Margaret Whiting, Fresh-Faced Singer of Jazz and Pop Standards, Dies at 86

[Fansome]

The New York Times
January 11, 2011
Margaret Whiting, Fresh-Faced Singer of Jazz and Pop Standards, Dies at 86
By DAVID BELCHER

Margaret Whiting, a songwriter’s daughter who as a bright-eyed teenage singer captivated wartime America and then went on to a long, acclaimed career recording hit songs and performing in nightclubs and on television, died on Monday in Englewood, N.J. She was 86.

Her daughter and only survivor, Deborah Whiting, said Ms. Whiting died of natural causes at the Lillian Booth Actors’ Home, where she had lived since March, having made her home in Manhattan for many years.

Ms. Whiting may not have been a household name like her contemporaries Rosemary Clooney and Ella Fitzgerald, nor was she a singing movie star like Doris Day, but in her heyday she was widely popular in the worlds of big band, jazz, popular music — even country — for more than 30 years, beginning in the 1940s.

Early on, with her schoolgirl smile and wavy blond hair, Ms. Whiting was a favorite interpreter of jazz and popular standards. Her fresh-faced appearance and clear, sturdy voice, tinged with innocence, made her a darling of U.S.O. tours during World War II and the Korean War.

Beginning in the ’40s, she turned out a string of hit records, became a fixture on radio, appeared on television in the ’50s and later embarked on a successful nightclub career, touring as late as the 1990s and occasionally venturing into musical theater. She was still performing into the 21st century, often at clubs like Arci’s Place in Manhattan, where she had long been a mainstay of the cabaret scene.

In 2009 she found a wide audience again when her original recording of “Time After Time,” a Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn song from 1947, was featured in the film “Julie & Julia,” starring Meryl Streep as Julia Child.

But it was her association with the lyricist Johnny Mercer that most defined Ms. Whiting’s career. Mercer was writing songs for the movies with Ms. Whiting’s father, the popular-song composer Richard A. Whiting, when young Margaret sang for him one night at the family home in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was just 6.

“I came down in my nightgown,” she told The New York Times, “sang two songs and went up to bed.”

It would become a lasting friendship. After Mr. Whiting died of a heart attack in 1938 at the height of his popularity, Mercer became a surrogate father of sorts to 13-year-old Margaret, personally overseeing her budding career and signing her immediately after he helped found Capitol Records in 1942. He once told her, “I have two words for you: grow up.”

When she was 16, the comedian Phil Silvers asked her to fill in for a missing member of his act at the Grace Hayes Lodge in the San Fernando Valley. It helped start her career. At 18 she recorded the Harold Arlen-Johnny Mercer song “That Old Black Magic” with the bandleader Freddie Slack. The next year it was “Moonlight in Vermont” with the trumpeter Billy Butterfield and his band, followed in 1945 by “It Might as Well Be Spring,” with Paul Weston, a Rodgers & Hammerstein tune from the musical “State Fair.” That song became a signature for her.

There were more hits, among them “Come Rain or Come Shine,” a Mercer-Arlen song from the musical “St. Louis Woman.”

In 1948 alone Ms. Whiting had three major hits: “A Tree in the Meadow,” “Now Is the Hour” and “Far Away Places.” A duet with Mercer, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” (by Frank Loesser), lasted 19 weeks on the Billboard chart in 1949. Her nine duets with the country star Jimmy Wakely, from 1949 to 1951, were sensations, particularly “Slippin’ Around.” She released albums into the late 1950s with Capitol Records, then switched to the Dot and Verve labels, but returned to Capitol and recorded her last big hit, “The Wheel of Hurt,” in 1966.

Ms. Whiting was a regular performer on television in its first decades, appearing on variety shows hosted by George Jessel, Red Skelton, Jonathan Winters and Nat King Cole. Besides “Julie & Julia,” her voice is heard in the films “Bugsy” and “The Cider House Rules.” In another, “Valley of the Dolls,” she was uncredited as the singing voice of Susan Hayward.

In her long nightclub career, Ms. Whiting was a mentor to younger cabaret singers like K. T. Sullivan and Mary Cleere Haran. She played in touring and regional musical theater productions of “Call Me Madam,” “Gypsy,” “Pal Joey” and “Over Here!” And in 1983 she appeared in the Off Broadway musical “Taking My Turn,” in which she delivered the line, “Age doesn’t make you boring; boring makes you boring.”

“We have been billed as a show about old people, but I don’t like that,” Ms. Whiting told The Times in an interview at the time. “I call it a musical comedy about living. I mean, in my business, there is no such thing as retiring at 65. You retire when you want to. Right now I’m doing all the things I want to do — this show, television, records, personal appearances. I just gave a pasta demonstration at Bloomingdale’s. I don’t cook, but they wanted me anyway for pasta Bolognese. I told them, ‘Don’t ask me to chop or mince.’ ”

Margaret Eleanor Whiting was born to Richard Whiting and the former Eleanor Youngblood on July 22, 1924, in Detroit, where her father was moonlighting as a piano player in a hotel. As a girl she moved with her parents and sister to New York, where her father worked on Broadway musicals, then to Los Angeles, where he wrote for movies (supplying Shirley Temple with her trademark song “On the Good Ship Lollipop”). He also met Mercer there and collaborated with him on songs like “Hooray for Hollywood.”

Living with her family in Beverly Hills, Ms. Whiting attended a Roman Catholic private girls’ school and enjoyed a gilded childhood, frolicking at lavish parties with movie stars and music legends, among them Mercer, Arlen and Jerome Kern, whom she called Uncle Jerry.

Her younger sister, Barbara, who died in 2004, also became an entertainer, and together they starred in “Those Whiting Girls,” a 1950s television series about college coeds.

Ms. Whiting had an early love affair with the actor John Garfield, and her first three marriages ended in divorce, to Hubbell Robinson Jr., a television executive; Lou Busch, a musician with whom she had her daughter, Deborah; and Richard Moore, a cinematographer who helped found the company Panavision.

In her later years, Ms. Whiting was known to many as the unlikely wife of Jack Wrangler (originally John Stillman), a star of gay pornographic films in the 1970s who went on to become a cabaret and theater producer.

Ms. Whiting and Mr. Wrangler, 22 years her junior, met in the 1970s, lived together for many years and married in 1994. She wrote about their relationship in an autobiography, “It Might as Well Be Spring,” saying it was based on similar interests and mutual respect, not sex. When they first became involved, he told her, “I’m gay,” to which she replied, “Only around the edges, dear.”

Mr. Wrangler helped conceive the 1997 Broadway musical “Dream,” a tribute to Mercer, in which Ms. Whiting starred; it was her only Broadway show. Mr. Wrangler died of emphysema in 2009.

Her friend and mentor, Mercer, died in 1976. But he remained in her thoughts and the subject of stories she told for years afterward. “He was a perfect Southern gentleman until he had three Scotches and two sips,” she once said.

One often-repeated story took place in the early 1940s, when she was 19. Mercer had had asked her to sing “Moonlight in Vermont,” which he had just heard and felt was ideal for her voice.

“I’ve never been to Vermont,” she said. “How can I sing a song about a place I’ve never been to? What is the significance of pennies in a stream? What are ski tows?”

“I don’t know,” Mercer replied. “I’m from Savannah. We’ll use our imagination.”