Two gifts of God: Woman and Al Martino

October 24, 2009 12:36 am

Al Martino could find the way to your heart and remind it that it wasn't there just to pump blood to your toes.

YOU DID NOT have to be Italian to be a crooner-- Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, and Andy Williams stood outside the gates of Romulus--but Italian-American singers of sentimental songs certainly were, as the statisticians say, "overrepresented" on the musical charts during the 1940s and '50s. This month, one of their gifted number, Al Martino, died at age 82.

Mr. Martino, Philadelphia-born, was probably not in the first rank of these musical romantics, alongside Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Tony Bennett, and Perry Como. But even a fair-to-middling crooner--the word comes, oddly, from the old German for "growl"--beats a superstar of most genres, and Mr. Martino was much better than fair-to-middling.

In his signature tunes--"Spanish Eyes," "Mary in the Morning," the love theme from "The Godfather"--Mr. Martino didn't drill to the core of your soul, take a portion of your anguish, then lift you up to glory the way Frank could do. He didn't send you smiling, off your stool with the cuts salved, for another round of lacerating, lovely life à la Dino. Rather, Mr. Martino's beautiful baritone sought the human heart, softly reminding it of its purpose lest, like any muscle, it grow weak from disuse.

Consider "Spanish Eyes." The respectable husband must confess, from the perspective of maturity, to say nothing of fear of the frying pan, that the woman he truly loves best is his wife. But should his mind stray to women he loved second-best, in years past or climes distant, he will find no better ferryman to old feelings than Mr. Martino cherishing "blue Spanish eyes prettiest eyes in all of Mexico"--which may also be brown eyes in Seoul or green eyes in Dayton, Ohio, this transport making any requested stop in place or time.

Or timelessness. Mr. Martino and his fraternity told an old story--the first story, really--of a man in painful longing who informed God that, with all due respect, He was not enough. So God provided Adam the gift of Eve, a present Adam's sons have been trying ever since to unwrap, one embodiment at a time.

The genius of the crooners was to know that this is best done with chivalrous heart and pure hands. Is it chance that popes and pop singers--most of the best ones, anyhow--are predominantly Italian? Mr. Martino, et al., in their art approached women almost as though they were facsimiles of Our Lady, and made hymns of their love songs. Nothing's quite as pretty as Mary in the morning, whatever Mary's name is.

Late in life, Mr. Martino reportedly lamented: "I can't sell records in stores anymore. I don't have the access to younger audiences. But 20 or 30 years from now, how are kids going to feel romance?" Actually, no one need wait decades for an answer. Reports from the cultural front indicate that courtship is on life support, with "hooking up" the standard boy-girl introduction to intimacy and "shacking up" increasingly the alternative to devotional matrimony. "Up" now evidently means down.

But one believes that somewhere today (and also tomorrow, and a million tomorrows hence) a young man beholds a young woman with a feeling stronger than the coarsening indoctrination of a tawdry culture, an awe like that summoned by the prayer of saints, and that that feeling is reciprocated. And that there to fan the spark between two hearts will be an angel. Chances are, it will hold a microphone, wear a tuxedo, and remind them that it is a very good year for pocket-full-of-starlight amore and lovely eyes Spanish or otherwise.