The $390,000 Man

It is well after the late news and deep into the monster-movie hours, the time when TV punishes insomniacs with ads for truck drivers' academies and once-in-a-lifetime offers—"Send $6.98 for records, $8.98 for eight-track tapes" —for Tchaikovsky's Greatest Hits and the Best of Connie Francis. Suddenly, a smoothly handsome, oddly familiar-looking young crooner appears on a softly back-lighted stage. While he pumps a microphone and purrs out a ballad, viewers begin to wonder: Como's kid brother maybe? An Italian Goulet? Then on comes the voiceover, hailing the "mood rock" sound of that nationwide heartthrob, Peter Lemongello.

Peter who? Lemongello, 29, is a bland-voiced but relentlessly enterprising tenor from Islip, Long Island. For years he struggled to build a career—through such gimmicks as sending out little boxes of lemon Jell-O to deejays and record-company executives to remind them, should the occasion arise, how to pronounce his name. Now Lemongello and some home-town backers have forcefully raised the momentous question: Can an independent singer hit the big time by marketing himself like so much, well, JellO?

In 1974 Lemongello decided that his eight-year struggle to become a nationwide singing idol was hopeless. Too bad, because he certainly looked the part, with his long brown Prince Valiant locks, rosebud lips and gray-green almond-shaped eyes. He had also had all the prescribed early breaks. He had been "discovered" on the Tonight Show four times, sung with Don Rickles in Reno and Vegas, played the Copa, Jimmy's and the Rainbow Room in Manhattan, signed a $7,500 contract with Epic Records and toured the top spas on the Borscht Belt.

Selling Eggs. But it all turned sour. Tonight said "Enough." Rickles replaced him with Vic Damone. His record contract, after studio and musician costs were paid, netted him $180 and produced one single that tested well in Omaha but died in Atlanta—after which Epic dropped him too. Even in the Catskills, audiences played mah-jongg while he sang them love ballads, and they clacked their tiles on the table to show their bored approval. He quit, he says, "in disgust and revulsion."

But while he was bombing in show business, Lemongello was succeeding in a lot of other fields. In Islip, he turned an egg-selling job into a distributorship, using the profits to invest in some gas stations, which he then swapped for a chain of coin-operated laundries. He was moving into land speculation and home building when he told the local Islip banker who was financing his housing deals about his moribund career as a crooner. The banker gave him an idea: If he could sell eggs and laundries and houses, why not himself?