Ruth Olay was a secretary working for the maverick Hollywood screenwriter Preston Sturges when she was given the chance to fulfil her dream of singing with a jazz band. The 23-year-old single mother had persuaded the jazz composer and arranger Benny Carter, who knew her as Rachel, to hire her for a four-week, out-of-town engagement.
In 2000 she recalled how her personnel manager told her that she could not expect to return to her job if she took a month off. “I said: ‘I don’t care.’ I told Benny’s sister, Edna, and she said: ‘Rachel! Do you know how hard it is to get jobs in the studios?’ She meant for blacks. We’d been friends all along and she thought I was coloured, to use the old phrase.”
In fact she was Jewish and of Hungarian descent. She had longed to become a jazz singer since childhood, and had spent her teenage years hanging out at Sunday afternoon jam sessions in clubs on Central Avenue in Los Anglees. “I was so innocent. I never even smoked a joint. I never did anything. I just loved the music.” It was not a conscious decision to pretend to be black, she explained decades later. “I was so unaware it didn’t occur to me.
“In the summers I used to get very, very dark. I had short dark curly hair and I could have been anything. It was an all-black band. I always felt very much a part of the black community. It just never occurred to me that there was going to be a problem. I knew that we couldn’t eat in certain restaurants. But I let Benny and the guys handle that. I was just along for the ride. I had a good time.”
Despite this auspicious debut, her career did not take off until the late 1950s when she became known as “a singer’s singer”. Rosemary Clooney and Frank Sinatra were among those who marvelled at her regal stage presence, her dramatic way with a ballad and her trademark pronounced vibrato. Even then, and despite performing across the US, in Copenhagen and London (at the Colony Club), she remained a cult figure; one whose talent was best appreciated live rather than on the few albums she recorded, though her operatic approach to jazz singing was an acquired taste.
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She was born Ruth Nina Lissauer in 1924 in San Francisco but raised in Los Angeles. At the time of her birth her father, Herman, was a rabbi and her mother, Nina (née Weiss), was a classical singer who had paused her career before her eldest child, Saul, was born. She also had an older sister, Myra.
In 1930, her father quit the rabbinate and left her mother. He eventually became head of research at Warner Bros. Her mother resumed her career, singing in the chorus of Paramount musicals and at the Hollywood Bowl.
When it became clear that Ruth also had singing talent, her mother tried to push her in the same direction. “I had a feeling for music, all right. But when mother tried to teach me opera, I put a beat to it. I immersed myself in jazz records and jazz music. I was eight then, and I told my mother that I knew what I wanted in life — to become a jazz singer. I never yielded. My poor mother finally was forced to throw up her arms in despair.”
In her teens she was working as a secretary at 20th Century Fox when she heard about the Sunday jam sessions that were attended by leading jazz musicians such as Erroll Garner. Ivie Anderson, the former Duke Ellington vocalist, took her under her wing, and brought her up to sing for the first time in front of an audience at her regular gig. It became a weekly event.
Anderson, who died not long afterwards, made a terrific impression on the young singer. “I saw how she stood; the attitude she had. And I made that part of me. She was magnificent, and very kind.”
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In 1947 she married for the first time, to the Spanish writer Lionel Olay. Their daughter, Amy, survives her, along with her son, Adam, the product of her third brief marriage, to Lee Magid, an artists’ representative. In between she married Richard Friedlander.
She loved working for the eccentric writer-director Sturges. “He always took me out for dinner. If he didn’t, he ordered mounds of sandwiches from the Players Club that he owned up on the Sunset Strip, and shakers full of whiskey sours. Then he’d go into his office. Because it was a 24-hour deal, I went into golden time. I lived on the lot, slept on the lot. Another secretary would come in after 24 hours. We would alternate. He was a very special guy.”
By the mid-1950s, she was working as a waitress and singer at a Sunset Boulevard club and taking lessons from Florence Russell, whose students included Dorothy Dandridge. Another former pupil was Abbey Lincoln who gave Olay her next break, recommending her as her replacement when she left to work abroad.
Her career took off thanks to a residency at Ye Little Club, a cosy Beverly Hills bistro. She routinely packed in such A-listers as Judy Garland. “Judy used to come and we would sit and talk on occasion. ‘How do you remember all those lyrics?’ she asked me once.” Sinatra would shout: “Olay, more Olay!”
She stood out from other singers thanks to her voice, high-pitched for a jazz singer, and her unshowy, elegant appearance. She was said to look more like a business woman than a glamour puss, with her hair pulled back and her black high-necked, “street-length” dress adorned with pearls at the neck. She avoided low-cut, show-stopping gowns, “because I want to think only about my songs.” Her following was borderline fanatical. “I don’t do the rock’n’roll type of belting, but there are lots of people who appreciate the more mature type singing.”
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Before she had her second child she enjoyed success on television in London on Chelsea at Nine and Timex All-Star Jazz Show, both in 1959, in which her performance of I Let A Song Go Out of My Heart, with its composer Duke Ellington on piano, prompted him to describe her — in a French accent — as “truly formidable”. She in turn credited both him and Benny Goodman for shaping her musical thinking. “Perhaps you can notice that in my phrasing,” she said. In 1961 she had a go at acting, in a theatre production of Showboat. Ironically, she played a black girl passing as white.
She spent seven years living in Copenhagen in the 1970s, before returning to LA and its nightclub scene. Not long before her 1990 retirement, the LA Times reviewer Charles Champlin, who had tracked her on-off career since the start, wrote: “There is always, lurking behind the breezy, jazzy confidence, a strong hint of vulnerability and melancholy, of bedevilled romances and other items of fortune.”
An admirer once told her: “I can hardly believe I’m with someone who was employed by both Duke Ellington as a vocalist, and Preston Sturges as an assistant.”
“Honey,” she said, “I can hardly believe it myself.”
Ruth Olay, jazz singer, was born on July 1, 1924. She died on September 3, 2021, aged 97