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| How his fans saw him, I figure. |
People of earlier generations may know Rudy Vallee (there’s an accent aigu over the first “e,” for what it’s worth), born Hubert Prior Vallee, as Lord Marmaduke Ffogg in the old Adam West Batman series; even earlier generations may recall him from supporting roles in 1940s films like The Palm Beach Story, Unfaithfully Yours, The Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer, or even 1955’s Gentlemen Marry Brunettes, a sequel to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, both based on novels by Anita Loos.
But Vallee started elsewhere - and as something entirely bigger. From a very brief biography from the New England Historical Society:
“Women swooned when he would show his face in public and a crowd followed him everywhere. Watching his popularity, jokers said his effect on women made him a national menace.”
Most sources call Rudy Vallee one of America’s first crooners - if, inexplicably, without naming any other pretenders to that velvet crown. He was the phenomenon of Beatlemania before the Beatles, but he captured his audience through a national radio show rather than television. And yet Vallee relied on technology as much as anyone who came before him, if not more. Vallee need a microphone to reach the back of a large venue; even then, he often had to sing through a megaphone to make his “thin, wavering tenor voice” audible over the masses of flappers who screamed through his shows. (An old Betty Boop cartoon lampooned the megaphone.) On the other hand, that same gentle voice worked wonders on the radio, creating a personal, intimate rapport with his listeners, letting them get lost in the illusion that he was “coaxing, pleading and at the same time adoring the invisible one to whom his song is attuned.”
In a 1958 television interview with Mike Wallace (fascinating just for what it looks like), one that took place a couple decades after his peak radio fame, Vallee was oddly defensive about the female adulation, insisting that he saw plenty of men in his audiences. As much as he resisted, Vallee’s reluctance doesn’t make sense against the record. That New England Historical Society bio confirmed the same while hinting at some other theories, several of which Wallace brought up, all of which Vallee either denied or pushed back against:
“Vallee loved being a heartthrob, and played it to the hilt. He claimed to have slept with more than 145 women, and he married four of them. He was a tyrant to work with, starting fistfights with people who annoyed him. Very few of the people who worked for him could stand him, and he had few friends in the entertainment industry.”
It’s also reported that Vallee was a stickler for proper grammar - and to the point of stopping a conversation to correct someone. The balance of the record shows that Vallee was an asshole, but let’s go back to where it all started.
Though born in Pond Island, Vermont, Rudy Vallee’s parents raised him in Westbrook, Maine, and he would always be associated with that state. His parentage was Irish on his mother’s side (nee Catherine Lynch) and French-Canadian on his father’s (Charles Alphonse Vallee); Vallee liked to suggest he got his obstinance from one side and his sensuality from the other. I didn’t see a lot on his childhood. In fact, my two main sources gives Vallee's attempt to enlist in the U.S. Navy at age 15 as the first anecdote of his career. His naval career ended just over 40 days later when the brass discovered his age and threw him out. It was all music from there.
Vallee started on the drums in high school, but became a multi-instrumentalist shortly after, picking up the saxophone and clarinet. He worked clubs around New England before moving to London in 1924-25 to join the Savoy Hotel’s Havana Band. He first thought about singing during the same period, only to have his bandmates push back against the inevitable. After returning home, he first attended the University of Maine - who’s theme, “The Stein Song” he later wrote - before graduating from Yale University. After developing a little more musically with the Yale Collegians and replacing “Hubert” with “Rudy” in honor of famous saxophonist Rudy Wiedoeft, Vallee formed his own orchestra in 1929, Rudy Vallee and the Connecticut Yankees, after graduation. That band’s composition - two violins, two saxophones, a piano, a banjo, and drums - steered them away from jazz and into romantic ballads, and that opened Vallee’s path to the microphone. As history makes clear, he'd found his proper place.
But Vallee started elsewhere - and as something entirely bigger. From a very brief biography from the New England Historical Society:
“Women swooned when he would show his face in public and a crowd followed him everywhere. Watching his popularity, jokers said his effect on women made him a national menace.”
Most sources call Rudy Vallee one of America’s first crooners - if, inexplicably, without naming any other pretenders to that velvet crown. He was the phenomenon of Beatlemania before the Beatles, but he captured his audience through a national radio show rather than television. And yet Vallee relied on technology as much as anyone who came before him, if not more. Vallee need a microphone to reach the back of a large venue; even then, he often had to sing through a megaphone to make his “thin, wavering tenor voice” audible over the masses of flappers who screamed through his shows. (An old Betty Boop cartoon lampooned the megaphone.) On the other hand, that same gentle voice worked wonders on the radio, creating a personal, intimate rapport with his listeners, letting them get lost in the illusion that he was “coaxing, pleading and at the same time adoring the invisible one to whom his song is attuned.”
In a 1958 television interview with Mike Wallace (fascinating just for what it looks like), one that took place a couple decades after his peak radio fame, Vallee was oddly defensive about the female adulation, insisting that he saw plenty of men in his audiences. As much as he resisted, Vallee’s reluctance doesn’t make sense against the record. That New England Historical Society bio confirmed the same while hinting at some other theories, several of which Wallace brought up, all of which Vallee either denied or pushed back against:
“Vallee loved being a heartthrob, and played it to the hilt. He claimed to have slept with more than 145 women, and he married four of them. He was a tyrant to work with, starting fistfights with people who annoyed him. Very few of the people who worked for him could stand him, and he had few friends in the entertainment industry.”
It’s also reported that Vallee was a stickler for proper grammar - and to the point of stopping a conversation to correct someone. The balance of the record shows that Vallee was an asshole, but let’s go back to where it all started.
Though born in Pond Island, Vermont, Rudy Vallee’s parents raised him in Westbrook, Maine, and he would always be associated with that state. His parentage was Irish on his mother’s side (nee Catherine Lynch) and French-Canadian on his father’s (Charles Alphonse Vallee); Vallee liked to suggest he got his obstinance from one side and his sensuality from the other. I didn’t see a lot on his childhood. In fact, my two main sources gives Vallee's attempt to enlist in the U.S. Navy at age 15 as the first anecdote of his career. His naval career ended just over 40 days later when the brass discovered his age and threw him out. It was all music from there.
Vallee started on the drums in high school, but became a multi-instrumentalist shortly after, picking up the saxophone and clarinet. He worked clubs around New England before moving to London in 1924-25 to join the Savoy Hotel’s Havana Band. He first thought about singing during the same period, only to have his bandmates push back against the inevitable. After returning home, he first attended the University of Maine - who’s theme, “The Stein Song” he later wrote - before graduating from Yale University. After developing a little more musically with the Yale Collegians and replacing “Hubert” with “Rudy” in honor of famous saxophonist Rudy Wiedoeft, Vallee formed his own orchestra in 1929, Rudy Vallee and the Connecticut Yankees, after graduation. That band’s composition - two violins, two saxophones, a piano, a banjo, and drums - steered them away from jazz and into romantic ballads, and that opened Vallee’s path to the microphone. As history makes clear, he'd found his proper place.
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| Real deal. |
Recording contracts and offers to host radio shows poured in almost immediately - though Vallee had far more success (or just stability) in the latter. Vallee did a lot of label-hopping for someone so popular: he bounced between three (Colubmia, RCA Victor, and the short-lived Hit of the Week label, who laminated their records onto a cardboard base) between 1928 and 1931; curiouser still, he often recorded for the down-market subsidiaries owned by those same labels - e.g., Harmony, Velvet Tone, and Diva for Columbia and Bluebird for RCA Victor. He finally found stability, on the recording side at least, when signed with ARC in 1936.
Vallee landed his first national radio show in 1929 with The Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour, which was basically vaudeville on the radio complete with skits starring Richard Cromwell and Fay Wray. A succession of shows carried him through the rest of the 1930s and 40s, including the Royal Gelatin Hour, Vallee Varieties and The Rudy Vallee Show. He took breaks throughout those two decades - presumably to tour and start working in the movies (his first The Vagabond Lover came out in 1929) - and, on leaving in 1937, he insisted on Louis Armstrong as his replacement…which somehow made Armstrong, swear to God, the third or fourth among the “first African-American to host a national radio program” I’ve come across in this project. At any rate…
Things just kind of kept on from there: Vallee played Broadway (as J.B. Bigley in How to Get Ahead in Business Without Really Trying in 1961), acted in movies, and ran his Vallee-Video production company, which produced film shorts for TV (e.g., These Foolish Things and Under a Campus Moon; couldn't find either, sadly), one of the first cartoon shows on television (Tele-Comics), and a 15-minute TV serial based on the Dick Tracy comics with friend/actor Robert Byrd reprising his role from the movies…and then Batman. As much as he suffered from his “too-quick temper,” Rudy Vallee survived 50 years across show business…and yet he couldn’t resist a dig at Variety, a publication for which he seemed to hold a sharp hatred.
“When I retire, Variety will say, ‘I told you it wouldn’t last.’”
Rudy Vallee died of cancer in 1986 with his fourth wife, Eleanor, by his side. As he watched fireworks explode over the Statue of Liberty, he uttered some fine last words: "I wish we could be there; you know I love a party."
About the Sampler
If I had to describe what Rudy Vallee sounded like to a stranger, I’d offer Disney movies from the 1930s and 1940s as an example. The tonal quality of the vocals sound equal parts smooth and unnatural; much like movie dialogue from the same period, they sound performed. That wavering tenor is nice, though, and it stars in all 20 songs on the sampler. I didn’t lace many songs into the narrative above, but none of the few sources I consulted treated any one song as either exemplary or significant. Vallee’s most famous song may be his last: “As Time Goes By,” which featured in 1942’s Casablanca. After that, Wikipedia’s entry flagged “Deep Night” for his “trombone-like phrasing” on the recording and “Vieni, Vieni,” while the New England Historical Society held up “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries” and Vallee’s (lesser, in my mind) reworking of “Brother Can You Spare a Dime” (Bing does it better; but I thought Vallee killed on “St. Louis Blues.”)
That takes care of about 2/5th the sampler. Here’s the rest: “When Yuba Plays Rhumba on the Tuba,” “This Can’t Be Love,” “The Drunkard Song (There’s a Tavern in Town),” “Honey,” “Baby, Oh Where Can You Be,” “Vagabond Lover” (that's a clip from the movie, btw) “A Stranger in Paree,” “Naturally,” “Lover Come Back to Me,” and “Me Minus You.”
The one thing I’ll say about Vallee’s music is, after months upon months of hearing mostly brass, hearing violins slur honey all over his songs was a nice change. It’s all a bit treacly, but that’s by design. Rudy Vallee was one of the first heart-throbs in American popular music. He played his era’s version of pure pop, as well as a lot of standards, but what was that but giving the people what they want.
Vallee landed his first national radio show in 1929 with The Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour, which was basically vaudeville on the radio complete with skits starring Richard Cromwell and Fay Wray. A succession of shows carried him through the rest of the 1930s and 40s, including the Royal Gelatin Hour, Vallee Varieties and The Rudy Vallee Show. He took breaks throughout those two decades - presumably to tour and start working in the movies (his first The Vagabond Lover came out in 1929) - and, on leaving in 1937, he insisted on Louis Armstrong as his replacement…which somehow made Armstrong, swear to God, the third or fourth among the “first African-American to host a national radio program” I’ve come across in this project. At any rate…
Things just kind of kept on from there: Vallee played Broadway (as J.B. Bigley in How to Get Ahead in Business Without Really Trying in 1961), acted in movies, and ran his Vallee-Video production company, which produced film shorts for TV (e.g., These Foolish Things and Under a Campus Moon; couldn't find either, sadly), one of the first cartoon shows on television (Tele-Comics), and a 15-minute TV serial based on the Dick Tracy comics with friend/actor Robert Byrd reprising his role from the movies…and then Batman. As much as he suffered from his “too-quick temper,” Rudy Vallee survived 50 years across show business…and yet he couldn’t resist a dig at Variety, a publication for which he seemed to hold a sharp hatred.
“When I retire, Variety will say, ‘I told you it wouldn’t last.’”
Rudy Vallee died of cancer in 1986 with his fourth wife, Eleanor, by his side. As he watched fireworks explode over the Statue of Liberty, he uttered some fine last words: "I wish we could be there; you know I love a party."
About the Sampler
If I had to describe what Rudy Vallee sounded like to a stranger, I’d offer Disney movies from the 1930s and 1940s as an example. The tonal quality of the vocals sound equal parts smooth and unnatural; much like movie dialogue from the same period, they sound performed. That wavering tenor is nice, though, and it stars in all 20 songs on the sampler. I didn’t lace many songs into the narrative above, but none of the few sources I consulted treated any one song as either exemplary or significant. Vallee’s most famous song may be his last: “As Time Goes By,” which featured in 1942’s Casablanca. After that, Wikipedia’s entry flagged “Deep Night” for his “trombone-like phrasing” on the recording and “Vieni, Vieni,” while the New England Historical Society held up “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries” and Vallee’s (lesser, in my mind) reworking of “Brother Can You Spare a Dime” (Bing does it better; but I thought Vallee killed on “St. Louis Blues.”)
That takes care of about 2/5th the sampler. Here’s the rest: “When Yuba Plays Rhumba on the Tuba,” “This Can’t Be Love,” “The Drunkard Song (There’s a Tavern in Town),” “Honey,” “Baby, Oh Where Can You Be,” “Vagabond Lover” (that's a clip from the movie, btw) “A Stranger in Paree,” “Naturally,” “Lover Come Back to Me,” and “Me Minus You.”
The one thing I’ll say about Vallee’s music is, after months upon months of hearing mostly brass, hearing violins slur honey all over his songs was a nice change. It’s all a bit treacly, but that’s by design. Rudy Vallee was one of the first heart-throbs in American popular music. He played his era’s version of pure pop, as well as a lot of standards, but what was that but giving the people what they want.
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