"I just
open my mouth at eight o'clock
and out it
comes"
Very few singers can match the durability of Perry Como, whose performing career now spans more than four decades. He began as a band singer in 1933 and ten years later signed with RCA, the company he has recorded for ever since. Thirteen of his singles have earned gold records, as have two of his albums. And he is still going strong: early this year he was nominated for a Grammy Award (for his recording of And I Love You So), in May he made his first concert appearance in London, and in July RCA issued his latest album, "PERRY". Como is aware of his longevity, but he doesn't particularly like to dwell on it. "I don't mind being sixty-two, I just don't like to look and feel sixty-two," he says. He didn't really feel anywhere near his age until two years ago when he broke his left leg in a freak accident, falling off a rehearsal stage in Los Angeles. It laid him up for months, and it still gives him trouble. "It was such a dumb thing. I never dreamed I'd break the whole thing. I'm not the sick type, but I guess we're all destined for something like this at least once in our lives. What I hate about age is that the body starts crackin' up. It's the most boring thing in the world and there's nobody I dislike enough to wish it on. I really didn't need this - my legs look like they're on backwards anyway." In person, except for the slight limp he may always have now as a result of the accident, he looks the same as he did on his fifteen-minute television shows in the early 1950's. Up close, his hair is quite white, but most of it is still there, and when he gets on stage it magically looks dark with just a few flecks of gray. This sameness of appearance and style (although half of his songs may well be very new ) is perhaps the major reason he gets $100,000 a week for performing at the Las Vegas Hilton, the only night club he'll agree to play, and why he fills the room every night of his annual two-week engagement. Self-aware and self-deprecating, Como is always telling little jokes about himself. Since the accident has severely limited his capacity for walking and standing, he keeps threatening "to come out on stage in a golf cart." And he says, "Between shows I drink a cup of soup and put all of Bing's records on the record player to see if I'm doin' right. As for training and rehearsal, perish the thought. What is there to train? I've never studied singing; I don't have much of a voice. I don't practice; maybe I should, but I don't. I just open my mouth at eight o'clock and out it comes, hopefully. Some night you may hear the biggest nothing. But as a kid I did play the trombone. You know, all Italians play guitars and checkers. And I know I can always get a job in a barber shop." Relaxed is the Como image, in a word, and relaxed is what he seems offstage, in his casual royal-blue velour shirt, gray slacks, white sweat socks, and moccasins, telling about his career. Even his leisure-time recreations are the most tranquil kind - golf, boating, and fishing - and he keeps wandering back to them in conversation, as if all this show-business stuff were an intrusion, although a pleasant one. Perry was born May 18, 1912, in the Pennsylvania mining town of Canonsburg, and he could have faced a lifetime of toil in the coal pits except that when he was eleven years old he got a job in Steve Fragapane's three-chair barber shop. He stropped razors, swept the hair up from the floor, and apprenticed himself to the barbers until he was barbering and shaving customers himself. He opened his own shop before he finished high school, entertaining his customers with the popular songs of the early 1930's. Since some of his customers were traveling band musicians, he was soon offered a job. He gave up the steady $ 125 weekly he made barbering and accepted $28 a week to sing with a dance band. Just turning twenty-one, he married a home-town girl, Roselle Belline "I was singing with Freddie Carlone's band in Warren, Ohio, in a gambling casino in 1936 when Ted Weems came in. He won at roulette and then came downstairs to hear me. He offered me the job to replace Art Jarrett at $50 a week. Marilyn Maxwell was also singing with the band, but she was known as Marvel Maxwell then." The job with Weems lasted until 1942, when the shortage of manpower and the difficulty of traveling brought on by World War II forced Weems to disband. Perry went back to Canonsburg ready to resume cutting hair, but the era of crooners was quickly emerging out of, and taking over from, the era of the big bands. Crosby, Sinatra, Dick Haymes, and others began to dominate entertainment on the male side, and Perry Como got a call to do his own New York radio show at $100 a week. "I did a fifteen-minute show five times a week at 8:00 p.m., and then we repeated it again for the West Coast at 11:00." RCA offered him a contract in 1943 and released Goodbye, Sue. In 1944 he made a movie, Something for the Boys, started his NBC radio series The Chesterfield Supper Club, and made his night-club debut at the Copacabana in New York. Three of the records he made in 1945 sold more than a million copies each: A Hubba Hubba Hubba, Till the End of Time, and Temptation. Other million-sellers followed regularly, including Prisoner of Love (1946), When You Were Sweet Sixteen (1947), and Forever and Ever (1949). His show The Chesterfield Supper Club made a successful transfer to television in 1950 and was done live three times a week. And the succession of hits continued: No Other Love, Wanted, Don't Let the Stars Get in your Eyes, Round and Round, Papa Loves Mambo, Home for the Holidays, Hot Diggity, Seattle, Catch a Falling Star and Magic Moments. After a couple of years on television he had switched to a weekly hour-long show, and this went on until 1958, when he began signing multimillion-dollar contracts for TV specials. And they keep rolling along. "Usually, it's all settled with a handshake every three years," he says. The Kraft Music Hall alone made him more than $25 million between 1959 and 1968. "I've been doing this for forty years. I can't put up with it much longer," he says laughing. "All the people who remember Temptation are dead. It sounds dated, and so I now do it with a different arrangement. I stole a couple of things from Shaft. I'm not trying to be a hippy, and I'm not going to do rock-and-roll. But my sounds are attuned to the times." About half of his performance material is made up of familiar oldies and half of new songs not associated with him. Perry still uses the Ray Charles Singers as his backup; the composition of that group changes constantly and now consists of a dozen kids assembled for Perry's decreasingly frequent appearances. He admits to never having worked very hard as an entertainer. " Take away the cue cards on TV and I'm lost. I can't get past 'hello.' Even with lyrics. Once I had to sing Night and Day on a show and as many times as I had sung it, I had to read the cards. Somebody goofed and I sang the second half first and then the first half second and didn't even know it until the show was off the air." Wife Roselle, who stays so far in the background of her husband's career that she won't even go to his opening nights, has concentrated on their marriage and motherhood. The Como's have three children, all married, and eight grandchildren, the oldest of whom is twelve. All come to visit Perry and Roselle frequently in Jupiter, Florida, which has been their full-time home since the Como's sold their Sands Point, Long Island, house two years ago. Jupiter is eighteen miles north of West Palm Beach and eighty miles north of Miami. "Sometimes I get tired of fishin' and playin' golf," he says, "but most of the times I can stay out in the boat all day." On the other hand, he admits, "When you step out on stage things do happen. The relaxed thing comes from the people; I sense it in two seconds, and they do too. The years I've been there make me feel at ease. They are old friends. After forty years, where can I go? My wants and needs are so small. I can be out in my boat all day. I can come to Las Vegas and sing all day. Life has become even more beautiful because I can pick any spot and do just what I want to do." After forty years, that seem about right. Robert Windeler STEREO REVIEW MAGAZINE OCTOBER 1974 pp 69-70 |
