Posted 7:55 PM by Gene

Robert Goulet was born in the wrong time. Had he been born thirty years earlier he might have occupied the same noble place as John Raitt (you know -- BONNIE'S FATHER), but he started off too late with Camelot -- he and Ed Sullivan saved that show -- and despite that strong and virile baritone he too readily became The Voice of Easy Listening (especially as he recorded for Columbia, a label with too many such voices), and even his dashing looks may have counted against him as he became a second-string TV star and later Mr. Vegas, a particular burden when his career careened past self-parody. But it is hard not to hear "If Ever I Would Leave You" (ideally from the cast album, in that majestic Robert Russell Bennett - Philip Lang orchestration, not his later recordings) in the mind's ear and think, in the brief time before he became something else he was something else.