By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 1, 2007

In the shower, any man is Robert Goulet.

On a clear day, rise and look around youuuu, and you'll see who you arrre. . . . Somewhere, my love, there will be songs to sing. . . . No never would I leave you, at allll. . . .

Out of the shower, though, no man is Robert Goulet, because there isn't that kind of singing star anymore, or really even that sort of man. They don't make them that tall, that blue-eyed, that sunny; they don't all have preternaturally black mustaches forever and ever. You step out of the tile acoustics and into America's never-ending teen talent show auditions, a world of imitators imitating imitators, the Michael Buble types.

These new crooners tap some innate need in popular culture to keep nearby the luscious, soothing, retro love songs. But Goulet's baritone was purer, deeper and stronger than what you hear in neo-Rat Pack lounges. It was love, all melty and warm. He was Barry Whitest.

It makes you think of the easy-listening FM stations your orthodontist started tuning in on his waiting-room stereo in the 1970s -- perhaps already nostalgic for something like the Robert Goulets, or perhaps just choosing the music once deemed universally comfortable for all ears. You're listening to KKNG, King Stereo -- gentle on your mind . . . .

Goulet died Tuesday, at 73 (yes, only!), waiting for a new lung, in the Cedars-Sinai wing where so many of our parents' favorite singers and celebrities seem to be spending their last. If you think about that sort of thing too much, such star obits make you think of your own parents dying. You ask: Who has Mom's Robert Goulet albums, anyway? What happened to all those show tune LPs, all those comedy records, all that easy-listening vinyl?

Oh, right -- the estate sale.

(We asked if you wanted to keep them, remember?)

Try to remember, the kind of September . . . .

In retrospect, Goulet almost came along too late. They cast him as Sir Lancelot in "Camelot," his big break, in 1960, in the last few years you could still build a Robert Goulet from scratch. He spent his career mostly recording other shows' show tunes ("The Fantasticks," "Fiddler on the Roof" and a version of "Annie Get Your Gun" with Doris Day), and other classic ballads from his generation's past and the next generation's present (he did versions of "You Light Up My Life," "The Way We Were"). He made a couple of Christmas albums, and instant covers of other people's movie themes -- "Dr. Zhivago," "Love Story."

Where do I begin, to tell the story of how great a love can be?

He did some movies, television and more concerts than you can count, all over the world. He got very rich, and lived with wife No. 2 in a Las Vegas spread and on a yacht in Los Angeles called the Rogo. He was Bob Goulet, celebrity fixture, prostate-exam proponent, almost always available.

Which, where we generally come in, meant that Goulet had to become intimately familiar with irony. It meant he had to play himself on an episode of "The Simpsons." (And on so many other sitcoms -- "The King of Queens," "Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place," "Mr. Belvedere," "Just Shoot Me" -- always cast as "himself," part of the joke of himself.) He had to be referenced in "Saturday Night Live" skits. He had to do morning-zoo radio shows in cities where he was singing that night with the local symphony. He had to embrace the whole part about the cheese of being Bob Goulet.

That's what happens when you're just about the last of something. That's the price of love songs.

Songs that still sound perfect, by the way, and gentle on your mind -- ripped or downloaded or however the kids do it -- and it is still that strong, manly voice a guy is going for, behind the steamy glass door, in some Head & Shoulders reverie.