Lawrence Tibbett

HE ONCE PICKED GRAPES TO PAY HIS RENT— TODAY HE EARNS FIVE DOLLARS A SECOND
 
In 1922, Lawrence Tibbett was living near Los Angeles having a hard time trying to support his wife. He sang in a church choir on Sunday, and picked up five dollars now and then by singing Oh, Promise Me! at a wedding.
 
He had studied for years; but he wasn’t getting anywhere. However, he had a friend, Rupert Hughes, who believed in him. Hughes said: "You have the makings of a great voice. You ought to study in New York.”

That little bit of friendly encouragement proved to be the turning point in Tibbett’s life, for it caused him to borrow twenty-five hundred dollars and start East. What if he failed to make good in New York? Well, if he did, he was determined to go back to California and make a living selling automobile trucks.
 
That was in 1922. Is Lawrence Tibbett selling automobile trucks today? Far from it! He is now selling his services for thousands of dollars a week in Hollywood. You probably heard him sing in such motion pictures as The Rogue Song, New Moon and The Cuban Love Song.
 
And the next time you hear his stirring voice on the radio, it may interest you to recall that someone is paying him three hundred dollars a minute, or five dollars a second, to sing to you.
 
In 1922, Lawrence Tibbett was so poor he couldn’t afford to live in town. ... So he rented a house in the country. Fortunately, the house stood in the middle of a vineyard; he got all the grapes he wanted to eat free; and he confessed that there were times when he had very little to eat except grapes. The house cost him only twelve dollars and fifty cents a month; but little as that was, it was sometimes more than he could make as a singer. He once got ten months behind in his rent and had to pick grapes and prune vines to pay off his debt.
 
He rented a piano for five dollars a month, but he couldn’t put it in the front room because the rickety old house stood on a steep hillside and the front part of it was propped up on high stilts and he was afraid the piano would fall through the floor and go rolling and bouncing through the grape vines until it struck the bottom of the hill.
 
When he first came to New York, he couldn’t afford to buy even the cheapest seat in the Metropolitan Opera House. So he used to pay two dollars and twenty cents for the privilege of standing up in the back of the mighty Metropolitan Opera House to listen to the glamorous performances of the immortal Scotti and the beautiful Mary Garden. In those days, he had to borrow money from his friends to pay for his room rent and music lessons.
 
Yet ten years later, he himself was striding across the proud stage of the Metropolitan, arousing a frenzy of wild huzzas, winning twenty-two curtain calls at a single performance and making himself one of the most famous baritones in all the world.
 
Every year there are hundreds of ambitious youngsters with good voices who flock to New York, eager to win fame and fortune. I have often wondered how many of them fail to rise above mediocrity. I asked Lawrence Tibbett, and he said about nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand; he added that the majority of them didn’t fail because they lacked good voices, but because they lacked vocal intelligence. They failed, he said, because they had no gift for showmanship, no ability to grip their audience, to put their songs over, and make people feel what they were singing.
 
Lawrence Tibbett spent his childhood in Bakersfield, California. For years, his father had been a cowboy in California, riding the range, repairing fences, branding calves and battling with cattle rustlers. The old man carried a big pearl-handled revolver in his belt; he was a dead shot. He had two notches in his gun, because he had already killed two cattle thieves, and now he was sheriff of Kern County, California. He had a regular arsenal of guns in the house, and kept a huge bloodhound, with long ears and sad eyes, chained up in the back yard. Whenever a shooting occurred, the phone would ring and Sheriff Tibbett would grab his dog and gun, dash away to the scene of the crime, and put the bloodhound on the trail, and Rod — that was the old bloodhound’s name — Rod would go bellowing across fields and through orchards and Sheriff Tibbett would run behind, holding on to the leash, waving his arms and crying: "Rod’s got him this time. Rod’s got him.” But, instead of catching the criminal, Rod usually tracked down an old cow or a coyote.
 
Being a sheriff seemed like a mighty exciting and glamorous business to young Larry Tibbett, so his boyhood ambition was to be a sheriff himself like his father.
 
Then suddenly a dramatic and tragic thing happened. His father was shot and killed in a battle with Jim McKinney, one of the most notorious bank robbers and gunmen of the West.
 
That shooting changed the whole course of Lawrence Tibbett’s life, for his father was a very religious man, bitterly opposed to smoking and dancing and card playing and the theatre; and Tibbett told me that if his father had not been shot, he himself would never have dared to become a singer and an actor. His father's training still casts a spell over him and even now he seldom smokes more than one cigar a year; and when he does, he has the feeling that he is doing something terribly wrong and that the devil is standing right by his side, urging him on to destruction.
 
As a boy in high school, Tibbett developed an inferiority complex. His mother ran a rooming house. He had only one suit of clothes, his trousers were too short, and he couldn’t buy his best girl an ice cream soda at the corner drug store. The other students snubbed him and paid no attention to him. So he resolved to make a name for himself, and he looked about for a short cut to distinction. He tried to become a member of the glee club and they wouldn’t have him. He tried to get a part in the high school plays . . . and no one wanted him. This boy who was destined to become the most famous singer that ever came out of California was turned down cold when he wanted to sing in a high school concert. The spark of genius didn’t shine through his voice until he was twenty-one years old.
 
Tibbett says that the greatest music is that which thrills you most and that a lot of our popular music is good, very good.
 
The "End of a Perfect Day" is the most popular song ever written. Five million people bought copies of it, and Lawrence Tibbett says that that humble song is a truly great one.
 
He believes that "Old Man River" and "The Rhapsody in Blue" are as fine as anything ever written by the greatest Viennese composers that ever lived.