THE MANY LIVES OF MAXINE

Precious few singers still active today can claim to have been performing in public before the repeal of Prohibition. Maxine Sullivan can do better--she was singing before Prohibition.

“It’s true,” said the silver-haired woman during a recent Hollywood engagement. “My grandmother was always pushing me out front, and I remember singing ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’ at the Carnegie Library in Homestead, Pa., wearing my high-top shoes, in 1918.”

Sullivan has three celebrations in the near future: her 76th birthday (May 13); the 50th anniversaries of her first recording (“Gone With the Wind” with Claude Thornhill’s Orchestra, recorded June 14, 1937) and of her hit (“Loch Lomond,” recorded Aug. 6, 1937).

She takes things a little easier now. Last year, working hard, still smoking and drinking, not sleeping enough--and sidelined at one point by pneumonia--she alarmed friends and her daughter, Paula, by her ever more frail condition. She stands at 4-feet-11 and at last count weighed in at 82 pounds.

“I’ve stopped smoking,” she says now. “It was easy--I was in the hospital anyway. And I’m learning to turn jobs down. I have a couple of jazz cruises, like the Norway, lined up, but that’s fun. There’s a big charity event in London during the fall, and I’ll be back here at the Hollywood Cinegrill, I guess. But I really knocked myself out last year, and I don’t intend to do that again.”

Sullivan has lived three vocal lives: as a child prodigy in her native Homestead, Pa.; as an adult star worldwide from 1936-57, and as a returnee who in 1967 emerged from a 10-year retirement.

“I keep getting rediscovered,” she says. “Before I retired, I was playing jobs where a lot of young people had never heard of Maxine Sullivan, and the radio stations had none of my records.” Today, she has more albums on the market than ever before; of more than a dozen recent recordings, three were nominated for Grammys.

Music came to Sullivan very early and quite naturally. “The family on my father’s side was quite musical. They were from Coatesville, Pa., and in the early years of the century they migrated to Homestead, a very small town outside Pittsburgh.

“I was born Marietta Williams, after an aunt Marietta, who sang contralto. An uncle, Harry Williams, played drums in a band led by a man named Lois Deppe. The pianist in that band was Earl Hines.

“My father died in 1914, when I was only 3, and I was raised by my mother’s family. Then in 1922 my uncle Harry came back off the road and decided to start his own band, which he called the Red Hot Peppers.

“When I was growing up, becoming a young lady, I would tag along with the band. I couldn’t work the big clubs because my voice wasn’t big enough, but by the late ‘20s or early ‘30s I was known around Homestead as the local Mildred Bailey or whoever was popular. I was the only singer in town!”

After repeal, Sullivan, in her 20s, was traveling regularly with the band until she was asked to audition at the Benjamin Harrison Literary Club in Pittsburgh. The name was a cover--”Actually the BHL Club had operated all through Prohibition, one of those ‘Knock three times, who’s there?’ places, but after repeal it became a popular sportsmen’s club where people would hang out after the legitimate clubs closed at 2 a.m.

“I got the job there, working with a pianist, Jennie Diller. I went to work at 11 p.m. and worked until unconscious, singing from table to table--you know, 99 choruses of ‘Dinah’ or whatever. It was good experience, and it paid $14 a week plus tips. I stayed there for a year.”

One night, while Ina Ray Hutton’s band was in town, her pianist, Gladys Mosier, advised Sullivan to come to New York. Sullivan and Diller decided to take an excursion on their Sunday off. “I stayed at a place up on Sugar Hill, and after I called Gladys she came to see me and brought Claude Thornhill with her. He was an important arranger at CBS with lots of connections.

“Well, I auditioned at every gin mill from 155th Street to the Onyx Club on West 52nd. I auditioned for Carl Kress, the guitarist who was a partner in the Onyx. Two days later, I went to work there.”

Within a week, Thornhill had recorded her. But the definitive move was his idea of having her swing an old Scottish folk song. “Loch Lomond” was an immediate sensation, and it did not hurt at all that one radio station pulled it off the air, claiming it was irreverent to treat a respected theme in this manner. The uproar of publicity led to a big spread in Life magazine. Overnight, Sullivan was famous, the new heroine of the swing era.

After a long run at the Onyx, she was claimed by Hollywood, appearing with Louis Armstrong in “Going Places” and singing the title tune and three other numbers in “St. Louis Blues.” Her first stage role was that of Titania in a modernized version of “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” retitled “Swingin’ the Dream.” Panned by the critics, it folded after 10 nights and is remembered mainly for having introduced a tune sung by Sullivan, “Darn That Dream.”

By now, she was married to John Kirby, the bassist who led the band at the Onyx. Together, they landed a unique assignment, a CBS radio series called “Flow Gently, Sweet Rhythm.” Kirby’s sextet played delicate instrumentals, many of them based on classical themes; Sullivan sang folk and pop songs. It just may have been the best live jazz series ever presented in the radio days.

“We were on every Sunday afternoon for two years, and everyone from coast to coast was listening. Aside from late-night remotes, there weren’t many black artists on radio, and Kirby’s was the only band.”

The next decade was one of continuous triumphs. Though the association with Kirby broke up (as did the marriage), she toured with many other bands: one-night stands with Benny Carter, vaudeville houses with Glen Gray, swanky hotel jobs such as the Ritz-Carlton in Boston.

The jobs came fast; the profits took a little longer. Typically, she was paid $25 for the entire record session that included “Loch Lomond,” and received not a penny in royalties. When the music was published, the name on the cover was not Sullivan’s but Benny Goodman’s; he had jumped on the bandwagon and recorded it with a vocal by Martha Tilton.

Sullivan says she never had a chance to settle down and earn steady money until the Ruban Bleu, one of the great East Side supper clubs, hired her and kept her there off and on for six years. The international circuit opened up after her first trip to Britain in 1948. She has been back dozens of times, and has visited Stockholm every year for the last 12 years.

In 1950, she met Cliff Jackson, for many years the house pianist at Cafe Society. Their marriage was long and happy, ending only when Jackson died in 1970.

The last job during her first adult career was at a club in Honolulu. She came home feeling ill, underwent an operation and took stock of her life. “I had saved money; Paula was just coming out of junior high school, and it seemed to me that after 20 good years I ought to quit while I was ahead.”

She had studied nursing, and for a while worked as a health counselor at schools. She also took up the valve trombone and fluegelhorn and played them on occasional gigs when she returned after hiatus.

“I’d had no idea of returning, but a musician friend talked me into doing two weeks in Washington. I thought everyone had forgotten me, but I ran into a lot of old friends there, people who’d known me from the Ruban Bleu days. Soon afterward I met Dick Gibson, and wound up doing eight weeks with Bobby Hackett and eight weeks with Dick’s new group, which he called the World’s Greatest Jazz Band.”

By 1970, Sullivan realized that she was back working full time. Tours and records with the World’s Greatest Jazz Band, clubs and jazz festivals and jazz parties kept her as busy as her telephone: she has no agent and no need for one.

“It’s a great life,” she says. “New things keep happening. In 1985, I went to Japan for the first time, with Scott Hamilton’s Quintet, and made an album there with him. I’ve done festivals in Nice, Holland, Denmark; I’ve been to Ireland and Wales--I’ve just about done it all. No, wait a minute--I’ve never been to Paris. Anyone out there listening? Call me up!”