Jack Jones, hitmaking Death: Jack Jones, a Grammy Award-winning baritone who merged compassionate sincerity with powerful vocal technique on pop successes in the 1960s and the disco-jazzy theme song of the TV series “The Love Boat,” died on October 23 at a hospital in Rancho Mirage, California. He was 86. Eleonora, his wife, revealed that the cause was complications from leukemia, a bone marrow cancer.
Mr. Jones, the son of movie legends Allan Jones and Irene Hervey, grew raised in Hollywood’s elite circles. Nancy Sinatra was one of his closest high school friends, and he recalls being in amazement while her father performed at a school assembly. Mr. Jones’ father was a notable performer in his own right, a wavy-haired leading man who showcased his operatic singing voice in films starring the Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello, and other comedy teams from the 1930s and 1940s.
Mr. Jones received early voice lessons from an operatic instructor at the request of his father, despite the fact that his personal musical tastes were more influenced by big-band jazz and Hit Parade tunes from his childhood. The resulting hybrid style, as he rose to prominence in the early 1960s, was one of velvety romantic ardour, virile passion, and dazzling swing, earning him accolades from renowned music reviewers. Will Friedwald, one of his most fervent supporters among succeeding generations of music writers, once said that “for all of Jones’s polish, there’s never an instant when he comes off as merely slick.”
Mr. Jones’ musical personality was multifaceted, ranging from show-tune belter to gritty bluesman, swinging crooner to pensive romantic.
“His weathered voice is filled with seams and crevices,” New York Times music critic Stephen Holden observed in 2008, reflecting on the talcum-haired singer’s five decades in the profession. “His world-weary cragginess corresponds with an inclination to perform ballads at exceedingly slow tempos…. Because Mr. Jones’ bottom end has deepened, his startling leaps into quasi-falsetto are more dramatic than ever.”
His daring approach to music, which included blending Afro-Cuban rhythms with 1950s pop standards like “Just in Time,” was not immediately apparent when he rose to national prominence in 1961 with “Lollipops and Roses,” a syrupy ballad that won him the Grammy for best male solo vocal performance. Two years later, he scored a Top-20 chart success and another Grammy award with “Wives and Lovers,” a charming waltz about how a dutiful lady should satisfy her husband with well-mixed martinis and perfectly done cosmetics.
Feminists condemned the songs’ blatant sexism, and Mr. Jones changed the lyrics decades later, including references to Viagra and grooming tips for guys (“Hey, little boy, cap your teeth, get a hair piece”).
With his strappingly handsome physique, striking blue eyes, and dreamy-jazzy intonation, Mr. Jones became a ubiquitous TV and concert performer, and he continued his prolific recording career through the 1970s with middle-of-the-road pop hits such as “Love With the Proper Stranger,” “Dear Heart,” “Alfie,” “Girl Talk,” “The Race Is On,” “The Years of My Youth,” “The Impossible Dream” (nominated for a Grammy), and the string-laden “Lady.”
His favourite composers were Burt Bacharach, Marvin Hamlisch, Bert Kaempfert, Michel Legrand, Charles Aznavour, and Marilyn and Alan Bergman. Despite rapidly changing musical tastes, he experimented with covers of songs by the Doors and the Beatles (and later Little Feat, Billy Joel, Sting, and Keb’ Mo’), but his approach remained consistently earnest and unironic — a straightforward, adult-contemporary/easy-listening style that emphasized the lyric and the mood.
Lyricist Sammy Cahn personally asked Mr. Jones to record “Call Me Irresponsible” in 1963, following Frank Sinatra – an offer that would have intimidated any performer. “Frank did a very good characterization on his record, he sort of sang it as if he were a little bit drunk, as if he were the character that the song is about,” Friedwald recalls Mr. Jones saying. “It was a fantastic record, but it wasn’t particularly commercial. Mine was very pure and out there. I did it correctly, and I believe I received the hit because mine was simpler.”
In the mid-1960s, Sinatra declared him the “next major star of show business,” which Mr. Jones mistook for heir apparent. “I was thrilled,” he told the London Observer in 2002. “The only problem was that he never retired. When a somebody reaches that level of renown, no one can push him out. Many of us were unwilling to sacrifice what Frank done to establish his mystique. I wasn’t concerned about having a hot woman on my arm, but it’s necessary if you want to be a star.” (Mr. Jones was not short of female attention; one of his six wives was “Bond girl” Jill St. John, and he had a four-year relationship with actress Susan George in the 1970s.)
Despite his international celebrity and superb looks, Mr. Jones never intended to turn his musical success into a substantial acting career. He was wary of movies following his poor performance in the 1959 musical “Juke Box Rhythm.” He later starred in a British slasher film, “The Comeback” (1978), but otherwise limited his performances to guest appearances on TV variety shows, long-running Las Vegas lounge acts, and the touring musical-theater circuit, playing lead roles in shows such as “Man of La Mancha,” “Guys and Dolls,” and “South Pacific.”
His most prominent TV credit was singing the theme to ABC’s “The Love Boat” from 1977 to 1985 (Dionne Warwick did it in the last season, 1986). He mocked his lounge-singer reputation with an unexpected cameo in the disaster-movie satire “Airplane II” (1982), performing a few bars from “The Love Boat” as a prison searchlight beams on him and a beautiful coastal breeze caresses his hair.
“So it’s not the greatest song in the world,” he once told a reporter of the lyrics, which promised a “exciting and new” love that “won’t hurt anymore.” “But I think just about every singer would like to have a song with which they’re identified.” John Allan Jones was born in Los Angeles on January 14, 1938, the same day his father recorded his biggest hit, “The Donkey Serenade,” from the musical “The Firefly.”
He described his background as a mix of luxury and melancholy, with outwardly glamorous parents suffering from marital issues. He claimed his father was an alcoholic whose womanizing caused constant family strife. Around the time his parents parted, Jack was sent to boarding school.
“At first, I felt that my mom and dad had rejected me,” he told Ireland’s Sunday Independent, “though now I realize they were doing that because they were both in show business and on the road so much and boarding school to them was an easy way of dealing with all that.”
He graduated from University High School in Los Angeles in 1957 and joined his father’s act a few weeks later, first in Elko, Nevada, and then at Las Vegas’ Thunderbird Hotel. “It was okay, but with my dad, I felt like a kid,” he told syndicated columnist Phyllis Battelle. “In the beginning, he kind of wanted me to go in his direction — and I wasn’t really myself.”
He methodically planned his career and submitted audition tapes to Capitol Records. “They wanted to make me a rock singer, and I recorded some bad rockabilly songs,” he told the Sunday Independent. He was even more dissatisfied with the label’s callous handling of his 1959 album “This Love of Mine,” which had ballads but showed him on the cover as a scantily clothed cave man clutching a club and placing his foot on top of a plump woman.
Following his time at Capitol, Mr. Jones had a three-week run at a San Francisco bar that garnered the attention of a producer from the independent Kapp Records. Not long after, his rendition of “Lollipops and Roses” catapulted him into a touring and recording career.
By the end of the 1960s, he’d switched to RCA Victor and resumed his prolific output of albums and singles. A nondrinker who quit smoking four packs a day in 1980, he maintained great command of his singing voice well into his 80s and remained in demand as casino nightclubs expanded.
His hectic work, however, resulted in “circumstances that set relationships up to fail,” he admitted. His marriages with model Lee Larance, actress St. John, flight attendant Gretchen Roberts, Kathryn Simmons, and Kim Ely all ended in divorce. In 2009, he married Eleonora Jung.
In addition to his wife of Indian Wells, California, surviving include a daughter from his first marriage, Crystal Jones; a daughter from his fifth marriage, Nicole Ramasco; two stepdaughters, Nicole Whitty and Colette Peters, and three grandkids.
