Jack Jones, the silky Grammy-winning crooner who had hits with “Lollipops and Roses,” “Wives and Lovers” and “The Impossible Dream” before inviting TV viewers to set a course for adventure on The Love Boat, has died. He was 86.
Jones died Wednesday night at Eisenhower Medical in Rancho Mirage, California, after a two-year battle with leukemia, his stepdaughter Nicole Whitty told The Hollywood Reporter.
Jones was born into a showbiz family. His mother, Irene Hervey, was an Emmy-nominated actress who spent more than 50 years in film and on television. His father, tenor Allan Jones, portrayed the romantic male lead in Show Boat (1936) and in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera (1935) and A Day at the Races (1937), and he managed a hit song of his own with “The Donkey Serenade.”
For eight seasons and more than 200 episodes of ABC’s The Love Boat starting in 1977, Jones extolled the virtues of romance on the high seas — “Love, exciting and new. Come aboard. We’re expecting you” — with his theme song for the Aaron Spelling-produced series. (Dionne Warwick took over in season nine.)
Featuring words and music by Charles Fox and Paul Williams, the tune added a new layer to Jones’ decades-long career.
“Because of The Love Boat theme, everything was great on ships after that,” Jones told Las Vegas Magazine in 2016. “I did six weeks a year. They gave me the best suite on the ship, and it was the S.S. Norway. We just had a great time.”
Jones released “The Love Boat Theme” as a single in 1979, with a cover of Barry Manilow’s “Ready to Take a Chance Again” on the B-side, and the song became a concert staple. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t above poking fun at it.
In Airplane II: The Sequel (1982), he can be seen performing the theme song in a cameo as a tuxedo-clad lounge singer. And when Sandra Bullock gets ready for virtual sex with Sylvester Stallone in Demolition Man (1993), she sets the mood by playing his song.
Known for his breezy, ladies’ man persona onstage, Jones was married six times, most notably to actress Jill St. John for slightly more than a year in the late 1960s. He also was romantically linked to actress Susan George.
In 1959, Jones landed his first recording contract with Capitol Records, which released his debut album, This Love of Mine. On that was his spritely rendition of the Steve Allen composition “This Could Be the Start of Something Big.”
Capitol, which was trying to turn Jones into a rockabilly singer, dropped him, but Kapp Records picked him up, and he struck gold right out of the gate with “Lollipops and Roses,” recorded while he was on two weeks’ leave from the U.S. Air Force Reserve.
A romantic ballad written by Tony Velona, it proved to be ideal for Jones’ velvety tones. The single reached No. 12 on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart, earned him a Grammy in 1962 for best male solo vocal performance and made him an heir apparent to Frank Sinatra.
After he found success a year later with “Call Me Irresponsible,” which Sinatra had recorded, Jones collected another Grammy in 1964 for “Wives and Lovers.” The bouncy Burt Bacharach-Hal David composition rose to No. 14 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and was nominated for Record of the Year but lost to Henry Mancini’s “Days of Wine and Roses.”
Kapp “put the tune on the B-side of the single,” Jones told the Los Angeles Times in 1993, “but disc jockeys turned it over and played it anyway.”
Over the years, “Wives and Lovers” became another one of his standards. But with lyrics that basically instructed women to kowtow to their husbands to keep them faithful — “Don’t think because there’s a ring on your finger, you needn’t try anymore” — it didn’t age well. By the ’90s, there was a growing outcry to ban the song. Jones addressed the backlash by altering the words to poke fun at men. But he never abandoned the tune.
“Since it’s a politically incorrect song, I start it out with a disclaimer,” he said. “I hear that women still call up radio stations, angry that such a sexist song is being played. It’s now part of history, it won a Grammy, and I meant no harm when I did it. It made my career, and I’m grateful for that.”
John Allan Jones was born in Los Angeles on Jan. 14, 1938. He said he arrived on the same day that his dad recorded “Donkey Serenade” for RCA Victor. (His father had performed the song on horseback for Jeanette MacDonald in the 1937 MGM musical The Firefly.)
Jones was still in his teens when he started recording demos in search of a singing career. By 1958, he was sharing the stage with his dad at the Thunderbird Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.
“I don’t know if anyone showed you my video bio, but at the beginning of it there’s a shot of a newspaper in Las Vegas, and there was my father, and I was underneath him for smaller billing,” Jones said. “I got that clip from a friend of mine, a drummer, who was helping a guy refurbish a house. They were digging under the floorboards and found this newspaper, and that was the newspaper from when my dad and I were playing the Thunderbird.”
Taking it full circle, they performed one last time together in 1980 when they appeared as father and son on an episode of The Love Boat. As Jones remembered it, the storyline was based on a true story.
“It supposedly happened to Robert Alda and Alan Alda,” he said. “They were supposed to be doing something together, working together, and Alan pulled out to do something that was a big break for him or something like that. And there was a parting of the ways, probably a little less dramatically than it was on the show we did. And the idea was that the wives tricked us into being on the ship together so we could talk.”
On the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart, Jones scored nine top 10 singles, including three No. 1s — “The Race Is On” in 1965, “The Impossible Dream” in 1966 and “Lady” in 1967.
Jones received another Grammy nom for “The Impossible Dream,” the signature song from Broadway’s Man of La Mancha, and another in 1998 for the album Jack Jones Paints a Tribute to Tony Bennett.
When filmmakers wanted to create that easy-listening ’60s vibe, Jones was one of their go-to guys. He can be heard on the soundtracks for Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), Goodfellas (1990), Reckless (1995), Duplex (2003), Bobby (2006) and American Hustle (2013), on which he had a cameo. “Lollipops and Roses” accompanied the end credits on a 2008 episode of Mad Men.
In addition to his stepdaughter Nicole, survivors include his wife, Eleonara, whom he married in 2009; his daughters, Crystal and Nicole; another stepdaughter, Colette; grandchildren Grace, Mercer and Agnes; and his poodle, Ivy.
A Las Vegas headliner for seven decades, he released more than 50 albums during his career and continued to perform into his 80s.
“I want a song to make the audience laugh or make it cry, make a very poignant statement,” Jones said. “Like John Sebastian’s ‘I Had a Dream.’ The lyric starts, ‘I had a dream, I dreamed we were all, all right.’ That’s such a wonderful thought.”
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