Thursday, Sept. 30, 1999 | 9:54 a.m.
Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme
When: 8 p.m. Thursday, Saturday and Sunday; 9 p.m. Friday.
Where: Caesars Palace Circus Maximus Showroom.
Tickets: $55, plus $3 handling fee.
Information: Call 731-7333.
Let's play word association:
Black? White.
Even? Odd.
Five people crying in New Jersey? Steve Lawrence.
A peculiar connection, perhaps, but consider the evidence, mined from a long-ago memory:
A Jewish couple from New York and their young son frequently cross the river to visit the boy's aunt and uncle. Every visit begins cheerfully, brimming with hugs, kisses and laughs.
Then the uncle strolls toward the record player and slips a 45 (remember those?) on the turntable. Thunderous orchestral music swells, subsides, then steps aside for the velvety voice that soon engulfs and entrances the room.
Steve Lawrence starts the stirring strains of "Where Can I Go," sung in English and Yiddish, celebrating the birth of Israel as a Jewish homeland. It is a dramatic tour de force, conveying tremendous struggle and eventual triumph in terms so moving that the song is nearly a prayer, the singer nearly prayerful.
The small Jersey living room falls reverently still. Then four adults and one confused kid -- who doesn't quite understand why he's suddenly quiver-lipped -- dab at their moistening eyes with tissues from a box that has been strategically placed nearby especially for this regular ritual.
Lawrence roars toward the finish, his voice rife with tears, defiance and pride, as if single-handedly delivering a people's destiny through his polished pipes. Swept toward the climax atop a crescendo that could shatter the heavens, the song ends with a BANG! -- its resounding final note echoing ... echoing ... echoing ... into the stunned silence that follows.
The emotional dam breaks. ... Tears flow freely and fervently, finally slowing to sniffles. ... Satisfied sighs are heaved, heavily ... Catharsis is complete.
Then they eat. (This is a family that knows how to have a good time.)
More than three decades later (last week) and 3,000 miles from New Jersey (Las Vegas), the confused, quivering kid sticks a tape recorder near the mouth that turned that living room into Waterworld.
"Oh my goodness!" Lawrence exclaims before digging into a Caesar salad at Casears Palace, where he and wife Eydie Gorme -- or simply Steve & Eydie, being on a first-name basis with the immediate world -- will perform tonight through Sunday. "It is so wonderful to hear that."
Every bit the old-school gentleman but with a still-silky-smooth persona that tips toward hip, even at age 64, the former Sidney Leibowitz from Brooklyn-turned-longtime Las Vegan is an easygoing blend of coolness and kindness -- with just a pinch of impishness."You've been asking a lot of questions," he tells the interviewer in the buttery voice that has lost none of its flavor over the years.
"Now it's my turn to ask you a question ... You see any salt on this table?"
He is handed the condiment and the conversation shifts from a song that imprinted itself on a family memory to one that glommed onto the national consciousness.
"Go away, little girl. Go away, little girl; I'm not supposed to be alone with you. ..."
"It was a No. 1 record -- it put gold on my wall," Lawrence says about the tune that put him on the pop music map. And unlike some singers who grow so weary of their hits that they come to despise them, Lawrence embraces "Little Girl."
"I learned that lesson a long time ago when I asked Nat King Cole, 'Don't you ever get tired of singing 'Mona Lisa'?' He said, 'Whether I do or not is not the question. The people are here because of that and I couldn't be happier. What you have to do is find new ways to sing it.' "
" ... I know that your lips are sweet, but our lips must never meet..."
The huge scope of the 1964 hit was also a departure for the young crooner. "When I was recording at 16 or 17, you had a hit in Pittsburgh or a hit in Cleveland or a hit in Jersey, local or regional hits.," he says. "But I wound up recording 'Go Away Little Girl' in several languages."
Still, when it comes to foreign tongues, Lawrence bows to his multilingual wife. "Her Spanish records, she's a diva in any Latin American country. We used to go to Mexico once a year and we never went through Customs because I was with Eydie. There were trios meeting her at the airport, playing with guitars. They didn't know who the hell I was. They thought I was Mel Torme because it rhymed with Gorme -- 'Eydie Gorme, Mel Torme!' "
"... I belong to someone else and I must be true. ..."
Speaking of his wife, Lawrence quickly quashes a rumor. "Eydie is fine," he says emphatically, mindful of two previous Caesars engagements that were postponed over her health. "There were a lot of rumors in those rag magazines. She had a cold, we were flying, her ear clogged up, and everybody thought the worst. The gal that printed it (New York gossip queen Liz Smith) should have known better because she's a friend. She said Eydie is retiring, but she printed a retraction."
"... Go away little girl, go away little girl; it's hurting me more each minute that you delay. ..."
Life partners for nearly 42 years and stage partners for almost as long, the couple famously fell for each other while working on Steve Allen's "Tonight Show" (celebrating its 45th anniversary this week), but their introduction actually predated that.
"She doesn't remember it," Lawrence muses. "I met her at the Brill Building in New York, which was the home of a lot of music publishing and writers. I was coming into the building, she was going out of the building with a mutual friend of ours. He said, 'Steve, meet Eydie Gorme.' I'd heard her record. I had a record out called 'Poinciana.' We traded hellos. She was wearing her hair in a ponytail. She said hello and she turns and the ponytail gives me a whack. So I said I'll get even with you -- I'll marry you. Which I did."
"... When you are near me like this, you're much too hard to resist. ..."
Once they were paired with Allen, the budding partnership was almost scuttled -- at least professionally -- by NBC. "The network wanted to get rid of me and Eydie," he recalls. "In their words, they said to Steve they wanted two singers who were more 'Americana.' I didn't think we were ethnic looking or sounding, but some of the executives who ate white bread and mayonnaise decided that. Steve was infuriated. He told them, 'OK, you want to replace Steve and Eydie? You get me Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee.' And they didn't work for scale even at that time, so our job was secured."
They went on to award-laden careers individually and as a couple. Their trophy case runneth over with Emmys, Grammys, Tony nominations and, most recently, induction in the Gaming Hall of Fame. Through all the decades on stage together, Lawrence says that only one thing has changed: "My legs bother me. I'm trying to do 'Who Can I Turn To' and my feet are killing me. If your feet hurt, you can't sing good."
"... So go away little girl, before I beg you to stay. ..."
But seriously, folks. "Marriage, any relationship, takes work," he says. "There are times, on a scale of one to 10, you touch all those numbers. And you have to be strong enough -- and what you have has to be worth it enough -- to stick it out and survive it," Lawrence says, recalling one show the two did in which they had a massive fight backstage just before the curtain rose.
"It was one of the best shows we ever did," he says. "You just can't turn that off. And we're screaming at each other -- 'I did! ... You did not! ... Screw you! ...' -- then, 'Here they are, Steve and Eydie!'
"We came out, smoke coming out of our ears. During that show I said everything to her every husband has ever wanted to say to his wife, she said everything to me that any wife has ever said to any husband, and it was therapy for us. We unloaded on that poor audience. We felt great after the show -- 'come on, let's go get a bite!' The audience had to be thinking, 'What problems those people have!' "
" ... Go away; please don't stay; it'll never work out. ..."
Just as enduring as their marriage is their loyalty to the pop standards that made them famous, from their hits such as "This Could Be the Start of Something Big," "Blame It on the Bossa Nova," "A Portrait of My Love," "What Did I Have," "If He Walked Into My Life" and "On A Clear Day," to the classics of Broadway and the works of legends such as Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and the Gershwins.
"It amazes me that young people who relate to the kind of music I do, how they survive at all in today's music business," Lawrence says, clearly annoyed at the youth obsession that has overshadowed his style of singing and literally hijacked Hollywood.
"Who cares what an 8-year-old likes to hear?" he says. "There's a great deal of it I resent. When I was a kid nobody said to me, 'What do you think of Bing Crosby or Russ Columbo?' Sure, there are new avenues you create as you go along, but not at age 7 or 8."
He and his wife, he adds, make only occasional forays into contemporary material -- a stray rock ballad, songs by Barry Manilow or Billy Joel -- in their shows.
"You can't fool around with an audience and you can't change who you are," he says. "The audience comes to see Steve and Eydie 'cause they know who we are -- most of them. The ones that come out of curiosity probably want to see if we're not on walkers. But you become a product over a period time. If you're around long enough, you have a space on the shelf they know and can always go to."
"... When you are near me like this, you're much too hard to resist ..."
A singer supreme though he is, Lawrence also has a pronounced flair for comedy, first honed on "The Tonight Show" with Allen, whose freewheeling antics paved the way for the likes of David Letterman. "The last thing we were called upon to do was sing," he says. "We were in sketches, on top of the Empire State Building, hanging over Niagra Falls. It was basic training, except without helmets and boots."
His knack for sketch silliness resurfaced on "The Carol Burnett Show," where he was a favorite guest of the legendary comedienne over her 11-year run. "I just got a great gift from Carol," Lawrence says. "She sent me a composite tape of all the sketches I did with her. When that show started to get syndicated, a lot of young people came to our shows and knew me from 'The Carol Burnett Show.' They had no idea that I sang. They'd come and say, 'Do Bogart! Do Jimmy Cagney!' "
And it doesn't take much prodding to coax some Steve shtick out of their stage shows. Occasionally, a joke-telling Lawrence has to be dragged off-stage by his exasperated spouse. "She'll say, 'I don't want to bring my lunch out here and camp out,' " he sheepishly admits.
"... So, go away little girl; call it a day, little girl ..."
Happily ensconced for the last 20 years in Las Vegas -- "I love it," he declares -- the Lawrences look forward to cutting back on their touring schedule. "We could stay on the road like road rats, but we're getting older," he says. "All the airplanes are at the last gate -- coming and going."
But there are always other challenges. Besides being a fanatical movie buff -- Lawrence and his pal, Las Vegas fight promoter Bob Arum, frequently take in the latest flicks -- he figured he'd also be in a couple of them. Due out in the near future: "The Yards," co-starring James Caan, Mark Wahlberg, Faye Dunaway and Lawrence as the corrupt president of Queens in an action-drama about the New York subway system; and "Close to the Bone," a boxing movie with Antonio Banderas, Woody Harrelson and Robert Wagner, in which Lawrence appears as himself.
"That was very difficult," he says, "because I don't know who the hell I am anymore."
"... Oh please, go away little girl, before I beg you to stay."
Who the hell he is ... is an icon of American entertainment. But what more could Steve Lawrence hope to accomplish, anyway? His resume is already topped by his crowning achievement:
Five people crying in New Jersey.
