She was born on August 16, 1928 in the Mount Eden section of the South Bronx, which was primarily a Spanish neighborhood at the time, before turning into a Puerto Rican area in the 1940s. Her family's surname was Gormezano and her father was a Sicilian immigrant from Palermo.
Her father's name was initially Nicola Gormezano until he converted to Judaism and changed it to Nessim Gormé after falling in love with her mother in 1923. Her mother was a Sephardic Jew. Eydie grew up speaking the Jewish languages known as Yiddish and Ladino, but also learned Spanish as a result of growing up in a Latin American neighborhood.
She worked as a Spanish interpreter after graduating from Taft High School in 1946. She decided to quit that job to pursue a singing career, touring with bandleader Tommy Tucker. In 1953, she joined Steve Allen's TV show known as The Tonight Show. That's how she met her husband Steve Lawrence, whom she married in 1957.
The pair won a Grammy in 1960 for their album We Got Us and performed together on many stages. The son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Lawrence was born Sidney Liebowitz in Brooklyn, New York on July 8, 1935. He had started singing in the synagogue choir where his father served as cantor while supporting the family as a house painter.
Eydie collaborated with the Mexican group Trio Los Panchos in the 1960s. Her best-known hit songs are “Too Close for Comfort,” “Love Me Forever," “Blame It on the Bossa Nova” and “If He Walked into My Life."
Throughout the 1980s, Gormé and Lawrence appeared on many well-known stages, including Carnegie Hall, the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles, Harrah’s in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, and Bally’s in Las Vegas. In 1991, they joined Frank Sinatra on his Diamond Jubilee Tour. In 1995, Eydie and Steve received Lifetime Achievement Awards from both the Society of Singers and the Songwriters Hall of Fame
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