Vic Damone

As a general rule, it’s wise not to expect modesty from a celebrity autobiography, but there it is, right up front in Vic Damone’s book Singing Was the Easy Part:

“I … did not feel comfortable with what show business expected of me. I was not given a special talent as a show person. I’m thinking of people like Milton Berle, or Sammy Davis or Jerry Lewis … all consummate showmen. I never thought of myself that way. That wasn’t my particular gift.

“My gift was singing.”

Singing Was the Easy Part is as much a proclamation that these are Vic Damone’s good years as it is a reminiscence of his years as a celebrity.

Damone, 81, and his wife, Rena Rowan Damone, the co-founder of the women’s apparel line Jones New York, have been married for 11 years and residents of Palm Beach for most of that time. Ensconced in a stunning, completely redone Maurice Fatio house, the atmosphere around Damone is tranquil, especially when compared with his past.

Damone’s book, co-written with David Chanoff, is a benign, breezy read about mobsters, wives, bankruptcy and friends named Sinatra and Como, among many others. He emerges from the pages as a nice guy without an instinct for the jugular, but one who sustained a lengthy career based on the fact that he was a supremely lyrical singer of romantic ballads.

“I couldn’t have been that young,” Damone says, looking at his face from nearly 50 years ago. He’s looking at an NBC show called The Lively Ones that he hosted in the early 1960s. On the screen, he’s singing April in Paris in an achingly sweet arrangement that reminds you why Frank Sinatra once said that Damone “had the best pipes in the business.”

“When I was a kid, I was hypnotized by Sinatra. I felt that what he was doing was right for me. My voice fit his voice. He didn’t just stand there and sing. He told a story, had his voice fit the story. He tried to interpret the lyrics in a way that they made dramatic sense, and emotional sense.”

In one sense, it all began in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, where he was born in 1928. In another, deeper, sense, it began at the Paramount Theater in New York, where, he says, “I got my musical education.”

Young Vito Farinola – Damone is his mother’s maiden name – worked at the Paramount as an usher. He watched the bands and the singers come and go, saw the rhythm and the lighting blend with the music and the voice.

Damone was singing professionally shortly after his voice changed, and by 17 was making good money. He had his first hit record at 19, and they kept coming: You’re Breaking My Heart, I Have But One Heart, (the song Al Martino croons in The Godfather), On the Street Where You Live, An Affair to Remember, Ebb Tide.

He went to work at MGM in 1951, earning $2,500 a week every week, for making one or two movies a year, including Hit the Deck and Deep in My Heart, which aren’t well-remembered, and Kismet, which is.

“I enjoyed MGM. I was single, the starlets were great, I had a lot of fun. Janie Powell was there, Ann Miller, Debbie Reynolds. But I’m a Brooklyn guy. I didn’t go to a lot of parties. I played a lot of golf. I’d rather do that, and have a good Italian meal. My pals were guys like Dean Martin and (choreographer) Nick Castle.”

Turmoil in his marriages

In 1954, he met and married the beautiful, fawnlike actress Pier Angeli, who was coming off a relationship with James Dean. The marriage produced a son, Perry (named after his pal Como), followed by an ugly divorce and custody battle. Angeli eventually remarried, and committed suicide in 1971.

There were four more marriages (most famously to Diahann Carroll), three more divorces, a bankruptcy. Through it all, Damone kept singing, but, as the title of his book implies, he is a man who has had a lot more problems in his life than in his art.

“I think I believed in people – that they would try to be honest, try to be fair, try to do a good day’s work. But people aren’t always like that. I got to the point where I didn’t trust people. I got disenchanted. Today, I can honestly say that I love music, but I don’t like show business.”

What kept him going was just that – the music, and a few other guys that felt about it the same way he did. Namely, Frank Sinatra.

“I really got to know Frank in the ’60s and ’70s in Vegas. In talking about singing, he would always stress the importance of emotional memory – find something in your own life that fits the mood of the song.”

Appropriately enough, Damone was offered the part of Johnny Fontane in The Godfather, which was transparently based on urban legends about Sinatra, and he was thinking of doing it. When Damone asked his friend about the movie, Sinatra told Damone to make up his own mind. The fact that Sinatra didn’t say it would make him angry served as a green light, but Paramount was offering only $1,100 a week with no expense account. Damone could make far more than that on the nightclub circuit, and this was a period when he needed the money. He turned the job down; Al Martino didn’t. On occasion, he still wonders about how he would have played the part.

Damone’s musical gods are the same as they used to be: mainly, Gershwin and Cole Porter. Elegant musical lines, elegant lyrics. “Certain songs, I can’t learn. For instance, What Now, My Love. It’s repetitive, it goes up and down without seeming to have a reason; there’s something about that lyric that I can’t sing.”

When the musical tide went out in the ’60s and ’70s, such peers as Tony Bennett and even Sinatra went through some rough times, but Damone didn’t seem to mind much. “I worked. I sang. Gershwin, Porter, Jule Styne. Nobody told me what to sing.”

On balance, he seems to have respected Sinatra, but he loved Dean Martin. “Dean was the best. He had such charisma on stage. Everybody thinks Dean’s singing model was Crosby. No. It was Harry Mills of the Mills Brothers. That’s who he sang like, and that’s who he idolized.

“One time Dean and I were playing golf with a couple of other guys. They were cheating. I saw it and pointed it out to Dean.

“”They’re cheating,’ I said.

“”I know.’

“”How can you play with them if you know they’re cheating?’

“”It’s OK. After this, we’re playing gin.’ And then I remembered that Dean had started out as a dealer and could make a deck of cards sit up and dance if he wanted to. One way or another, Dean was going to make the money back.”

On Angeli and Carroll

Singing Was the Easy Part is a fairly chaste book, without a lot of kissing and telling. He goes very easy, for instance, on his ex-wives – even Diahann Carroll, who was much less polite about him last year in her memoirs. Mainly, he still seems bruised by the infidelity of Pier Angeli. Tellingly, there is no photo of her in the book.

“She wasn’t as honest with me as she should have been. She wasn’t the pure, innocent woman I thought she was. I didn’t think she deserved to be in the book. But the only marriage I regret is Diahann. I respect her professionally, but her priorities were not mine. Her priorities were show business, pure and simple.”

He seems at least as proud of his seven holes-in-one as he is of his singing career; as he puts it, “instead of hitting guys, I hit golf balls.” He’s also proud of his son, three daughters, and six grandchildren, and the fact that the marriage to Rena has turned out to be the keeper.

Damone had a stroke seven years ago, although there is no sign of it today, and last year had another health scare. Sustaining him through all that, and many of the other tough times has been the Baha’i faith. What did Baha’i give him that Catholicism didn’t?

“I was an altar boy at St. Finbar’s on Benson Avenue, and I had great priests that took us to Coney Island. No funny stuff; they were good priests. But I never learned about myself as God’s creature, about my reasons for living, about putting my life in balance. That’s what the Baha’i faith did for me.

“You know, I never wanted to be a superstar. The entourage, four or five guys walking everywhere with me. None of that. I just wanted to pack up the bag, go to the airport and go do my job. I was happy with what I was doing.”

And yes, he still can sing. Discussing this composer or that song, he’ll occasionally burst out in a few bars, and the volume, as well as the quality, of sound, is remarkable – for a 41-year-old man, let alone an 81-year-old man. There’s nothing wrong with this man’s lungs, throat, or heart.

“Do I miss singing? Yes. And if I ever sing again, it will be at the Kravis right here in Palm Beach. For the rest of it, I just don’t want to travel any more.

“Jeez, I just sing. What’s the story?”

Just a guy from Bensonhurst – with a special gift.