Vegas & All

The voice has a pump-organ quaver and a soft adolescent fuzz on it, the phrasing is smooth, and the sentiments belting from the jukeboxes hit the pop fans right where they love to live: t

I'm on ftre

Let your lips caress me My desire Is that you possess me . . . Lover, come to me.

The invitation is from a ballad called Come to Me. and the voice that has boosted it onto the charts belongs to Negro Singer Johnny Mathis. With the help of some canny promotion, 22-year-old Singer Mathis has also boosted himself during the past year into the most valuable new property in show business. Last week, for the sake of "prestige" (and $2,000 a week plus a percentage of the take), Johnny checked into the Venetian Room of San Francisco's Fairmont Hotel and showed the home-town folks how he had made it big so fast.

Jumping High. Johnny gave San Francisco a little of everything. Dressed in a shadow-striped, tuxedo-style suit with smudgy white bow tie, he hit Looking at You with a rubbery, infectious beat, breathed out There Goes My Heart in one elastic sigh, quavered in a high, thin falsetto through My One and Only Love. His phrasing was fresh, his diction irreproachable, his dramatic sense unfailing. But it was the intimate, haunting quality of his voice that brought the audience alive. It has a kind of choirboy innocence hooked with a Cole Porter leer.

When Johnny left San Francisco two years ago, his chief claim to fame was as a high-jump star (6 ft. 5 1/2 in.) at San Francisco State College. The son of a chauffeur, Johnny once took operatic coaching but prepared in college for a teaching career (English). In his spare time, he picked up pin money singing in local clubs and with a semiprofessional opera group. Helen Noga, co-owner of San Francisco's famed Black Hawk nightclub, heard him, introduced him to Columbia Records' George Avakian. His first successful single, Wonderful, Wonderful, sat around for several months before it began lighting boards in San Francisco and Boston. It climbed the charts, catapulted Johnny into a career that should bring him $500,000 this year.

Running Hard. Johnny and Manager Noga are playing the big time with all the care and finesse of deep-sea fishermen hooked into prize tuna. Johnny has abandoned his ambition to be a pure jazz singer ("not profitable"), has carefully cultivated the delicate art of wooing local disk jockeys. So far, he has been seasoning himself in small clubs, avoiding the gaudier barns on the theory that "I haven't yet got the ability of a Lena Home to take a thousand people and bring them down to the size of a fist."

Johnny confidently plans to be "a rich man in three years," and the best way to make it, he figures, is to become "a singing actor" like Sinatra. That way, he says, staring with wide, artless eyes across the table and shooting out his moonstone cuff links, "I could make one film and Vegas and have it all."

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