21: The Incredible, The Unforgettable, Mr Vic Tenetta!
For the majority of human history aptitude in singing has been a question not so much of raw talent but of logistics. It wasn’t so much about “can you hit the notes perfectly and have deep levels of expressiveness and an extensive range?” as “can you physically make yourself heard in the space?” When performing in a theater or music hall or even as small and intimate a venue as a pub, the primary duty of the singer was to make themselves heard above the strings or horns or even simply the dishwashing and chatter. This is why in the earliest recordings of the human voice the singers commonly sound like what we would now describe as opera singers. Even if singing a clearly “lowbrow” popular song as with Charles Harrison’s 1918 number one hit “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” the song is sung with far more gusto and vibrato than we here in the 21st century are used to in our pop songs.
Charles Harrison’s job is primarily that his lungs are powerful enough to make sure the people in the cheap seats can still hear the song without a microphone. This all however began to change when both recorded sound was able to be broadcast and the technology that allowed for recorded sound was adapted to be able to amplify sound. Suddenly a singer didn’t need to be loud to be good, and new genres of singing styles were able to achieve mass appeal. Some singers who previously had sung to audiences no larger than their children on their back porch would be professional singers to large audiences, and the 1920s saw an explosion of new kinds of voices, such as Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family, Louis Armstrong, and most important for our purposes, Rudy Vallée.
Vallée’s singing style ushered in an entirely new way that mass music could be experienced. His style couldn’t be replicated by the symphonic and music hall style of singing of years past without amplification. Because amplification existed, Vallée could impart more expressiveness into his voice and create an intimate setting with the listener. When someone tuned into him singing on the radio or saw him onstage singing into a microphone, the way he sung sounded more like a loved one singing a song in the same room than the massive projection of someone like Al Jolson. His style, soon adopted by many other singers especially in the jazz genre became known as “crooning”. Soon, crooners were leaning into the abilities of microphones and recorded and amplified sound to sing even softer, leading the singer to further levels of intimacy, where singers like Bing Crosby and Russ Columbo sounded less like they were in the next room but more like they were in the same bed, to the point where hand wringing pearl clutchers were decrying the entire style of singing. “Crooning is a degenerate form of singing….No true American would practice this base art” said Boston Cardinal William Henry O’Connell. “Crooning corrupts the minds and ideals of the younger generation." said the New York Singing Teachers Association. Of course by this point in the jazz and pop idioms of the music of the day (and even in some hillbilly and country songs) it was too late, crooning was the vocal style, and nothing was sexier.
By the 1950s, crooners had become fully commodified. While there was little truly subversive about them from the get-go, by the 50s anything approaching rebellion and transgression in their music had been co-oped by record companies who had figured out just the right ratio of sexiness in vocal qualities to be titillating but safe enough to be acceptable to a massive swath of middle America. If Rudy Vallée was Johnny Rotten, the crooners of the 1950s were Sum 41. If Vallée was Motörhead, the crooners of the 1950s were Warrant. If Vallée was Betty Davis*, the crooners of the 1950s were Donna Summer. Rhythm and Blues or “Race” music (becoming “Rock & Roll” in 1955 after Cleveland DJ Alan Freed used the term to describe the new national sensation Elvis Presley) had become the truly transgressive musical art form of its day. By the late 1950s a crooner was a safe, pseudo transgression, the kind of person you might hire to inject a little spice into your black tie corporate holiday party.
Vic Tanetta, Hudsucker’s ficticious crooner appears onscreen for 42 seconds. As with many of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-them characters in the film he’s effectively a prop, there to signify something about the characters and setting more than there to be a character in his own right. He’s played by Peter Gallagher, best known to us here in the future as Seth’s dad, public defense lawyer Sandy Cohen in the Fox dramedy The O.C, a role for which he would gain mass recognition and become America’s supportive dilf. In 1994 however he was a handsome character actor who looked kind of like Dean Martin if you squinted, exactly what Joel & Ethan Coen needed for the character.
Everything about Tenetta’s brief screen time is perfect manufactured cool. He takes his entrance after being introduced as “the raja of romance, the ministerio of moonlight, the incredible, the unforgettable Mr. Vic Tenetta” and the camera pans towards him. The first we see of Tenetta is his perfect ‘who, me?” act. He’s been ‘caught’ mid-sip of his whiskey on the rocks once the spotlight hits him, patently an act as he’s been given three sentences worth of introduction to finish his sip. His bowtie is undone, giving him a casual and relaxed look for a black tie event attendee, and you know he had to do it to ‘em, he’s wearing a white dinner jacket to a black tie event in December. This is what passes for “I don’t give a damn about you and your norms, man” in a way that’s palatable to captains of industry: white after labor day.
As he takes the stage a wide grin appears on his face and he puts his hand on his chest suggesting “what, little old me? Take the stage? You’re too kind”. He carries his whiskey and cigarette to the stage and points at the offstage MC and says, barely audibly “Raja, I like that.” As his schlubby Jordanaires-style backups singers start singing, he faces the camera which tightens in on his face, showing us, as the shooting script indicates: “His jet black hair sweeps out over his forehead in a roguishly pompadoured mat; one forelock droops and bounces across his forehead.” Everything about Vic Tenetta is a kind of rehearsed spontaneity. It’s not like he’s been paid handsomely to sing at the Annual Fancy-Dress Hudsucker Christmas Gala, heavens no! He’s just there as a guest and it just so happens that there’s a stage and a microphone there and seeing as they were gonna have music anyway maybe he could come on stage and sing us a number? If a part of coolness is a greatness of character while displaying minimal effort, Tenetta’s well rehearsed routine shows us how much effort is required in that effortlessness.
Tenetta takes the stage to sing the song “Memories Are Made Of This”, written by Terry Gilkyson, Rich Dehr, and Frank Miller**, better known as “Terry Gilkyson and the Easy Riders”, a one hit wonder from the early 50s with the calypso-influenced song “Marianne”. A version of “Memories Are Made of This” was recorded in 1955 by Dean Martin who made it an instant hit, and it’s likely that Vic Tenetta is the Hudsucker universe’s version of Dean Martin, signifying him without naming him for fear of the real (at the time still alive) Martin’s reaction, a strategy the Coens would repeat with a different mid-century New York movie, Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), as Dave Van Ronk, Peter Paul & Mary, Tom Paxton, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliot were hinted at by the characters Llewyn Davis, Jim & June, Troy Nelson, and Al Cody***. Getting a real deal celebrity to your corporate bash is a time honored tradition that continues to this day as the likes of Janelle Monáe and Imagine Dragons have played Christmas parties for Yahoo and Amazon in the past decade, so it’s entirely probable that the Coens intended the lavish Hudsucker Ball to include a real life rat pack member. The strongest bit of support for the idea that Vic is a real deal Deano analogue though is the swoony reaction of Mrs. Mussburger and Mrs. Braithwaite.
Sure, he sings real pretty and looks real handsome, but no one is going to swoon seven notes into a song unless they’re already familiar with the performer. You swoon like that for the real Dean Martin, you don’t swoon like that for the Dean Martin tribute act. If Tenetta is indeed a Dean Martin analog, the performative aspect of his nonchalance is all the clearer. Dean Martin was not a musician who got carried away in the emotional content of his songs as with someone like Billie Holiday or Hank Williams. He was a proficient singer, but he was first and foremost a comic actor who happened to sing. His vocalizations are skillful, but so are those of Jake & Elwood Blues. Dean Martin’s (and thus Vic Tenetta’s) character of romantic crooner is exactly that, a character. It’s schtick.
The Coens are meticulous planners of their films. When making their first feature Blood Simple (1984) they were able to achieve a much higher production value than their meager $1.5 million budget would allow for by meticulously storyboarding their screenplay and only getting the shots they needed, changing incredibly little between the writing / planning and shooting of the film, and this is a habit they’ve stuck with for the remainder of their career. The shooting script for the christmas party however does not indicate how much of what song Tenetta was supposed to sing. The natural place to cut away from the song then would be after the first verse with the title line “memories are made of this”. This is not where the cut happens however. Gallagher as Tenetta finishes singing the first verse and makes like he’s going to take a sip of his drink during the 8 beat pause between the first and second verses. His attempted sip is leisurely, which means that he can’t quite get the glass to his mouth in those 8 beats, as he stops and goes back to the mic to sing a single word of the second verse: “don’t”.
The fakeout sip is not merely the perfect moment of the scene, it’s one of the most perfect moments of the film. Gallagher caps his performance of Vic Tenetta’s performance of pseudo spontaneity with one last well rehearsed “off the cuff” gesture. “We’re all just pals here, I’m gonna sneak a sip. Oh wait, that next line went and crept up on me!” Tenetta is communicating of a song he has no doubt sung hundreds of times by this point. Gallagher probably performed more of the song than this one verse and one line in filming, and this is how much of the footage the Coens chose to use to get the character across, and ending the song on that “don’t” is such a beautiful move, giving us a dozen little perfect moments about a character who appears onscreen for less than a minute, squeezing all the charm and gags they can into that brief appearance. As with the Pants scene previously discussed in another essay, the scene does not particularly move the plot forward nor does it drive much in the way of character development. It exists as a bridge between Norville getting his lights knocked out by an angry Fin and his subsequent romantic exchange on the balcony. One might argue that it establishes a romantic mood, but at the same time Vic Tenetta doesn’t make Amy Archer swoon, he makes Mrs. Mussburger swoon.
His romantic moods are saccharine and silly, but the performance of this saccharine and silly performance is so wonderfully executed, that when The Atlantic critic Peter Orr wrote his piece on Hudsucker for the magazine’s “30 Years Of Coens” retrospective and said “My favorite role in the film, however, is a brief cameo by Peter Gallagher as a Dean-Martin-style crooner singing ‘Memories Are Made of This.’ Show me the movie about that guy”, my reaction is not “You fool! That movie is so full of wonder! Here, let me show you my essays on it!” so much as it is “You’re right, I’d love a movie about that guy”
*Not Bette Davis, Betty Davis. Look her up. The album They Say I’m Different is a good place to start.
**Not that one.
*** The great irony is that this strategy somewhat backfired for the Coens. Several incidents in the character Llewyn Davis’s life and the title of his album / the film come directly from Dave Van Ronk’s memoirs The Mayor of MacDougal Street and his album Inside Dave Van Ronk. The Coens gave their character who shares life events with Van Ronk a different name primarily because they wanted to write the character as kind of a jerk in order to drive conflict in the plot without implying that Van Ronk himself was a jerk. Unfortunately though Van Ronk’s friends from the time period recognized Van Ronk’s songs and biographical information being used, but Dave Van Ronk was apparently an incredibly nice person with little personality-wise in common with the acerbic Llewyn Davis, causing many surviving Greenwich folkies to decry the film.