If I were Dick Haymes, I would have taken to drink, too. Here he was, one of the greatest pop singers of all time, and his career was essentially over by the time he was 40. Just when Frank Sinatra, his colleague and one-time competitor, was getting a second wind and conquering the pop music world all over again, Haymes was being put out to pasture, the victim of his own bad habits, unfortunate decisions, and inability to reinvent himself the way Sinatra did.

In her new biography (the first ever on Haymes),”The Life of Dick Haymes: No More Little White Lies,” Dr. Ruth Prigozy explains that Haymes (1918–1980) could never escape from Sinatra’s shadow, and even at his best was regarded as Sinatra’s most formidable rival. Yet, as further shown by “Dick Haymes: The Complete Capitol Collection” (EMI) a new two-CD set of the singer’s best music, Haymes never imitated Sinatra. He even denied being influenced by the older singer, which is a dubious claim at best.

Haymes’s approach to a song was roughly halfway between the two poles of pop singing circa 1941: the deep, baritone resonance of Bing Crosby and the heightened sensitivity and swing of Sinatra.Haymes represented the best of both worlds, and, ironically, for a period in the 1940s and early ’50s, there were probably more young singers (like Bob Manning and David Allyn) who were trying to sound like Haymes than were yet imitating Sinatra.

Dr. Prigozy, who teaches at Hofstra University, is a professor of literature rather than of music, and though her book does not discuss the bulk of her subject’s recordings (few of his rank-andfile ’40s records are even mentioned), she is generous with the other details of his life and career. “No More Little White Lies” is especially noteworthy because Dr. Prigozy has managed, largely with the help of Haymes’s family, to sort out the often conflicting and always confusing details of the singer’s early years.

Haymes was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to a rancher father of Scottish descent and an Irish mother who sang and taught singing, and was somehow both domineering and indifferent. Haymes and his brother Bob (later a successful songwriter) were raised mostly in private schools in Europe and by a string of stepfathers who tended to share their mother’s view that they were mere nuisances. As a young man, Haymes sang with lesser-known bands and also did stunts and bit parts in movies, yet when he first contacted the bandleader Harry James in 1939, it was not as a performer but as an aspiring composer.

When Haymes first recorded a year later, it was the singer himself who inadvertently invited the comparisons to the Chairman of the Board. When Sinatra vacated the James band to join Tommy Dorsey, it was Haymes who replaced him; less than three years later, when Sinatra left Dorsey to become a solo act, once again it was Haymes who stepped in to fill his shoes. Yet Haymes had already worked briefly on his own as a solo artist, thereby anticipating Sinatra; in the Spring of 1943, when both singers were on their own, it was Haymes who entered the studio first to make his own solo recordings. Sinatra later acknowledged that in 1943,he regarded Haymes as the singer he had to beat (this was a long time before he would even have

considered trying to upstage Crosby’s overwhelming popularity).

The careers of Haymes and Sinatra operated in rough, delayed parallel to each other for almost 15 years; both singers climbed the ladder from the big bands to solo recording careers, Hollywood leading men, and, most important, top attractions on radio. By the early ’50s, both careers were seriously in decline. The difference was that Sinatra was eventually able to transform himself into an entirely new artist; Haymes was not. Where Sinatra continually looked for new worlds to conquer, Haymes essentially spent the rest of his career doing what he did in 1946.

He did, however, constantly improve and perfect his art, at least through the ’50s. That, too, is borne out in the new two-CD set, which contains both of the exemplary albums he made for Capitol Records in 1955 and ’56,”Moondreams” and “Come Rain or Come Shine.”These are considered the best singing of Haymes’s career. As with his earlier work, he continued to combine a dark, warm vocal timbre reminiscent of Crosby with the subtlety and nuance of Sinatra (his sense of time wasn’t the equal of either man, but his intonation may have bested both).Yet by his mid-30s, he had completely absorbed his influences and was his own man.

More important, on these two albums, he sings with an emotional intensity comparable to Sinatra on “In The Wee Small Hours,” but in no way in thrall to that landmark album. “The Way You Look Tonight,” perhaps Haymes’s greatest track, finds him mixing emotional colors the same way a great painter looks for the exact shade of blue. At different points in Dorothy Fields’s vivid lyric, Haymes sounds either brimming with joy or reservedly melancholy, assertive and confident or anxious and passive.He elaborates on all the complexities — even the paradoxes — of the text in a way that few singers besides Sinatra were ever able to do.

These two albums, which are included along with Haymes’s Capitol singles and other bonus material, are not just Haymes’s best work; they are also, unfortunately, virtually the only Haymes recordings that most pop music buffs have ever heard. He recorded over 200 sides for Decca between 1943 and ’52 — the same years that Sinatra was on Columbia — nearly none of which have been reissued in any form during the last 50 years.

Haymes was the victim of changing musical tastes, yet he was considered passé long before the rock ‘n’ roll rebellion of the mid-’50s. Haymes’s great failure was not in his singing but in his inability to see the big picture of pop music, where it was going and what his place in it would be — the way Sinatra did so brilliantly.He never seems to have had a plan, from the time he was a bright 20-something with a beautiful voice and matinee idol looks, to the later years, documented in painful detail by Dr. Prigozy, when he was an alcoholic hasbeen grasping at straws. Early success came to him so easily that he wasn’t able to sustain it; Sinatra, contrastingly, had to work harder to get were he ultimately went, and that professional served him well. It wasn’t a lack of ability that stopped Haymes, it was a lack of vision. Yet when he was at his peak, as he frequently was in the 1940s and even more so in the Capitol recordings of 1955 and ’56, few were better.

wfriedwald@nysun.com