Jerry Vale----Mystery Man.

Singer Jerry Vale just died.
Some celebrities have to be introduced by their titles, to avoid lack of clarity.
I think that Jerry Vale was one of them.
You didn't have to say "Singer Frank Sinatra, or even "Sinatra".
All you needed was "Frank".
Same thing sort of applies to Dean Martin.
You didn't need ""Singer Dean Martin".
"Dean", or "Dino", was more than enough.
But here, it was "Singer Jerry Vale".
He was just in that slightly lower rung of show business.
I was watching the Preakness Stakes last Saturday, and it occurred to me that the Derby winner, California Chrome, seemed to be in a class by himself.
No other horse looked like they had a prayer.
Maybe they had a prayer on paper.
At least some did.
Hell, one of them almost beat him.
But when you looked at them that day, they looked pretty sad.
But someone has to make up the field.
Or there is no horse race.
And there were so many nightclubs, and records, and TV appearances to make.
And you couldn't always get Frank or Dean.
So Jerry Vale made up the field.
He was not an opening act.
He was a real act.
He filled seats.
He sold plenty of records.
He could make a good showing.
He could cross the finish line
But he rarely if ever won against the real star performers.
He didn't seem to be at all mysterious.
If anything, it was completely the opposite.
I can't recall any major performer who was this blatantly dull.
He completely lacked any noticeable personality.
I knew nothing about him through his music, except that he had a beautiful pair of pipes.
I guess that's where the mystery begins.
He seemed to be a nice guy.
Maybe.
Was he happy being known as ""Singer Jerry Vale"?
Did he want more out of life than that?
It's harder to sustain a major career as just a singer.
There are too many out there just like you.
You are too easily replaceable.
And Elvis and the Beatles probably made a major dent.
Nobody but Tony Bennett survived as well.
And I have reliable sources that indicate that Vale was very insecure about all this.
In his obits, there is puffery about how grateful he was to be plucked out of a life of shining shoes and working in sewers.
But once you have received Gold Records, maybe your perspective changes.
This is part of the mystery.
Was he liked and appreciated by the other, bigger stars?
Yes.
But maybe they liked him partially because he was not real competition.
He just looked like real competition.
He never made a movie, except cameo roles as himself.
Movies like "Good Fellas" and "Casino", capitalizing on  his blatant Italian heritage.
He was kind of a parody of himself in them.
Maybe he had loftier ambitions as an actor than that.
We'll never know.
The main difference between Jerry Vale and his contemporaries was that the rest of them were all, to some extent, romantic figures.
Matinee idols.
The kind that young girls would throw their hotel room keys at from the audience.
Vale, though not unattractive, was more the kind of singer that these girls' mothers would come to see, wishing that he was their son.
He was never a contenda.
He never could have been a contenda.
But he looked like a contenda.
At least he was no longer working on shoes or in sewers.
When Eddie Fisher died, I did a series of comps to find the closest facsimile to him.
After an extensive search, I came up with Robert Goulet.
With Vic Damone a close second.
I explored the possibility of Jerry Vale for a moment.
Mainly because their voices were so similar.
You could hardly tell them apart.
But the similarity ended there.
Because Jerry led an extremely dull life, and Eddie was such a glamorous putz.
Trying to do a comp on Jerry Vale led me right back to Eddie Fisher.
Because there is no place else to go.
Nobody even approaches being uninteresting.
So we're left with Eddie.

Was he Jerry Vale mobbed up?
A natural question.
He was Italian, sustained a career when others didn't, worked all those nightclubs, appeared in movies about the mob?
Technical advisor?
A mystery.
I once ran into him in an elevator in an Atlantic City Hotel-Casino.
He was neatly dressed in a suit and a tie, in the middle of the afternoon.
There was a huge stickpin in his tie.
It had his initials.
Totally diamond encrusted.
This has me leaning slightly towards mobbed up.

Buddy Hackett once described sitting at an event where celebrities were doing book-signings.
He was sitting next to his good friend Jerry Vale.
They each had new books that they were selling and signing.
Well, Hackett was selling and signing.
Vale was sitting and being ignored.
In what was apparently a rare moment of humanity for Hackett, he got up, walked around the room, and started paying people to go over to Vale's table to compliment him and buy his book.
So the man definitely had friends.
Very late in his career, Jerry Vale became the subject of mockery.
He had come to represent Show Business Schlock so much that David Letterman took to introducing him from his audience the way Ed Sullivan used to from his.
He had become the Joe Piscopo of singers.
Letterman did this with Jerry Vale five nights in a row.
And the mystery is, I don't know if he was in on the joke, or just happy to be there.
Some things will remain shrouded.
But he sure sang good.
R.I.P., Jerry.


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