Da Moan

The usher standing in the back of Manhattan's Paramount Theater was skinny and pimply faced and his mouth hung open. "Frank Sinatra was tearing the heart out of a ballad up there on the stage," he recalls, "and there was me, 17 years old and nobody."

Last week, ex-Usher Vic Damone was 19 years old and somebody for Sinatra to reckon with. He was "Da Moan," a suddenly well-known young singer who is being noised about as "Sinatra with quality." His first record (of I Have But One Heart and Ivy), released six weeks ago, had already sold 100,000 copies. Damone fan clubs were fizzing up like hot pop. And last week young Vic had binged into big-time radio as star of the coast-to-coast Saturday Night Serenade (10-10:30 p.m., CBS). "Geez," he said, "altogether I'm making a thousand a week."

That sum might soon be sundae-money to Vic Damone. Like Crooners Sinatra, Perry Como and the late Russ Columbo, Vic is of Italian descent--and he managed to be born & bred in Brooklyn. He has shrewd management and the shyest little catty-cornered grin that ever melted the lipstick off a teenager. He also has a full, lyrical baritone, trimmed with a sense of phrase that Sinatra might envy if it were not so much like his own. Says Vic: "I try to tell a story. I never sing a song the same way twice. I'm a temperamental guy. I sing from the heart."

It has taken eight years of costly singing lessons to develop the Damone style. "There's been times the family went without spaghetti to pay for them," says Vic. The family began to get its spaghetti back in 1945, when Lou Capone,* a 34-year-old Brooklyn olive oil importer, heard Vic sing. Capone promptly left his business (olive oil was hard to come by, anyway, during the war) and gave his full time to managing Vic. He spent $3,000 just to make Vic's audition records.

They paid off. Vic landed a quarter-hour on Manhattan's WHN, went into a full-network sustaining spot on Mutual. Then the late George Washington Hill snapped him up as an understudy to Andy Russell on the Hit Parade. Vic never sang on the show. "That Russell," he complains, "is the healthiest crooner."

But on the Serenade, Vic has already pulled more than 1,000 letters from such groups as "Vic's Victims," "Veni, Vidi, Vic," and "The Golden Agers"--a Damone fan club composed entirely of grandmothers. Vic seems to have a fatal charm for elderly women; once, after he had sung, an old lady rushed onstage and bussed him roundly.

"I'm dazed by all this," says Da Moan, "but one thing I'm sure of. Some day, I'm going to have a great big mansion in Brooklyn."

* Not to be confused with the late infamous Scarface Al, no kin.

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