JAZZ : Still in the Mood : Joe Graydon brings together big-band-era performers for serenades on the high seas and jitterbug jaunts across the country

Talk about a name-dropper. Joe Graydon seems to know them all.

“Here’s some of the people I’ve used,” he said of a hastily scribbled list.

Included were Kay Starr, Martha Tilton, Tony Martin, Frankie Laine, Margaret Whiting, Herb Jeffries, Maxene Andrews, Harry Babbitt, Connie Haines . . . and more than 20 other singers, a few vocal groups, a couple of dancers, six specialty musicians and 10 big bands.

Almost half a century ago, most of those entertainers and their music had young Americans stompin’ at the Savoy, taking Harlem’s A train and dialing an obscure phone number: Pennsylvania 6-5000.

Lovers were dancing in the dark and serenading in the moonlight. Their eyes, Helen O’Connell told us, were a cool and limpid green. And Billy Eckstine, with tears in his resonant voice, was apologizing . . . for just about everything.

Many of those performers--now in their 60s and 70s, some even in their 80s--are still performing regularly on stages across the country and on ships at sea, thanks to Graydon, a big-band concert producer for 13 years.

“In all honesty,” Graydon said, “it’s gotten to the point where, for those people, it’s almost the only game in town. There is not a lot of work out there for them.”

But keeping busy clearly hasn’t been a problem for Graydon, a Glendale resident who packages and produces the shows, which are booked by Columbia Artists Festivals. Happily, Graydon says, he has no financial risk in what has proved, for him, a “very lucrative” business.

“The shows are a sellout everywhere, or just about. We keep wondering how long this is going to last, and yet it shows no signs of falling off at all.”

A typical tour, Graydon said, would include 72 concerts in about 12 weeks, most of them in performing arts centers, theaters, college auditoriums and symphony halls.

Before hitting the road, the entertainers warm up on Southland stages, including the Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena, Citrus College in Glendora, El Camino College and the McCallum Theatre in Palm Desert.

Then it’s on to Arizona for shows at Sun City West, a 20,000-resident retirement community, and nearby Phoenix. Sun City West’s Sundome, said to be the largest single-level performing arts facility in the country, seats 7,169.

“You could draw a line through Arizona to Albuquerque, through Texas, down to Florida, then up the East Coast, all the way to Massachusetts and on to Chicago,” he said in outlining his well-traveled concert route. “We play all the major cities.”

Graydon’s next show will be July 20, “A Salute to Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey,” at the San Gabriel Civic Auditorium. Featured will be John and Donald Mills of the Mills Brothers and Martha Tilton. Clarinetist Henry Cuesta will front the Goodman orchestra, and trombonist Rex Allen will assume the Dorsey role.

Two major concert tours will be launched this fall, plus what Graydon calls his most successful show, “A Salute to Glenn Miller.”

“That name is still absolute magic,” the producer said. “Wherever I take it, it’s a sellout way before we get there. On Nov. 9 it will be on a cruise ship in the Caribbean.”

“Cole Porter’s 100th Birthday Party”--being written, produced and directed by Graydon--opens Sept. 21 in Riverside, and “Mostly Duke,” a concert featuring Duke Ellington’s arrangements, kicks off Oct. 22 at Pasadena’s Ambassador Auditorium. The “Duke” cast includes singers Barbara McNair, John and Donald Mills, dancer Gene Bell and Duke’s former vocalist, 76-year-old Herb Jeffries.

Like most of those he hires, Joe Graydon is a name out of the distant past, albeit a considerably less prominent one.

A former professional singer who worked his way through law school in front of microphones, Graydon passed the bar but never practiced law. Instead, he became an FBI agent at 22. After six years of tailing suspected Russian agents, tracking down military deserters and performing other duties, he resigned from the bureau to resume his career in music.

Graydon made a few recordings, eventually got a break and ended up on the “Lucky Strike Hit Parade,” a national radio show, where he was a weekly crooner for six months--an anonymous one.

“The first song I ever sang on the show,” he recalled, “was ‘It Might as Well Be Spring.’ All the announcer said was, ‘Sing it, Joe,’ and from then on, that’s how I was introduced. They got a lot of letters about the mysterious ‘Joe,’ but it didn’t help my career much.”

After leaving the station, Graydon bounced around for a while, worked briefly as an actor, then finally clicked with a hit song--”Again,” which he recorded with Gordon Jenkins’ band around 1950.

That success led to a contract with KCOP Channel 13, where he was host of a talk-variety program. After two years, the show moved to KABC Channel 7, where it ran another year.

He opened a supper club in Long Beach in the mid-’50s and two years later moved to Las Vegas, where he sang on radio and TV and in lounges along the Strip. But, suddenly, romantic ballads were out, rock was in and Graydon was finished as a professional singer.

“I viewed rock as a giant tidal wave,” he said. “I can’t sing rock. It was then I decided to try the other side of the business, which always fascinated me. I became a personal manager instantly.”

Among his clients were Dick Haymes, Ray Eberle, the Pied Pipers, Helen Forrest, Connie Haines, the DeCastro Sisters and the Mary Kaye Trio. He also worked closely with many others.

Then, in 1978, Graydon fulfilled a longtime ambition.

“I always had a driving desire to put on a concert featuring some of these people and two of my favorites were Dick Haymes and Helen Forrest. They were the stars of my first concert.” “I did quite a few tours for Joe,” Forrest said during a recent phone conversation. “They were four to six to eight weeks, all one-nighters. It’s tough work but I loved it. It was easier than when I was with the big bands, though.”

A semi-retired resident of Horace Heidt Estates in Sherman Oaks, Forrest recalled some of the grueling trips when she was featured with the Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman and Harry James bands.

“In those days, we would change in the bus or in the ballroom, do the job, get back on the bus and drive to the next job. Joe arranged it so we would never travel at night. We slept in hotel rooms.”

But, for her, tours are history.

“I have arthritis, a lot of medical problems,” she said. “Those days are gone for me. I did my share and paid my dues.”

Joining Forrest for that initial show were the Pied Pipers, inactive at the time, and a band Graydon called the Fabulous ‘40s Orchestra.

“That started it,” Graydon said, “and it snowballed to the point where we now are the largest producers of name-band concerts in the industry.”

Perhaps the oldest entertainer Graydon ever hired was pianist Frankie Carle, who was 79 when he climbed aboard a tour bus in 1982, along with the Russ Morgan band (directed by Russ’ son Jack Morgan) and singers Roberta Sherwood and the DeCastro Sisters.

Now 88 and living in Mesa, Ariz., Carle said he still plays a few dates now and then.

In show business for more than 70 years, Carle claims to hold the record for cross-country tours. Although he cherishes his on-the-road memories--traveling with Gene Krupa, Jack Teagarden and others over the decades--they are laced with misery.

“We’d wrap newspapers around our body, heat bricks and tie them around our shoes to keep warm,” he recalled. “Snow banks would be six feet high. And there was no heat in the hotels. Three guys would sleep in a bed.”

Involved in three serious auto accidents, Carle said he once broke a couple of ribs when a car overturned, “then played that night with them taped.

“Those were the good old days,” he joked, “when I got $125 a week.”

His contract with Graydon was for $4,000 weekly, but “he never booked me after that,” Carle added. “I made too much money.”

Another veteran, 77-year-old Harry Babbitt--remembered for such past hits as “A Slow Boat to China,” “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” and “Who Wouldn’t Love You” when he sang with the Kay Kyser orchestra--recently directed the Kyser band on a slow boat to Hawaii, a 17-day voyage aboard a cruise liner.

“People were dancing on the deck under the stars,” said Babbitt, a Newport Beach resident who was accompanied by his wife of 56 years. “It was fantastic. People loved it.”

“Harry’s in tiptop shape,” Graydon said. “He does a great job. He’s singing well.”

Another veteran still performing is 78-year-old Frankie Laine, who has undergone two heart bypass operations. Earlier this year, between back-to-back concerts in San Gabriel and Fontana, Laine developed a throat problem that nearly caused him to cancel his performance with Kay Starr.

“He saw the doctor, called me back and said, ‘I’m fine,’ ” Graydon said. “He’s still out there working.”

Singer Tony Martin, 77, did cancel a scheduled tour because of illness, the producer added, “but had been working for me a lot in this area.”

“Some of them have bailed out before the tour, giving me cockamamie reasons why they can’t make it,” he continued, “letters from doctors and all that jazz. There’s just a fear . . . that it’s going to be too tough.”

Graydon’s worst experience was the legal hassle he had with one of the famed Andrews Sisters, Maxene, who sued him in a dispute involving her piano player.

“She was nothing but trouble,” Graydon recalled, still fuming years later.

According to Graydon, the piano player who accompanied Andrews on the tour was not the one agreed upon in the contract.

“She showed up with a guy who played like he had boxing gloves on,” Graydon said. “And none of the artists in the show would sing with him, none of them. He wasn’t a piano player. He was an arranger who played piano on the side. She loved him.”

Graydon refused to pay for her pianist and hired another. When the tour ended, Andrews sued--reportedly for $15,000--and the case went to arbitration.

“To me, it was the most one-sided case I’ve ever been involved in,” said Graydon, whose law degree proved of little value. He ended up paying Andrews $7,500.

Contacted at her home in Auburn, Calif., Maxene Andrews declined to comment on the suit.

“I went out with the show and that’s it,” she said abruptly. “I wish him all the luck in the world.”