Mrs. Miller has featured a few times on this blog, but it's been eight years since I wrote about her in any detail, and seven since she appeared in my first book,
the World's Worst Records Volume One. Later on today (10 July 2020) I am hosting a
two-hour audio documentary on her life, so now seems like the perfect time to expand on her story, correct a few mistakes I have made in the past and bring you the Complete Mrs. Miller. It's a long read, but I hope you enjoy it!
The Incomparable Mrs. Miller.
I’m writing this on a gloriously sunny day while listening
to, and thoroughly enjoying, the disjointed, off-key warbling of the subject of
this chapter, Mrs. Miller. If you haven’t discovered the joys of Mrs. Miller’s
recorded work yet then go out immediately and buy a copy of her one and only
legitimate CD release, which collects the highlights from her first three
albums and serves as a brilliant introduction to one of the most remarkable
artists of the 1960s.
Elva Ruby Connes Miller first came to fame in 1966 when
Capitol Records released her debut album, the ironically-titled Mrs Miller’s
Greatest Hits. Her shrill, tuneless braying seemed to strike a chord with
the record-buying public: that album sold 250,000 copies in three weeks and her
bizarre versions of rock and pop standards, including Petula Clark’s ‘Downtown’
with its incredible whistling solo and the Nancy Sinatra chart-topper ‘These
Boots Are Made For Walking’, led to her becoming known as the worst pop star of
all time.
However, the Mrs. Miller story didn’t begin there – this
overnight sensation was in fact a fifty-nine-year-old housewife who had been
singing since childhood, had already self-financed a number of recordings and
had released at least one EP before Capitol ‘discovered’ her and snapped her
up.
Born on 5 October 1907 to Edward and Ada Connes, Elva was
born in Joplin Missouri, but by her teens was living in Dodge City, Kansas.
According to one of the earliest major articles written about her (in a May
1966 issue of
Time magazine), when she was a child people were forever
telling her to ‘knock off the singing and please go skip rope or something. But
she persevered, joined the high school glee club and the church choir’ and,
remarkably, ‘later studied voice for seven years’. In 1934 she married John
Miller (a breeder of horses and a man twenty-five years her senior) and later moved
to Claremont, California. Theirs was a good marriage: John was indulgent of his
wife’s hobby and she in turn created and kept a wonderfully comfortable and
fragrant (she was a keen horticulturalist) home for him. Elva balked, however,
at the oft-repeated theory that the man in her life had financed her way to the
top. ‘Of course my husband supported my hobby of recording songs - he's paid
all the bills since we were married. But he didn't buy me a career,’
[i]
she once said. Elva doted on John, but sadly by the time she found stardom the
couple were living apart: at 84 years old he had become too frail was residing
in a rest home.
In Claremont she became the founding member and secretary of
the Foothill Drama and Choral Society and continued her music studies at Pomona
College. ‘At first I worried about how the younger students would receive me,
but they liked the idea of an older woman there. And within three weeks, they
were coming to the house, to copy my notes or listen to my records,’
[ii]
she later revealed. Once every few weeks, Elva would drive into Los Angeles and
indulge her hobby. Carrying her own portable tape recorder, she would spend a
few hours in a recording studio accompanied by a young man by the name of Fred
Bock, who would later carve out a successful career as a producer of religious
music. Fred helped Elva record the self-financed EP
Songs For Children,
signed up to become her accompanist and manager, and convinced her to try more
modern songs – including an unreleased (so far) version of the Bobby Vinton hit
‘Blue Velvet’ and the Petula Clark hit ‘Downtown’, which he then took to
different record labels in the hope of securing her a deal.
She never forgot Fred, or the encouragement he gave her: ‘There
was a turning point in my singing, and Fred brought it about. He felt I always
sang at a very slow tempo and suggested I speed it up.’ Fred Bock would, rather
pleasingly for bad music-ophiles, go on to produce several Little Marcy albums.
Elva became close to Fred’s young wife, Lois, who would accompany the pair on
their trips and act as her secretary. ‘She was very proper,’ Lois Bock told
writer Skip Heller. ‘Once she walked off of a session at Capitol because a
musician told an offensive joke. I talked her into going back, and they put a
sort of glass booth around her so she couldn't hear the musicians talking.’
[iii]
Disc jockey Gary Owens (who would later write the sleeve
notes for Mrs. Miller’s Greatest Hits and who would enjoy international
fame as the announcer on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In) was friendly with
Bock and featured Elva on his radio program as early as 1960. He was the first
person to bring her to public attention, including Elva as a guest artist on
his first comedy album, Song Festoons (co-produced by Bock), in 1962. Owens
would later claim (in a 2010 interview with Kliph Nesteroff for his Classic
Television Showbiz blog) that he created Mrs. Miller. That’s stretching it a
bit: Elva appeared on his album not as herself but in character as Phoebe
Phestoon, the ‘wife’ of one of Owens’ own comedy characters, mauling the song ‘Slumber
Boat’ (which had previously appeared on her debut EP), but he could certainly
be credited with helping to bring her to the attention of Capitol Records and
the composer, pianist, producer, arranger and conductor Lex de Azevado – who
bad record aficionados will know as the producer of Ric King’s dreadful ‘Return
Of A Soldier’ – who would go on to produce her debut album. Apparently Lex, who
was friendly with both Bock and Owens, jumped on the Elva train after being won
over one night while enjoying dinner with Fred and his wife Lois. He started to
bring in acetates of her recordings into his weekly A&R meetings – which
took place every Wednesday on the twelfth floor of the Capitol tower - and play
them to the assembled company executives for a bit of light relief. Once they
had recovered from the hysterical laughter induced by Elva mangling tracks
including early versions of both ‘A Lover’s Concerto’ and ‘Downtown’ these
hardened music business executives agreed that they had a potential hit on
their hands.
That first album - recorded with a crack team of session
players that included Earl Palmer and Jimmy Bond, both members of the infamous
Wrecking Crew - contained Mrs. Miller’s unique take on a number of contemporary
hits, including ‘A Lover’s Concerto’, ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ and the Four
Seasons’ classic ‘Let’s Hang On’. Released in the US on 11 April 1966, by 30 April music trade paper
Billboard was reporting that the album had already
sold out of its first two pressings (of fifty thousand and one hundred thousand
respectively), and that Capitol Records were ‘one hundred and fifty thousand
orders in arrears’. The previous week that same trade magazine stated that ‘the
LP is reminiscent of another package which made sales noise several years ago
featuring New Yorker Sam Sachs, who sang out of wack [sic] and became the
favourite of DJs in many cities.’ The article went on to compare Elva to both
Florence Foster Jenkins and Leona Anderson: high praise indeed.
Mrs. Miller’s
Greatest Hits reached number 15 on
Billboard’s album charts, and
soon copies of her debut album (and its accompanying 45) were being snapped up
in Britain, across Europe, Australia and New Zealand, as well as in America and
Canada. ‘The record certainly wasn't my idea’, Elva revealed to reporter Vonne
Robertson. ‘It was just a series of coincidences that could happen to anyone.
Everyone has a hobby. Some people take pictures and file them in albums. Others
paint pictures and store them in the garage. My hobby has always been singing.
I've made records and tapes of sacred or classical songs for my own amusement.
A closet at home is filled with them.’
[iv]
Mrs. Miller fan clubs were set up in Los Angeles and in New
York, and teen magazines carried interviews with the latest rave. Orville
Rennie, the one-time keeper of the Cherry Sisters’ flame, even attempted to
establish an award in their name, and declared Mrs. Miller the first recipient.
For a woman fast approaching 60, who only a few years previously had thought
herself lucky if she could command an audience of a half-dozen or so at her
local Baptist church, her sudden and massive success must have been a shock,
but she seemed to take it all in her stride. Danny Fields, a reporter from
Datebook,
was entranced by her: ‘I don’t want to talk to all these old fogies from
Time
and
Life and
Look, and all the other old fogey magazines’ she
told him at a press reception. ‘I want to talk to the teenagers… I love them
and they love me.’
[v]
She and John were stoical about her success: ‘he knows I am mature enough to realise
things like this run their course’.
[vi]
According to that early Time article ‘While Elva may
not replace Elvis, her rocking chair rock features a kind of slippin' and
slidin' rhythm that is uniquely her own. Her tempos, to put it charitably, are
free form; she has an uncanny knack for landing squarely between the beat,
producing a new ricochet effect that, if nothing else, defies imitation. Beyond
all that, her billowy soprano embraces a song with a vibrato that won't quit.’
The following year that same magazine, reviewing a live performance at the
Coconut Grove (where she made her debut on February 1, 1967) said: ‘”A Hard
Day’s Night”… was reduced to chaos - off-pitch, off-tempo, desperately
tremulous at times, otherwise hopelessly shrill. The harder she tried, clasping
a rose-coloured wrist hanky before her, the worse she sounded and the more they
heard, the louder the audience responded - with peals of derisive cackling.’
However, the appeal of Mrs Miller goes beyond the humour
found in a mere novelty act. She initially claimed to be serious about her
singing and to begrudge the fact that Capitol made her recording sessions
difficult for her in order to get the performance that they wanted. ‘Capitol
Records created the angle that “she's so bad that she's good.” Or, it’s what
you call camp,’ she told an interviewer from the
Los Angeles Times. In
his book
Between Wyomings, Capitol executive Ken Mansfield, one of the
men in the office the day Lex de Azevado dropped the needle on her Downtown
acetate, confirms this: ‘Mrs Miller was dead serious about her singing career
and actually thought that Capitol was signing her as a legitimate recording
artist. She was so sweet and so sincere and completely clueless that this was
all a joke.’
Once she became fully aware that her recordings were being
treated as comedy releases by her record company she went along with it;
initially at least. Mrs. Miller’s fame spread like wildfire, even though Time
described her as possessing a ‘uniquely atrocious vocal style and [a] fearless
gusto with which she assails - and destroys - a song’. She made appearances on
countless TV shows, including Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, the Ed
Sullivan Show (where she was greeted by a ‘good luck’ telegram from Elvis,
exactly as The Beatles had been a couple of years before) and Laugh-In;
she performed with Jimmy Durante on popular variety show the Hollywood
Palace, sang for the troops in Vietnam with Bob Hope, and appeared on
TV in the western drama the Road West – as a grandmother who had once
been a dance hall singer – and in the film The Cool Ones alongside Roddy
McDowell: her performance of ‘It’s Magic’, right at the end of the movie, is
the highlight of this mediocre teen flick. Many column inches were given over
to her unique whistling prowess, a skill she sharpened, she explained, by using
ice cubes to shrink her prominent pucker. She performed live in New York,
Hawaii, Ontario and even in Disneyland.
Both sides of her 45 ‘Downtown’/’A Lover’s Concerto’ became
minor chart hits; she played the Hollywood Bowl and went on to release two more
albums for Capitol – Will Success Spoil Mrs. Miller?! (which was
originally scheduled to be released as Strangers in the Night: other
rejected titles included Mrs. Miller Sings the Johnny Mercer Songbook and
Capitol Punishment) and The Country Soul Of Mrs. Miller - and a
fourth, Mrs. Miller Does Her Thing, on the Amaret label, although each
sold significantly less than its predecessor. She even inspired an imitator, of
sorts, when an act calling itself Mr Miller and the Blue Notes released their
own, off-key rendition of the Herman’s Hermits hit ‘Mrs. Brown You’ve Got A
Lovely Daughter’ on Swan records in 1966. It was a short, sparkling career,
echoed in many ways by that of Tiny Tim and aped – much less successfully - by
Canada’s Mme St Onge.
But she soon tired of being treated as a joke. ‘I don't sing
off key and I don't sing off rhythm,’ she insisted. ‘They got me to do so by
waiting until I was tired and then making the record. Or they would cut the
record before I could become familiar with the song. At first I didn’t
understand what was going on but later I did, and I resented it. I don't like
to be used.’
[vii] She
left Capitol to set up her own company, Vibrato, which would lease her masters
to independent labels (such as Kenny Myers’ Amaret), but was hurt when her
former home announced that they had dropped her, an action which, she insisted,
was untrue. Sales of her second album had been around ten percent of her debut:
her final album for the company sold even less: she simply felt that Capitol
were no longer prepared to give her albums the promotion they needed. Despite
that, reporters guesstimated that she had made somewhere in the region of
$100,000 while at Capitol: much of it had been placed in a trust fund to care
for the ailing Mr Miller.
According to the
Los Angeles Times, Mrs Miller was
keen to leave her image behind by taking, of all things, vocal lessons: ‘”It's
a gamble,” she admits, “but I'm willing to take a chance on a new Mrs Miller.
After all, the people weren't responding to the old Mrs Miller.”’
[viii]
Again, Ken Mansfield backs up her story: ‘One day she walked into the Capitol
lobby and, upon seeing the promotional cardboard stand-up (a life-size Mrs
Miller proudly holding copies of her first two albums), kicked it over, stomped
on it, then marched upstairs and asked to be dropped from the label.’ It was a
rare show of pique from someone referred to time and time again as charming,
sweet natured and sincere, but clearly illustrated how she felt she had been
misrepresented by Capitol. It is little wonder that one reviewer described her
as having the ‘charm and determination of a defensive Valkyrie.’
[ix]
Leaving Capitol also meant leaving Fred and Lois Bock, and
Lex de Azevado, behind too but, sadly, this reinvention would not produce the
success she hoped for. By the time her final album
Mrs. Miller Does Her Thing
was issued in 1968 the joke was starting to wear thin and her audience was
deserting her; in the pop charts and on the TV chat shows her charming
innocence was replaced by the high camp folderol of Tiny Tim. The blatant drug
references on the cover – which had her dressed in a psychedelic muumuu
brandishing a batch of hash brownies (the cakes hand-tinted a garish green in
the printed photograph just in case anyone missed the reference) - and in the
lyrics of songs such as ‘Mary Jane’, ‘The Renaissance Of Smut’ and ‘Granny
Bopper’ were too much for her, as was the attempt to repackage Elva as a late
sixties precursor to Anna Madrigal. However, the album does have its highs (if
you’ll excuse the pun), and her version of the Lemon Piper’s hit single ‘Green
Tambourine’ is a wonderfully shrill assault on the ears: there’s even a little
dig at her ukulele-plucking successor. Even though ‘Mary Jane’ went on to
become the theme to a film starring pop star Fabian as high school teacher
fighting a marijuana gang (Mrs Miller’s version of the song was included on the
soundtrack album, although she went uncredited on the sleeve), Elva had had
enough, and the death of her beloved husband that same year put paid to any
thoughts of a major-label comeback.
Although John had gone, his widow continued to record and to
make sporadic live appearances. Two singles were released through her own Mrs. Miller Records in 1971: production values were high (she put together a great
band of big name jazz musicians to back her efforts) but sales were poor and in
1973 Mrs. Miller had disappeared from the spotlight for good, retiring
gracefully to her Claremont home before moving to Los Angeles where she would
spend the remainder of her years. Still, this amazing performer took it all in
her stride. ‘If something comes along to stop this merry-go-round, I'll be able
to go right back to being a housewife,’ she once said. ‘In the meantime, I will
have met lots of people and had a great deal of fun. Not many women my age have
such an opportunity.’
Although she was often referred to during her stellar career
as a grandmother, the childless Elva spent her remaining years doing charity
work instead of employing what Jordan Bonfante, writing in
Life shortly
after she left Capitol, called ‘the voice of a tubercular parrot’. In her later
years she gave few interviews: when she did she was always gracious and often
surprisingly candid about here 15 minutes (more like 15 months) in the
spotlight: Capitol, she said, wanted to make her into ‘some kind of kook… I
belonged in opera. I wanted to do ballads but they wouldn't let me. Life was
full of turmoil because of that. I didn’t need it, so I got out. I was glad
when it ended.’
[x]
Luckily the world still had her recordings to comfort and confound.
It has been some time now since Elva left the building. She
passed away on 5 July 1997 – just three months shy of her ninetieth birthday – at
the Garden Terrace Retirement Centre, in Vista, California, three and a half
years after the apartment she was living in was levelled by an earthquake.
Sadly, she passed too soon to enjoy the resurrection of her career instigated
by Capitol’s career-spanning compilation Wild, Cool & Swingin', The
Artist Collection: Mrs Miller. In late 2012 news broke that a movie about
her life (titled Will Success Spoil Mrs. Miller?, starring Annette Bening
and written by Matthew Fantaci) was in the offing: sadly that movie has yet to
transpire, it’s thunder stolen somewhat by the very real success of the Meryl
Streep vehicle Florence Foster Jenkins. However, in March 2017 a stage
musical, Mrs Miller Does Her Thing, written and directed by Pulitzer
Prize winner James Lapine, opened to enthusiastic reviews in Washington DC,
with Elva portrayed by Debra Monk (NYPD Blue, Frasier). It seems that
Elva Miller’s story is not quite over yet.
Here are a couple of cuts from her final album, Mrs. Miller Does Her Thing: Green Tambourine and Mary Jane. Enjoy!
[i] Vonne
Robertson, ‘Sudden Fame at 59- She’s Having a Ball’, the Progress-Bulletin, 29 May
1966
[ii]
Jordan Bonfante, ‘Mrs. Miller is Off-pitch for Profit: A Most Unlikely Lark’, LIFE
Magazine, 22 September 1967
[iii]
Skip Heller, ‘Searching for Mrs Miller’, Strange and Cool Magazine, Issue 14,
1999
[iv] Vonne
Robertson, ‘Sudden Fame at 59- She’s Having a Ball’, the Progress-Bulletin, 29 May
1966
[v] Danny
Fields, ‘the Sound of Mrs Miller, Twenty-minute Fandangos and Forever Changes;
a Rock Bazaar (Jonathan Eisen, ed.), Random House, New York 1971
[vi]
Bob Thomas, ‘Mrs. Miller Sings Beatle-Type Hits’, The Courier-News (Bridgewater,
New Jersey), 12 July 1966
[vii]
Bob Thomas , ‘Mrs. Miller Tries to Change Image’, Los Angeles Times, 2 October
1967
[ix]
Martin Bernheimer, ‘Most Memorable Debut for Coloratura From Claremont’, Los
Angeles Times, 6 June 1966
[x]
Jim Houston, ‘Postscript: Bravo for Mrs. Miller - She Had to Be Free’, the Los
Angeles Times, 7 July 1976
He passed away in a hospice, where he had been receiving care
after suffering a brain tumour, in May 1996 at the age of 77. he had continued
to act until he became too ill to do so, appearing in a touring production of
Michael Frayn’s Noises Off the previous spring. I had no idea
that he was gay: no one would have. Unlike many homosexual actors of the time
the press left him alone, never hinting (at least as far as I am aware) that he
was anything other than the slightly foppish heterosexual he often portrayed on
screen. Even when he died, obituaries made vague mention of the fact that he
had never married, but left it at that. Of course, being a trifle more sophisticated
I can now look back and see the signs… chief of which was his long-term relationships
with landscape gardener Vernon Page and, later, James Markowski.
