Ventura County Star: Local group's effort to get Rudy Vallee

[silentfilm]

http://www.venturacountystar.com/news/2 ... ing-to-it/

Local group's effort to get Rudy Vallee his own stamp sheds light on a sometimes arduous process
Sticking to it
By Brett Johnson
Sunday, May 31, 2009


Photo courtesy of Eleanor Vallee

Rudy Vallee greets Queen Elizabeth II during a film festival command performance in 1954, the year after she was crowned queen.

Sticking to it
Local group's effort to get Rudy Vallee his own stamp sheds light on a sometimes arduous process.

For more on commemorative stamps, the 12 criteria for choosing them and the Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee, visit http://www.usps.com/communications/orga ... n/csac.htm.

For more on the campaign to get Rudy Vallee on one, including where to send letters of support, see http://www.rudyvalleestamp.com. For general information on the crooner, see http://www.rudyvallee.com.

For more on Vallee memorabilia and the American Radio Archives housed at the Grant R. Brimhall Library in Thousand Oaks, visit http://www.americanradioarchives.com/collections.htm.

In the somewhat secretive world of stamps, Rudy Vallee is crooning a sad song into a megaphone and Bob Hope is belting out more thanks for the memories.

That’s because Hope’s legacy now includes a commemorative stamp, issued Friday (the 106th anniversary of his birth) by the U.S. Postal Service amid fanfare that included a ceremony on the USS Midway in San Diego.

Hope, who once owned sizable chunks of land in Ventura County, joins the rarefied list of celebrities honored with postage that includes Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and Frank Sinatra.

But Vallee — deemed by his widow Eleanor as “the Elvis of his day,” said to have influenced Sinatra’s style and who once had his own candy bar — will not get such an honor. At least not now, despite a lobbying effort that included a little help from a library in Thousand Oaks where much of his archives are housed.

A key Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee, a mix of celebrities and academic types that meets quarterly, last month rejected the idea of putting Vallee on postage. The Vallee camp says it will appeal the decision, which it can do next year.

The cases of Vallee and Hope, whose careers ran largely concurrently (Hope’s first big radio appearance was on Vallee’s show in 1937), offer a little spotlight on the fascinating and difficult arena of determining who and what get chosen to be on our stamps.

The Postal Service gets about 50,000 application letters each year concerning commemorative stamps, stationery and the like. It does about 25 special stamps annually now, said Terry McCaffrey, manager of stamp development at the agency’s suburban Washington, D.C., headquarters.

Not all 25 are celebrities, he noted. Commemorative stamps also include flowers, lighthouses, historical things, and anniversaries of major events.

“We certainly get a lot of requests,” McCaffrey said. “We’d love to do them all, but unfortunately we can’t.”

The stamp committee has existed since 1957, McCaffrey said; in that time, the Postal Service has run about 3,000 commemorative stamp subjects.

Forget a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame; having someone adhere or lick your likeness to the upper-right corner of an envelope is a far more exclusive club.

Elvis was the first “real entertainment figure” to get a stamp, back in 1993, McCaffrey said, adding that the Postal Service has done about 100 entertainers total. (Compare that to the 2,383 stars on the Walk of Fame — both Vallee and Hope have one of those.)

There are 12 criteria for stamp selection. Among them: Candidates must be American and they must have been dead at least five years. The exception to the latter is presidents; they can be honored with a stamp on their first birth anniversary after their death.

Broad national appeal is another stamp criterion, and that certainly describes Elvis, Dean, Monroe, Sinatra and, now, Hope (who died in 2003).

“Stars not of that magnitude are going to have a tougher time, quite frankly,” McCaffrey said.

Assessing Vallee against those names, he added, “I would say he’s not quite up there in that league in terms of the recognition factor.”

‘America’s Troubadour’

Eleanor Vallee understandably will have none of that. She thinks her late husband, who died in 1986 at age 84, belongs in the same sentence.

“I think he’s way ahead of all of those,” said Eleanor, who has remarried (to actor Byron Clarke) and lives in the Los Angeles area. “He was the icon. He started it all. They should do it for all of them, but Rudy deserves one as well.

“If they do birds and Donald Duck, then they certainly can do one for Rudy Vallee.”

Brad Butler, a public relations account executive whose company was hired by Eleanor to advance the stamp idea, pointed out that Vallee had a 50-year career in entertainment that included singing, Broadway, TV and movies. He even did a three-show arc in 1967 as the villainous Lord Marmaduke Ffogg on the campy “Batman” TV show.

His crooning style is said to have influenced not only Sinatra but also Bing Crosby and Perry Como. Vallee recorded “As Time Goes By” more than a dozen years before it became famous in the 1942 Humphrey Bogart-Ingrid Bergman classic “Casablanca.”

“He was the original pop singer,” Butler averred. “He had women throwing underwear onstage at him.”

Added Eleanor, “He was the Elvis of his day.”

He’s said to have had the first radio talk show, in 1928. His likeness appeared on jigsaw puzzles, one 1933 box touting him as “America’s Troubadour.” Vallee also had his own candy bar, called the Candy Mello-D, in 1931. Made in Maine, where he grew up, it promised “a new thrill in candy.”

“It’s hard to estimate just how popular he was back in the day,” said Jeanette Berard, special collections librarian at the Grant R. Brimhall Library in Thousand Oaks, where Vallee memorabilia is the cornerstone of its American Radio Archives collections.

Eleanor is going to his Westbrook, Maine, hometown in July to rededicate Rudy Vallee Square. There, she noted, his dad had a drugstore.

“Rudy was a soda jerk there as a boy,” she said.

Eleanor was the last of his four wives; she and Rudy married in 1949 after meeting several years earlier in Lake Tahoe, where her family vacationed every summer.

Eleanor went with Rudy as he entertained all over the map. Gary Cooper was a dinner companion; Jimmy Durante also was among those who dropped by their home off Mulholland Drive. Ronald Reagan was a close friend, as were Richard and Pat Nixon, and Johnny Carson.

“We went everywhere, did everything,” Eleanor recalled. “We had so many friends. I had a wonderful life with him.”

She wasted no time when asked what she remembered most about him.

“He was a sexy, sexy man, and he was my husband,” she said in a long, drawn out, husky voice, followed by a laugh.

A rubber stamp

The Postal Service declined to comment on why the committee specifically rejected the Vallee stamp, which apparently occurred at its most recent meeting, in late April in Tampa.

The committee’s meetings are not public and are completely confidential. “It’s all done in secret,” McCaffrey said.

The committee, appointed by the postmaster general, currently has 13 members (and a maximum of 15). They include actor Karl Malden; former Vice President Walter Mondale’s wife, Joan; former Olympic gold-medal swimmer and TV commentator Donna de Varona; past American Film Institute director Jean Firstenberg; and academicians such as Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Said McCaffrey of its wide-ranging makeup, “It makes for some interesting meetings, believe me.”

The next one will be held in July in Portland, Ore., to be followed by an October meeting in Washington, D.C.

Getting the committee’s blessing is a virtual rubber stamp for getting a stamp. For although final approval rests with the postmaster general (a post first helmed by Benjamin Franklin back in 1775), it is rare for a committee’s thumbs-up recommendation to be overturned.

McCaffrey has worked with the committee since 1990 and can recall only two instances in which the postmaster general has gone against it.

Asked which two got rejected this way, McCaffrey replied: “We don’t talk about that. Then the estates get mad.”

McCaffrey, who made his comments before the committee’s recent rejection, indicated that including Vallee in a group stamp series might be a better option.

For example, in 1995 the Postal Service put out a stamp series celebrating 10 silent-film stars, including Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Rudolph Valentino, Clara Bow and Theda Bara.

“How many people remember who Theda Bara was?” McCaffrey observed. “That’s why we grouped them together, so it made a solid package.”

Hypothetically, Vallee could be included in a radio-era-stars series with Fred Allen, Kate Smith and Jimmy Durante, all of whom are under consideration for stamps, McCaffrey said.

Rootin’ for Rudy

Vallee’s heyday has long since passed; most of his fans (and thus would-be stamp buyers) are likely also dead. Asked if that would hurt him and others of his ilk, McCaffrey replied, “To a certain audience they’re remembered, so there’s still a chance.”

But, he added, it’s hard to tell what the committee will do.

“Some stamp ideas have sat in the books for 10 or 15 years before we found the right vehicle for them,” he said.

Audie Murphy, a war hero who later became a star of Western films, was under consideration for 12 years before the committee grouped him in a series honoring distinguished World War II soldiers, McCaffrey recalled.

The committee, he said, considers the volumes of support raised by letter-writing and e-mail campaigns — such as those waged by Eleanor Vallee’s camp, an effort that included postcards at the Thousand Oaks library.

The postcards have drawn interest; Berard said she got a request for one from a hard-core prisoner in Arizona. “He’s a big Rudy fan,” she said.

The support campaigns also are used to gauge the size of a stamp run should one be OK’d, McCaffrey indicated.

An average run is about 40 million to 60 million stamps, he said. For icons, it tends to be higher. The Hope run is slated for 100 million stamps; Sinatra’s, issued last May, was 120 million.

But the undisputed champ is Elvis, back in 1993. The Postal Service ran a whopping 500 million stamps “and they all sold out,” McCaffrey noted.

“He’s still the King,” he said. “That’s the all-time most-collected stamp we have.”

It also was a revenue boon for the Postal Service. “We made $26 million off that one stamp alone,” McCaffrey said.

Of course, he noted, that was back when the Postal Service was issuing, and people were using, more stamps.

In 1929, Rudy Vallee dropped by a Brooklyn post office to stump for a “mail-early” campaign urging people to not wait until Dec. 24 to send their Christmas packages. He did it for free as a favor to the Postal Service.

Some 80 years later, Rudy stamp backers would love to get a return favor.


© 2009 Ventura County Star