The $390,000 Man

It is well after the late news and deep into the monster-movie hours, the time when TV punishes insomniacs with ads for truck drivers' academies and once-in-a-lifetime offers--"Send $6.98 for records, $8.98 for eight-track tapes" --for Tchaikovsky's Greatest Hits and the Best of Connie Francis. Suddenly, a smoothly handsome, oddly familiar-looking young crooner appears on a softly back-lighted stage. While he pumps a microphone and purrs out a ballad, viewers begin to wonder: Como's kid brother maybe? An Italian Goulet? Then on comes the voiceover, hailing the "mood rock" sound of that nationwide heartthrob, Peter Lemongello.

Peter who? Lemongello, 29, is a bland-voiced but relentlessly enterprising tenor from Islip, Long Island. For years he struggled to build a career--through such gimmicks as sending out little boxes of lemon Jell-O to deejays and record-company executives to remind them, should the occasion arise, how to pronounce his name. Now Lemongello and some home-town backers have forcefully raised the momentous question: Can an independent singer hit the big time by marketing himself like so much, well, JellO?

In 1974 Lemongello decided that his eight-year struggle to become a nationwide singing idol was hopeless. Too bad, because he certainly looked the part, with his long brown Prince Valiant locks, rosebud lips and gray-green almond-shaped eyes. He had also had all the prescribed early breaks. He had been "discovered" on the Tonight Show four times, sung with Don Rickles in Reno and Vegas, played the Copa, Jimmy's and the Rainbow Room in Manhattan, signed a $7,500 contract with Epic Records and toured the top spas on the Borscht Belt.

Selling Eggs. But it all turned sour. Tonight said "Enough." Rickles replaced him with Vic Damone. His record contract, after studio and musician costs were paid, netted him $180 and produced one single that tested well in Omaha but died in Atlanta--after which Epic dropped him too. Even in the Catskills, audiences played mah-jongg while he sang them love ballads, and they clacked their tiles on the table to show their bored approval. He quit, he says, "in disgust and revulsion."

But while he was bombing in show business, Lemongello was succeeding in a lot of other fields. In Islip, he turned an egg-selling job into a distributorship, using the profits to invest in some gas stations, which he then swapped for a chain of coin-operated laundries. He was moving into land speculation and home building when he told the local Islip banker who was financing his housing deals about his moribund career as a crooner. The banker gave him an idea: If he could sell eggs and laundries and houses, why not himself?

Lemongello and his banker chum formed a corporation and invested $32,000 in a one-shot showcase performance at the Westbury Music Fair, a theater near Islip, aimed at attracting other partners. They found six, among them the owner of a Long Island Midas Muffler franchise and an Islip doctor. The six put up $390,000, and Lemongello worked out a plan to hit the New York metropolitan-area market, as he puts it, "like a slow-release time bomb." He cut a two-record album, Love 76, then in January activated his bomb: a 13-week, $187,000 campaign jamming all six New York City TV channels with 70 to 100 commercials a week.

They worked: Lemongello fans were born. One Brooklyn girl started staying up until 4:30 a.m. just to see his one-minute ad on TV. Another kissed the tube whenever he appeared. He booked a concert at Manhattan's Lincoln Center, and it sold out. Westbury asked him back for a one-week gig for $100,000. Love 76 has sold 43,000 copies, through mail orders drawn by the TV spots. Lemongello was becoming a household word of sorts--at least in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. But, as he ruefully admitted, "if you mentioned my name in Philadelphia, no one would know me." He realized that unless he could get a recording contract, his instant success would evaporate.

Chance to Buy. So last month Lemongello took his pitch to Los Angeles and Las Vegas with a $210,000 TV-commercial campaign. If that did not bring the record companies to their knees, promised Lemongello's banker friend, it would be on to Chicago and Texas and Florida: "We'll take him to eight or twelve cities, if necessary, to give people a chance to buy our product."

Last week Private Stock, a scrambling, young recording company that handles Frankie Valli, Jose Feliciano and the Troggs, signed on Lemongello. His backers in Long Island--not to mention viewers in Chicago, Texas and Florida--can relax for a while.

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