Mel Torme: He’s Blue and Sentimental : Jazz: As a vocalist, he’s at his peak, but with the breakup of his fourth marriage, he’s about at his lowest.

Slumped unhappily on a large couch in the Southwest-styled living room of his Beverly Hills home, Mel Torme--winner of two Grammys, composer of “The Christmas Song” and one of the world’s best-known entertainers--is not in the best of moods.

“I’m really embarrassed that I can’t offer you anything,” he says. “But no one’s here to help out. I’m going through a divorce and everything is really screwed up.”

Torme, who joins a multitude of stars honoring Ella Fitzgerald at the Universal Amphitheatre tonight and makes his 20th Ambassador Auditorium concert appearance with his trio on Thursday, is not one to mince words.

“And it’s my fault. I’m the one to blame for the divorce,” he continues, speaking with the kind of straightforwardness and candor about his private life that is rarely found today in the entertainment business. “I behaved stupidly. I’ve tried like mad to make amends, to get her to give me another chance. But she won’t do it. So I’m going just ahead on a day-to-day basis, trying to get through this.”

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Ironically, the split comes at a time when Torme, whom many observers place at the top of the list of male jazz vocalists, is at the peak of his career. In February, he embarks on a 36-city, two-month nationwide tour. His fourth literary work, “My Singing Teachers: Reflections on Singing Popular Music,” was published last year, and both a new recording and a new video have just been released. After Thursday night’s performance, he will be presented with the 1995 Ambassador Award for Excellence.

But Torme’s full plate of successes will now have to make room for a troubling new addition. His 10-year marriage (and 18-year relationship) to the former Ali Severson, an attorney, is apparently destined to follow the path of his three previous marriages to actress Candy Toxton (1949), Arlene Miles (1956) and English actress Janette Scott (1966).

If past experience is any guide, the effect on his singing will probably be great. “Look,” he says, “I’m not one of those guys who can think about his golf score while he’s singing a love song. Singing love songs and torch songs is tremendously impactful for me. And when I have to sing them at a time when I’m going through the kind of trauma I’m going through right now, they can be excruciatingly painful.

“When Jan Scott and I broke up, I had to go on the road. But all I could do was just sit on the front steps and cry. When I got on the airplane I was still crying. And when I got to the venue, the only ballad I had in my book for the big band was ‘Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, man, why this?’ But, I sang it.”

It was typical of Torme. A performer since he was 4 years old (he made his debut in 1929, singing “You’re Driving Me Crazy” with the Coon-Sanders dance band), he has maintained a show-must-go-on attitude through the breakups of his three previous marriages. Two of them involved unpleasant court hearings and disputed custody of his five children.

Through it all, it has been Torme’s 65-year career--as child radio actor, singer, drummer, composer, songwriter, arranger and author--that has been the single constant in his life, regardless of the passage of relationships. While the demands of that career, via the hazards of travel, isolation and distraction, may have had their negative effects upon his marriages, it seems clear that his work has always held a priority position.

A radio star in Chicago before he was a teen-ager, Torme wrote his first hit (“Lament to Love,” for Harry James) at 15, and reached Hollywood a year later with powerful ambitions (“I really wanted to be a movie star--badly”). Despite roles in RKO’s “Higher and Higher” (with Frank Sinatra) and MGM’s “Good News” and “Words and Music,” however, his creative efforts continued to be dominated by musical activities. In 1946, he wrote (with Bob Wells) his most popular tune, “The Christmas Song.” Initially a hit for Nat King Cole, it has since become a Christmas perennial, comparable to “White Christmas” in popularity.

“Improbable though it may sound,” says Torme, “we composed it in less than an hour.”

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In the ‘50s and ‘60s, he hosted his own television variety program, and appeared in and wrote for an array of dramatic shows. In the ‘70s, he began a writing career that has thus far resulted in four books, and in the ‘80s, he returned to widespread public visibility via his quirky role (both as a character and as a kind of visual icon) in the sitcom “Night Court.”

Like many performing artists, the quality of Torme’s music has ebbed and flowed, often in response to episodes in his personal life. His vocal metamorphosis, for example, from the gentle sound associated with his early image as the Velvet Fog (a label he dislikes, despite the fact that his car’s license plate reads “LePhog”) to a more assertive, upfront rhythmic style, took place in the mid-’50s, around the time of the breakup of his first marriage. And Torme’s re-emergence as a highly regarded jazz singer in the late ‘70s followed his bitter divorce and custody battle with Scott.

The connections are not surprising to Torme, who notes in “My Singing Teachers” that singing, and especially jazz singing, is a deeply personal art.

“It’s all life experience, and it’s all grist for the mill,” he explains. “Singers are like good actors, in that respect, who draw on life experience when they want to do a scene.

“One of the major tunes I do in my act--and every night when I do it it’s an experience for me--is ‘Star Dust.’ Which is essentially a torch song: ‘Sometimes I wonder why I spend the lonely night,’ and so on. It gets me the very biggest round of applause in my act, and I’m grateful for that because I know how familiar it is to the audience. But I think it works as well as it does because of what it generates in my own feelings, from my life, and from my experiences.

“I think audiences can sense emotional honesty, and, hell, I couldn’t do it any other way, anyhow.”

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For that reason, perhaps, Torme favors “story” songs, songs with words that, in his description, “create pictures in your head.” His lifelong love affair with the drums no doubt has contributed to a gift for bringing drive and swing to rhythm pieces. And his superlative ear has made him a scat singer who can improvise with the articulate imagination of a jazz instrumentalist. But give him a good tune with a strong melody and a storytelling lyric--preferably one by Johnny Mercer--and Torme is at his best.

“I really believe,” he says, “that the lyric content of a song is about 95% of what a song is all about. If the melody is attractive, that’s frosting. But the lyric is the cake.

“I choose the songs that I do with meticulous care. They all have to have a story, a dramatic center to be a performable song for me. The best tunes for me are songs that make pictures in the head: (singing) ‘I took a trip on a train, and I thought about you.’ ”

Torme finishes the lyric, leans back pensively and sighs as he looks around his spacious, comfortable living room.

“It’s awfully quiet here now,” he says.

On one wall, a framed set of rare pulp magazines from the ‘20s and ‘30s attests to his inveterate interest in collecting. Elsewhere in the house are miniature trains, guns, books and, in the garage, a classic 1939 Jaguar that has become “so valuable that I can only take it out once or twice a year.”

He seems particularly proud of a collection of painstakingly constructed model airplanes. “Made ‘em all myself,” he says, proudly.

For the most part, however, this is a relatively sedate, somewhat detached Torme, looking toward the future--despite his current achievements--with considerably more uncertainty than he felt a few months ago. Open, frank, humorous and energetic when discussing music and the music business, Torme also has an air of distraction, clearly trying--as he has had to do in the past--to reconnect to the emotional center of his life.

“I guess the only good thing you could say about what I’m going through now,” he concludes, with a wry smile, “is that maybe it’ll help make me a better singer.”