Born to working class Jews in Short Hills, New Jersey, Stickboy rose from humble beginnings to become one of the world's most gifted and beloved entertainers. After leaving yeshiva against his parents' wishes, the young stick figure worked as a pastry chef, a cantor, and as a fur trader on the St. Lawrence River until a fateful Sunday morning in December 1941.

Too young to enlist, Stickboy fled to France and joined the Resistance. After the liberation of Europe, he survived in post-war Paris as an artist's model and by busking on the streets of the Left Bank.

In 1947 bandleader Tommy Dorsey, on holiday with his wife, discovered Stickboy singing an acappella version of "Lean Baby" in French in front of Les Deux Magots café on Boulevard St. Germain and convinced him to return to the U.S. Once stateside, Stickboy immediately distinguished himself as a master of mood and phrasing on hundreds of standards he recorded and produced with Dorsey, Axel Stordahl, Billy May and Nelson Riddle, including "I've Got the World on a Stick," "Erasable You" and "Willow Weep For Me."

No one in the history of popular music has placed more singles in the Top Ten, including Stickboy contemporaries and sometime duet partners Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald and Mel Tormé. In 1955 he invented the LP as we know it with the release of In The Wee Small Hours of Stickboy.

"When I sing I believe I'm honest," he told Paris Match in a 1963 interview. "An audience is like a broad -- if you're indifferent, endsville."

One of the few great vocalists to make the successful leap to the silver screen, Stickboy has starred opposite Hollywood legends Bette Davis, Burt Lancaster, Marilyn Monroe and Jimmy Stewart in classics such as Stickboy of Arabia, Some Like It Stick and Ben-Hur, and in 1953 he won an Academy Award for his performance as Angelo Maggio in From Here To Eternity. Merry Stickmas, America, his annual NBC Christmas special, is enjoyed by more than 300 million viewers worldwide. In 1987 he was awarded a Kennedy Center Honor for his contribution to American culture.

"You gotta love livin', baby," he told Le Monde in 1990. "Dyin's a pain in the ass."

Stickboy lives in Palm Springs, California and Paris, France. In 2001 he was named the U.S. and European spokesperson for Celexa, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor designed for women.