performance. Though Valle was not playing a comic role, whenever he appeared on screen, the audience burst out laughing. “This guy’s funny, and he doesn’t realize it, Preston told Charley.”
“In seeing Time Out For Rhythm,” Preston wrote Rudy Vallee, “I thought I perceived how you should be used and how you should not be used in pictures. It gave me the idea of showing a gentleman on the screen…with the qualities and some of the faults that might imply.” So Sturges began writing a character who would display Vallee’s talents…”
Alluding to How To Succeed, Rudy gives this self-deprecating account in his memoir:
It is kind of a droll lesson in “how to succeed without really trying.” Preston Sturges, the great comedy director, decided to go to the Pantages Theater to see a Ronald Colman picture. It was part of a double feature and Sturges miscalculated his timing. He was therefore subjected to a portion of the other picture which starred that great thespian Rudy Vallee. Preston was astounded by the fact that each time I was required to be serious, the audience roared with laughter. “My God,” he said to himself, “this guy is funny and doesn’t know it.”
Rudy was an old fashioned patriot. He died watching watching the televised centennial ceremonies of the restored Statue of Liberty. His last words were: “I wish we could be there; you know how I love a party.”
Rudy must have been one of the hardest-working men I have ever met. As the somewhat grudging Times obituary observes, “he was hard-working to the point of indefatigability[.]” He was also a study in good manners. He sent us generous Christmas gifts every year as long as I can remember and left me to learn on my own what a star he had been.
