He was "The Romeo of Song," "The Singing Valentino," and "Radio's Revelation." From 1931 until 1934, he, Bing Crosby, and Rudy Vallee were crooning rivals for the public's attention.

His incredible talent encompassed recordings as a violinist, and vocalist, radio, and ultimately the brink of film stardom. His records are considered musical standards of the 1930s.

He was a comet in the entertainment industry for a three-year period, illuminating Los Angeles' Cocoanut Grove nightclub, Brooklyn's Paramount Theater, Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, and entertainment giants NBC, RCA, and Universal Pictures. But like a comet, he passed through our universe all too quickly. He died at 26, the victim of an accidental shooting by his closest friend.

"Bing Crosby once was to have said, that had he lived, Russ could have become a bigger star than Bing himself.

Russ Columbo was born January 14, 1908, in Camden, New Jersey, the twelfth child of Italian immigrants Nicola and Giulia (aka Nicholas and Julia). He was christened Ruggiero Eugenio di Rodolpho Colombo.

Legend places his birth in San Francisco or Philadelphia, but his death certificate states New Jersey. The Colombo family moved back to Philadelphia when Ruggiero was about five years old, and when he was eight headed west to California, residing in the San Francisco and Calistoga areas before moving to Los Angeles.

All news accounts identify the young Ruggiero Colombo as a child prodigy, mastering the violin at the age of five, and his family's frequent movement was said to allow Ruggiero the opportunity to continue his violin studies under the tutelage of Alexander Bevani. At the age of 13, "Russ" made his professional debut at the Imperial Theater in San Francisco. The abbreviated "Russ" came from a childhood friend's inability to fully pronounce Italian. In 1931 the second "o" in his last name was replaced with the more phonetic "u." This gave rise to the legend that Russ was a direct descendant of Christopher Columbus.

He was romantically linked to a former Miss Universe, a screwball comedienne, and then engaged to one of Hollywood's top stars, Carole Lombard . [The same Carole Lombard who married Clark Gable, and died in a plane crash in 1942.]

A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY JORNEY AND BEYOND

You Call It Madness: The Sensuous Song of the Croon,
Lenny Kaye, Villard: 512 pp., $25.95
Los Angeles Times
By Anthony Heilbut
December 26, 2004

According to Lenny Kaye, the three great pop crooners of the early 1930s constitute a trinity.

Bing Crosby, the affable domesticator of every idiom from light jazz to Hawaiian music, plays the universal dad.

Randy, rambunctious Rudy Vallee enacts the misbehaving son.

And, by default, Russ Columbo (1908-1934), the least known, the handsomest, the most vocally gifted and soulful, assumes the role of Holy Ghost.

Ghost, indeed and alas: He's remembered mostly as the victim in a Hollywood mystery, accidentally shot to death by his best friend on the eve of his engagement to Carole Lombard. Kaye is so moved by his martyred saint that he dreams of rewriting his fate. As the book ends, he resolves to take the bullet himself. Greater love has no fan than Kaye's for his Columbo.

Kaye, best known for being Patti Smith's guitarist, quickly tells Columbo's story: the son of Italian immigrants, raised in California, a musician from childhood, gifted at both violin and piano, freelancing in Hollywood until he joins Gus Arnheim's band in his late teens.

Shortly after, molded and shaped by a calculating New York agent and the loving ministrations of his best friend, Lansing Brown, he steps out on his own. Capitalizing on his swarthy good looks and a voice blessed by the microphone, he becomes famous as a soloist and composer of future standards such as "You Call It Madness but I Call It Love" and "Prisoner of Love."

Whereby he becomes the most dangerous threat to the slightly older Bing and Rudy.
 
 

But in Kaye's ecstatic meditation, Russ' croon provides the soundtrack for an America on the cusp of every imaginable change — racial, sexual, economic...
And when the book steers, and occasionally wobbles, into a nonfiction novel, Russ becomes his Orpheus through the bright shades of Broadway and Hollywood.

The word "croon" appears in song lyrics as early as 1900 and has its origins in lullaby. But the croon identified with Bing and Russ is not just a softly sung soporific. It's a wordless vocal and, as such, an obvious adaptation of the moans of blues and gospel. A moan can be formed from a hum or any vocalized sound — ah, ee, oo, eh, hey. But it is always a deeper expression of the lyric. That's how Russ nursed his croon. And why not? By the early 20th century, most of the characteristic devices of the black church — moans, falsetto hollers, growls — had entered the public domain. Consider that Irving Berlin's "Revival Day" was introduced by Al Jolson in 1914.

Jolson would be the greatest star of the 1920s, the significant other in most singers' imaginations. Viewed today, his style appears generated as much by his cantorial baritone as by his reckless blackface. Rhythmic spunk and effeminate grace underwrite his career.

Russ was something else. As a solo performer, he would leave the clowning to Crosby and Vallee. He would be, first and foremost, a singer. From the start, his style was authoritative. His diction was crystalline yet never quite academic, more period gesture than affectation.

In radio serials such as "The Goldbergs" or "The O'Neills," mothers might still sound as caricatured as Amos and Andy but their sons all spoke like Rudy Vallee. The ethnic trace in Julia Columbo's vocally assimilated son is the residue of light opera, the quenched sob à la Caruso.

Though his range is not immense, the notes are so fully inhabited that it sounds huge, the low tones almost as resonant as Paul Robeson's, the higher floating as sweetly as John McCormack's. He never breaks the way Bing does when negotiating the spangled-banner intervals of "Stardust." His vowels and consonants are so emphatically sung that Kaye proposes a new form of musical notation: Ba sharp, da flat.

Best of all, his phrasing is supple, relaxed, conversational with the playful empathy of a partner dancing cheek to cheek. As ideally in poetry, each verbal and acoustic detail conveys an aesthetic intent. Even the recorded sound contributes. The compression robs him of air, but he never sounds breathless. Instead he achieves a kind of monolithic intimacy. An exquisite calibration of melody, sentiment and meter defines his vocal art, a combination rarely heard outside the black church.

Indeed, by the time he reaches the croon in "When the blue of the night meets the gold of the day" — a wistful pastiche of Irish ballad and Tin Pan Alley — his initial hum verges on a moan, approximating the craft of a gospel hymnodist.

Russ had a band musician's time sense, but, at least on records, he seldom swung. His death prevented an expansion of his talent. Only a few of his imitators (Don Cornell, for example, and Tony Martin) came remotely close to duplicating his sound.

What thrills this listener is the adoption of Russ' technique in the black church, a beautiful instance of cultural barter. If you listen to the male stars of 1930s gospel — R.L. Knowles, Norsalus McKissick, and, particularly, Robert Anderson — you'll hear his intonation and luxuriant vibrato.

The man whose gun accidentally discharged and killed Columbo was his mentor and confessed soul mate Brown, a portrait photographer. Columbo was half Lansa's creation; his pal had first thought to depict him as a teenage Valentino. After the accident, Brown disappeared into a reclusive existence, shattered, but not before reporting visions of his holy ghost. Kaye's gloss?...

Kaye diagnosis women's hearts, analyzing the makeup of Columbo's audience, mostly shopgirls and secretaries for whom dreams of romance were both a token of class mobility and an assertion of independence.

Kaye writes best about music, presenting passages about performance technique that take one's breath away, statements about the interplay between musicians that only a pro could have composed. But at times the holy ghost of Columbo spins him out of control. He imagines Russ' dying thoughts: fair, I guess.

After Russ' death, his siblings inform their mother that he is touring abroad, and she dies happy 10 years later. This allows Kaye to imagine Columbo's ghost stranded in an Italian town in 1938, reading about the death of Gabriele d'Annunzio, which enables a quotation from that inspired writer that may pertain to any of the book's several themes. Now, I'm a sucker for a good tangent. But there are swerves that make you happy and snags that make you blue. He is so mercilessly allusive that I braced myself with the introduction of each new proper noun....
*
Anthony Heilbut is the author of several books,
including "Exiled in Paradise" and "The Gospel Sound."

A sentimental journey and beyond
http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/
books/la-bk-heilbut26dec26,1,3638165.story?coll
=la-headlines-bookreview