Jack Jones, a suave, hit-making and enduring crooner, dies at 86

Jack Jones performs at the Oak Room in New York, on Oct. 26, 2010. Jones, the crooner who beguiled concert fans and stage, screen and television audiences for decades with romantic ballads and gentle jazz tunes that even in large venues often achieved the intimacy of his celebrated nightclub performances, died in Rancho Mirage, Calif. He was 86. (Matthew Murphy/The New York Times)

By Robert D. McFadden

Jack Jones, a crooner who beguiled concert fans and stage, screen and television audiences for decades with romantic ballads and gentle jazz tunes that even in large venues often achieved the intimacy of his celebrated nightclub performances, died Wednesday in Rancho Mirage, California. He was 86.

His wife, Eleonora Jones, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was leukemia.

While his popularity peaked in the 1960s, Jones found a new audience in later years singing the theme to the hit television show “The Love Boat.” But even then he seemed always to have stepped out of an earlier generation, one that dressed in tuxedos for the songs of Tin Pan Alley and reminded America of its love affairs with the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen.

He won two Grammy Awards and recorded numerous albums of American Songbook favorites that hit the upper reaches of Billboard’s charts on the strength of his smooth vocal interpretations. He performed at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, the White House and the London Palladium, and for more than 60 years drew crowds to cabarets and nightclubs around the world.

At the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan in 2010, marking his 52nd year in show business, Jones opened and closed a two-hour retrospective of his songs with Paul Williams’ “That’s What Friends Are For.” He sang to a packed house of longtime fans:

Friends are like warm clothesIn the night air.Best when they’re oldAnd we miss them the most when they’re gone.

“Those lyrics evoked the vanishing breed of pop-jazz crooner, of which Mr. Jones and Tony Bennett remain the great survivors,” Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times. “Mr. Jones, now 72, draws the same kind of well-dressed sophisticated audiences that used to attend the annual appearances at the defunct Michael’s Pub of his friend Mel Tormé, who died 11 years ago at 73.”

Holden called the show “a kind of master class in traditional nightclub performance: suave but intimate, alternately preening and humble, seemingly casual but seamlessly professional,” adding, “most of the old songs responded to Mr. Jones’ thoughtful outlook, which tinges everything with the sense of a man taking a moral inventory of his life.”

Jones, the son of Hollywood actress Irene Hervey and Allan Jones, a tenor singing star of the 1930s and ’40s who romped with the Marx Brothers in “A Night at the Opera” and “A Day at the Races,” started out in a Las Vegas father-and-son act when he was 19, in which he tried to copy his dad’s forceful style. It was a mistake.

“My voice was less mature than his,” Jones told the Times in 1964. “We had a well-received act with a lot of references to Mom and home. But then my folks were divorced, and that knocked the wind out of the whole thing. I went out on my own, and my salary dropped, but I felt better.”

He began recording and singing in clubs, but with a different approach: crooning the lyrics. It was a magical transformation of his singing style and stage presence to something more casual, and it made an intimate emotional connection with audiences. It became his trademark.

On the 1960s pop scene, Jones was an anomaly, ignoring rock ’n’ roll in favor of big-band arrangements, romantic ballads and the American Songbook.

He recorded dozens of albums on the Kapp label, including “Dear Heart,” “Shall We Dance,” “She Loves Me,” “Call Me Irresponsible,” “I’ve Got a Lot of Livin’ to Do” and “The Jack Jones Christmas Album.” He won Grammy Awards for best solo male vocal performance for “Lollipops and Roses” in 1962 and “Wives and Lovers” in 1964.

He sang the title songs of several films, including “Love With the Proper Stranger” (1963), “Where Love Has Gone” (1964) and “A Ticklish Affair” (1963). He sang at White House parties during the presidencies of Lyndon B. Johnson and Ronald Reagan and performed twice for Queen Elizabeth II and the royal family.

Jones reached No. 1 on the Billboard easy listening chart with “The Impossible Dream” (1966) and “Lady” (1967). He was a staple on television variety shows hosted by Dinah Shore, Ed Sullivan, Andy Williams, Carol Burnett, Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, Judy Garland and Steve Allen. And millions more heard him when they tuned into “The Love Boat” on ABC from 1977 through 1985. (He was replaced by Dionne Warwick for the show’s last season.)

John Allan Jones was born in Los Angeles on Jan. 14, 1938, and spent his first few years living in a movie colony bungalow in Palm Springs, California, attended by hired help while his famous parents commuted to Hollywood to make movies. He had a half brother, Ted Jones, and an adopted half sister, Gail Jones, by a previous marriage of his father’s.

Jack, as he was always known, attended the Nellie Coffman School in Palm Springs and, for two years, the Principia School, a Christian Science boarding institution in St. Louis. He also had private drama and singing tutors at home, hired by his father. He was self-conscious about his privileged life when he enrolled at University High School in Los Angeles, class of 1956. His father sometimes drove him to school, but dropped him off a block or two away.

Jack Jones, who lived in Indian Wells, California, was married six times, and all but his last marriage ended in divorce.

He was married to Katie Lee Nuckols (a model also known as Lee Larance) from 1960 to 1966; actress Jill St. John from 1967 to 1969; Gretchen Roberts from 1970 to 1971; Kathryn Simmons from 1977 to 1982; and Kim Ely from 1982 to 2005. He married Eleonora Donata Peters in 2009.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by a daughter, Crystal Thomas, from his marriage to Nuckols; another daughter, Nicole Ramasco, from his marriage to Ely; two stepdaughters, Nicole Whitty and Colette Peters, from his marriage to Peters; and three grandchildren.