Abbe Lane, the glamorous entertainer who starred in movies with Glenn Ford and Cornel Wilde and built a thriving singing career alongside her onetime husband, famed bandleader Xavier Cugat, has died. She was 93.
Lane died April 25 of natural causes in Los Angeles, her son Steven Leff told The Hollywood Reporter.
Lane starred in nearly two dozen Italian movies, working with the likes of Vittorio De Sica and Totó, and with Tony Randall toplined the 1958 Broadway musical comedy Oh Captain! (1958), directed by José Ferrer.
Once called the “Swingingest Sexpot in Show Business,” the redhead made a 3D splash in Wings of the Hawk (1953), starring Van Heflin and Julie Adams. She also appeared with Audie Murphy and Dan Duryea in Ride Clear of Diablo (1954), with Ford in The Americano (1955), with Dennis O’Keefe in Chicago Syndicate (1955) and with Wilde, who also directed, in Maracaibo (1958).
The Brooklyn native had married the Spanish-born, Cuba-raised Cugat in Miami in 1952 after he had spotted her singing in a Broadway show when she was nearing 16 and he was approaching 49. She fronted his Latin music orchestra and toured with him throughout Europe before she initiated their Mexican divorce in June 1964.
She quickly remarried, and two years later Cugat wed another much younger entertainer, Charo, the last of his five wives.
Lane wrote about her marriage to Cugat in the 1993 roman à clef But Where Is Love?, which publisher Warner Books promoted as a “riveting, glitzy, star-splashed tale of passion, obsession and one young woman’s poignant search for happiness. Peopled with Hollywood luminaries both real and imagined, it features tantalizing lore and gossip only a true insider could provide.”
In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Lane said she suffered “constant mental abuse” from Cugat. “He told me when to eat, when to sleep, when things had to be done,” she said. “I never argued with him. There was no point. His will prevailed in all cases.”
Abigail Francine Lassman was born in Brooklyn on Dec. 14, 1932, and raised in Manhattan. She sang on the radio and modeled, attended the High School of Music and Art for a year and then, billed as Abbe Marshall, performed on Broadway in 1947-48 in George Abbott’s Barefoot Boy With Cheek and in Michael Todd’s As the Girls Go.
“That’s when I met Cugie,” she said in 1963. “He was looking for a new vocalist when he saw me doing a calypso number in the stage show one night. The very next day Cugie was a guest with Vincent Lopez [on Lopez’s TV show, where she was a performer], and he saw me again. He liked my style and voice and asked me to audition the next day. I did and he hired me.”
Abbe Lane with bandleader Xavier Cugat in the 1950s.
Courtesy Everett Collection
After being accompanied by her mother on the road for about a year, she and Cugat wed — “I figured, I’ll marry him and travel, I didn’t realize that there would be other things involved,” she explained in a 2005 interview.
The couple toured Italy and performed as themselves in cha-cha-cha nightclub acts seen in Lo Scapolo (1955) and Donatella (1956). Soon, she was heading such Italian films as The Lady Doctor (1957), Honor Among Thieves (1957) and Roulotte e roulette (1959).
In 1957, Lane performed backed by her husband on NBC’s The Xavier Cugat Show and on The Ed Sullivan Show, and a year later, she was paired with Tito Puente and his mambo orchestra on the album Be Mine Tonight. A review of the LP notes that she “commands the spotlight from start to finish, galvanizing otherwise innocuous lyrics with wit, sophistication and sheer lust.”
Lane also partnered with bandleader Sid Ramin on a 1959 album of pop tunes as she recorded for RCA Victor and then Mercury Records.
She had become a cultural icon, and in the original 1960-61 Broadway production of Bye Bye Birdie, Chita Rivera‘s character sings “Spanish Rose” with these lyrics: “I’ll eat the tacos and the enchilada; I’ll drink tequila till I feel no pain; The only song I’ll sing will be ‘Granada’; I’ll be more español than Abbe Lane.”
Lane, who spoke four languages, also headlined a Las Vegas act, performed often on The Tonight Show, The Hollywood Palace and The Merv Griffin Show and acted on Naked City, Burke’s Law, F Troop, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., The Flying Nun, The Brady Bunch — as a spoiled perfume heiress — and Hart to Hart.
She said that the dominating Cugat told her “for so many years that, ‘Unless I’m behind you on the bandstand, you will not be able to perform, you will just melt away,’” she said. “It was not true, but I bought into it.”
Six months after divorcing Cugat, she married Perry Leff, a Creative Management Associates agent who represented the likes of Barbra Streisand and Gilligan’s Island creator Sherwood Schwartz, in a ceremony at the Plaza in New York. He died in 2020.
She also is survived by another son, Andrew, a music industry veteran and attorney, and a granddaughter, Kaia.
