Whiting, Margaret (1924—)

Popular American singer of the 1940s and 1950s . Born on July 22, 1924, in Detroit, Michigan; daughterof Richard Whiting (a songwriter); sister of Barbara Whiting (a singer and actress); attended high school in Hollywood; married Hubbell Robinson (an executive at CBS, divorced a year later); married Lou Busch (a pianist and conductor), in 1950 (divorced 1953); married John Richard Moore (a cinematographer, divorced); children: (second marriage) Debbie Whiting.

Biggest hits include:

"Moonlight in Vermont," "That Old Black Magic," "My Ideal," "It Might As Well Be Spring," "Now is the Hour," "(I'm in Love with) A Wonderful Guy," "Come Rain or Come Shine," "What Are You Doing New Year's Eve," "Forever and Ever," "Baby, It's Cold Outside" (with Johnny Mercer), "A Tree in the Meadow," "Far Away Places," "Guilty," "Slippin' Around" (with Jimmy Wakely).

The daughter of popular songwriter Richard Whiting, whose oeuvre in the 1920s and 1930s included "Ain't We Got Fun," "Sleepytime Gal," "Hooray for Hollywood," and "Too Marvelous for Words," Margaret Whiting grew up in an environment saturated

with music. (Her godmother was Sophie Tucker .) Born in Detroit in 1924, she moved with her family a few years later to Beverly Hills, California. Her father often had her sing his new songs on demo records, and she studied piano and voice with him. At his frequent parties, she met other influential songwriters including Jerome Kern, Harry Warren, Harold Arlen, Jule Styne, and Frank Loesser. She was especially close to Richard's collaborator Johnny Mercer, who guided her career after her father's death when she was barely a teenager. In 1941, Mercer gave Whiting her first break when she sang on his radio show as part of an anniversary tribute to her father. Her rich alto voice was a hit with the audience, and by age 16 she was singing under contract with NBC on musical shows virtually every night.

Although Whiting was fired from her four-week test contract with the top popular-music program "Your Hit Parade" after she irritated the sponsor by not singing quickly enough, she found national success on the Capitol Records label (co-founded by Mercer) in 1943. Her first hit came serendipitously, after a pregnant Ella Mae Morse canceled a session to record a new song by Mercer and Harold Arlen for the movie-star-studded, morale-boosting musical Star-Spangled Rhythm. Whiting already had a song waiting for release, but this new Mercer-Arlen one was guaranteed to open to a wider audience. Her recording of "That Old Black Magic" became a hit across the country (it was later sung memorably by Marilyn Monroe in the movie Bus Stop). Columbia quickly followed up with the song she had recorded first, "My Ideal." It too became a hit, and with her first releases Whiting was a nationwide star.

In the turmoil of World War II, Whiting's warm, stable delivery embodied the sound of home to soldiers overseas and to their loved ones in the States. Along with Peggy Lee and Jo Stafford , Whiting was, as she noted in her autobiography, a "vocal pinup" whose "records were spun on beat-up phonographs all over the world." She credited her friend Art Tatum, the jazz pianist, as her greatest influence, remarking that his "happy approach" to music taught her to enjoy singing. In 1944, her recording of "Moon-light in Vermont" sold two million copies. Whiting also devoted much time and energy to the war effort, waiting tables and singing each week at the Hollywood Canteen and performing at air bases, Army camps, and Navy bases.

The innocence and optimism her voice conveyed were particularly well suited to the postwar era, as the Allied victory left the majority of Americans awash in patriotism and economic prosperity. Between 1946 and 1954, Whiting had 40 hit songs, including "It Might As Well Be Spring," "Faraway Places," "(I'm in Love with) A Wonderful Guy," "A Tree in the Meadow," and "Come Rain or Come Shine." Many of these are now regarded as standards, frequently heard on radio stations devoted to music of the era and covered by cabaret performers. Whiting was an unabashedly commercial singer with a smoothly polished style and—thanks to her songwriter father—great respect for songs as they had been written, and she rarely expressed any untoward emotion or experimented with the meanings or stylings of the songs she sang. She had 13 gold records, and was a staple on live radio broadcasts. In 1949, she teamed with country star Jimmy Wakely for a number of duets, including the #1 hit "Slippin' Around," which they performed to loud acclaim at the Grand Ole Opry. In the early 1950s, as more and more Americans began purchasing television sets and radio began to dim beside the new medium, Whiting made regular appearances on the live variety shows that were popular. She was the resident vocalist on "The Bob Hope Show," and in 1955 and 1956 had her own series, "Those Whiting Girls," a summer replacement for Lucille Ball 's "I Love Lucy." The story of two sisters in show business, the show costarred her sister Barbara Whiting and included Margaret singing a song in each episode.

When rock 'n' roll began to eat away at the popularity of the romantic ballad, Whiting's wide popularity also started to decline. After a brief attempt to fit her style to the new hardedged music, she began singing in supper clubs and cabarets—often including new songs in her act—and appearing in charity benefits. Whiting also began starring off-Broadway and on tour in musicals, including Call Me Madam, Anything Goes, Girl Crazy, and Gypsy; Gypsy Rose Lee called her the best Mama Rose (a part originated by Ethel Merman ) she had seen. In the later 1970s and 1980s, Whiting was a longtime member of the touring revue 4 Girls 4, which also featured Rosemary Clooney, Helen O'Connell , and Rose Marie . And although she had always eschewed jazz in favor of the easy-listening pop that made her famous, she also began singing jazz standards and occasionally performing in jazz clubs.

Whiting, the mother of one daughter, Debbie Whiting , was married and divorced three times, and never lacked for male companionship. (She once had an affair with actor John Garfield.) In 1976, she met Jack Wrangler, then a superstar in the world of gay pornography. Despite their disparate lives and the fact that she was 22 years his senior, they fell in love, and have been happily and unapologetically together since then. A resident of New York City since the mid-1960s, Whiting is the head of the Johnny Mercer Foundation and conducts a master class each summer at the Cabaret Symposium of the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut. She published her autobiography, It Might as Well Be Spring, in 1987. After recovering from a knee injury caused by a fall on a city street in 1998, she returned to performing in concert and in cabarets in New York City and elsewhere. "I've never been a Judy Garland or a Paul Newman," she once said, "but I've gone everywhere and seen everything. And I'm always learning new things. Charles Laughton once told Bette Davis , 'Never be afraid to hang yourself.' I keep that in my wallet."

sources:

Celebrity Register, 1990. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1990.

DeLong, Thomas A. Radio Stars. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996.

Hemming, Roy, and David Hajdu. Discovering Great Singers of Classic Pop. NY: Newmarket, 1991.

Kinkle, Roger D. The Complete Encyclopedia of Popular Music and Jazz, 1900–1950. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1974.

The New York Times Biographical Service. August 1977, pp. 1168–1169.

People Weekly. May 4, 1987.

suggested reading:

Whiting, Margaret. It Might as Well Be Spring. NY: William Morrow, 1987.

Rebecca Parks , Detroit, Michigan