Back in the days of Napster (end of the 90s into early 2000s), I discovered the music of Julie London. To me, she was just a faded 50s lounge singer, known for her whispery, husky voice who had one fluke hit, "Cry Me a River" (which I knew better from Joe Cocker's sped-up version). I knew she had starred in the hit 70s TV series Emergency but I'd never seen an episode of that. At any rate, her sultry version of the bubblegum song "Yummy Yummy Yummy" was included on an episode of Six Feet Under. I was quite taken with it, searched Napster for recordings by her, and downloaded a handful of them. This eventually led, as Napstering often did, to me buying some of her music on CD and later on iTunes. I became a fan, but still didn't know much about her except that her album covers were quite sexy. So I was excited when I saw Go Slow, a biography of London by Michael Owen, at the library.
I discovered that Julie London's career in music and movies was never really a high priority for her. The movies she co-starred in, often B-grade westerns, weren't big hits. After "Cry Me a River," she never hit the Billboard singles chart again, and though she recorded some thirty albums, only a handful of those charted--however, she must have sold enough copies to please Liberty, her record company, who kept releasing her music for 15 years. As far as I can tell, this is the only book about London in print. It ended up being more about her career and her music than about her as a person, which is par for the course for bios that are pieced together mostly from press releases and old interviews. Still, if this never really scratches the surface of her personal life, it is a fairly exhaustive survey of her albums and her concert and club appearances.
If Owen couldn't hunt down many people who knew her well (she died in 2000), he did manage to collect lots of information about her recording sessions, her live shows, and her movie roles. It seems that London didn't really think much of her own singing, and admitted she didn't have the drive or ambition to keep a career going full steam ahead. In a misguided attempt to find a tragic flaw, Owen occasionally hints that she may have had problems with alcohol--she often needed a nip or two before recording--but though he brings the subject up often, he never digs up any evidence of real alcohol abuse, or ways in which her drinking hurt her family. The closest thing to a tragedy is her first marriage to actor and producer Jack Webb, which seemed to have been an unhappy relationship all around. However, years after their divorce, he became friendly with London and her second husband. musician Bobby Troup, and Webb was responsible for getting London and Troup roles in his series Emergency, the success of which seems to have made it possible for London to retire from show business in the early 1980s. The middle of the book drags, becoming a string of unvarying descriptions of her live show, but still I enjoyed the chapters about her recordings, and I am now more interested than ever in getting more acquainted with her music. [BTW, the title of this post is the name of one of her more notorious albums]
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