After I was discharged I moved back in with my family, Everything was different than it had been before. “The Good War,” as Studs Terkel calls it, had changed everything in ways I couldn’t explain. All I knew was that I wanted to get my life started again as soon as possible.
One of the first things I did when I got home was get in touch with Freddy Katz. We had grown so close during the war that I couldn’t wait to see him again. He lived in New York City too, so it was easy to get together, and soon we were hanging out all the time. I got to know his whole family, and I became buddies not only with Freddy, but with his brothers, Stan and Abe, and their father, a learned man who taught me many things. They became my second family.
They were a very close family who all had a deep respect for music, art, and literature. I swear I received the equivalent of a university education from hanging around the Katz family. Mr. Katz, a dentist, was a Russian-Jewish intellectual who could talk about any subject. Listening to him was like going to hear a great lecturer. We sat around and discussed music and philosophy over coffee: Marx, Plato, Spinoza, music theory, all the great subjects. All three brothers were terrific musicians—Abe was first trumpet player in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. He taught me how to breathe correctly when I was singing.
The Katzes hosted an informal “musicale” every Friday night, and great musicians around the city dropped by to jam. We went into the library and somebody would pull the music for, say, a string quartet off the shelf, deliberately one they’d never played, and those guys would sight-read (that is, read the music and play it straight off the page without ever having heard the piece before) it right on the spot. It was amazing. One Friday night there was a terrible blizzard that virtually shut down the city and Freddy figured that nobody was going to come. I was already there, of course—no snow storm was going to keep me away from my beloved Friday night ritual—and I guess everybody else felt the same way too, because by eight-thirty there were about thirty people in the house. Those Friday evenings were incredibly inspiring. By the end of the night I was so elated when I walked out of their house I felt like I was three feet off the ground. Sometimes I didn’t leave at all; I slept over so I could do it all again in the morning.
I was now determined to do whatever I had to do to become a professional singer. This meant pounding the proverbial pavement of New York City and knocking on the door of every booking agent, club, and promoter in town. Believe me, I got a lot of rejections, which was a bit of a shock after all the success I’d enjoyed in Germany, but I didn’t let it get me down. I just kept at it I went on so many auditions, but for years I couldn’t get work as a singer. I even tried out for the chorus of a Broadway show, but with no luck. I kept singing wherever I could—not for money mind you, because at that time there was none to be made—for the experience and the chance to work with some great talents. As an unknown singer I was amazed at the caliber of the jazz musicians I was able to perform with and learn from as a result of my persistently hanging around the good clubs.
The first time I sang in a nightclub was at the Shangri-La. It was right under the El train in Astoria and was a very fancy, hip place in 1946. The great trombonist Tyree Glenn—who earlier in his career had played with Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, Benny Carter, and Cab Calloway—was leading the band. I sang informally at the bar, and when Tyree saw how much I loved his band, he said to me, “Come on up and sing with us.” What a thrill! After he heard me and saw the audience’s reaction, he gave me a job. It didn’t last long, though, because a few months later Tyree joined Duke Ellington’s orchestra, and after that became one of Louis Armstrong’s All-Stars. But those were very successful moments for me, and they encouraged me to keep going. I knew if I just had the chance to get up in front of an audience, I’d win them over.
I “worked” all kinds of clubs in Queens and Manhattan. I sang once or twice at the old Venice Gardens in Astoria, although mainly I used to go there to dance and look for girls. For a while I was once again a singing waiter, this time at the Pheasant Tavern and the Red Door in Astoria. Occasionally I sat in at the Yukon Bar on Fiftieth Street in New York, and for a while I performed at the Bal Tabarin on Broadway around Forty-fifth Street. That was the biggest job I’d had yet, and when I got it I said to myself “I’ve hit the big time, I’m right on Broadway!”
The Nestle Inn in Astoria was fairly typical of the kinds of gigs I was getting. It was a tiny club “nestled,” as it were, under the Hell Gate Bridge. Stan Weiss had a nice little jazz thing going there as the leader of a quartet. He’d just come off the road with Tony Pastor’s Orchestra, where he got to play with Rosemary Clooney, so he was doing great. When I heard he was playing the Nestle Inn, I went over and asked him if I could sit in.
Stan apparently liked what I did, because he told me I could sing with his band whenever I wanted. As usual there was never any talk of paying me anything, but like I said, it was all about the experience of working with Stan and his pianist, a wonderful guy named Bobby Pratt. Bobby knew millions of songs, and he turned me on to a lot of them. He gave me a song called “While the Music Plays On,” a great tune which I later recorded on my first jazz album for Columbia.
Stan’s friends, like Zoot Sims and Al Cohn, two of the most swinging tenor saxophonists in the entire history of jazz, would often drop in to jam. That was the first time I heard them, and from that moment on I became a fan for life. When I met them I didn’t realize how famous they were—they had both been featured in Woody Herman’s Second Herd, probably the greatest big band of those years. Like the great sax player Stan Getz, who was also in Woody’s band, they were heavily influenced by the legendary Lester “Prez” Young of Count Basie fame, who created the light and swinging style of tenor saxophone that was a jazz revelation. Zoot and Al became like brothers to me, and when I started recording regularly many years later, I was thrilled to have them play with me. Back in 1947, all three of us were sitting in with Stan Weiss’s group at the Nestle Inn for the fun of it.
I was showing up at the Nestle Inn whenever Stan was playing there, and we got to be great pals. Between sets I’d show him all the cool places to eat in Astoria—it was my neighborhood, after all—and once we double-dated with a couple of nice local girls. A few months later Stan got an offer to go back on the road with Elliot Lawrence’s band. I was sorry to see him go, but happy for him, because Elliot had a fine band.
I met quite a few lifelong friends in those years after the war. There were a lot of showbiz bars around midtown and Greenwich Village where I’d hang out and socialize with the guys. Right near the Winter Garden Theater, on Seventh Avenue between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth, there was a place called B-G Bottomless Coffee, where I spent many happy hours. Right next door was Hanson’s, where all the comics hung out, and across the street were Hector’s and Charlie’s Tavern, It was an all-star line-up of hangout joints all along Seventh Avenue between Fifty-first and the legendary Fifty-second Street, I met John Cholakis at one of these clubs. He was a struggling bass player and I was a struggling singer, so we hit it off right away, John had inherited a resort hotel in Far Rockaway Beach, all the way at the end of Queens, practically in Long Island, and in the summer we opened up the place and got it ready for the guests. We fixed up any broken-down furniture, aired out mattresses, did any odd job that needed doing, and in exchange I got to stay at the hotel all summer. It could have been a Neil Simon play, two kids spending the summer on the beach, dreaming of stardom.
John and I used to go to Fifty-second Street to hear great jazz: swing, bop, and Dixieland, in one little funky club after another. It was incredible. John had a friend named Billy Verlin who played trumpet and ran a rehearsal studio. All the musicians hung out and jammed there, but Billy was in no better shape than the rest of us, so he asked each of the guys to cough up a dollar to help with the rent. It worked out great for everybody. Marlon Brando, who was then on Broadway in A Streetcar Named Desire, often came down and hung around with the musicians at Verlin’s studio on his matinee days. This was long before the general public knew who he was. Billy didn’t recognize him and was about to tell him to split until one of the guys said that he was an actor. That was okay with Billy. Brando always had a pretty girl on his arm and strolled into the studio wearing his trademark T-shirt.
John later made it himself, not as a bassist but as a television director, and his wife, Betty Frasier, a wonderful woman, is one of the country’s leading illustrators of children’s books.
I was living on a dime a day, literally. I’d get up and go into the city every morning and start my door-to-door rounds. My mom always left me a dollar’s worth of change on the table before she went to work, but I never took more than ten cents. She was still working as a seamstress and I couldn’t bear to take her money. I still dreamed about being a successful singer so that she wouldn’t have to work anymore, and in the meantime I wasn’t going to take more than I had to.
What really struck me as strange was the fact that, after all the positive stories about show business my uncle Dick had told me, he now gave me a hard time about pursuing my dream of getting into the business instead of getting a “steady job” to help support my family. I guess he felt it was his duty to read me the riot act. He’d say things like, “You’re just a bum! You’re not going to make it, so you might as well just get a regular job. Help your mother out! Don’t be a gigolo!” He was really rough on me, and he made me feel like I was talentless. But at the time Uncle Dick’s ridicule only made me more determined to succeed. I know now that he was just telling me what he thought I should hear, what the upstanding Italian uncle should say to the son of a widow, because years later I found out from Gary Stevens, a famous press agent, that Uncle Dick used to talk me up all over town. He was still working at the Broadway Theatre then, and he’d tell anyone who would listen: “I’ve got this nephew who can really sing! He’s going to be a big star. He’s really gonna make it. You gotta go out and see him!”
The best thing that happened to me after the war was the opportunity to study at the American Theater Wing on Forty-fourth Street. The government set up a program called the Gl Bill that provided benefits for returning soldiers. It paid the tuition for college or trade schools, and provided other important services—anything to help the vets get back on their feet. It gave a lot of guys like myself the opportunity to continue the education that was interrupted by the war or to go to a school that we otherwise would never have been able to afford. In fact, in 1954 I was presented with a special citation that singled me out as “the ex-soldier who’d accomplished the most with his GI Bill of Rights training” by President Eisenhower. I am particularly proud of this award.
The American Theater Wing (which later became The Actors’ Studio) was one of the greatest schools in New York City. I had amazing teachers, most notably a Russian professor named Zhilinski who had performed with the world-renowned Konstantin Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre. Stanislavsky was the founder of what became known as Method acting, a discipline that has been made famous by actors like Marlon Brando and Dustin Hoffman. To this day I’ve never seen performances on Broadway or anywhere else that were better than the ones Zhilinski gave us. In one class, he demonstrated fifteen different ways to play a drunk and fifteen different ways to cry.
I’ve since applied the techniques I learned there to my singing. When I sing a song, I think autobiographically, as though the lyrics are about something I’ve experienced. I look for songs that lend themselves to that type of expression, songs that are full of powerful emotions, so that the public can “dream along with me,” as Perry Como used to say. That’s what I look for in a singer too. Nat “King” Cole, for example, just hypnotized me when he sang a song like “I Realize Now,” because he revealed himself so honestly. That’s the idea: to let the audience know how you feel.
At the same time that I was learning how to tell a story at the American Theater Wing, I was also studying vocal technique. Pietro D’Andrea taught me bel canto singing, the same method my brother had studied when he was a kid. These techniques and exercises have really saved my voice. There’s nothing like knowing the basics. I also studied with Helen Hobbs Jordan for a while. She taught me sight reading, which was quite a challenge, and gave me a whole new appreciation for what I was trying to do.
Another tremendous coach of mine was Mimi Speer. She had a studio right on Fifty-second Street, across from all my favorite haunts. We’d look out her window down at the marquees across the street: Art Tatum, Erroll Garner, Stan Getz, George Shearing, Lester Young, Count Basie, and Billie Holiday, all lined up in a row. It was enough to make your head spin. She’d tell me, “Do not imitate another singer, because you’ll end up sounding just like they do, and you won’t develop an original sound. Instead, find a musician you really like and study their phrasing. That way you’ll create a sound all your own.” It was a great tip. I paid particular attention to sax players Stan Getz and Lester Young. Art Tatum, was the greatest piano player of all time and was particularly instructive to listen to because he did unexpected stuff, all those jumps in and out of the melody.
I was particularly taken with Charlie Parker and the early beboppers. I knew a lot of soldiers who came back after the war and felt alienated by what had happened to jazz, but I was crazy about it. I remember the first time I heard Parker. It was at the legendary Birdland, and I didn’t even know who he was at the time. I was so intensely overcome with emotion at what I heard that I actually went into the alley behind the club and threw up.
By studying the great artists over the years, I’ve learned ways to keep the public’s interest, I spent a lot of time with Count Basie, and his music was all about dynamics and nuances, first soft and then BOOM! There would be unexpected little body blows and then knockout punches, BOOM, BOOM, BAM! I try to do the unexpected so that the audience doesn’t know what’s going to happen next.
I was fortunate to catch the tail end of an era when performers helped each other out. There was camaraderie then. Established stars helped young performers coming up. If you got a hit song, the veterans took you along with them on the road and helped you break in. And the public was so encouraging. They rooted for you if they saw that you were nervous and you were trying, and they kept plugging for you. Showbiz today seems much more cutthroat. I think young performers should be encouraged and nurtured much more carefully, and be given a chance to grow.
I never did actually get a paying gig on Fifty-second Street, although I basically lived there for a few years. I did perform once at Leon and Eddie’s, thanks to Milton Berle and Jan Murray, who had heard me sing and arranged for me to perform at the club on a Sunday night so agents could come in and see me.
The wonderful entertainer Barbara Carroll invited me to sing with her at a club called La Cava on Fifty-second Street, and that was a terrific break. She said, “Come in and just sing, and maybe someone will hear you.” I did that for a while, still making no money, but I did get free drinks and experience. One night someone came up to me and said, “There’s a big songwriter in the audience, Rube Bloom. Sing for him.” He had written “Don’t Worry ‘Bout Me,” and many other standards. I started singing for Mr. Bloom, looking right at him, but instead of being flattered by the attention, he was annoyed that I was trying to catch his ear. When he discovered I wasn’t going to let him enjoy his drink in anonymity, he got angry and abruptly turned his back on me. I was singing “Blue Moon,” and when I got to the second chorus, I sang, “Rube Bloom, you saw me standing alone.” He got up, threw his money down on the table, and stormed out of the place. Timing is everything.
My closest friend in these early years was Jack Wilson. Wed been friends since 1939; his family lived next door to us in the Metropolitan Apartments. When we were kids, he, my brother, and I hung out together all the time. He was a few years older than me, but that didn’t make any difference because we liked to do the same things. Jack and I discovered that we both wanted to make it in the music business. Most kids would get together and talk about girls or sports, but not us. All we thought about was music. I had my heart set on singing, but Jack was an aspiring songwriter. We listened to the latest big band records and got to know them so well that we could stand on the corner and scat-sing all the solos. We sang for dimes on the streets of Astoria. It was a great friendship.
I taught Jack about drawing and painting, and he taught me about poetry, but not from a book. Jack had the mind and soul of a poet, and I was very much inspired by his point of view. Before the war he used to talk about the three bridges that connected Astoria to the rest of the world. The Queensboro Bridge went straight into midtown Manhattan. We played hooky (same as I did with my friend Rudy DeHarak), and we’d catch all the big band shows—Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, and Frank Sinatra—and the comics, like Bob Hope and Red Skelton. The Triborough Bridge took us uptown to Harlem and the world of jazz: the Apollo Theater and the Savoy, Count Basie and Billie Holiday, soul food and church choirs. Then there was the Hell Gate Bridge, the bridge that really set us dreaming. We saw these long freight trains coming in from all over the country, one boxcar after another. We’d try to count them, but we’d always lose track. Jack and I would imagine where they’d come from, where they were going. Some nights wed go watch the barges and ships in the river, and it was the same kind of feeling. Those trains and boats really fed our wanderlust and made us dream about all the wonderful places we hoped our music would take us.
During our wanderings around town, Jack introduced me to Abby Mann, an aspiring screenwriter and director who was struggling just like the rest of us. At the time Jack and Abby were throwing ideas together for a musical comedy, and the three of us met on Central Park South. We’d been hanging around for a while, looking at the grand apartments lining the street, and I remember that we said to each other how glorious it would be to live in one of those fancy places along the park. I can’t help feeling it was some kind of omen or something, because that’s exactly where I live today. Abby and I have been friends ever since. His writing career was a big success, and he eventually went on to win an Oscar for his screenplay of Judgment at Nuremberg.
I introduced Jack to Freddy Katz, and from that point on the three of us were together almost constantly. Jack and Freddy became a great writing team. Jack wrote the words, Freddy wrote the music, and then the three of us went around town to different record companies to “demonstrate” the finished compositions by performing them live. Today musicians use what they call demo tapes that are mailed out to record companies or music publishers in hopes of selling their work. In those days we sold our work live. One day we decided to try our luck at the Paramount Theater. Frankie Laine was on the bill with Stan Kenton and his Orchestra, and June Christy was his vocalist. We got backstage and demonstrated the song for them. They all liked it, and Frankie Laine said to me, “Why are you demonstrating songs? You should be the one making records and singing here on this stage!” I was floored.
Freddy was working primarily as a pianist and accompanist for different singers then, but the bandleader Skitch Henderson knew what a great cellist he was and hired him to play in the orchestra at the Capitol Theater. He played for the entire show, including for the headliner, Lena Home. One of Lena’s arrangers, Phil Moore, had written a very fancy orchestration of “Frankie and Johnnie” for her, with a really difficult cello part, and Freddy carried it off with characteristic aplomb. After the run was over, they had a big cast party, and Freddy got a chance to impress everybody with his piano playing. Lena liked it so much that a few weeks later he got a call from her manager offering him the job as her accompanist. Needless to say he took it.
Freddy also played piano for a while for the up-and-coming Vic Damone. Vic was being managed by a man named Ray Muscarella. He ran a few businesses in Brooklyn, his family owned a winery down in Little Italy, he managed prizefighters, and he dabbled in show business. In those days, there wasn’t a business or industry that wasn’t connected one way or another with the underworld and nightclubs were run by unsavory characters. It was understood by everyone in the business that if you wanted to play the big clubs, if you really wanted to make it, sooner or later you’d run into one of these guys. There was nothing you could do to avoid it. The underworld also ran the jukebox operations across the country, and it’s no secret that they built Las Vegas.
Freddy was always talking me up to Ray, so sometime around late 1948 he agreed to give me an audition. We got together in the basement of Freddy’s house, and he played the piano and I sang. Ray Muscarella loved it.
So Ray became my manager. When Jack Wilson found out, he pulled me aside. “You realize, don’t you,” he said, “what we’re talking about here?” He wanted to make sure I knew what I was getting into. But I felt that I couldn’t pass up the chance to get the good gigs I was sure Ray could get me.
Jack was completely opposed to my getting involved with Ray. He said, “You’re making the wrong move.” I told him that I’d been scuffling long enough, living on ten cents a day all these years, and I just couldn’t turn down any kind of help. Ray was going to give me financial backing, and I was sure he was gonna make something happen. But Jack was adamant. He felt so strongly about it that he really let me have it: he took his best shot and slapped me hard right in the face. I knew he had my best interest at heart, though, and we worked things out between us. When I started touring, Jack even became my road manager for a while.
With Ray as my manager, I felt for the first time that somebody professional really believed in me, somebody who could actually do something for me. He started in right away by getting me a good gig at the Shangri-La in Astoria, where I had sat in with Tyree Glenn. That first night I was wearing a new suit and the club hung out an enormous picture of me. I was so excited about my first real publicity shot that I not only saved the picture, I made a special frame for it.
Ray was convinced I could make it, but he thought I needed some polishing first, and I agreed. He hired coaches and arrangers for me, starting with a guy named Nat Debin. Nat was a nice guy, but he wasn’t the right teacher for me. His teaching technique was just too stiff I’ve learned that just as important as practicing the proper technique is knowing how to relax. You can’t be concerned about technique every minute or you’ll never get the emotion across. The trick, really, is to learn all the rules and then throw it all away and be yourself.
Ray got me a spot on the Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts program, which was in the tradition of the famous radio program, Major Bowes Original Amateur Hour and its TV successor, the Ted Mack Amateur Hour, Godfrey was a giant on radio and early television, the Jack Paar of his day. The Godfrey show differed from the Bowes and Mack shows in that the focus wasn’t on pure amateurs but on “rising” young talents who hadn’t made it yet, I appeared on the show with another unknown singer by the name of Rosemary Clooney. Freddy Katz wrote out a special arrangement for me, and it went over well, but I lost to Rosie, who by that time was already touring with Tony Pastor and his Orchestra. It’s funny: I remember she sang a song called “Golden Earrings,” but I can’t recall what number I performed.
Rosie has always been good, a natural singer, and she was the first big star to do a whole album with Duke Ellington. We worked together a lot over the next few years. She jokes that I more than got even with her for beating me on that show: for most of the last decade we’ve been competing in the same category at the Grammy® Awards, and she likes to kid about losing to me every year. She says, “Maybe I’m in the wrong category I should be in the category for women over sixty who were born in the Ohio Valley.” Around the time of the 1998 Grammy Awards, Rosie was very sick. She ran a temperature of 107 degrees, and the doctors didn’t think she was going to make it. She later told me that when she was unconscious she had fever dreams, and in one dream she was surrounded by fifteen Tony Bennetts, all walking up to her and handing her the Grammy! What a great person she is, my buddy, I’ll always love her.
I appeared on the Arthur Godfrey show right around the time Pearl Bailey came to Greenwich Village to check out the Village Inn. The club owner would let me come down, hang out, and perform whenever they had an open spot. I was sitting at the bar one night and I overheard him say to the bartender that he was planning to turn the club into a more legitimate showroom and that he was trying to persuade the legendary performer Pearl Bailey to headline the room. After the show, the club owner came up to me and, much to my astonishment, said, “Miss Bailey agreed to play the room on the condition that you, ‘that Joe Bari guy,’ stay on the bill.” I couldn’t believe it! “Can you beat that?” he said. “If you don’t stay, she ain’t gonna play the room. And I was gonna tell ya’ to take a hike.”
That was, as they say, my first big break. It was also the beginning of a long and wonderful friendship between Pearl and myself, a relationship that grew even closer when she married my dear friend, the wonderful drummer Louis Bellson, in 1952. Pearl wanted me to know just how much hard work lay ahead of me. She said to me, “I can start you out, kid, but it’s going to take you ten years to learn how to walk on the stage.” It was great advice, but she probably underestimated how long it actually takes to get everything right. I think all performers starting out today should be given the same advice, so that a little bit of success early on doesn’t go to their heads and screw up their future careers.
I learned a lot from Pearl, especially how not to take any nonsense from anybody. There was a girl in the chorus line at the Village Inn who was very jealous of Pearl’s success and had it in for her. One night when Pearl was dancing, this girl got behind her and started mimicking her dancing, trying to make a fool of her. So Pearl, without missing a beat, just turned around and knocked her out! Then she turned to the audience and said, “That’s the end of the show, folks. I can’t top that!” Classic Pearl Bailey.
She always took great care of me and had me work with her whenever she could. She once hosted her own TV special for PBS and brought in Sarah Vaughan and myself as her guests. She had a fifteen-week series on ABC and she invited me to come on. It was really special, since Louis Bellson was playing and conducting the orchestra; it was so comfortable I felt like I was hanging out with friends and jamming. Pearl was a great lady who treated me very kindly. She gave me a copy of her autobiography that was inscribed: “To my son Antonio—Mama Pearl.” What an honor.
In the spring of 1949, Ray arranged for my first record date for a small label called Leslie Records, owned by Sy Leslie. Their claim to fame was that they had made a couple of successful records featuring famous baseball players.
I was thrilled to find out that George Simon would be producing my recording session. George, the head writer for Metronome, the greatest music magazine of all time, was already a legend in the business. He always knew who the best bands and singers were. It was thrilling to be in a full-fledged recording studio for the first time, and I was grateful for the opportunity to work with George. He knew more about music and had a bigger record collection than anybody I ever met. Spending an evening with him at his place in the West Fifties was like taking a course in the history of jazz.
The recording from this session was a two-sided 78 RPM disc, as all records were then. One side was an original composition by George, an Italian-style novelty called “Vieni Qui.” The other side was the Gershwin standard “Fascinating Rhythm.” I’m proud that I sang a Gershwin song at the very start of my recording career—for me, that really was beginning at the top! We did it at the New York Decca studios on Fifty-seventh Street, the same historic place where Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong, Woody Herman, Count Basie, and so many others made so many classic recordings.
There was a vocal group backing me up who had recently worked with Bing Crosby on his recording of “Jamboree-Jones,” a Johnny Mercer song. The group had earlier been known as the Skyriders but had, by this time, changed their name to the Tattlers.
“Vieni Qui” and “Fascinating Rhythm” by “Joe Bari” went absolutely nowhere, but it was still a kick for me to have a record of my own. My friend John Cholakis had a cousin who owned a bar called the Rainbow Bar and Grill out in Far Rockaway. As soon as we got a copy of the disc, John and I hopped on the Long Island Railroad and went straight to the bar and put the record on the jukebox. That was a thrill too. It’s been almost fifty years since I made that record and I can’t say I remember what it sounds like. The one copy I had literally crumbled in my hands in the 1960s.
There’s another record I made a few months after the Leslie record that’s been completely lost. This was a “demonstration disc” of two old songs I loved—another rhythm song, “Crazy Rhythm,” and a great old standard I remembered from the early thirties, “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams.”
Ray was trying everything he could to get some attention for me. He used every contact he had in the music business, one of whom happened to be a very smart show-business lawyer named Jack Spencer. Spencer had a number of famous clients, the biggest of whom was Cole Porter, Mr. Spencer was friendly with Hugh Martin, the composer who had written the great score to Meet Me in St. Louis for Judy Garland (which included one number I later recorded, “The Trolley Song”). So they sent me over to Hugh Martin’s apartment with my demo disc of “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and told me “When he plays the record, have him call us and tell us what he thinks.”
Mr. Martin called and said, “This kid is another Martha Raye!” Now, lately people think of Martha Raye strictly as a comedienne, and of course she was one of the best. Charlie Chaplin, in his whole career, hardly ever hired another comic to work opposite him—Jack Oakie in The Great Dictator and Buster Keaton in Limelight were practically the only ones, and Martha Raye in Monsieur Verdoux. She was also a truly great vocalist. So I was very flattered by Mr. Martin’s comparison. That comment also confirmed for Ray that he had made the right decision in taking me on.
Through Ray, I eventually found a vocal coach who was just right for me, and he was about the most spontaneous guy I ever met. A tremendous musician and a great person, his full name was Tony Tamburello, but he sometimes worked under the name “Tony Burrell,” and usually everybody just called him Tony T. When I first met Ray, he had me and two other singers audition for Tony T., who immediately pointed to me and said, “This guy is the one you want.” I was always grateful for that.
Tony T. was one of the first to teach me one of the big lessons of my life: he told me never to compromise and to stay with good music; a sentiment that Frank Sinatra would reaffirm years later. Tony T. was a terrific coach. We just rolled up our sleeves and got to work, full of ambition to make something happen. We spent hours working on a song or an arrangement, never thinking about the time.
Tony T. could play every great song ever written, and his playing was as smooth as silk, just brilliant. He was like a character in a Fellini movie, way ahead of his time. As an example of his sense of humor, he started his own label, which he called “Horrible Records,” and the company’s slogan was “If it’s a horrible record, it’s bound to be a hit!” He also started a company called “MOB Records,” which featured a singer named “Al Dente.” The discs were pressed at “45 Caliber Speed.” He rented space in the famous Brill Building, but when the rents got too expensive for him, he got one of those huge old dry-cleaning trucks and put a little spinet piano in the back. He rigged up a staircase so people could get in and out, and he gave vocal lessons in the truck! Students would call to make an appointment, and he’d say, “Meet me at the corner of Seventh and Forty-ninth at three o’clock.” That was the address of the Brill Building, and when his students got there, they were surprised to find they’d be having their lesson outsidethe building. He even had someone paint “Fresh Fish and Music” on the side of the truck.
For years Tony T. was practically my musical conscience. When songwriters came around with something they wanted me to hear, Tony T. acted as a buffer, helping me find the good songs, which I sang and recorded. I like to think that after fifty years of singing professionally I know what I’m doing, but I still wish I had Tony T. with me.
Ray had one other connection that was to prove important to me: a man named Charlie Cooley, who worked for Bob Hope. At the beginning of Hope’s career, Bob had a vaudeville act opening for Charlie, who had given him one of his first breaks. Bob had been a tough kid; he came right from the streets and had done time in reform school, so for Charlie to give him a break meant a lot to him, and he never forgot it. Bob’s a wonderful man. Anybody who ever did Bob Hope a favor of any kind has had it repaid tenfold. Anybody who helped him, any of the girls who went on the USO tours—he always made sure to use them in one of his movies or on one of his NBC-TV specials. Charlie stayed on Bob’s payroll for the rest of his life.
Ray waited until Bob Hope was in town playing the New York Paramount, then he called Charlie and got him to come down to the Village Inn and catch the show with Pearl and myself Charlie liked what he heard well enough to bring Bob back with him. So the same week Pearl Bailey saw me at the Village Inn. Bob Hope came down to check out my act. He liked my singing so much that after the show he came back to see me in my dressing room and said, “Come on, kid, you’re going to come to the Paramount and sing with me.” The Paramount! Talk about the big time! Bob Hope and Pearl Bailey, all in the same week! But first he told me he didn’t care for my stage name and asked me what my real name was. I told him, “My name is Anthony Dominick Benedetto.”
“Oh, no, too long for the marquee,” he said. (Little did he know that someday there’d be a performer named Engelbert Humperdinck.) He thought for a moment, then he said, “We’ll call you Tony Bennett.”
And that’s how it happened. A new Americanized name, the start of a wonderful career and a glorious adventure that has continued for fifty years.
It was an honor to be part of Bob Hope’s troupe. I could hardly believe it: here I was performing with the man I felt had saved my sanity during the war and who had inspired me to go into show business. It was a dream come true.
He had a great bunch of people working with him: Jane Russell, the great tap dancer Steve Condos, and Les Brown and his wonderful Band of Renown. They were all very supportive. I was young and didn’t know what to do with myself while I was singing. Between Bob Hope and Pearl Bailey, what an amazing education I had! They showed me the value of being positive: when you walk out on a stage, the audience has to know that you want to be there, that you want to entertain them. I’m still using what they taught me fifty years later.
When I finished my number, Bob said to the audience, “Well, I was getting tired of Crosby anyhow!” It was a great line and helped me win over the audience at the Paramount.
It was also a thrill working with Les Brown. His was the first major band I ever sang with. I remember being so excited about that gig that I ran out and bought myself a brand new zoot suit for the occasion. Working with great musicians like the kind Les had in his Band of Renown really rubbed off on me. I sang a couple of songs a night, mainly tunes from the early recordings I had done—“Crazy Rhythm,” “Fascinating Rhythm,” and “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” But I kept working hard to become a better singer.
When the gig at the Paramount ended. Bob took me and the rest of the troupe on a brief six-city tour. Everywhere Bob Hope went, people went crazy; in each town the local sheriff and the entire police force escorted us to the theater. Every night was an event.
That tour was the first time I ever flew. Bob did everything first class. He was one of the first entertainers to fly from city to city, which I guess he got a taste for in the war. The tour ended when we reached the West Coast. I didn’t do Bob’s radio show at that time, but I got to attend a broadcast, and meet Margaret Whiting, one of my favorite singers, who was a regular on Bob’s show at that time. At one point I sang for her, and her reaction was one of warm approval. Bob also introduced me to Bing Crosby when he dropped by the show one day, and that was one of the greatest thrills of my life.
It wasn’t long after I got back from the coast that I had another happy surprise coming to me. Ray had been sending out copies of my demo disc to anybody he thought would listen. As it turned out, the “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” disc had attracted the attention of a gentleman named Mitch Miller, who had just taken over as head of the “pop singles” division of Columbia Records. I didn’t know exactly what was in store for me, but I did know that getting a recording contract was the next big step.