What Was Called For

In 1937, Pennsylvania-bred Trumpeter Vaughn Monroe, fronting for a five-piece Boston society combo, was about as low on the bandleaders' register as a man could get. Now & then he would try to jolt his cocktail-and coming-out party patrons from their fox trot and rumba rut by booming Ave Maria or Glory Road in the aggressive baritone he was training for opera in his spare time. But mostly he gave them "what was called for--a hundred and twenty-eight beats to the minute--the debutante stuff and the businessman's bounce."

By last week Baritone Monroe had long since given up his operatic ambitions, was churning out strictly "what was called for." From the bandstand of the heavily upholstered Cafe Rouge in Manhattan's Statler Hotel, he beamed handsomely at the biggest crowds the nitery had ever seen, contentedly mooed the season's ballads in a domesticated baritone. Behind him were 23 dapper and earnest young men, a quintet of well-groomed young women carefully schooled to furnish a plush vocal cushion for what has been called everything from "The Voice with Hair on its Chest" to the "Million-Dollar Monotone." The Jeanette (Pa.) High School boy-most-likely-to-succeed (Class of '29) was definitely a success.

Small-Town Boy. What had made 38-year-old Vaughn Monroe's outfit a $2,000,000-a-year business was partly luck, mostly hard work and sound business sense. When he got a chance to head his own twelve-piece band in 1940, Monroe gave up his concert ambitions, trained with a vocal coach for four months to tone his big voice down to dance-hall size. At the same time he mapped out his strategy for winning the public. One important campaign detail: constant caravaning through the hinterlands.

Even when Monroe records (There I've Said It Again, Ballerina, et al.) began selling like hot cakes (5,000,000 in 1948) and his name began to climb toward the top of popularity polls for the country's most popular male vocalist and bandleader, he still kept up his barnstorming. (He still averages 200 one-night stands, covers 50,000 miles a year.) A small-town boy himself, he was never too busy to launch local Community Chest or Christmas Seal drives.

Time for Table-Hopping. It all added up to big business. In addition to Vaughn Monroe Productions Inc. (which covers his tours, records, and radio shows, brought in $1,000,000 last year), he owns or has an interest in a fleet of Boston taxicabs, an office building, a song-publishing house, a moving-picture producing outfit which has just completed a picture starring Vaughn Monroe.

As a big-time operator, Monroe still finds time for table-hopping between sets, shaking hands with visiting record salesmen from the Midwest, jawing with disc jockeys from upstate, planning his next cross-country dash. Says he: "You keep in business by keeping in touch with the people . . . playing for everyone there is to play for."

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