Mega-Mementos : Thousand Oaks Archivists Sift 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 he gathered for more than 60 years.

Vallee saved X-rays of an impacted wisdom tooth he had extracted in the 1970s, brief notes 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, 1990, 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. “For anyone writing his biography or interested in history, its value is incalculable.”

Shortly after Vallee died in 1986 at 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 material, 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, Hagopian said.

Although it is rare for a small city library to embark on such an ambitious endeavor, the foundation believes 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 who lived in the area before he died 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 the collection is an investment whose value will continually increase, and the outcry was short-lived.

State Library 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 are 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.”

Vallee’s widow, Eleanor Vallee Hustedt, owns the copyrights 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. However, the library does have hundreds of recordings of Vallee’s radio shows, which will be copied onto cassette tapes and lent to library patrons, she said.

Interesting Discoveries

The archivists say they have made some interesting discoveries by perusing the collection. For instance, they have come across records that indicate Vallee hired a detective to follow a woman with whom he was romantically involved before he met his fourth wife.

“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 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.