By the time I arrived in 1950, Columbia Records was the oldest record company in business. William S. Paley, who owned CBS radio, bought Columbia Records in the late thirties and quickly established it as a major label by releasing recordings by some of my favorite acts: Count Basie, Kay Kyser, Mildred Bailey, Gene Krupa, and Benny Goodman. He even signed Harry James’s “boy singer” Frank Sinatra.
The label grew throughout the big band era, then signed the pop singers who succeeded those bands in the late forties. Mannie Sachs headed “artists and repertoire” (A&R), the department responsible for discovering and developing new talent for the label. He launched the careers of Sinatra, Dinah Shore, and Buddy Clark, acts that ended up selling more records for Columbia than any other artists before. At the end of the forties, Mannie was offered a better deal at RCA Records, and he took it. Columbia went into a panic.
Paley decided to restructure the company and brought two men into the picture who would have a tremendous impact on my recording career: British-born Goddard Lieberson, a composer who went into the business side of music, and producer Mitch Miller.
Goddard Lieberson had a reputation for fighting hard to ensure that the business side of music never overwhelmed his artists. He was appointed Columbia’s executive vice president, and started recording cast albums from original Broadway shows. He was the first to realize that the original cast package was perfect for the new medium known as the LP, or long-playing record, which Columbia had recently introduced, South Pacific became their biggest album, selling over a million and a quarter copies, unheard of sales at that time.
Mitch Miller had recently headed A&R at Mercury-Records, where he’d been responsible for making that company a major force in the industry. Lieberson persuaded the top management at Columbia that Mitch was the guy to replace Mannie Sachs. Mitch had started out as a classical oboe player and gradually reinvented himself as perhaps the single most influential producer in the history of recording.
Not long after Mitch took over as head of A&R, he heard my demo discs of “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and “Fascinating Rhythm.” This was around the same time that he had his now-infamous feud with Frank Sinatra. They constantly fought over what songs Frank should record. The industry was beginning to give Mitch a lot of flack for that, and I always suspected he signed me partially to show people that he wasn’t prejudiced against Italian singers! He had never heard of me, but he was so impressed by the way I sang “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” that he signed me to the label sight unseen, and selected “Boulevard” as my first single for Columbia, As it turned out, it would be one of the few times that Mitch and I saw eye to eye on the subject of repertoire.
Mitch was very supportive of me. He believed in my talent, and he wanted to make my career happen. He tended to like novelty songs, so everybody associates him with the “square” side of the pop scene, but that’s not really fair. Mitch innovated the “Sing Along with Mitch” records that became so popular that the concept was turned into a television show, making “Mitch Miller” a household name. His trademark was his goatee and his cigar, and pretty soon other producers were growing goatees and smoking cigars. Everybody was imitating Mitch, so obviously they felt he had something cool going on.
The modern incarnation of Columbia Records had only been around for eleven years, so these were still the early days of the record business. I loved those days, when things were much looser and less bogged down by big business. I was still a star-struck kid back then.
We cut everything on these big old wax discs; even a major record company like Columbia hadn’t begun using tape yet. Recording artists had to do four songs in a three-hour session, and we had to come into the studio with all of our songs memorized, and if you went over the three hours, Columbia would have to pay overtime to all the musicians in the studio orchestra. Sometimes it was crazy but usually we got the job done without going into overtime.
On my first recording date with Columbia, April 17, 1950, I was so nervous I couldn’t get through all four tunes like I was supposed to. I had to do two that first day, and the other two three days later. My engineer on that first date was the great Frank Laico, and he remained my engineer for the entire time I was at Columbia. We made all my records together in a magnificent old church on East Thirtieth Street that Columbia had bought and had converted into a recording studio. It was a beautiful building—the best recording studio on the planet. Many Columbia artists, including Igor Stravinsky, Frank Sinatra, Count Basie, Dave Brubeck, Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington, and Bill Evans recorded there until Columbia sold it in the late sixties. What a shame that was.
Right from the start Frank knew how to get just the sound I was going for, and though I’ve worked with other engineers over the years, he’s always been my favorite. He was able to get inside my brain and capture the essence of my performance on record. Mitch also paired me with the great arranger Marty Manning. Some musicians didn’t think his writing was “hip,” but all I can say is that every time I made a record with Marty, it was a hit, from “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” to “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”
When “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” was released on June 12, 1950, it wasn’t a smash, but it was a huge local hit and was well received by the critics. On the twenty-eighth of that month the single earned me my first notice in Walter Winchell’s popular entertainment column. It simply said, “Orchids, Tony, orchids.” I was working in Dallas at this time and I ran into the wonderful drummer Mickey Scrima, who for many years had played with Harry James. He pulled me aside and said, “Do you know what Sinatra says about you?” I said, “Does Sinatra even know who I am?” It turned out that Frank had said, “That kid’s got four sets of balls.” It was a little raw, but it was one of the nicest things anybody ever said about me. I was knocked out. With the attention I received in New York, and with Frank Sinatra bantering my name around music circles, I felt like I’d really hit the big time, and I decided to celebrate by taking my first-ever vacation. I went to Miami, hung around on the beach, and basked in my first real success.
I began getting some good work on radio and TV. A producer named Irving Mansfield, who was married to Jacqueline Susann (she was around the early TV scene before she became an author), came up with a concept for a summer replacement show called Songs for Sale, basically a talent contest for aspiring songwriters. Each week two popular male and female singers sang the songs of that week’s contestants, and then a panel of experts judged the songs they’d just heard. I was chosen as the male singer, and my great friend Rosemary Clooney was chosen as the female vocalist. Jan Murray was the host. The show started on CBS radio on June 30, and beginning on July 7, it was simulcast on CBS-TV.
Gary Stevens was one of the producers of Songs for Sale. It was Gary’s job to put together the panel of judges for each week’s show. He always made a point of having a well-known songwriter and at least one radio deejay in addition to “a regular guy” who would represent the opinion of the man in the street. Gary had several reasons for bringing in the deejays. For one thing, they knew as much about songs as anybody. For another, Gary knew that if they were going on a TV show on Friday night, they’d spend the preceding week promoting the show in their local markets. It was free advertising. A lot of famous jocks got their first TV exposure on Songs for Sale.
Gary did a great job assembling the panel of judges, but unfortunately the same thing can’t be said for whoever it was who picked the contestants. They were never selected on the basis of their songwriting ability. The producers made a point of picking the wackiest, weirdest people in the world for the show, and then considered it entertaining when these people made fools of themselves on national TV. I thought it was cruel.
Needless to say the songs these characters came up with were consistently mediocre but we had to sing them. We didn’t have time to actually memorize the songs, since they were different every week and eminently forgettable, so we had to rely on cue cards. This was before there were professional cue card holders, and the producers made the mistake of using the stagehands to hold the cards up. It was clear they’d rather be drinking or playing poker, and that they hated actually working, so they’d intentionally hold the cue cards sideways or upside down. Anything to make it more difficult for us, and these songs were already tough enough to sing! We were in a panic every week because we often had to make up our own lyrics, live on the air. It was a disaster.
I managed to slip in a good song once without the producers realizing I’d done it: the tune “Kiss You,” with words by my old friend Jack Wilson, Jack was a professional songwriter by this time, but we were able to get his song onto the show on the grounds that Jack’s collaborators, Georgie Brown and Alex Fogarty, were unknowns.
Only one song a week could win, and the losing songwriters inevitably blamed Rosie and me. They would corner us somewhere and harass us to no end. In order to avoid their attentions we were experts at finding sneaky exits out of the studio, taking our leave through basements and down fire escapes. All that for a hundred dollars a week!
But what was nice was, the three of us—Rosemary, Jan, and myself—got our picture in the New York Times as a result of being on that program. It was the first time the Times ever covered me, and I can still remember what a thrill it was. We also did a brief tour of the local movie theaters, the first time I worked that circuit since I was with Bob Hope’s show.
Around the same time, Hubbell Robinson, a top booking agent at MCA, called Mitch to see if he had any ideas for a radio series that could serve as a summer replacement for Bob Crosby’s daily variety show. Mitch said, “I’ve got two fabulous young people here, Tony Bennett and Rosemary Clooney.” So on Mitch’s suggestion CBS put together a show called Steppin’ Out It aired every weeknight from 7:45 to 8:00 PM, beginning on July 3, 1950, We did Steppin’ Out five nights a week, then on Friday night we’d stick around and go directly into the simulcast of Songs for Sale.
I guess Hubbell Robinson didn’t like how we handled the show, because after one week he called Mitch and tried to fire us. Mitch told him that we were the best young talents he knew, and that he was getting us for nothing, so the least he could do was to keep up his end of the bargain. Mitch talked to Goddard Lieberson, who then talked to William S. Paley. We were able to continue on the show, and as a last bit of advice Mitch told Robinson, “Enjoy them while you can. Next year, you won’t be able to afford either one of them.”
We were glad to do that show because the songs were first class, but it was only what they called a “sustaining series” there was no commercial sponsor, so we didn’t have the budget for a full orchestra. But we did have a great quintet led by Johnny Guarnieri, a masterful pianist who’d played with both Lester Young and Frank Sinatra. Steppin’ Out was a joy.
My career has covered the whole history of television. It’s wild to think about how much it’s evolved since 1950. I’ve worked with all the greats of the medium—Edward R. Murrow, Ed Sullivan, Dave Garroway, Jack Paar, and Steve Allen. I did the first Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and I did the first Merv Griffin Show. I’ve kicked off a lot of new television shows in my time, and it’s an honor I’ll always be proud of.
I went back into the studio on July 14, 1950. This time I worked with arranger-conductor Percy Faith. The folks at the label were looking for a song to build upon the success of “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” There was a song floating around at that time that had been a country hit for Red Foley on Decca, and for Kitty Kallen and Richard Hayes on Mercury, a semireligious tune called “Our Lady of Fatima.” My producers thought I should try recording my own version, since it was a proven hit.
In those days, “cover records,” the recordings of songs previously made popular by another artist, were standard industry policy. What usually happened was that a smaller label would have a hit, like pianist Francis Craig doing “Near You,” with a little outfit called Bullet Records, When it started selling, RCA got into the act and “covered” it with their own instrumental version by staff arranger Larry Green. Sometimes white artists “covered” Black artists, or mainstream artists “covered” country artists. Normally the big label’s profits would leave the independent label’s in the dust, so the majors were always on the lookout for successful independent tunes that one of their artists could cover.
One of the things I liked about Mitch was that he didn’t believe in making “cover” records, particularly the kind in which the original record was mimicked note for note, nuance for nuance. Mitch always said that he would rather spend the same energy creating original hits. But this was early in Mitch’s career at Columbia, before he became a power figure at the label, so when Columbia’s sales department wanted another hit, Mitch obliged by getting Percy and me together in the studio to record “Our Lady of Fatima.” It was a hokey tune, but it was an important record for me because it was the first time Percy and I worked together.
The song caused little fanfare when it was released, and Columbia sent me right back into the studio. I could sense that the label was becoming concerned, and we both knew that I needed another hit to keep my career moving forward. Although my live engagements were going well, I wasn’t selling records. I released eight singles between August 1950 and January 1951, and none of them went anywhere. “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” was a big enough regional hit for me to get jobs on the road as far away as Ohio and Pennsylvania, but nothing had broken through on the national level.
By the spring of 1951, I was told that if I didn’t get a hit soon I’d be dropped from the label. I went into Percy’s office and he said, “In this next session you really have to deliver. We have only three songs ready, so we need another song.” I remember that he looked through a bunch of sheet music on his desk, grabbed a song, and said, “Well, let’s do this one.” That song was “Because of You.” I was doing a lot of dramatic singing on my early records like “Sing You Sinners” and “Boulevard,” but Percy said to me, “Just relax. Use your natural voice and sing the song.” I took his advice.
When “Because of You” was released, the record company didn’t have much confidence in me. But then something interesting started happening; the record didn’t get on the radio right away, but people were playing it on jukeboxes so often that it started to build momentum, one nickel at a time. It was unusual for a song to become popular on jukeboxes before it got on the radio, but this one did. Listeners from all around the country began calling their local radio stations and requesting “Because of You,” and it reached number one on Billboard magazine’s pop chart on June 23, 1951. It stayed on the chart for thirty-two weeks-ten weeks at number one. I finally had my first major hit record.
It was amazing. Everywhere I went that summer I heard the song blaring from car radios, and record stores set up speakers outside and played the song to attract customers. My family was thrilled, of course, and couldn’t stop telling me how proud they were that I had made it. It was wonderful.
“Because of You” sold a million copies, and Billboard put me on the cover with Mitch Miller and Harry Siskind, owner of one of the country’s leading jukebox companies. Suddenly my songs were being played everywhere, and my records were selling. I was really enjoying my success, but the funny thing was, I couldn’t help thinking that I had jinxed myself when I took that monthlong trip to Miami right after my initial success with “Boulevard.” It taught me never to take a vacation when the public is clamoring for you.
We recorded fifteen more songs that year. Those sessions turned out to be a gold mine. “Cold, Cold Heart” also hit Billboard’s number one spot, and three other songs from those sessions were all in the top twenty: “I Won’t Cry Anymore,” “Blue Velvet,” and “Solitaire.” That was kind of the moment of truth for me. All of a sudden I had to deliver, and I did. I felt the way I imagine a baseball player feels when he hits a home run when the bases are loaded.
When Mitch first played me Hank Williams’s “Cold, Cold Heart,” I have to admit I didn’t think I should sing it. In those days country artists still used the old-time fiddle, and I told Mitch that I couldn’t do it. He told me just to listen to the words and music, pointing out how beautiful the ending was: “Why can’t I free your doubtful mind/And melt your cold, cold heart?” He convinced me, and I recorded it. The song started out slowly at first, but it caught on, and it kept climbing the charts until it was number one.
I’d never heard of Hank Williams before then, though I soon learned that he was the single most important figure in all of country music. Back then there wasn’t the “crossover” between different styles of music that there is today. If you listened to country music, you probably never heard pop music, and vice versa. Williams had reached the top of the country ladder in 1949 when he joined the cast of the Grand Ol’ Opry, and by then virtually all of his records were hits in the Bible Belt and the Midwest. All you have to do is listen to Hank’s records to understand why he was so popular. He was the greatest.
Thanks to “Cold, Cold Heart,” Hank’s songs finally caught on with the rest of the country. This was the first time a country song had crossed over to the top-forty mainstream chart-it even became an international hit. I never met Hank in person, but one day he called me on the phone and said, “Tony, what’s the idea of ruining my song?” He obviously had a sense of humor. We sold two million copies of “Cold, Cold Heart,” and I’m sure he did quite well by it. Later, Hank’s friends told me how much he loved my recording and said that whenever he passed a jukebox, he’d put a nickel in and play my version.
Hank died in 1953 when he was only twenty-nine years old. A few years later I had the privilege of being invited down to Nashville to pay homage to his memory on The Grand Of Opry TV show. In those days they were very strict about what was authentic country music and what wasn’t: just violin, bass, and guitar. Anything else, including drums, was off limits. When I passed out my arrangement to the Opry musicians, one of the guitar players put the arrangement aside and said, “You just sing and we’ll follow you.” So I sang it the same way I always did, and they accompanied me beautifully.
Mitch customarily reserved Monday afternoons to audition new material, and songwriters and demo singers lined up the entire length of the hall outside Mitch’s office. When songwriter Bernie Wayne got his chance to play “Blue Velvet” for Mitch, he got as far as the first line, “She wore blue velvet...” when Mitch interrupted and said, “How about Tony Bennett?” Bernie said, “Don’t you want to hear the rest of the song?” and Mitch answered, “Quit while you’re ahead!”
I was on a roll. With a second hit single I was getting a lot of bookings and having a great time on the road, but the one thing that made me unhappy was Columbia wouldn’t let me use my musicians when we recorded. Mitch and Percy Faith insisted on using their guys, who were great, but I was building up a rapport with my trio that’s hard to duplicate with studio musicians. My great drummer Billy Exiner had been with me from the beginning, but it wasn’t until 1955 that I was able to have him at my Columbia recording sessions.
Billy was something of a legend among musicians: he’d never even touched a drumstick until he was twenty-four years old. When he was a merchant seaman, he was at a dance when the drummer, who had to leave the stand, asked him to take over. He did, even though he’d never played before. He eventually became one of the great drummers of all time.
My pianist throughout 1951 was a fine musician from Boston named Jack Medoff. When Jack left in 1952 I was able to get Gene di Novi, an old friend of Billy’s. I knew Gene from Charlie’s Tavern and the other musicians’ hangouts in New York. He’d been one of the original bebop pianists on Fifty-second Street in the late forties. Back in those days there were only a few piano players who could handle the new music, and Gene was one of them. He had the honor, at a very young age, of playing with jazz giants like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, and Lester Young, just to name a few.
All my records were hitting the charts at the same time. I was on a real lucky streak. While “Because of You” and “Cold, Cold Heart” were still hot, I was booked into the Paramount as a headliner. This was the first time I was the main attraction, and I was thrilled. I was on the same bill as Louis Prima and his Orchestra, featuring Keely Smith and the Vanderbilt Boys, and the movie feature was The Flying Leathernecks, starring John Wayne.
The shows were more fun to watch than they were to perform in, let me tell you: I did seven shows a day starting at ten-thirty in the morning—I’m still numb just thinking about them! There were at least three distinct audiences coming in to see the shows. In the morning we had kids, some who had probably ditched school the way I had in the early forties. In the afternoon came the senior citizens, and then in the evening the young lovers and married couples. Bob Whitman and Nat Shapiro, managers of the Paramount, insisted that we do material that would appeal to everybody not just one age group, so we had to find songs that everybody loved. Today It’s completely the opposite. I dislike the concept of demographics—targeting certain segments of the market—because it puts everyone in categories. There’s no reason that if you sing good songs the whole family won’t like them. On this subject, Duke Ellington always quoted Toscanini: “Music is either good or it isn’t. It’s not someone’s opinion.”
I was set to open on September 19, 1951. Ray Muscarella and Sid Ascher, the press agent he’d hired, were determined that this would be a big deal. Ray owned a whole fleet of trucks as part of his family’s wine business, and he had them all specially wired for transmitting sound. The trucks made a parade starting in Little Italy, playing “Because of You” as loud as they could all the way to the Paramount in midtown Manhattan. You could hear it in Astoria and Brooklyn! It got louder and louder as the trucks approached the Paramount, and by the time they were parked in front of the theater, it was a virtual Tony Bennett wall-of-sound.
Apart from his sound trucks, Ray used other publicity stunts to promote the Paramount appearance. He hired skywriters to write “Tony Bennett—New York Paramount” across the Manhattan skyline, and on opening day I gave away American Beauty roses and handkerchiefs monogrammed “Borrowed from Tony Bennett” to the first five hundred girls. It was really quite a show. I was overwhelmed by what was happening to me: everybody knew who I was, and young girls mobbed me wherever I went.
The greatest thing about that gig was getting the chance to work with Louis Prima, another of my show business heroes. He was terrific. I always called him “The Chief” Prima was a genius of a showman, a wild man on stage that you just couldn’t take your eyes off Louis grew up in New Orleans, and he had been surrounded by gambling all his life. He knew more about it than anyone I’ve met, before or since. When they started building casinos and resorts in Vegas, Louis was the one who showed them how to do it. He told them where to put the casino, where to put the lounges, where to put the showroom, how to make it work. But they weren’t loyal to Louis. When he came to them and wanted to open his own golf course in Vegas, they wouldn’t help him out. That broke his heart.
People wondered why I was so happy to follow a strong act like Louis Prima. In fact, there are a lot of big stars, and I’m not going mention any names, who always make it a point to get a weak act to open for them; that way the “big star’ can feel confident the audience can’t wait for him to go on.
I’ve had Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Lena Horne, and the great drummer Buddy Rich in front of me on the bill. Of course they knocked everybody out, but I’ve worked hard at being able to follow the best in the business, and I realize that the best way to win over an audience is to give them something great right off the bat. I believe the audience deserves the best from start to finish. Every time I opened with a very dynamic act like the Step Brothers, the Nicholas Brothers, or even Louis Prima, by the time I got on stage the crowd was wide awake and at the edge of their seats. They’re all thinking, “What’s gonna happen now? How can anybody follow what we just saw?” Then, I just came out and did it. If the program is strong all the way through, from the first act to the last, then the public never feels cheated.
I know how important it is to reach the kids—then and now—and I was the first entertainer I know of to make a point of playing at high schools. I played three schools a day in Chicago, New York, or wherever I happened to be performing. I’d sing a few songs and then tell the kids how much I enjoyed playing for them, and I thanked them for listening to my records. It was a great way to reach an audience that otherwise would never get a chance to see me perform live.
But I was once so badly mobbed that I really got scared. I had agreed to appear at a graduation at a girl’s school in Brooklyn. They were holding the ceremony in the Botanical Garden. The young ladies hadn’t been informed beforehand that I was going to be there, and as soon as this very proper teacher got up on the stand and said, “Girls, don’t get too excited, but we have Tony Bennett here...” the “ladies” went wild and started chasing me all over the park. They tore my clothes, took my cigarettes and everything that I had in my pockets, and made me run for my life. I had to hide in a little stone house in the park. They had me trapped like a rat!
All this attention, of course, meant that I really had made it. The first thing I did with the money I was making was buy a house for my mom. It was a nice place at 76 Valley Road in River Edge, New Jersey and I felt so proud that I’d finally achieved my life’s ambition: getting my mom to stop working. That’s all I was interested in. Everything else I’ve done ever since has essentially been a free ride. I would have stopped singing altogether after “Because of You” and “Cold, Cold Heart” if I hadn’t loved it.
But do you know what? Life is funny When my mom was working, she was never sick a day in her life, but she fell apart the minute she stopped going to her job every day. I thought I was doing something great for her, but it was more like a curse. She couldn’t afford to get sick during the years that she was struggling to take care of my father and raise her family, but I guess once she was able to relax, it hit her all at once. She was like her brother, our uncle Jim, who had been a cab-driver. It wasn’t until the end of his life that he found out he’d had two heart attacks and never even felt them. He just knew he had to show up the next day for work.
If she’d kept working, maybe she’d have stayed strong. My mom was never the same. Mary and her husband, Tom Chiappa, moved in with her in River Edge, and for many years they took care of her. Mary set up my office for me, now that things were really under way, and she worked for me through most of the fifties. She’s very gregarious and always great to everyone she meets. She organized my first fan club, “The Bennett-Tones,” even before I was with Columbia Records, and after everything started happening for me Mary kept track of the day-to-day business. I can’t say too often how much I love her. We also hired a very nice woman named Natalie Sanders as her assistant to help out around the office.
After the success at the Paramount, I was booked to appear in Miami, Chicago, Cleveland, and Buffalo. I did some further touring with Jan Murray and Rosemary Clooney and as Mitch had predicted, my price had gone up considerably In 1950 I was getting a hundred dollars a week, but after the success of “Because of You” I was commanding over three thousand dollars a week, top dollar at that time. Rosie and I played the Capitol Theater in Washington in October 1951, and the local press sent out their “inquiring photographer” to do a story on us. The novice reporter was a young woman named Jacqueline Bouvier, who later became Mrs. John F. Kennedy
My asking price went up so fast that one sharp club owner was able to take advantage of it. I first worked for Ben Maksik’s Town and Country, which was sort of the “Copacabana of Brooklyn,” in early 1951. To get the gig, Ben insisted I come back later in the year and work at the same price. I took the deal. After all, you never know what will happen, right? And then a few months later “Because of You” became a hit. Ben called in my contractual obligation in August, when I was really soaring. People lined up around the block to see me, but all Ben had to give me was the one thousand dollars that he’d paid me six months earlier, a third of what I was getting everywhere else. It was Christmas in August for Ben.
Of all these early gigs, my biggest personal triumph was playing Chicago, and that was entirely due to Nat “King” Cole, a wonderful man and a great artist, I don’t think people fully comprehend the extent of his brilliance. He was a magnificent piano player, and he could sing like an angel. Songs like “I Realize Now,” Embraceable You,” and “Its Only a Paper Moon” are mesmerizing, Nat and I had the same agent, Buddy Howe, of General Artists Corporation (GAC), I came into the GAC office one day and there Nat was, all six feet and change of him. I told him I’d just come from visiting my mom in New Jersey. He asked, “Did you take a limousine?” I told him, “No. I don’t use a limo. I took a bus in.” He was shocked that I had all these records on the chart and I was taking the bus in from my mom’s house. That knocked him out and we became friends.
At this time I was very big in New York City, but I hadn’t made a dent in Chicago. It happened that Nat was booked into the Chez Paree there, but he had to cancel when he was asked to sing at the White House. He needed to have someone fill in for him, so he told the owners of the club, “Get Tony Bennett.” I did the show, and I went over big.
The Chez Paree was an important gig for me. I was on the bill with Sophie Tucker, one of the all-time great ladies of show business. I’ll never forget the opening night with the Step Brothers, Ford and Hines, and Sophie Tucker. The show hit so big that Sophie told us, “You guys can relax, because our contract’s gonna be picked up, and well be here all month.” And sure enough, I spent the whole month there. Miss Tucker had been such a big headliner for so many years that she always insisted on top billing. But I wanted to get at least equal billing. We resolved it by writing “Sophie Tucker and Tony Bennett” on one side of the marquee and “Tony Bennett and Sophie Tucker” on the other side. The club very carefully arranged to drive Sophie in from the “correct” direction, so she never saw the side that gave me top billing.
The audiences in Chicago were wonderfully receptive to me. They’d never seen me before, but they knew my records, and called out requests. Sophie used to stand in the wings and monitor the opening acts to make sure we didn’t grab any extra stage time or go over too big with the audience. One night I wound up staying on stage for longer than my allotted time, and Sophie was fuming. When it was clear I was going to keep singing, she marched up to my road manager and hollered, “Tell your friend to get off stage!”
I met and fell in love with a young woman named Patricia Beech in July of 1951. I was singing at Moe’s Main Street in Cleveland, Ohio, and one night she came in with a date. I could see her from the stage—she was sitting ringside—and I was taken with her beauty. After the show her date asked me to join them at their table, so of course I took that opportunity to introduce myself to her. I found out that she was from a little town south of Cleveland called Mansfield and that she had just graduated from high school and moved to Cleveland. Even with my newfound fame and all the attention I was getting, that night was the first time I’d met someone I wanted to see on more than a casual date.
That night was probably Patricia’s first time in a nightclub. She was a big jazz fan, though, and used to listen to radio broadcasts by the famous disc jockey “Symphony Sid” Torrin. He played jazz records all night long, and as a teenager she’d stay up and listen to his show. She’d heard my singing before, but didn’t own any of my records until after we met. She loved art, and had come to Cleveland in the hope of being admitted to that city’s excellent art school. I was twenty-four and she was eighteen.
I managed to get her telephone number, and since I was in Cleveland for a couple of days doing promotion, I called her the next day and asked her out. That Saturday we had our first date, an unusual one since I didn’t have a lot of free time in those days: we spent the day picking out neckties for me to wear on stage. She had great taste! We hung out together as much as we could, but soon I had to leave Cleveland and get back on the road. For the next couple of months we had a long-distance relationship. I called her every day, and we talked on the phone for hours about jazz and art and all kinds of things. She always came to my shows when I was playing around Ohio, which was a big market in those days, so we got to see each other quite a bit. But not enough.
Two months after we met, I invited Patricia to come and visit me in New York in time for the big show at the Paramount. I wanted her with me so that she could get a taste of what my life was like. Shed never been to the city before, and the only address she had for me was the Paramount Theater, so when she arrived she took the bus from Newark Airport right into midtown Manhattan. She was astonished to see thousands of screaming bobby-soxers surrounding the theater and clamoring for me. There were so many kids they had to be held back by police barricades. She had no idea it would be like this—the only place shed seen me perform was in Ohio, and I guess I neglected to mention that New York City would be a little different. So different that Patricia almost didn’t get in to see me because the police thought she was just another teenage Tony Bennett fan and they refused to let her backstage. She was standing there at the stage door trying to convince the doorman that I’d invited her to the show when Billy, my drummer, happened to walk by and he rescued her. What a welcome Patricia had that day!
Soon after, I convinced her to move to New York City so we could be together more often. She found a job working for a broker on Forty-fourth Street as a gal Friday. I was on the road a lot that year, but New York was always my home base, so I got to see her a lot more often than I would have if she had stayed in Ohio. While I was on the road with the band, Patricia stayed at Jack Medoff’s empty apartment in the West Seventies until she found her own place at the Henry Hudson Hotel on West Fifty-seventh Street. It wasn’t very long before I decided that I wanted to marry Patricia, and I wanted to propose to her in a dramatic way. I was headlining the Paramount again for the Christmas holidays, and I thought that New Year’s Eve would be the perfect night. So during my show I announced my intentions to the world, which was a surprise to Patricia since I’d never actually asked her. I was fortunate that she wanted to marry me as much as I wanted to marry her, otherwise that would have been the most embarrassing night of my career.
My manager, Ray Muscarella, was also very surprised, although not as pleasantly. He didn’t like the idea that his star client would have a wife, or that somebody else would be more closely involved with me than himself. He believed that if I married I wouldn’t be as attractive to all the young female fans who, he thought, harbored the fantasy of someday marrying me themselves.
Ray’s attitude toward Patricia was one of the major reasons that Ray and I eventually split. He constantly did little things to discourage me from marrying her. One day she was on her way to meet me at a club when she noticed that some guy was following her. He waved a wad of money at her and tried to force her to take it. He said, “Hey, lady! I won it at the track. I don’t need it. I don’t want it. Here, you take it.” It was frightening and bizarre. Of course she didn’t take the money, and when she got to the club, Ray and his brothers were hanging around waiting for her. She told me what had happened, and we figured that it was a stunt Ray had pulled—I guess he expected her to walk into the club holding a pile of bills, tell a ridiculous story about a strange man who had given the money to her, and somehow compromise herself in my eyes.
Ray pulled his biggest stunt on my wedding day. Patricia and I were originally set to get married on February 11, 1952, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, one of the most spectacular churches in America. But Ray decided we should get married on the twelfth. We didn’t know why, but Patricia and I agreed. Well, it turned out that Monday February 12, was Lincoln’s Birthday, which meant that all my teenage fans would be out of school and able to show up at the church on Fifth Avenue, create a huge scene, and turn our wedding day into a publicity stunt. Ray arranged for thousands of screaming girls to mob the church; he even supplied black mourning veils for them to wear! It was so crazy that Patricia had a hard time getting into the church—the girls didn’t want to let her up the steps—and Patricia never forgave Ray for it.
We honeymooned at Nassau in the Bahamas for a week, and when I got back my first gig was at Copa City in Miami with Sophie Tucker and Jack Carter. That March we visited Patricia’s family in Mansfield, Ohio, and I invited everybody to come down when I played the Loew’s State Theater in Cleveland. We had a great time. Patricia traveled everywhere with me, and for the first few years of our marriage we were always on the road, though we did get an apartment at Riverside Drive and Eighty-sixth Street. This was our first real place together, and we spent our time there when we weren’t traveling.
By 1952 I felt I had matured both as a performer and as a person. I was a married man, I’d proven that I could create hit singles, and I was ready for the next stage in my development as an artist. I wanted to try something beyond the familiar Tony Bennett—Percy Faith sound that had given me five chart hits in 1951. Mitch had a knack for finding these snappy little novelty tunes, things like Rosemary Clooney’s “Come On-A-My House,” Frankie Laine’s hit “Hambone,” Doris Day’s “Sugarbush,” Jo Stafford’s “Chow Willy,” and Guy Mitchell’s “Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.” All of these songs were hits, but I wasn’t interested in singing that type of song. Yet Mitch kept trying to push these kinds of tunes on me, and as much as we liked each other, there was always tension between us. I wanted to sing the great songs, songs that I felt really mattered to people.
Rosemary Clooney who was recording for Columbia at the time, felt differently about this than I did. Like me, she knew from the time she was a child that she’d make her living singing. But she couldn’t have cared less if she was in Maysville, Kentucky; Cincinnati, Ohio; or if she was on the road with Tony Pastor. Essentially it was just a job to her. And so for her the object of this job, like any other, was to please the people who signed the checks. When Mitch Miller gave her a song called “The Canasta Song”—she told me that she couldn’t believe how bad it was, that it was just awful—she didn’t think about it; she just did it. She worked for Mitch, and she sang whatever he told her to.
Rosie told me that when Mitch played her “Come On-A-My House,” she hesitated. She asked him, “Do you think this song is a song that people will understand? And do you think that if they hear me sing this, that they’ll realize I’m a singer who can do other things too?” Mitch explained the situation to her in his own sensitive way: “If you don’t want to sing this song, don’t bother showing up at the session tomorrow, or ever again.”
Rosie was amazed that I stood up to Mitch, but she respected me for it. She knew I wasn’t being disrespectful to him, or obstinate, or hard to deal with. She understood that I just could not sing a song I didn’t like.
Fortunately, Mitch and I came to an understanding. We were still doing four tunes per recording session at that time, so we worked out a deal. He picked two songs and I picked two songs. Of course, even then there were certain songs he’d come up with that I just couldn’t do. But on the other hand, not everything that Mitch picked was a novelty, He often showed me that he still knew a thing or two about good songs. As a result I ended up having some great sessions with Mitch. But I always had the sword out, and I was always verbally dueling with him.
I’m not saying that I was always right. I absolutely hated “Rags to Riches” the first time I heard it in 1953. They really had to tie me down on that one. But Mitch laid down the law. “I don’t care what you hate. You have to record this,” so I went along with him. Thanks to Percy’s innovative arrangement, which included what he called a “double tango” in the instrumental break, I had another colossal hit and a gold record. More importantly, I grew to like the song and to enjoy singing it. Years later “Rags to Riches” was in Martin Scorsese’s hit film Goodfellas and it became popular all over again.
There was one source for new songs that both Mitch and I agreed on. When I first came to Columbia, Cole Porter’s lawyer, Jack Spencer, was trying to interest the label in me at the same time they were negotiating for the rights to Kiss Me, Kate. By 1953, the situation had reversed itself. I became so hot as a pop singles artist that all the Broadway producers and composers came running to Mitch pleading for me to record one of their songs.
In 1953, there was a huge newspaper strike in New York that lasted so long it actually closed down two or three newspapers permanently. Reporters couldn’t review openings. The producer of Kismet had a brainstorm. He compelled Columbia to have me record “Stranger in Paradise”—then had New York radio stations play it over and over again weeks before the opening. It hit the charts in November, making it all the way to the number two spot. On opening night in December, when the audience heard “Stranger in Paradise,” it stopped the show cold. Word of mouth had made the song—and the show—a smash hit.
Over the years ninety different artists have recorded “Stranger in Paradise,” but my version remains the biggest. It was also the first record of mine to go over really big in England, and I sang it the first time I played there in 1955. In England the song has been recorded ninety-six times, but the public eventually made mine number one.
In 1956, Jule Styne came to me with “Just In Time,” the big song from his forthcoming show, Bells Are Ringing. The Columbia people told him, “If you want Tony to record a single of ‘Just In Time,’ you’ll have to let Columbia Records have the cast album.” That was standard policy for Columbia. Jule said, “I want Tony No one else!” So that was that. I recorded “Just In Time” in September. I had a hit with the song and the show opened at the Shubert Theater on November 29.
We eventually collected twelve show tune singles for my 1962 album Mr. Broadway. I did many more Broadway show tunes over the years—enough to fill a two-CD set. I think probably the most important part of my recording legacy is that I had the privilege of introducing all those wonderful show tunes to the general public.
My habit of recording songs from Broadway shows also endeared me to Goddard Lieberson. I would record a new Broadway song, and Columbia in turn got the cast album, which became the foundation of their catalogue. Goddard was a friend of both Rex Harrison’s and Alan Jay Lerner’s, and when he heard about the show My Fair Lady, he took Columbia’s involvement in the Broadway scene one giant step farther. He persuaded William S. Paley to put some of Columbia’s money into the show, and Columbia was rewarded a thousandfold.
The show was the biggest hit in the history of Broadway up to that time: Columbia not only made a fortune with their original cast album (which they rerecorded in stereo in 1958 with the British cast); it was the biggest-selling cast album of all time, selling five million copies by the 1960s, When the producers of the show sold the movie rights to Warner Bros, for five million dollars, Columbia Records made out like a bandit. So did Goddard. My Fair Lady had opened on Broadway on March 15, 1956, and Goddard became president of Columbia Records that June.
With more and more hit records, my bookings got better and better. In April 1952, I opened at the El Rancho in Las Vegas for the first time.
Las Vegas was just getting started as a major entertainment town in the early fifties. The first hotel-casino had opened in 1941, featuring the now-standard showrooms, restaurants, and entertainment lounges. The Strip contained only two or three hotels in the forties, among them the Desert Inn and the El Rancho, and 1-95 was just a dirt road. But what followed in the fifties was a construction boom that gave us the glitzy gambling and entertainment capital we know and love today, Vegas thought big right from the start, and by the time I opened there, the Strip was packed with clubs and casinos and was already legendary. If you played Vegas, you knew you were famous. The underworld controlled just about every club and casino, but that was not news to me or anybody else who played there. It was a wild place where the attitude was “anything goes!”
Eventually I worked all the big hotels in Vegas: the El Rancho, the Sahara, the Sands, the Dunes, the Riviera, Caesars Palace, you name it. Those were sensational days. Entertainers like myself, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Lena Horne, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Noel Coward, Marlene Dietrich, Harpo Marx, and Louis Prima really made that town happen. Playing Caesars Palace regularly came about because of my friend Dave Victorson. When I first started making it, Dave came to see me and told me, “I’m flat broke. I have to go to L. A. and try my luck.” I asked him how much he needed. He said, “Five hundred dollars.” So I gave it to him. About seven years later I got a call from Dave. He said, “You’re coming to work for me.” “What are you talking about?” I asked him. He told me he was the entertainment director for a new hotel called Caesars Palace, and remembering that favor cemented our long-term association.
My big opening of that year was in October at the Copacabana in New York City. All the superstars—Frank Sinatra, Nat “King” Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Jimmy Durante, and Joe E. Lewis—played there. Vegas generally took its booking cues from the Copa then, and at first neither venue was too keen on what they called “record acts,” which they figured were a bunch of fly-by-nighters who wouldn’t bring in the right type of customer. They preferred old-line show business legends like Sophie Tucker. Once I got out on stage, I won them over.
One of the great things about my first engagement at the Copa was getting to work with Joe E. Lewis. Today he’s primarily remembered as the character Frank Sinatra played in the classic movie The Joker Is Wild, in which Frank introduced the song “All the Way,” but in his day Joe E. Lewis was an immensely popular and well-respected comedian. It was a real honor to be on the same bill with him. I felt like an amateur opening for a giant like Joe, but he was great to me. Being inexperienced, I couldn’t handle the crowd at the Copa; they never stopped talking, and I didn’t yet know how to hold a difficult audience like that, Joe gave me some great tips on how to grab the audience’s attention. When he found out that I was going to Texas, he wrote the critics in Houston and Dallas before I got there and told them to check me out. He was a real gentleman.
By 1953, I was on the road pretty much full-time. Along with my musicians I was traveling with a radio promotions man from Columbia Records named Danny Stevens and my road manager, Dee Anthony. Toward the middle of the year my piano player Gene di Novi left me to do a solo gig at an important cabaret in New York called the Show Spot.
I made an unusual choice for my next accompanist, the remarkable guitarist Chuck Wayne. I remembered when I first heard Bing Crosby in the early thirties he had a brilliant guitarist named Eddie Lang. I liked the soft, intimate sound that a guitar brought to the songs. Chuck was an accomplished musician and could conduct the band for me as well as any pianist I ever had.
Chuck and I had a lot of wild times on the road. One night in Florida I was asleep when the phone rang around eleven-thirty PM. It was Chuck and he said, “There’s a guy downtown who’s really bad-mouthing the hell out of you and our act. Should I take care of him?” I said, “Wait a minute; I’ll get dressed and come with you.” So we walked into this club, and there was a comic on stage. Sure enough, when he saw us come in, he started dumping on us: “Ah, there’s that Italian kid crooner Tony Bennett and his sidekick ukulele player Chuck Wayne. They think they’re hot stuff just ‘cause they’re from New York City” It started out pretty mild, but he went on rapping us big time. By the time the set was over, Chuck and I were really steamed up and we went backstage to jump the guy. We walked right over to him and pushed him up against the wall. I put my hand around his neck, and Chuck put his knee in his crotch. Then I said, “Don’t ever mention us again. Ever.” He said, “You got it. You got it. You boys are serious.” “You better believe it,” I told him, and walked out. Well, I found out later the comedian’s name was Don Rickles. That was at the very beginning of his career—nobody had even heard of him then. That type of insult comedy was completely new, and a lot of people, myself included, found it shocking. He was like Howard Stern today, pushing the limits of what’s considered acceptable. Chuck and I laughed about the whole thing because our bark was always much bigger than our bite, but to this day Don only has nice things to say about me.
Luckily, my legion of bobby-soxer fans did not lose interest in me after I got married. In fact, my two most ardent admirers, Molly Siva and Helen Schulman, became even more determined to pursue me. For months on end, whenever I’d go anywhere in public in New York City, they were there. I’d be sitting in a restaurant, having a bowl of soup or something, and I’d look up to find them staring at me through the window. When they found out I was getting married, they sent me telegrams by the hour pleading with me to change my mind. They’d wait at the stage door at the theater where I was appearing, and when the show was over, they’d follow my cab home. When Patricia and I got back from our honeymoon, they camped out on our doorstep for days.
During one engagement at the Roxy, I gave a total of seventy performances. Molly and Helen were there for at least sixty-eight. There was a building across the street from the theater that had an unoccupied office facing directly into my dressing room. Molly and Helen convinced the owner to lend them that office space for the month. There was a huge poster of me in front of the theater, and somehow the two of them managed to make off with it. They filled their special room with sandwiches, bottles of soda, and that enormous poster, and basically lived there. Most importantly, they had a phonograph and copies of all of my records that they blasted so loud that the neighborhood heard nothing but Tony Bennett for the entire month.
Once they took a bus all the way to Asbury Park, New Jersey, to hear me perform. They missed the last bus back and wound up stranded and came crying to me in my dressing room. I called their parents and assured them that everything was all right; then Patricia took them down to the local hotel and got them a room for the night. Another time they showed up for a performance at the Copa, but they’d drastically underestimated how expensive that famously high-priced nightspot could be and again wound up coming to me. I was happy to help them get into the show. Anything for such loyal, dedicated fans!
In those days, syndicated newspaper columnists occasionally invited celebrities to fill in for them. Once in 1954, when Dorothy Kilgallen took a vacation, I wrote one installment for her as a “guest columnist.” I devoted the entire column to the exploits of Molly and Helen, and that column inspired a novel by Nora Johnson called The World of Henry Orient, in which two schoolgirls become obsessed with a concert pianist (somehow they figured a classical musician was funnier than a pop crooner). The gag is that he’s always trying to make it with some chick, and these two little girls are forever following him around and messing up his plans. It was a very funny book and was later made into a film starring Peter Sellers as Henry Orient (me!), as well as a 1967 Broadway musical entitled Henry, Sweet Henry, starring Don Ameche.
That June Patricia told me she was pregnant. Things couldn’t have been better. My career was in full swing, and now I could look forward to starting a family. Since our apartment wasn’t big enough to accommodate the new arrival, Patricia and I decided to look outside the city for a bigger place. We found an apartment at the Briar Oaks apartment complex right off the Henry Hudson Parkway a little north of the George Washington Bridge in Riverdale, New York. We lived in apartment 1012 in the first tower, a spacious four-room spread. This was much different from anywhere else I’d lived, and the view of the Hudson River and the New Jersey palisades was spectacular.
My first son, D’Andrea, was born on February 3, 1954. We were so pleased when he arrived, and Patricia wanted to choose a very special name for him. She liked the name “Andrea,” but didn’t want the baby to be called “Andy,” so we weren’t really sure about it. But then I thought of my singing teacher Pietro D’Andrea, of whom. I was very fond, so we decided to put a “D” in front of “Andrea.” Patricia started in right away calling him “Danny,” and I also liked the idea that I could call him “Danny” because once on Fifty-second Street I had heard the great Art. Tatum play “Danny Boy” so beautifully that it always stayed with me. So that’s how he got the name he goes by today.
It was thrilling and at the same time a little bit frightening to think that I was now a father. Great responsibility comes with being a parent, and I didn’t want to miss a day of my son growing up. I was determined that we stay together even though my career required extensive travel. Patricia agreed and we traveled with Danny from the time he was three weeks old.
Traveling was quite different then than it is today. We were all basically still kids. I was twenty-eight and Patricia was only twenty-two, and we were traveling with the whole crew. We went from city to city, often performing in one town one night and opening in another town the next. We did get to travel by plane, but again, this was back in the fifties. The planes were prop jobs, they barely flew above the clouds, and we were subjected to some pretty bumpy rides. On top of that it took twice as long as it does today to get anywhere.
We’d pack up our luggage, the baby, and all the musicians every day, get into cabs, and rush to the airport. We’d invariably arrive at the last minute. Now remember, I was traveling with some pretty hip jazz musicians, and we were all known to partake in a little recreational pot smoking; everyone but Patricia, that is. I remember one time when Patricia was learning how to make my moms special spaghetti sauce. My mom came over to our house and showed Patricia her secret ingredients: a package of aluminum foil filled with a “stash” of herbs. Coming from a small town, Patricia had never seen oregano before and in her astonishment she thought, “Oh, my god, Tony’s mom uses pot in his favorite recipe!”
The musicians’ “extracurricular activities” made the organization a little less than organized. Getting everybody up and going in the morning was quite a feat. On top of that, the stand-up bass, which is about six and a half feet tall, was always too big to fit in the cargo compartment of the plane and had to have It’s own seat, and this was always a last minute hassle. But somehow we never missed a show in all those years, and we had a great time.
I had two more top-ten hits in 1954, Hank Williams’s posthumous hit “There’ll Be No Teardrops Tonight” and a novelty tune—Mitch’s idea, of course—called “Cinnamon Sinner.” I was especially fond of a song I recorded that year called “Funny Thing,” which was credited to the excellent lyricist Carl Sigman and a little-known composer named “Arthur Williams.” Actually “Arthur Williams” was a pseudonym adopted for publishing reasons by the great tunesmith and my great friend Jimmy Van Heusen, Van Heusen had also written “Somewhere Along the Way” in the same undercover fashion, and though I also recorded that, the hit on that 1951 classic belonged to Nat “King” Cole. I thought “Funny Thing” was a great song and a likely hit, and I was disappointed when it didn’t go anywhere.
At this point in my career, I became dissatisfied with just trying to turn out one pop hit after another, I wanted a hit record as much as anybody, but I knew that there was more to music than trying to beat out all the other pop singers for a top spot on the charts. I had wanted to do an LP ever since I signed with Columbia, but Mitch Miller felt that the public was really only interested in singles. Capitol, Decca, and other labels were starting to release full-length albums and were doing well with them; in fact, George Avakian, who ran Columbia’s jazz division, had released albums a couple of years earlier. But Mitch really missed the boat. It wasn’t until the advent of stereo sound in 1956-57 that Columbia really got behind LPs.
I was already singing a lot of jazz numbers live, and I continued to plead with Mitch and everybody else at Columbia to allow me to record a full-length jazz album. Finally perhaps out of fear that I’d leave the label, they relented and let me have my way.
I started recording that album. Cloud 7, in August 1954. Two years earlier, Columbia had released an LP called Dedicated to You, but that was only a collection of hit singles and not an original album. Cloud 7 was, to use a latter-day term, a genuine “concept album,” and it was one of Columbia’s first twelve-inch long-playing records.
Among the great musicians I was able to bring to that session were my old friend and idol, the great Al Cohn, alto saxophonist Davey Schildkraut, who like me was a big fan of Charlie Parker, and drummer Ed Shaughnessy, who later became famous as the linchpin of the Tonight Show band. I also brought back Gene di Novi on piano. Columbia had never wanted me to use Gene when he was officially part of my touring band in 1952 and 1953 because they thought he was too much of an upstart bebopper.
The most important player on Cloud 7 was Chuck Wayne. He worked out all the arrangements with me, and we featured his sensitive guitar work on every song. Chuck was also smart enough to clue me in to the fact that one of the songs we included on the album, “My Reverie,” was actually based on classical composer Claude Debussy’s “Reverie.” So here I was, a pop singer, doing an album that had both jazz and classical inspirations.
We did Cloud 7 very inexpensively, using just six musicians on each of the two recording sessions, the first in August, the second in December, 1954. Cloud 7 included the song “While the Music Plays On,” which Miles Davis later told me was one of his favorites. It was released in February 1955. Cloud 7 wasn’t a smash hit like’ “Because of You,” but then I wasn’t expecting it to be. This was a record I wanted to make to show the world that I was capable of doing something beyond hit singles. It was a long-term investment in my career, not a fast-buck hit. Though Mitch wasn’t thrilled with the album, be wasn’t opposed to doing something a little high-minded once in a while.
As far as I was concerned, Cloud 7 was a triumph. It proved that I was ready for some major changes in my career.