I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Frank Lovejoy didn't know how to sing. He was an actor from the rugged and handsome school who usually played second leads in Hollywood movies. A studio offered Frank a pretty good role, which happened to call on whatever talents he had as a singer. He had none, and one night in the mid-1950s, he showed up at the Cocoanut Grove asking Lennie Hayton for singing lessons.

    Lennie's philosophy was that if a guy couldn't sing, then he should say the lyrics. If there were a couple of notes the guy could sing, then he should sing them and say the rest. It didn't sound complicated the way Lennie explained it. Walter Houston, a great actor, couldn't sing a lick, but he made a huge hit on Broadway in the early 1930s saying the lyrics to Kurt Weill's September Song for the show, Knickerbocker Holiday. As another example, Jimmy Durante was a comedian and piano player who had limited singing chops, but he knocked people out performing any tune he wanted just by shouting some lyrics and throwing all his emotions into the song. Bobby Tucker, Billie Holiday's frequent accompanist, always said that Billie had a range of about four notes, but she could kill an audience with the four notes.

    With Frank Lovejoy, Lennie worked from his basic philosophy and taught Frank enough about singing and saying a song for Frank to land the role he was offered. I paid attention to what Lennie did with Lovejoy, and those tips put me in good shape in the late spring of 1960 when I was asked to give Lucille Ball lessons in singing on the Broadway stage.

I was free to take the Lucille Ball job because, after Lena finished with Jamaica, she didn't return to club work right away. She took a long rest. Over the next couple of years, she retired from performing and then she unretired. That happened more than once. I accompanied her whenever she decided to be unretired, and the rest of the time, I picked up plenty of other work.

    That didn't include much jazz. Rock'n'roll dominated the popular music culture by the late 1950s, and jazz got pushed back to its historic position on the fringes. Of all the great jazz clubs on 52nd Street, the Hickory House still survived but not much else was still around from the great old days. The clubs were converted to restaurants or, worse, to strip clubs. Jazz no longer boasted the outlets it once had in New York and in many other cities when I was a kid.

    Still, for pianists like me who cared deeply about well-crafted songs, and about singers who sang out of the Great American Songbook, good jobs were still available. The truth of that came in a great gig I got in the spring of 1960 working for the wonderful singer Dick Haymes and his singer wife Fran Jeffries at a New York Club called the Roundtable. I played piano accompaniment for the pair, conducted the orchestra and wrote some of the arrangements. Along with Vic Damone and David Allyn, Dick had the best sound of any singer I knew in those days, and I loved working with him. He got such a deep, rich sound that I realized I had to match it with the piano by searching for fuller and thicker harmonies. I didn't play for Dick the way I had played for Peggy or Tony. Dick was far different from them, and I had to be different too.

    In personality, Dick happened to be a nice guy who had a lot of complications to deal with in his life. With his incredibly handsome looks, women went crazy over him; he got married six times, one of the wives being Rita Hayworth. His personal life was, to put it mildly, mixed up. When it came to money, Dick had no sense at all. In one episode during our time at the Roundtable, he left his car in a remote parking lot and never went back to get it. Maybe he even forgot where it was. The car just vanished. And this was no ordinary make of car. It was a rare and valuable Delahaye.

    "Man," I said to Dick, "I would have loved a car like that."

    "Oh, Gene, I'm sorry," Dick said. "If you'd have told me, I would've given it to you."

    It wasn't any surprise to me that Dick kept going broke.

While I was working with Dick, Cy Coleman dropped by the Roundtable with a proposition for me. Cy was a piano player and composer, a very New York type of guy. We were already acquainted because we often played opposite one another at a Manhattan piano club called the Composer.