BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. –Johnny Mathis, master of the velvet vibrato, exercises with a personal trainer at 5:30 in the blasted morning every weekday that he’s not on perpetual tour of midsize cities and casinos.
“Everything counts when you’re onstage,” he says, perched on a stationary bike at a hotel gym. “The age thing crept into my life for the first time when I became 80 years old.”
Which was two years ago. Mathis’s self-discipline extends to a practice of limited talking in the days before a concert to maintain his lustrous tenor, “which is everything” — his livelihood, his identity.
His music became the soundtrack for people’s lives, for their loves and heartaches. And literal soundtracks: “Goodfellas,” “Play Misty for Me,” “Mad Men.” In 2017, he recorded an album covering contemporary hits (Adele, Bruno Mars, Josh Groban) with smooth-jazz trimmings: “Johnny Mathis Sings the Great New American Songbook.” But his fans require the classics. His crystalline enunciation, caressing every note, never quite jelled with rock ‘n’ roll.
Mathis sports an enviable halo of sable hair. He’s trim, fit, natty and a surprisingly compact 5-foot-7. Little reveals his age except a slight shuffle (two titanium hips) and his 1950s songbook. At every concert, he performs “my holy grail” of hits — “Chances Are,” “The Twelfth of Never,” “Misty,” “It’s Not for Me to Say” — from the days when he held court on Ed Sullivan and headlined the Copa Room at the Las Vegas Sands.
“You have to take advantage of every opportunity,” Mathis says, flat on his back in socked feet while lifting 20-pound free weights. “New generations come along all the time who don’t know who you are. It gets very embarrassing. Go to the man behind the desk at the hotel. You go, ‘Mr. Mathis.’ And they say, ‘Who?’ ”
Here’s who: Columbia Records’ longest-running recording artist. An album-selling juggernaut whose 1958 “Johnny’s Greatest Hits” spent almost a decade on Billboard’s chart.
A confidant of Nancy Reagan (“we talked about everything and everyone”), who nudged him to deal with his champagne habit at a Jesuit rehab in Havre de Grace, Md. Collegiate high-jump champion whose 6-foot-5 1/2 record bested that of future NBA legend Bill Russell.
Winner of the Sinatra-vs.-Mathis “best make-out singer” debate, as adjudicated in the 1982 film “Diner.” The unlikely role model of high-camp maven John Waters, who once hailed him as “so unironic, yet perfect.”
Victim of Dr. Feelgood-to-the-stars Max Jacobson, whose infamous amphetamine cocktail landed Mathis in the hospital and almost sidelined his career. A singer’s singer: Barbra Streisand proclaimed, “There are a number of good singers, a smaller handful of truly great singers, and then there’s Johnny Mathis.”
A black artist favored by predominantly white audiences. A gay man adored by female fans.
“Poised on the cusp of black and white, masculine and feminine,” Mathis’s finest songs “projected an image of egoless tenderness, an irresistible breath of sensuality,” critic Robert Christgau wrote.
Long before the terms “multiracial and “gender-fluid” came into vogue, Mathis owned those spaces. He was a man in the vanguard but performing as a most traditional artist, with a catalogue of classics and a 29-piece band.
Face matched voice
And, why, yes, he was gorgeous.
The face, dimpled chin and all, matched the voice. “I fell in love with him immediately. He’s one of the most handsome men I’ve met,” says Deniece Williams, the R&B star who collaborated with Mathis in the ’70s.
“I was cute,” Mathis concedes, resting in a lounge chair in his furnished penthouse rental. “I had curly hair. I was not hostile. I was very agreeable. And I sang pretty songs. Most of the time, I sang them pretty good.”
Yet, he says, “fans were often surprised to discover I was black,” even though his face graced every album cover. White admirers perceived him as one of them. Mathis knew his past was more complicated than black and white, as was his place in popular culture. His maternal grandmother was part Choctaw, and he suspects that his grandfather, whom his mother never knew, was white.
“I had to find out who I was. So I decided that I was everything,” he says. “I was taught singing by my dad and by this white lady, my voice teacher.” He attended the opera and haunted jazz clubs. “I was comfortable with Leontyne Price, Beverly Sills, Miles Davis, Cole Porter.”
Mathis revered Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Nat “King” Cole. He knew them all, and oh, honey, the stories. (Lena Horne was “the beginning, middle and end of everything, but she was a piece of work.”) Good luck getting the details, though; Mathis is quick to retreat to courtly discretion.
Faultlessly polite
He’s a marvelous mimic but faultlessly polite. He has plenty of opinions. He prefers not to be known for them. Mathis has to like the person to respect the artist. So we will not speak of Sinatra, although he adores the man’s daughters. Of Streisand, he once confessed that he “was always a little frightened of her … she has a reputation for being difficult to work with.” Now, he calls her “one of my best pals. I love what she does. I love her work ethic.”
His singing voice is lush and seductive. His public persona remains remote and anodyne. At a post-concert meet-and-great, he’s dutiful and gracious, but both hands are shoved deep into his khaki pockets.
Mathis rarely speaks about politics or race, sexuality or gender politics. He was the child of domestics, and he remains respectful of tradition, even while being a trailblazer in the industry, and grateful for his success. He never delighted in being a symbol or a pioneer. Public speaking has never been a forte.
At his concerts, Mathis is typically one of the few black people in the theater. “My crowds have long been 90 percent white. It’s all about the perception of the music,” he says. “There must be a thousand reasons, but none of them are valid.”
Mathis maintains that racial bias never affected him growing up in the 1940s and ’50s — not until he toured the South, but again, he shies from the details. Although he helped raise money for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington, Mathis never felt comfortable putting himself out there, or making a ruckus.
With age, Mathis has become more forthcoming. The crooner is expansive on subjects he has long swatted away with enigmatic responses.
“I’ve been to the White House thousands of times,” he says. Part of a politician’s job is “to be gracious. When you’re not gracious, people don’t vote for you,” he says. Mathis gestures toward President Donald Trump, looming nearby on a massive screen, with CNN tuned to mute. “How did he slip by?”
