I parted company with Ray Muscarella in 1955. My career really got started during the early years with Ray, and though I appreciated how much he had helped me, I questioned some of the engagements that were being presented to me—they weren’t exactly the kind of career moves that I wanted to be making. I didn’t feel that I had my finger on the pulse of my career, and I wanted to have more control over my own destiny. I had my lawyer negotiate an agreement with Ray that gave him ten percent of everything I earned for the next five years. Even then, Ray was reluctant to let me go, but the offer was a very generous one, and my lawyer convinced him to take the deal. I made sure I never missed a payment, and when the five years were finally over, I felt a new freedom. My sister Mary stepped in and managed my career.
As a result of the success of “Stranger in Paradise” in the U.K., where it went all the way to number one, I was invited for the first time to appear there.
I must say that the circumstances under which I visited Europe were much more agreeable than they had been in my previous visit during the war. But my first “tour” consisted of only two cities, Glasgow, where I played for a week at a theater called the Empire, and Liverpool, where I played a week at another club called the Empire. This wasn’t my English dream tour, not yet. English commentators at the time thought it was unusual that I didn’t perform in London, but I did lay down some good groundwork. I filmed what I believe to be the first music video—I was shot walking in Hyde Park along the Serpentine while my recording of “Stranger in Paradise” was played. The clip was distributed to all the local TV stations in the U.K. and America, where it was aired on shows like Dick Clark’s American Bandstand.
I also made my first of many appearances on Perry Como’s show around this time. Como’s NBC variety show was a Saturday night institution. He was by far the most successful singer on television, and his shows were beauties. The first time I met him I went to one of his rehearsals. Don’t forget I was a kid who grew up on the streets. He took one look at me and said, “Come with me.” I thought he was taking me to lunch. He walked me down to Tenth Avenue and Fifty-eighth Street and took me into St. Paul’s Church. Perry led me right to the confessional and said, “All right, now step in!” That was part of Perry’s great humor—always doing the unexpected, but always the right thing.
I went over well on the Como show, so much so that in 1956 NBC decided to let me take over his time slot as host of the summer replacement show. It was a great opportunity for me, and an intimidating challenge. When Perry did the show, it was a big production with great sets, a huge budget, all kinds of big name guest stars, and a full vocal chorus. I soon realized I wasn’t going to get any of those big budget advantages, including the high-powered guest stars who could pull in the ratings. To make things even tougher, they stuck me on an empty stage with a ten-piece band. I was still a little jumpy about going out on stage in general, but the idea of having to appear in front of an audience, with very little assistance, really made me nervous.
It occurred to me that maybe Frank Sinatra could give me some advice. He was always my number one hero, and I figured if anybody knew what to do in the spot I was in, it was him. He was in New York that summer, sharing the Paramount bill with the Tommy Dorsey orchestra and one of his own movies, Johnny Concho. I told my friends I was going to go backstage at the Paramount and talk to Sinatra. Some of them told me it wasn’t a good idea—that sometimes he was unpredictable. But I didn’t care what they said. I believed in my heart that he would have some good advice for me.
I went over to the theater and asked for permission to see him. He said yes, and they led me back to his dressing room. The door opened, and there was Mr. Sinatra. He looked at me and without batting an eye said, “Oh, hello, Tony, come on in.” So much for the cynics. I told him about my predicament, about how nervous I was. He said not to worry about that, people don’t mind when you’re nervous. On the contrary, he said, it’s when you’re not nervous that you’re in trouble. If you don’t care about what you’re doing, why should the audience? When people see how much this means to you, they’ll adore you. They’ll see that you really want to please them, he told me, and they’ll support you. Frank Sinatra taught me a great lesson, one that I carry with me to this day. I learned that anxiety is a very essential part of performing. “Will the lights work? Will I remember the words?” I focus on these elements when I do a show, and as a result I get butterflies, but that’s part of being a good performer. In the end, I got through that TV series fine. Three summers later, in fact, I was again invited to star on Perry Como Presents, another summer Saturday hit.
My second son was born on October 15, 1955. Patricia went to the hospital in the middle of the night, but by the time the baby was born, it was morning and the sun was shining. We took that as a good omen and named him Daegal, a Scandinavian name Patricia liked that means “day.”
By this time we were on the road all the time, and Danny was getting to the age where he suffered from the lack of a stable home environment. He’d begun walking and talking before he was a year old, and believe me, he hit the ground running. Nobody could keep up with him. His feats became legendary within the entertainment community. In fact, the comic Joey Bishop did a bit about how Danny totally exhausted Joey’s pet dog! When the new baby came, we felt that Patricia needed to stay at home with the kids, especially since I was scheduled to start an extensive tour that would last until the end of January. Not being together was a big adjustment for all of us. Having two children running around a small apartment was more difficult than we had expected, and after the tour, Patricia and I decided it was time to get a house out in the suburbs where the kids could spread out.
Englewood, New Jersey, was only a few minutes away from my mom’s house, and Tony T. had recently moved there, so it seemed like the perfect place to look. In the spring of 1956 we decided to rent a house in the nearby town of Tenafly while we looked for a lot to build a new home.
By summer we’d found a beautiful two-acre piece of property that had once been part of the Morrow estate. (Anne Morrow eventually married Charles Lindbergh.) There was little else on the property except the original carriage house and a big old red barn. It was perfect: all this space, and close to midtown Manhattan. That was a very important consideration for me—since I’d grown up in the city, I’d never learned to drive, and I had to be able to get back and forth easily. From here, I could jump into a cab and be there in twenty minutes. About a year later we rented another house right around the corner from Tony T. in Englewood, hired an architect, and started construction on our new home.
My annual appearance at the Copacabana was a magical engagement. I’d played the Copa at least three times before, but this one was the charm. Although I was still doing some of my hit songs in the set, the main emphasis was on a collection of standard tunes that I performed with a traditional fifteen-piece swing band. I put together the greatest group of songs you could possibly imagine, choosing songs like “Taking a Chance on Love,” arranged by Neal Hefti; Duke Ellington’s “I’m Just a Lucky So and So” and Sammy Fain’s “I’ll Be Seeing You,” arranged by the legendary Gil Evans; and “Always,” arranged by Don Costa (whom Sinatra called “Mr. Music”); most of the other tunes were arranged by Marion Evans. These guys were the cream of the crop, the best of the up-and-coming jazz and vocal arrangers on the New York scene, and all of them went on to become leading lights in the field of orchestration. It was a kick to sing those orchestrations! I loved them all, and I featured them in my act for many years.
I got tremendous reviews, and every celebrity in town came by to check out the show. I went on to tour that show around the country, and the material got really tight. I was anxious to get home to spend some time with Patricia and the kids. My road manager, Dee Anthony, and his wife, Harriet, had just had their first daughter, Michele, so it seemed to be a good time for all of us to take a break from the road and begin work on a new album. I was still desperately trying to persuade Columbia to continue to let me do complete albums, but since the live show was so successful, Columbia agreed to let me make an album based on that material. This became Tony, my second original album.
We were going to tape the album live at the Copa, but we couldn’t get good enough sound recording in the club, so we moved to the studio. Frank Laico and I set it up in an unusual way. Instead of having the musicians sit around in a circle, the way most big band records were made, we set up the band in a regular bandstand arrangement. I stood in front of the band and sang, just as I did during live performances.
All the guys—Marion, Gil, Neal, Don—did a tremendous job on the orchestrations for Tony, but you’d never know it from reading the front or back cover of that album. At that time Columbia was heavily pushing Ray Conniff. He was going to be the new Percy Faith, their next big name in instrumental pop music. Ray conducted the sessions, and he did a good job, but it burned me up that none of the others received any credit on the cover. Over the next few months I was embarrassed when I ran into them. They’d always ask me why they didn’t get credit. I felt terrible about it.
Tony was released in January of 1957 and was more warmly received than Cloud 7, but the main order of the day was still making pop singles. My favorite one of the era was “Ca, C’est L’Amour,” one of Cole Porter’s songs, the kind of hip song I was happy to sing. I just loved that record; it was a great song and a mellow Neal Hefti arrangement. Goddard Lieberson sent me a very nice letter—the first he ever wrote to me—saying, “If you keep making records like this, you’ll be with us forever.” If only Goddard’s successors at Columbia had shared those sentiments.
I did a tour in Cuba in January of 1957, and Patricia came with me. Our decision to have Patricia and the boys stay home while I was on the road was beginning to put a tremendous strain on our marriage. This trip was an attempt at a compromise between my work and our life together at home. But it was the last time Patricia went on the road with me.
I was booked into the Sans Souci nightclub outside of Havana for an extended run. I was excited about playing there because I’d heard how enthusiastic the Cuban audiences were and how much they loved American jazz. The first night I was singing, I was interrupted by the audience. At first I thought I was being heckled, but then I realized my audience had found out that Zoot Sims was jamming in the lounge next door, and they were whispering, “Zoot, Zoot, Zoot!” during my show! They loved him so much that after his show they carried him away on their shoulders. We didn’t see him for two days, and he even missed his plane back to the States!
Cuba was in the beginning stages of the revolution, and because this wasn’t officially acknowledged by Cuba, or by the rest of the world for that matter, American entertainers were still performing in the casinos and nightclubs around the island—which, by the way, were primarily controlled by the underworld.
I discovered that in show business sometimes you can’t help running into a political situation head-on. I’d picked a particularly bad time to go to Cuba because the discontent of the Cuban people was explosive. What had started out as a small guerrilla rebellion was becoming a full-fledged revolution. The rebel army, led by Fidel Castro, was in a state of war against the dictator Fulgencio Batista. It wasn’t even safe to go to restaurants because rebels randomly shot up any place where they thought government officials or members of the bourgeoisie might be. They’d spray the dining room with machine gun fire, and if a visiting American happened to be eating there, it was too bad for him. The rich placed armed guards in front of their houses, and government buildings were heavily protected, and every day we heard about a new rebel attack or about a body found washed up on the beach.
My closest call with danger came when a bomb went off on stage in the middle of a show. Fortunately I wasn’t on stage at the time, but the chorus line of thirty-five girls was in the middle of their number. The explosion reduced the cinder block wall of the club to rubble, injuring every one of the chorus girls. None of them were killed, thank God, but some were permanently maimed or disfigured. Many were never able to dance again.
Patricia and I visited them in the hospital. One young woman was desperate to get her baby out of Cuba and safely back home, and Patricia offered to bring the child back with us. The woman was grateful but ended up making other arrangements. She never forgot us, though, because just a few years ago, a middle-aged woman recognized Patricia on the street and walked up and embraced her. She turned out to be the same chorus girl we had tried to help forty years ago!
A few days later, Patricia had driven herself into Havana at night to see the ballet. As she was driving back to the hotel, she lost her way on a long road between two towns. Two soldiers emerged from the trees. It was hard to tell if they were rebels or part of Batista’s army, but they forced her to pull over and pointed their machine guns through the car windows on either side of her. She had no idea what was going on—she didn’t speak Spanish and they didn’t speak English. They kept asking her questions that she didn’t understand, and she just sat in frightened silence. Fortunately, they let her drive on.
When she got back to the hotel, she was in a complete panic. We knew that we were pushing our luck by staying so we decided to pack up and leave immediately. The next morning the sheriff’s house right across from our hotel was blown up. To make matters even worse, when we got to the airport, we learned that a hurricane was about to hit the island and that all the planes and boats were grounded. We found a pilot who was willing to risk the flight to the States, and Patricia said, “Let’s go. We’re better off taking our chances with the hurricane than staying here.” The takeoff was frightening but we arrived home safely.
My first gig after Cuba was at the Americana Hotel in Miami Beach. It was a very special engagement because I got to play with one of my favorite people, the blind accordionist and singer Joe Mooney. Joe was already a major star in his own right, but he was kind enough to come on over to the Americana and play the accordion for me during a few of my sets. A couple of weeks later he served as my official accompanist when I played at the Miami Copa.
At rare moments in life a pure musician like Joe comes along. When he played, it was the most sublimely musical thing you could imagine; he put you right in heaven. He sang just right, his intonation was perfect, and he had tons of feeling. He wasn’t loud, so he never attracted a big crowd, and as a result, he never got the recognition he deserved. Shirley Horn is like that, and so are Milt Jackson, Ruby Braff, and Joao Gilberto. They each have a sound that’s as precious as a string of pearls or a rare diamond. And fortunately they’ve made records that audiences will enjoy forever.
While I was down in Miami I met the crew from the performance group the Vagabonds. I’ve had some crazy friends in my life, but I have to say the Vagabonds were the greatest. What wild times! They were like four maniacs on stage, doing music and comedy and shtick all at the same time. At one time they were bigger than Martin & Lewis. Tillio played the accordion in a unique way, using only the black keys and avoiding the white keys entirely. He never spoke on stage, doing everything in pantomime, and he was a total deadpan, just like Buster Keaton. The “Vags,” as Variety used to call them, had their own showroom in Miami, which was sold out all the time.
Tillio, my closest friend of the bunch, was one of a kind. He had a comic mind that was as funny and sharp and as farout as Lenny Brace’s, although today he is totally unknown, except to other performers. I used to watch them on Arthur Godfrey’s television show—Godfrey loved those guys so much that he had them on as often as he could. At that point they were making more money than any act in show business and they were just tremendous. I brought them with me on the Como show whenever I was host.
I first met them in the Miami airport when I was getting off the plane and they were getting on to go back to New York. They recognized me, we started chatting, and Tillio told me they were going to New York to do the Ed Sullivan Show. When I left New York there had been three feet of snow on the ground, and Tillio was wearing a mohair suit with no overcoat. He told me he was coming back to Florida the day after the Sullivan show, so I said, “Take my coat, and give it back to me when you get back to Florida.”
Well, that did it for Tillio. The fact that I loaned my coat to a stranger really meant the world to him. From that day on I became his main man. If I got a telegram that read “Bing Crosby called,” I knew that Tillio was in town. Every time he took a plane ride, I got a statement in the mail from some insurance company informing me that he’d had taken out a policy and had named me the beneficiary. Tillio was the kind of guy who if he borrowed your car put all new tires on it before he returned it.
I was having a lot of fun, but I also had business to take care of In 1957, my guitarist Chuck Wayne decided to move on. I needed a new accompanist, and was lucky enough to get pianist Claude Thornhill, but only for one month. When he left I held auditions at Nola Studios in New York. The first guy who showed up was okay, but the second guy, Ralph Sharon, just had to hit a few notes for me to know he was the piano player for me. Ralph said he’d played for Carmen McRae and Chris Conners and Johnny Hartman, and that’s all I needed to know. He got the job instantly. Claude passed my songbook on to Ralph, and he stayed with me for the next ten years.
Hooking up with Ralph was one of the best career moves I’ve ever made. No one understands me more than he does, and we’ve become as close as brothers. Ralph is my idea of the perfect accompanist. He’s a beautiful musician, and even more than most great players, he really knows how to perform with a singer or a soloist. He doesn’t show off like a lot of other guys, playing lots of extra notes or fancy runs. After all, it’s the emotion behind the music that’s important. It takes a special person to support a performer and make him look good. I like to communicate the song simply by telling the story. Count Basie played that way, and that’s why what he did worked so well. Ralph has that same gift.
Ralph’s mother was an American who married an Englishman and settled in London. He was born and raised there, but in the early fifties he moved to America to pursue his musical career. He’d played gigs around London during and after the war, including little clubs where both Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli (Europe’s most famous jazzmen of the time) informally sat in. Ralph’s talent was impossible to miss. He’s the only musician I know who started at the top: when he was just twenty years old, Ralph’s first big-time professional gig was as the original pianist with Ted Heath and His Music, England’s leading jazz big band. He stayed with Heath for two years, recording and broadcasting for the BBC.
Ralph left Heath to play with a small band led by clarinet player Frank Weir, a rather special position to be in, because the great pianist George Shearing was also in that group, only he was playing accordion at the time. Ralph is virtually the only piano player in the world who can boast that he played piano for George Shearing! In 1949 Ralph began recording as a bandleader in his own right, doing sessions for some British labels. For several years, he was voted the most outstanding jazz pianist in Britain by the readers of Melody Maker, the Down Beat of England, and he played at their all-star recording sessions.
By 1953 Ralph had decided to try to make it in the country that invented jazz and came to New York City. He made a series of albums with such major American stars as Howard McGhee, Teddy Charles, Kenny Clarke, Charles Mingus, J. R. Monterose, Milt Hinton, and Jo Jones. Ralph’s album of original compositions, Around the World in Jazz, featuring Eddie Costa, Lucky Thompson, and Oscar Pettiford, was recorded in January 1957, just a few months before he joined me.
During my first recording session with Ralph I was practically forced to record what is probably my least favorite hit song, “In the Middle of an Island,” and he had the pleasure, such as it was, of witnessing my worst disagreement ever with Mitch Miller. As I’ve said, if Mitch brought me a song I really didn’t like, I’d simply refuse to do it. He’d keep pushing me, and I’d keep turning him down, until one of us relented. But in the case of “In the Middle of an Island,” neither one of us would let up. He was absolutely determined that I record it, and I was equally determined not to go anywhere near that terrible song.
Mitch had worked up a big arrangement with a vocal group and four guitars. He said, “You should show the world what a varied palette you have. It’s only going to be one side of a single. Am I going to have you put out a bad record?” I didn’t answer that.
Mitch didn’t let up on me, and everybody was standing around waiting for me to do something. It was still early in my career, I was still an amateur, and I hadn’t gotten over the fear that I might be dropped from the label, so I began to sing the song halfheartedly. I suddenly developed a throat problem, and said I couldn’t complete a take. But Mitch wasn’t buying any of it. He told me, “Come on, just give me one take all the way through and we can all go home.” So I thought, “The hell with it!” I took off my jacket and tied it around my waist like a grass skirt, started doing a hula dance, and managed to get through one take. That’s all I would do. To my great annoyance it actually got in the top ten. But I’ve never received one request for that song in all the years I’ve been performing since.
That was the last time I sang something I really couldn’t stand. Mitch was gradually phased out of A&R, and fortunately none of my other producers were as aggressive as Mitch in pressuring me to go against my own judgment, but they still tried. All through the sixties Columbia gave me a hard time. Even Goddard Lieberson, as high-minded as he was (this is the person who recorded John Gielgud’s The Ages of Man), started in on me. I went to a big board meeting with Goddard and the rest of the top brass, and they were trying to put me in a certain musical pocket, one I didn’t want to be in. Goddard and Mitch were emphatic, telling me, “We know what’s best for you; we know what you should do,” and so on and so forth. I answered them very calmly. I said, “I have just two words for you: ‘Frank Sinatra.’” It broke them all up. By 1957, Sinatra was again the biggest thing in show business, and Columbia had let him leave.
Meanwhile Ralph was encouraging my jazz inclinations. He took a look at my whole repertoire up to that point and saw that Columbia was trying to put me in a certain commercial niche by having me record one ballad after another. He thought I needed to diversify. He told me, “You can have six hits in a row, but if you keep doing the same thing over and over, the public will eventually stop buying your records.” I always had some swinging numbers in my act, and now with Ralph on piano, Billy Exiner on drums, and Don Payne on bass, I was doing a lot of numbers with the trio. Mitch Miller claimed that every time I got a hit single I wanted to sing jazz. Well, I figured that every time I did one for Columbia, I was entitled to do one for myself Cloud 7 came after my hits “Rags to Riches” and “Stranger in Paradise.” Ralph said I should always do the unexpected to survive and to remain interesting to my fans. Once “In the Middle of an Island” made it onto the charts I felt free enough to start work on Beat of My Heart, the most ambitious jazz project of my career.
Ralph and I wanted to make a jazz statement in a big way, and I came up with the idea of recording an album of standards that put the spotlight on different kinds of rhythm by using all the great jazz drummers I could find. We talked the concept over during our first few months on the road, and gradually it all came together. The first recording date was in June 1957, with Chico Hamilton. I was delighted with the results, particularly with the tongue-twisting, super-percussive title track, “The Beat of My Heart.” Mitch came to the first recording date, but was unusually quiet. Maybe he hoped he was giving us enough rope to hang ourselves. But when the album came out, an army of jazz fans said, Hey, this guy knows how to swing. A whole new audience accepted me—in fact, I still get my biggest reactions at jazz festivals the world over.
Between the June and October recording sessions for Beat of My Heart, I decided to try my hand at acting in the Kansas City production of Cole Porter’s Silk Stockings. I was still gigging around the country, of course, and my live shows were going great, but I wanted to do something a little different. I hadn’t been in a “show” since I starred in On the Town back in Germany in 1946! I had a great time. Later that year I starred in the Chicago production of Guys and Dolls. It was a great experience. The show was well done, took off right away, and was sold out for a month. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of playing Sky Masterson instead of Nathan Detroit. The reviewer’s headline read “Tony Bennett, The Wrong Sky.” If I had played Nathan Detroit, I could have made it work—his dialogue had much more humor in it.
Guys and Dolls was done in the theater-in-the-round format. Patricia brought Danny and Dae to see one of the performances, and they were fascinated with how it all worked. As the actors entered and left the stage, wed have to carry all the props and scenery on and off with us; it was wonderful to watch how the stage manager organized the chaos. When we got back home, the boys put on their own play using the same concept, with sets and costumes they’d built out of cardboard. It was quite elaborate, especially considering they were only three and four years old. It was one of the first indications I had that Danny was interested in show business and stagecraft.
When I got back to New York, we did three more recording sessions in October, and that more than finished the Beat of My Heart album. For our first October session we had trumpeter Nat Adderley, Al Cohn on tenor, and Art Blakey as featured drummer. For the next date, Ralph indulged his passion for writing for trombones, and we had four, led by the wonderful Kai Winding, who flew in from Chicago for the occasion. We were also lucky enough to get Jo Jones, Count Basie’s greatest drummer. The last date featured my regular percussionist Billy Exiner; two giants of Latin American rhythm, Sabu and Candido; and Ralph brought in five flautists led by Herbie Mann. Not too shabby! The album was released in November and went over well with the critics and the jazz public.
When I played the Copacabana again in February 1958, I brought Herbie Mann, Sabu, and Candido along with me. I put cards on all the tables that read, “It’s great to be appearing at the famous Copa again. This time I’m being abetted by some wonderful musicians I thought you might like to meet.” And then I listed all the guys. We went over so well at the Copa that I took Candido on the road with me, playing the Chez Paree in Chicago, the Town and Country in Brooklyn, and the El Morocco in Montreal.
After the success of Tony and Beat of My Heart, I was finally allowed to make albums regularly, even though the vibe at Columbia was that I was wasting my time if I put my energies into anything but hit singles. I followed Beat of My Heart with a more conventional pop vocal album called Long Ago and Far Away. That was the first of three albums of lovely standards I did with arranger Frank DeVol. Frank was a great guy and a fine orchestrator. The album is a nice mixture of slow ballads, with a few slightly jazzy numbers thrown in, like “So Far,” which ends the album with a beat. Those sessions with Frank yielded a couple of hit singles, “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” which I sang on Hugh Hefner’s TV show Playboy’s Penthouse, and “Till,” another big hit for me on the English charts.
It was always my dream to perform with Count Basie and Duke Ellington, the greatest bandleaders of all time. I was particularly keen to do an album with Count Basie, and in 1958 I got my chance to make not only one album with him, but two. No star singer had ever recorded an entire album with Basie before, and Basie was all for doing an album with me, but we had to contend with his record label, Roulette Records, and Morris Levy, who ran it. Levy was a classic ruffian who wheeled and dealed any way he could. He was notorious for scamming artists, and unfortunately Bill Basie was a gambler who ended up borrowing a lot of money from Levy. In the typical “owing your soul to the company store” scenario, it was rumored that after a while Basie was simply put on the payroll, like the rest of his band, and never got a cent of the royalties from his compositions or recordings.
Morris Levy agreed to my recording with Basie for Columbia as long as we agreed to make a reciprocal record for Roulette. Basie and I decided that we’d record the Columbia album live and the Roulette album in the studio. But getting Mitch Miller to approve this was another story.
He was totally opposed both to my working with Basie and to my appearing on Roulette Records. He said, “No way. What do you want to be on a junk label like Roulette for?” Mitch’s own career as a recording artist was starting to take off around this time. He had a hit single with “The Yellow Rose of Texas” that was steadily climbing the charts, so I decided to bide my time and wait for the record to reach the top. I got Mitch’s approval the day his song hit number one. Mitch told me that if I made this record, it would ruin my career, but he was feeling so great about reaching number one with “Yellow Rose,” he finally gave in.
We decided to do the live album for Columbia first, and worked out the details with the Latin Casino in Philadelphia. Ralph orchestrated and arranged the entire album. Although I’d talked with him on the telephone I didn’t meet Count Basie until our rehearsals began. It was an amazing experience, the fulfillment of a dream, and I’ll never forget it. We hit it off right away, as though we always knew and understood each other. At one point Basie turned to his band, pointed at me, and said, “Anything this man wants, he gets!” I was floored.
We opened at the Latin Casino in Philadelphia on November 28, 1958, and did tremendous business. There was barely room in that tiny club for Frank Laico to set up his console, and he finally had to rig it up in the basement kitchen. I thought the recording came out wonderfully, but stereo recording had just been discovered and Al Ham, the producer, was unhappy that we had recorded in mono. It was his call, so the following month, we rerecorded the album in the studio in stereo, adding the crowd noise and applause to make it sound “live.” But of all things, Ham put the audience applause in the wrong places. What a mess! We titled the album In Person! and released it in early 1959. I never understood why we didn’t release the live version. The whole attempt at fabricating an audience was in bad taste. As a result I’ve always been partial to the second album, the one we recorded for Roulette. It was originally released in 1961 as Count Basie/Tony Bennett: Strike Up the Band, but Levy was such an opportunist that over the years he licensed the recording to anyone he could, and as a result the album appeared under an endless number of titles, including Basie Swings Bennett Sings.
Those two albums were the beginning of a beautiful personal and musical relationship with the Count. Over the next twenty-five years we worked together many times and hung out together whenever we got the chance. I’d gotten in the habit of bringing home my musician friends at all hours of the night, and Patricia got used to expecting the unexpected. One night she woke up and wandered into the living room in her nightgown, where she saw not only Bill Basie himself but all sixteen members of his band sitting around jamming. Not your usual domestic scene!
We once played the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, and our combined act was so hot the audience went absolutely crazy. We got ten standing ovations—it was phenomenal. After the show Basie and I were standing in the parking lot and a white guy came up to Basie, threw him a set of keys, and said, “Hey, buddy, get me my car, will ya?” He thought Basie was a parking attendant! The Count replied, “Get your own car; I’m tired. I’ve been parking them all night.” Basie always had a great sense of humor, and working with him was truly one of the highlights of my life.
Beat of My Heart and my two records with Count Basie earned me a whole new audience: true jazz fans. Jazz critics question my validity as a jazz artist, and I don’t label myself as one. But personally I love jazz more than any other form of music. It’s spontaneous, honest, and natural. Every civilization is known by It’s culture, and jazz is America’s greatest contribution to the world, and I’ve always surrounded myself with jazz performers because they understand that the moment is the most important thing: they improvise, they reinvent the music every night. I know how to improvise too. I sing in the tradition of Bing Crosby: if I like a song, I sing it, and I never sing a song the same way twice.
My most vivid memories from the late fifties are the great years I spent in Chicago. Those were tremendous days. My favorite Chicago hangout was the Black Orchid. It was owned by Paul Raffles, and it was the hippest place in town. He hired singers and brilliant comics like Larry Storch and Jack E. Leonard, there was a chorus line of scantily clad girls, and he always had a great piano player like Ace Harris in the lounge. When the show was over, we’d go to Paul’s apartment and jam until morning.
I met Hugh Hefner around this time. He was on the scene, just getting started with Playboy. He liked to hang out at the Black Orchid, and though he was basically a shy, introverted guy, he knew a good thing when he saw it. His plan was to take all the fun we were having in Chicago in those days and mass-produce it in his magazine, in his clubs, and on his TV show. He refined his idea into a million-dollar concept that’s still going strong today. I got to know Hugh during those nights at the Black Orchid, and I was a guest on his TV shows, Playboy’s Penthouse and Playboy After Hours.
One night after my show at the Chez Paree I was hanging out with the guys in the band. Suddenly there was a banging on the front door of the club and some guy yelled, “Open up! FBI!”
Two agents muscled their way into the club, lined us up against the wall, and frisked us, but there was nothing to be found. We were really shaken up and figured the incident would hit the papers the next day.
The next night, we were at a party at Hef’s place when in walked Lenny Bruce with his arms around those two “FBI agents.” The whole thing was a joke! Lenny wanted to get us, and he did.
When I think back to my days in Chicago, I can’t help but remember my great friend, the miraculous piano wizard Erroll Garner. The Chez Paree had a joint within a joint, a little piano room in the back called the Key Club, where Erroll would play until all hours. He loved playing the piano so much that even after the regular audience went home, he kept playing for the bosses, the entertainers, and the chorus girls.
We often met in his studio at Carnegie Hall and jammed for hours, and sometimes we hooked up when we were on the road. One time he told me he thought I should open my show with the song “When You’re Smilin’.” I told Erroll that everybody opens with that song, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer, I didn’t give in, though, because I felt sure the song was overdone, so I turned his request down. At the same time, I heard everybody raving about Judy Garland’s new live album from Carnegie Hall. I bought the record. It starts with an exciting announcement, “Ladies and Gentlemen, Judy Garland...” There are deafening cheers and Judy begins singing, in ballad tempo, “When You’re Smilin...” Once again I learned my lesson.
Erroll was a great musician, and his classic album Concert by the Sea showed Columbia just how well a jazz album could do. Before then everybody thought 75,000 was a good figure for a pop (let alone jazz) album to sell. But Concert by the Sea sold 250,000 copies. That was an astonishing figure for a jazz album, and it helped Columbia reach a whole new legion of fans.
I made my next album, Hometown, My Town, with the great orchestrator Ralph Burns. This and other albums I made with Ralph are a great example of the musical scene that was flourishing in New York in the late fifties and early sixties. This was the time when all the very best musicians were working in the city. Many of them—like Al Cohn, Urbie Green, and Zoot Sims—had started with Woody Herman and other big bands, and when they came off the road, they settled in New York. I’d see them in the recording studios, in the pit bands on Broadway, and jamming in the jazz clubs.
It’s significant, then, that our first album together had New York City as It’s theme. It consisted of only six songs, some of which directly refer to the Big Apple, but most simply reflect a New York mood. I wanted a rich, lush, orchestral sound, but I didn’t want anything that sounded like “easy listening” music. I knew Ralph Burns was the perfect guy for the job.
He had an apartment on Fifty-fifth Street and Seventh Avenue, and I’d go up there every day and wed work out the songs on the piano. And that’s the way I still work with Ralph Sharon today: we sit at the piano, figure out the tempos, the keys, and how the orchestration should go, and then we present it to the orchestrator and he does the rest. I told Ralph Burns that this might be the only “pop vocal” album he’d ever do where the overall quality of each track was the most important thing. I didn’t want to worry about making a commercial album filled with the standard three-minute pop songs. This was to be an album with no limitations.
I included some of the songs from Hometown in my live appearances. I did “Skyscraper Blues” and “The Party’s Over” when I played the Copa in March 1959. It was customary to introduce fellow performers who were out in the audience, and on opening night Joey Bishop, whom I’d recently worked with at the Sands in Vegas, and many other performers were in the house. I introduced them all, and they stood up and took a bow. I started a song, and I looked over and saw Jack Carter sitting ringside and realized I hadn’t introduced him. So I decided to do it during the instrumental break in the middle of “Skyscraper Blues.” I gave the usual spiel: “Ladies and gentlemen, there’s a great comedian in the house tonight. How about a big round of applause for Jack Carter!” When I went back to the song, the next line was “When you’re walking in the streets of New York and you haven’t got a friend in town...” I sang that right after introducing Jack, and the whole place collapsed in laughter! Sorry Jack!
Patricia and I finally moved into our first house. I was looking forward to having a home to return to for some sense of stability, and I thought it would do Patricia and me some good. It was a beautiful sanctuary. We designed the house after the style of Frank Lloyd Wright, building it mostly of redwood and glass. We were literally surrounded by nature. I had an art studio and a recording studio built in the basement, so I had a place to jam with my colleagues.
In the early part of 1960 I recorded two more albums with Frank DeVol; To My Wonderful One and Alone Together. Later on that year I did my first, and for many years my only, songbook album, A String of Harold Arlen. The son of a cantor, Harold grew up in Buffalo. He became the musical director of the Cotton Club and originally wrote many jazz compositions. But his pop songs were dramatic and right up my alley. Arlen was known for the jazzy quality of his melodies, but Mitch thought it would be novel to give his songs a lush, symphonic treatment. He brought in Glenn Osser, a veteran record and show orchestrator, and his charts were just right. I felt free singing to Glenn’s arrangements. We used a big orchestra of mainly classical players, and they really enjoyed the recording session. That’s the only album I ever made where the musicians actually applauded after each take. Glenn and I did some singles together, and he came up with a lovely, quasi-oriental treatment of Richard Rogers’s “Love Look Away,” the lament from Flower Drum Song.
I loved “When the Sun Comes Out,” and I thought that was a perfect opener for the Harold Arlen album. Then again, you can’t go wrong with any of Harold’s songs. His songs are perfect for an interpretive performer like me; I just love the tools he gives me to work with. You can give virtually any treatment to an Arlen tune. They can be sung dramatically or “straight out,” exactly as written.
Harold’s attitude was the opposite of Richard Rodgers’s, who always insisted that his songs be performed exactly as he wrote them. Harold loved improvisation. He said, “Hey, change it anyway you want, as long as it works.” Anything you did was okay with him as long it pleased the audience. That was the most important thing to him. I’ve sung the music of so many wonderful composers that I’d rather be diplomatic and not name any one of them as the best, but I’d be lying if I said the songs of Harold Arlen didn’t occupy a very special place in my heart. He was a very debonair man, with a thin “French style” mustache, and he always kept a fresh flower in his lapel; he was the consummate artist. He wrote his own music, sat down and played a mean piano, and performed his own songs as well as anyone.
In 1963 Harold wrote a song with André Previn’s wife, the lyricist Dory Langdon, called “So Long Big Time,” and I recorded it with Ralph and Marty Manning. Harold hadn’t attended any of the tapings for A String of Harold Arlen three years earlier, but he came to this session, probably because this was a new song. We were working with the song when Harold interrupted and started showing me more things I could do with the lyric, how I wasn’t getting enough out of it, how I could emphasize certain words. I liked what Harold told me so much that when the album, The Many Moods of Tony, came out, I gave Harold credit on “So Long Big Time” for conducting his own composition.
I always wanted to be unpredictable, and so for my next project, I decided to go in the opposite direction from the big orchestral albums I’d been doing lately and cut an intimate piano-vocal album with Ralph Sharon. We booked time in the studio and pored through music books, trying one tune after another. The arrangements were spontaneous, and we finished each song in one or two takes. In one afternoon we laid down sixteen tunes—which must be some kind of record—twelve of which made it onto the album, which became 1961’s Tony Sings for Two, Mitch Miller showed up at the start of these sessions, furious that I was really going through with it. When he saw that there was no dissuading me, he turned to Frank Laico and said, “I’m leaving. I can’t support this.” Tony Sings for Two turned out to be one of my finest records ever.
Ralph Burns and I got together again to do some singles, including “Smile,” and for our next album we changed gears again. Instead of the lush, ballad-style arrangements we had used on Hometown, My Town, we switched to a cookin’ jazz sound. The album is called My Heart Sings, and I simply love Ralph’s writing on this one. It’s really beautiful music.
By the end of the fifties the music of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and disc jockey Alan Freed dominated the radio airwaves. Rock and roll music was being forced on the American public. I was fortunate that my own string of hits in the fifties more than established me as a household name and enabled me to make the kind of quality records that I needed to make in order to assure that I’d be considered a lasting artist. Little did I know that Ralph Sharon had my biggest hit of all time sitting at home tucked away in his dresser drawer.