[Dixielandjazz] R.I.P. Virginia Wicks

[Robert Ringwald]

Virginia Wicks, 1920-2013, Jazz Publicist
eJazzNews, March 27, 2013
Few could have foreseen the prescience of a Look magazine headline for a 1954 photo
feature entitled "Career Girl Press Agent" detailing the busy life of star publicist
Virginia Wicks. At the height of her career in the forties and fifties, Wicks was
an around-the-clock woman about town in New York and later Los Angeles, who prevailed
in a field overwhelmingly dominated by men when she started in the late 1940s. Like
many of the vaunted entertainers of the latter half of the twentieth century whom
she represented, Wicks worked up until her health curtailed her activities in the
last few years.
Wicks, sister of violin virtuoso Camilla Wicks, died of natural causes on March 20,
at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles at the age of 92. Her death was confirmed
by her son Brian Engel.
Wicks' career as a publicist began the day Nat Cole said he wanted to record her
song, "You Gotta Talk Me Into It, Baby," which was featured in a 1944 film. She met
the star and his manager, who suggested she might enjoy doing record promotion for
Nat and his other clients. Knowing nothing of the field, but thrilled with the prospect
of representing Cole, Wicks opened a small one-room office in New York, and her career
in public relations began. Her first five clients were Nat, Peggy Lee, Stan Kenton,
Mel Torme and Nellie Lutcher.
As the Look article made clear, Wicks, a Goldwyn Girl who made an unsuccessful stab
at the big time in movies and fared better at modeling, she marshaled "nerves, good
looks and a striking mane of blonde hair... to pyramid this capital into a thriving
press agentry business whose portfolio includes gilt-edged clients," including many
top-flight jazz stars.
Among those she represented in jazz were: Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw,
Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Parker, Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown, Josh White,
the Modern Jazz Quartet, Norman Granz and his Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts and
Verve Records, Lionel Hampton, jazz critic Leonard Feather (and his daughter, Lorraine),
George Shearing, Al Grey, Julie London, Charlie Barnet, Annie Ross, Jon Hendricks,
James Moody, the Lionel Hampton and Newport Jazz Festivals, Jean Bach's documentary
film A Great Day In Harlem and Eldar Djangirov, the jazz piano phenom who at age
19 in 2005 dedicated his recorded composition "Lady Wicks" to his pro-bono publicist
and friend.
Other clients included Rock Hudson, Shari Lewis, Eartha Kitt, Cornel Wilde, Theo
Bikel, Jayne Mansfield, Marilyn Monroe, Harry Belafonte, Jean Pierre Aumont, Grace
Kelly, The Hi Lo's, John Ireland, The Clara Ward Singers, Dorothy Dandridge, Polly
Bergen, Joel Grey, Salvador Dali, producer/director Herb Ross, Diahann Carroll, Pat
Carroll, Orson Bean, Howard Keel, Arlene Dahl, Red Buttons, the San Sebastian Film
Festival in Spain, and Bobby Short. Wicks established her public relations firm in
New York in the late forties and made her trek west in 1958.
Virginia Elaine Wicks was born in Long Beach on Dec. 9, 1920 to Ingwald and Ruby
Lenora Wicks, both accomplished classical musicians; her father played violin while
her mother was an accomplished pianist. Her only sibling Camilla, one of the first
female violinists to enjoy an international concert and recording career, followed
in 1928 and survives her.
She is survived by three children, Michael Wicks Dunaway of San Diego, Christina
Virginia Bayles of Anaheim and Brien Engel of Atlanta; and eight grandchildren and
two great-grandchildren. Her marriages to Los Angeles judge Jack Gray Dunaway and
film producer Fred Engel, whose credits included the 1963 Lilies of the Field starring
Sidney Poitier, ended in divorce.
In later years, Virginia Wicks' contributions to jazz were recognized, one in 2000
as part of a Women Legends of Jazz ceremony and concert at New York's Merkin Hall
which also cited vocalists Nancy Wilson and Annie Ross among others. In 2010, she
received an A Team award from the Jazz Journalists Association for non-musicians
whose works had far-reaching consequences in promoting the music.
Wicks represented Nat Cole and songwriter Eden Ahbez, composer of Cole's No. 1 hit
"Nature Boy" from 1948. Ahbez, a forerunner of hippies by twenty years who once lived
under the first "L" of the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles, was on tour with Cole in
New York promoting the song when he came up missing. Thinking quickly, Wicks flagged
down a taxi and asked to be driven through Central Park, where she found Ahbez meditating
on a branch of a large tree.
__________
Prepared by Tad Hershorn, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University
http://ejazznews.com/?p=13773

-30-



-Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
Amateur (ham) Radio Operator K6YBV
916/ 806-9551

"Dad, if I never tell a lie, how am I ever gonna be President?" -George Washington