Lounging Around With Singer Kay Starr

The voice is distinctive--strong, earthy, familiar to millions over the last half-century as a country singer, big-band vocalist, recording artist, concert soloist, lounge entertainer. . . .

Seemingly, Kay Starr has covered most of the musical bases, highlighted by her No. 1 hit record, “Wheel of Fortune,” which made her one of the top female pop stars of the early ‘50s.

Despite her acclaim as a singer, she is, in her words, simply a storyteller, an actress playing a role, set to music.

But, once upon a time, something happened in the musical world that disturbed Starr--or, at least, frustrated her. Someone picked up an electric guitar and, suddenly, there were no stories.

“I sing things that have a beginning, middle and end,” she says. “Rock, hard rock and acid rock didn’t tell a story, just, ‘I got you, Babe. I got you, Babe.’ I was too old to be standing up there doing ‘I got you, Babe.’ ”

But for years she tried to adapt, she says, singing some of the Beatles’ hits and a few others, “but I wasn’t learning any new songs.

“I’ve tried to sing just about everything--everything but hard rock. When they brought in rock, hard rock and acid rock, I thought God was trying to tell me it was my turn to get off the stage.”

Finally, she did, for a year--when she painted, tried sewing, visited friends, went fishing, got back in touch with nature, even did some big-game hunting.

Starr talks at length about an exciting six-week African safari in Mozambique, where she killed a greater kudu, whose spiraled horns were large enough to get her name engraved on a wall in the Safari Club. But singing was what she enjoyed most, so she returned to work and hasn’t given a thought to retirement since.

During an interview at her Bel-Air home, Starr--dressed comfortably in a striped, ankle-length outfit with a slit up the leg--spoke candidly about her life . . . highs, lows, regrettable failures. Her words, laced with bit of country twang, came spontaneously, with no regard for the recorder at her elbow. To say she is loquacious is an understatement.

“If someone asks for the time of day, I build them a clock,” she says, laughing, as she frequently is inclined to do.

Despite a mostly warm and ingratiating manner, she can be abrupt when a question or comment displeases her, such as one pertaining to her marriages, of which there have been numerous.

Would she care to say how many?

“No,” she replies pungently, pauses for an awkward moment, then resumes less defensively.

“I don’t like to dwell on that. I said I was going to do it until I got it right, but I haven’t been able to get it right yet. Every time you get divorced, it means a failure. It’s a mark against you. You may not have been a failure all by yourself, but it is a failure.

“Yes, I’ve been married a number of times. I’ve been married enough. Let’s put it that way. I want to tell you I’m not proud at my age (66 last Thursday) to be turned out in the traffic again.”

But ask about her current activities in show business and there is nothing abrupt about her response. She’s more likely to build you a clock.

“If you don’t have a sitcom or commercial or are not in the movies and you’re not visible, people think that you have either quit or died,” she says. “I have done neither. I make a very substantial living. . . . I work 35 weeks a year. I could work more, but I really don’t want to.”

She just completed a week at Disneyland with Ray McKinley’s orchestra and now is headed for the Cinegrill in Hollywood, where she will appear Wednesday through Saturday and Aug. 3-6. “I can’t remember the last time I worked a lounge in L.A., maybe 15 years. Working small clubs scares me. I’m such a loud singer, I’m scared I’m going to put white caps on their drinks.”

Although reluctant to work in close quarters, especially so close to home, she thought the Cinegrill offer was a good opportunity to help a favorite cause, so she accepted.

As an active member of the Society of Singers, a nonprofit organization founded almost four years ago, Starr says she will donate her salary to the group “because I’m on the road so much, I don’t get to do as much as I feel I should do for S.O.S.”

Headed by Ginny Mancini, a former member of the Mel-Tones who backed up Mel Torme, the 500-member Hollywood-based organization (with chapters in New York and Chicago) provides financial assistance to all types of professional singers who have fallen on hard times. Its ultimate goal is to build a retirement home and hospital complex for singers. Frank Sinatra, chairman of the board, is chairman of this board, too.

Sipping white wine and reminiscing beside the pool, Kay Starr acknowledges matter-of-factly that her personal “Wheel of Fortune” is spinning as profitably as her hit recording did more than 35 years ago.

Besides the Bel-Air home, which she purchased for about $65,000 in 1955, she lists a Rolls-Royce, a Mercedes and a million-dollar profit on the recent sale of a home in Honolulu among her assets.

These days, while “in the throes of getting out” of another marriage, she lives alone. Her family consists of a grandson and daughter in Sunland, Calif., and her mother, in Sulphur, Okla.

Her daughter, Catherine Yardley, is a daredevil hang glider of some note who sings professionally with a group known as the Succulents.

“They do special material,” Starr says, “a little bit of everything. The flavor is very current.”

Starr isn’t about to reveal her mother’s age, saying only that “she’s heading toward her 80s. . . . Let’s put it that way.” But there was nothing evasive about where Starr, herself, is heading in the next few months.

On Aug. 16, she will travel to Memphis State University (she once lived in Memphis) to accept the 10th annual Distinguished Achievement Award for the Creative and Performing Arts, established in memory of Elvis Presley. And on Nov. 12, she will be inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame.

“It’s the highest honor an Okie can get from their state,” says Starr, the only entertainer among eight people selected this year.

Starr has cut a wide swath in show business: Radio (voted “Hit Parade’s” No. 1 female entertainer in the early ‘40s); TV (a frequent guest on “The Danny Thomas Show” and her own 90-minute special on CBS); stage (“Annie Get Your Gun” and headliner for two weeks at the London Palladium), movies, tours (still touring with Four Girls Four), big bands . . . and recording artist.

“Wheel of Fortune,” her first major hit in 1952, firmly established Starr as a top name in pop music and earned her a gold record from Capitol. She got another for “Rock ‘n’ Roll Waltz” and is identified with many other songs--”Angry,” “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” “I’m the Lonesomest Gal in Town” among them.

Besides turning up the volume, Starr’s low range is particularly distinctive and always has been.

“Charlie Barnet’s band could not believe that when I joined them I did not drink, and they knew I did not smoke,” she recalls. “Bob Crosby’s band thought the same way. They told me, ‘You sound like you’ve been raised on bathtub gin.”

Often, she was mistaken for a black singer, particularly when she was with Barnet, whose previous vocalist was the light-skinned Lena Horne.

“We played as many black dances as we did white,” Starr remembers. “I sang the same things Lena sang, only I sang them more colored than she sang them. She’s always had a white sound about her--very proper.

“I was dark and my hair was much darker than it is now. They (the band) would tell people that I was a high yellow or mulatto or, yes, I was black. They thought it was a game.”

Her lowest period as an entertainer?

“It was when I was with Charlie Barnet’s band, during the war. I caught pneumonia. (While performing at an Army camp) my lights went out. I fainted, and when I woke up I was in an Army hospital. I was there for 10 days. After that, without any warning, my voice stopped.”

Told she was beginning to develop polyps and nodes on her vocal chords, she was advised to undergo an operation, “which very likely could change my range. It could change my sound. There was no way of knowing.”

She decided against surgery. Instead, doctors froze her vocal chords, and “for almost a year, I really had a problem. For over four months I didn’t utter a sound. When I did start to sing again, I sang very softly. It took me a year before I could work with a band again.”

Her all-time favorite song?

“I couldn’t do a show without ‘Wheel of Fortune.’ People say to me, ‘After all these years of singing it and singing it, aren’t you tired of it?’ It never occurs to me to be tired of it, because it’s one of the songs I sing that people have a reaction.

“The minute you start it, people start applauding. And when something means that much to people, then you’ve done your job. And that delights me. I want people to smile and tap their foot, touch each other and remember the good times.”

For Starr, the “good times” started early in life.

Born Katherine Starks on an Indian reservation in Dougherty, Okla. (“I’m three-quarters American Indian, one-quarter Irish”), she began singing along to music on the radio when just a tot. At 6 or 7, she remembers squatting down in a hen house in her yard, crooning to rows of roosting chickens.

“That was my audience,” she recalls with a laugh. “It was cute at that age, but not after you get any older. People would think you weren’t playing with a full deck.”

When she was 9, she entered an amateur talent contest at the Melba Theater in Dallas, sang “Potatoes Are Cheaper, Tomatoes Are Cheaper. . .” while spinning a yo-yo, as required, and placed third in the competition. The yo-yo, she figures, was her downfall.

By the time she was 13, she was singing five days a week on a local radio show and eventually was heard by jazz violinist Joe Venuti.

The teen-ager was dark-skinned, fat (“Until I was a young adult, I weighed 165 to 170 pounds”) and could sing up a storm, all of which appealed to the Italian band leader, who hired her for a brief summer booking. He was so impressed he rehired her the following summer and the one after that.

Ultimately, Venuti became her mentor. And, according to Starr, he was a tough taskmaster.

“If you didn’t know the words, you’d better make them up, because he’d hit you across the butt with that violin bow, and when I tell you that thing stings, I kid you not. . . . I made up more lyrics than Johnny Mercer.

“If I have any style, any presence on the stage, I’m sure Joe Venuti is responsible for it. Joe once told me if you’re going to make a mistake, make it so loud everybody else sounds wrong, and I really and truly believe that’s why I sing so loud.

“He gave me the assurance. He molded me. He didn’t try to make me into anything that I wasn’t. He saw my potential and he just let me run with it, which was wonderful.”

Before she was old enough to vote, Starr had been featured with a number of bands, including Glenn Miller’s when she was only 15, and her career was barely off the ground.

“That was my era,” she says, her face brightening with each cherished memory. “We had the best of everything. We had our ups and downs, but we had the best of it.”