Margaret Whiting Dies At 86
Hearing about the death of exquisitely voiced singer Margaret Whiting, I was going to say: “The mold has been broken.” But Whiting, who passed away at the Booth Actors’ Home in Englewood, NJ, at the age of 86, was the product of no mold: she was custom-built, all the way. I saw and heard her many times in her later years, at the Algonquin in New York. By then her voice had deepened, and she brought an autumnal glow to her classics: “Moonlight in Vermont,” in particular. Always at those performances was her then companion, later husband, Jack Wrangler. They seemed the most unlikely of matches: he had been a gay porn star in the 1970s. But as Whiting wrote in her autobiography, “It Might As Well Be Spring,” theirs was a relationship based on similar interests and mutual respect, not sex. Anyone under the age of 40 probably won’t understand why deep love matches can arise out of something other than the libido; I can only tell you that they can and do.
