Mega-Mementos : Thousand Oaks Archivists Sort Through Crooner Rudy Vallee’s 4-Ton Collection

Rudy Vallee, the megaphone-carrying crooner and popular radio personality, was a pack rat, say archivists at the Thousand Oaks Library who recently began cataloguing the four-ton collection of papers and mementos that he gathered over more than 60 years.

Vallee saved X-rays of an impacted wisdom tooth that was extracted in the 1970s, brief notes that his fourth wife left on the refrigerator and a copy of the formula for his golden hair dye.

Fortunately for students of entertainment history, Vallee also kept thousands of fan letters, radio scripts, musical scores and other items that provide an unusually complete record of the popular culture of his day, said Henry Matoon, an archivist hired to catalogue the collection.

The material fills about 560 crates and spans Vallee’s long career, which began in the 1920s, reached its peak during the next two decades when he became one of the nation’s most successful vaudeville and radio personalities, and continued until he was well into his 70s.

The collection will be available to the public by January, Matoon said.

“Thank God Vallee saved all that stuff,” said Larry Gassman, president of the Los Angeles-based Society to Preserve and Encourage Radio Drama, Variety and Comedy, or SPERDVAC. “For anyone writing his biography or interested in history, its value is incalculable.”

Soon after Vallee died in 1986 at age 84, the Thousand Oaks Library Foundation bought the collection for $275,000 as part of an ambitious program to establish an archive on the history of radio and early television.

The foundation, which raised the money through private donations and a $125,000 grant from the city of Thousand Oaks, outbid the University of Wyoming and several other institutions for the highly coveted collection, said Antoinette Hagopian, the group’s president. By owning the prized Vallee collection, the foundation “is on its way to building a first-class archive” on the performing arts akin to those at UCLA and other area universities, she said.

Although it is rare for a small city library to embark on such an ambitious endeavor, the foundation believes that the role of a library “is to preserve history, not just to provide typical library materials to a community,” she said.

The foundation could have chosen early California history or other topics, but decided to devote its archive to radio and early television because many local residents are employed in the entertainment industry and have offered to bequeath their papers to the foundation, Hagopian said.

The library has more than 2,000 books on the subject and about 6,000 scripts. In addition, it has the papers of Clete Roberts, a famous World War II news correspondent and veteran Los Angeles broadcaster who lived in the area until his death in 1984, she said.

In 1987, the foundation came under fire from some city residents, who criticized it for acquiring the Vallee collection in the face of cutbacks in library services that year. But officials defended the acquisition by saying that the collection is an investment whose value will continually increase, and the outcry was short-lived.

“We bought it for a sweet price,” Hagopian said.

State Grant

In January, the foundation received a $50,000 grant from the state library to begin cataloguing Vallee’s huge collection, which he kept in a three-story building on his Hollywood Hills estate.

Surrounded by pictures of the clean-cut singer and by old newspapers with headlines devoted to his appearances, archivists Matoon and Martin Getzler have applied themselves to the massive task of sifting through the thousands of newspaper clippings, photographs, and financial and other records. While they are working, they sometimes play tapes of Vallee favorites, such as “My Time Is Your Time” and “I’m Just a Vagabond Lover,” Getzler said.

Vallee’s widow, Eleanor Vallee Hustedt, owns the copyright to many of Vallee’s personal papers, and researchers who want to publish the materials will have to approach her for permission, library officials said.

The collection contains none of the original megaphones that became Vallee’s trademark, said Ruth Leonard, special collections librarian. Some mementos are now in the Smithsonian Institution and at the University of Maine. However, the library has hundreds of recordings of Vallee’s radio shows, which will be copied onto audiocassettes and loaned to library patrons, she said.

Early Sex Symbol

The two archivists say they have already made some interesting discoveries about Vallee. For instance, they have come across records that indicate that Vallee hired a detective to follow a woman with whom he was romantically involved before he met his fourth wife. Vallee, who graduated from Yale University with a degree in Spanish and philosophy, had a clear, cultured voice that made him one of the first male sex symbols, Getzler said.

“In the early days of radio, the fan letters he got from women were on a high romantic plane,” Getzler said. “Later, in the ‘40s, the women were a lot more forward and tried to instigate meetings with Vallee.”

From the age of 8, Vallee saved memorabilia from his life because, even as a Maine schoolboy who played the saxophone, he believed that he would become famous, said Hustedt, whom he married in 1949. Vallee knew his collection “would be valuable for posterity, just like Nixon’s,” she said.

“Let’s face it, the guy was marvelously charming, but he saved this stuff because he had a monumental ego,” said Gene Gressley, former director of the University of Wyoming’s American Heritage Center, which tried to buy the collection. “The stairway in his house was lined with pictures of him and famous people, and I remember it took us two hours to get downstairs because he stopped to tell me about each one.”

Getzler and Matoon acknowledge that there are materials in the collection that indicate that Vallee thought highly of himself, including records of his unsuccessful efforts to get the Los Angeles City Council to change the name of his street to Rue de Vallee. But Vallee was also generous, they say, paying medical bills for friends and employees in need.

“The Rudy Vallee collection is one of the best windows onto a star of his high caliber,” Gressley said. “You can understand a lot about 20th-Century radio and film by studying that collection.”