WHO remembers Leslie Hutchinson? In an age that scorns the sophistication of what used to be known as popular song and that places Robbie Williams above Frank Sinatra in a poll of greatest 20th-century vocalists, the answer is: very, very few people.
Nor, it might be argued, should they be asked to. Artistically, Hutchinson - Hutch as he was professionally and popularly known - was no Sinatra, or even a Tony Bennett. Born in Grenada of mixed race in 1900, he achieved public success in the Paris and London of the 1 920s, '30s and '40s, but his style as both singer and pianist is now irretrievably dated, highly evocative of a vanished age but unable to transcend it. Indeed, his legacy remains among those tuxedoed Sunday afternoon hotel-lounge performers whose subdued chords and hushed enunciation are too polite to disturb the post-tea dozings of elderly guests.
Yet his life was a riot and makes for fascinating social, sexual and racial history. He had always, as Ms Breese observes, "been encouraged to show off" - first by his mother, who taught him social skills (including learning the ways of the white man) and sent him for piano lessons; then, when he was fourteen, by his father, who took him to a brothel, thus encouraging a lifelong obsession with sex. Self-absorbed from the outset, he repaid them both by never revisitingGrenada after he left it at the age of sixteen.
The United States was his first port of call, under the pretence of studying medicine, but he was soon making music in New York and hobnobbing with the likes of Ellington, Alberta Hunter and the Vanderbilts. However, he desperately wanted to be a big fish in a smaller pond and so he decamped to Paris, where he was feted as a performer, fawned over by wealthy women and got to schmooze with Josephine Baker, Tallulab Bankhead, Jean Cocteau, Arthur Rubinstein and Cole Porter.
The latter became his lover for a time (Hutch's sexual tastes were gender-crossing as well as voracious) and also provided him with the songs that were to enhance his fame, though his recorded versions of "Begin the Beguine", "I Get a Kick Out of You" and "I've Got You Under My Skin" now sound as affectedly and antiquatedly indeed, camply - posh as anything else he sang (Peter Skellern is his nearest latter-day equivalent, though Skellern brings a pleasingly sly knowingness to his genteel excavations of the past).
After Paris, he went on to conquer London cafe society, amassing yet more socialcontacts and more lovers: Edwina Mountbatten was an early passion, Princess Margaret a late intimate. But as the world changed, so, too, did Hutch's fortunes, not helped by the fickleness of the set he so obsessively courted. His last years make for sad reading: changed musical fashions and technologies (rock and the EP), abandonment by those who'd once taken him up as their token exotic, and his own over-reliance on booze brought him to a depressing end, bewildered and somewhat angered that his decades in the sun were over. Only high- born Joan, who'd stayed true to him throughout all his vagaries, was with him to the end, and it's a pity that Ms Breese can't locate a surname for someone so central to his life.
There are other irritating lacunae in this biography, but the author tells her story rather well, even if her prose doesn't inspire and even if at times the pages seem to be little more than a breathless catalogue of names. That, though, is apt, given Hutch's constant craving to he at the centre of the 'social whirl. Perhaps he knew that artistically he'd end up on the margins, a footnote in the history of popular music, and that he might as well enjoy himself while the going was good.