Out of the Fog

Now that he is 37, Mel Torme can look back with ease upon a bountiful life in music: lots of money, dozens of cars, two wives, three psychiatrists. In person, though, he has always been a sour-luck man whose glance wilts a flower. As a result, he managed to overwhelm his great talents as crooner, composer, actor, drummer, pianist and arranger and become an engaging failure. Good old Mel, his friends in music say, the public never liked him. But he is also a singer of jazz, and in that difficult and unfriendly medium, he has lately become one of the best around.

At four, Melvin Howard Torme was a complete nobody. Then he stood up one night in Chicago's old Blackhawk Restaurant and, having spilled his milk, sang You're Driving Me Crazy. It turned out to be one of the few unqualified successes of an unhappy life. When he was 14, he wrote an excellent song called Lament to Love and sold it to Harry James, but James took so long to play it that by the time it became a hit, all Mel's friends had already decided he was a liar. At 21, he made his New York debut as a singer with Mitzi Green at the Copacabana. "An egotistical, untalented little amateur," said Dorothy Kilgallen, and Earl Wilson said, "I'll take Mitzi; to hell with Mel." Mel was so deeply stung that he remembers the quotes verbatim to this day.

Life as a Little Doll. From then on, Torme patrolled the fringes of popularity, and from time to time slipped into downright obscurity. On the few occasions when he had to sing from center stage, he invariably fell victim to some quirk of personality that cost him friends, fans and jobs. His life, as even he tells it, began to sound like a punk's diary. "I didn't know the word for it then," he says, "but I can see now that I was defensive. I had a chip on my shoulder." To unload it, Torme took his troubles to the psychiatrist's couch.

Perhaps because of his weak chin, perhaps because he is unromantically short (5 ft. 7 in.), Torme realized, he had tried to be frighteningly manly. He made a brave show of it, dated Ava Gardner, collected guns, swooped around town on a motorcycle, swore a lot, got tough with nightclub owners, insulted customers--but all to no avail. "Most women who have dug my music have thought I was a little doll," he says grimly, also recalling that his manager once told him, "With your baby face, nobody cares about your opinions."

His Own Good Way. Trading on a second-growth tonsil that gives his voice a pleasantly fuzzy purr, Torme tried hard to be a balladeer. But his syrupy approach to hits like Blue Moon won him the unfortunate nickname "The Velvet Fog," typecast him as a limp crooner, and tempted tricksters to heckle him by slipping the irresistible r into "Fog." "Life was nothing but traveling," he says. "I was very unhappy with my recording career. Everywhere people would give me the 'so-you're-the-cocky-little-kid' bit." Mel's obstinacy never withered, and as he grew up on the psychiatric couch, it eventually became an element of strength that preserved his taste and led him closer to jazz.

Today Torme shares with the few other jazz singers around (Ray Charles is by far the best, but Ella Fitzgerald, Carmen McRae, Jimmy Rushing and Frank Sinatra are occasional equals) a musical freedom that distinguishes him from a pop singer. He improvises melodies that include harmonic intervals seldom heard in pop music, and he sideswipes both rhythm and notes with a looseness that delights any ear tuned to jazz. Where popular-singers are the captives of their sentimental songs, jazz singers like Torme take a musician's pride in controlling the song in all its parts, toying with the lyrics, experimenting with the tune.

Torme's latest record, Comin' Home Baby, is jazz with no compromise, but it has become a hit anyway, and at last he has a popular success he can be proud of. He also has a flock of new bookings (this week he sings at Andy's in Phoenix) and a chance for some new Atlantic singles in which he can sing in his own good way. After straying from jazz, he is now home again; in San Francisco, he kept a brand-new nightclub packed for three weeks singing jazz and was promptly invited to star in this year's Monterey Jazz Festival.

Torme feels that his days as a punk are at last over. He has only two cars (one is equipped with tape recorder and phonograph) and, having weathered some early storms, he has settled down happily with his second wife, Arlene. He has not felt the need to see his psychiatrists for a year or so. "The world of music has opened up for me," he says. "I'm working for people who accept me. I'm singing the music I want to sing."

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