He’s Got a Chorus in His Heart

Barry Leon Brussel pops unannounced into a fifth floor room at the VA Hospital in West L.A.: “Hi! Would you trade television for some live entertainment?”

The white-haired man in the window bed peers over his glasses at this unlikely looking 67-year-old troubadour and says, “If it’s a tambourine and some hymns, get lost.”

Brussel plunges ahead. “I’m 200 singers. . . “

The patient snaps off the TV--”Let’s give it a shot.”

For Brussel, this amounts to outright pleading. Name a favorite, he says. The patient thinks a moment: “How about Richard Tucker?”

Easy. Brussel warms to the task, regaling his captive audience with “The Bluebird of Happiness.” There is polite applause, which inspires him to encore as Ezio Pinza with “Some Enchanted Evening.”

Before heading off, Brussel says, “Gentlemen, I hope you get well soon,” He’s ready to play the next room. No sale here--they’d rather watch TV.

At his third stop, he gets a polite “Thanks, but I’m in too much pain to enjoy it.”

He shrugs, “Sometimes they just don’t want to be entertained--although I happen to be the best entertainer in the world.”

For two years, he’s been coming here two evenings a month. “I’m the dinner show,” he says. He does it because he loves to sing and because he wants to pay a debt to the hospital: “I had two heart attacks about eight years ago. They saved my life.”

His audience is the bedridden veterans who can’t go to the USO shows and, he admits, he’s part humanitarian, part ham. Once, he toyed with being a professional entertainer but, he says, “I lisped . . . I still lisp.”

So, he landed on the “fringes” of show business. In the ‘50s, he promoted prizes for shows like “Queen for a Day” in the era before formal screen credits--”Prizes furnished by. . .”--were required.

Then he went into the advertising business, using his basso-to-tenor voice of many accents to do his own radio and TV commercials for clients like Super Yarn Marts and Two Guys From Italy. “I’m known as the Man of 1,000 Voices.”

Once, he’ll tell you, he studied opera under a maestro who was taught by Enrico Caruso’s teacher. His goal wasn’t the Met. It was to get rid of that pesky lisp.

As he makes his hospital rounds, he’s tickled if an oldster asks for Robeson or Melchior, or some Brussel favorites like Durante, Jolson and Chevalier. But must the kids always request rock ‘n’ roll?

Don’t ask him to do The Righteous Brothers or Wayne Newton or Barry Manilow or Julio Iglesias. (People do.) He’ll give you his all as Elvis belting out “Heartbreak Hotel,” but that’s where he draws the line.

“There’s about 2,000 great singers,” he says. “I do 200.” As for the current crop, he says most of them mumble.

And if Brussel’s renditions don’t sound quite like the originals, well, the ticket to this show is free.

This night, he’s Sammy Davis Jr. belting out “The Birth of the Blues” for a woman who just had back surgery. He’s Sinatra (“Sinatra is my god”) and Tony Bennett and even Rex Harrison, emoting in “My Fair Lady.” In a room with four men sitting up in bed eating dinner, there’s a request for Nat (King) Cole. Brussel obliges with “Mona Lisa.” Could he do Mario Lanza? He could.

But his voice cracks on those high notes of “Be My Love.” Never mind. At 67, he figures he’s “lucky to remember the lyrics.”

It’s time to bring down the curtain for tonight. “See you,” Brussel tells the men. “Hope you get well soon.”

A voice follows him out into the hallway: “I hope so, too.”

Heading for the elevator, Brussel says, “When the voice gives out, I go home. It used to last for two hours. Then it lasted for an hour. Now it’s 50 minutes.”

Too much cigarette smoke, he grumbles. Stamping out smoking is one of his crusades. A high school dropout, he has a mind “that goes in all directions,” most of them at once.

One minute, he’s revealing his idea to eliminate dubbing of foreign films by inserting plot lines in the music breaks. The next, talking about his book that “solves most of the world’s problems,” if only he could find a publisher. He grins. “What I’m interested in, frankly, is immortality.”

At his age, he figures, “My voice isn’t going to last forever. I might as well give it to somebody.” And, he wonders, isn’t there someone out there who’d like to take over?

But, as he tells the patients, “Don’t clap yet. I’m not through.”