Singers Society Raising Money to Aid Its Own

For anyone of what the French delicately call a certain age, the names would evoke memories as romantic as a starry sky. They were the singers with the bands when the bands were big--the men and the women and the close-harmony groups who sang the pop tunes and the ballads that were the underscoring of our lives for a quarter-century or more.

The singers, some of them, won’t be identified here because they have fallen onto hard times. Their plight, which in some cases paralleled the attempt to evict the dying Woody Herman from his home, led in 1983 to the formation of the Society of Singers, to lend a hand to the vocalists who were suffering in silence.

The society, which now has 500 members--singers and friends of singers--is having its first major fund-raiser on April 28 in the form of a tribute to Ella Fitzgerald, whom no one would seriously challenge as the best female singer of popular songs in our day.

Bill Cosby will be the emcee. Clint Eastwood will present the honors to Fitzgerald. A large number of stars will appear, including Mel Torme and George Shearing, Carol Burnett, Dionne Warwick and Patty Austin. There will be a special tribute, “The Ladies Who Sang With The Bands,” and among the singing ladies will be Bea Wain, Martha Tilton, Helen Forrest, Kay Starr, Helen O’Connell, Kitty Kallen, Fran Warren and the Clark Sisters.

The night is virtually a sellout already. Additional money will be raised by selling lithographs of a special painting by Tony Bennett.

The founder-leader of the society is Ginny Mancini, who did a lot of singing herself. She joined Mel Torme and the Mel-Tones right out of Los Angeles City College. When Torme elected to go on his own as a single, she tried out for the Tex Beneke band’s Mello-Larks. The band’s pianist, who played for her audition, was Henry Mancini, and they’ve been married since 1946.

When the Mancinis left the Beneke organization and returned to Los Angeles, he to try his hand at composing for the movies, she continued to work as a production singer in television, on various shows, among them “The Dinah Shore Show” and, for a dozen years, “The Red Skelton Show.”

One of the case histories that persuaded her how badly something like the Society of Singers was needed, Ginny Mancini said recently, was the story of Bonnie Lou Williams. “She’d sung with Tommy Dorsey, and when that ended she did some ghost singing in the movies for June Haver and Ava Gardner. For a while she programmed music tapes for airlines.

“Then she became terminally ill. She couldn’t pay her medical bills and she was about to be evicted from her apartment.” The society found that the American Guild of Variety Artists had a relief fund for which Williams was eligible. The eviction was forestalled, and Williams was spared the last indignity.

“Before Bonnie Lou died, she said, ‘Use me as an example. Maybe it’ll help somebody else.’ And so we do,” Mancini says. “Otherwise everything we do is entirely confidential.”

In a typical case, the society put up money for urgent surgery a singer could not afford.

The society’s staff does a lot of networking with the various guilds and with the Actor’s Fund, checking eligibility for help. The difficulty, Mancini says, is that for many singers, “Fame lasts only a minute,” not long enough to build up the service years unions require for pension and medical benefits.

An older injustice is that the royalties from hit records went to the bandleader, the composer and the publisher but seldom to the vocalists. “Judy (Garland) never made a dime from the sound track recording of ‘Over the Rainbow,’ ” Ginny Mancini says.

Giuseppe Verdi created a home, Casa Verdi, for the opera singers who had served him so well. A principal aim of the Society of Singers is to create a comparable retirement facility for the singers who sang with the bands, and in the vocal groups. “We dream of breaking ground within five years,” Ginny Mancini says.

“Wouldn’t it be lovely if Irving Berlin, for example, left a sum in his will for something like Casa Verdi, for those who sang his songs professionally.”

Las Vegas, where a great number of singers live and work, has been suggested as a site. “Casa Verdi West,” she says.

The singers the society is presently helping are in part casualties of changes in the musical scene, notably the end of the big band era, and of their ineligibility for industry as opposed to government benefits.

Yet the problem is not confined to the survivors of the big band days. There’s a new generation of singers--”session singers, jingle singers, production singers, cabaret and musical comedy singers,” Mancini says. “Who is to say some of them won’t need a hand when their minute of fame is over? The younger singers may benefit most of all.”

How large the population of singers, distressed or solvent, is no one quite knows. “This is the first time singers have really talked to each other. We’ve never really fraternized beyond our immediate friends. Kay Starr says, ‘How come we were all asleep so long?’ ”

But now they are asleep no longer. “You can’t put a lady on the street. Or a gentleman,” Ginny Mancini says. “Not these people who raised the singing of popular songs to an art form.”