George Cory and Douglass Cross were an aspiring song-writing team living in New York in the mid-fifties. Like most songwriters, Cory and Cross were always hanging around singers and their accompanists, trying to get them to listen to their new tunes.
They met Ralph Sharon when he was playing around town, and frequently gave him some of their songs, hoping that he’d pass them along. One particular day Cory and Cross bumped into Ralph on the street, and true to form, handed him some more songs. Ralph promised he’d take a look, but our lives being as hectic as they were, he simply stuck them in a dresser drawer and forgot about them.
We were home in New York for a brief stay in mid-1961. We would be heading to Hot Springs, Arkansas, and then moving on to the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. Ralph was packing, looking through his dresser for some shirts, and he saw the batch of songs that Cory and Cross had given him two years earlier. On the top of the pile was a song called “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” and Ralph took it along since that’s where we were headed.
Off we went to Arkansas, where we played a great gig at a nightclub called the Vapors Restaurant. (When I was visiting the White House recently, President Clinton told me that he actually saw that show. Since he was too young to get in, he stood outside the club and watched my performance through the window!) After the show, Ralph took out the song, read it through, and decided it was good. We went down to the piano at the hotel bar, and he played it for me. I thought it was a great song. What really impressed me was that after I sang it through only once, the bartender setting up said, “If you guys record that song, I’ll buy the first copy.” You might say that was our first rave review.
I was happy to have a special song for my San Francisco show, because I’d never performed in that town and had heard that if the audiences didn’t know you, they didn’t warm up to you quickly. Ralph wrote up a great chart and I sang it on opening night at the Fairmont Hotel. It really went over like gang-busters. It might have ended right there, but as fate would have it local Columbia reps heard the song at rehearsal that afternoon and loved it. They wanted me to record the song, feeling that sales in San Francisco alone would make it worth my while.
The important thing was that I loved the song, and that meant more to me than how well it would sell in one market or another. I asked Marty Manning to flesh out Ralph’s chart, and he wrote a beautiful orchestration. On January 23, 1962, I recorded “San Francisco” in one take along with a song called “Once Upon a Time,” from a Ray Bolger show called All American.
The next day Ralph called Cory and Cross. They were knocked out to hear that I had recorded one of their songs. Columbia quickly released the single using “San Francisco” as the B-side, since I was positive that “Once Upon a Time” was the surefire hit. I even put that song in my show and plugged it like crazy. But Columbia reps stopped me in my tracks because requests were pouring in from all over the country for “San Francisco.” They immediately rang me up and told me that the public was reacting like crazy to the B-side. So I started plugging “San Francisco.”
“I Left My Heart in San Francisco” was a “grass roots” phenomenon: it literally came from nowhere, it was written by two unknown songwriters, it wasn’t from a show or a movie, and the record company didn’t spend millions of dollars promoting it. People responded to it because it was a great song, not because some record company exec was telling them what to like. Even Goddard Lieberson called and said, “You’re never going to stop hearing about ‘San Francisco’ for the rest of your life. As long as you keep singing, you’ll be singing this song.” I had big hits before, but this song was off the map. The record sold thousands of copies a week for the next four years, became a gold record, scored me my first Grammy, and in short, became the biggest record of my career. In fact, it hasn’t stopped selling, and although the record stayed on the charts for twenty-five months, it never reached number one. San Franciscans now treat me like an adopted son and often tell me that the song has done wonders to increase tourism in America’s most elegant city.
Cory and Cross eventually moved back home, where they built a lovely mansion in Clearlake, a posh suburb of San Francisco. Ralph and I went to visit them a couple of times, and they showed us press clippings from around the world. One mentioned that karaoke bars in Japan were using the song to help Japanese people learn English!
The song also helped make me a world citizen: it allowed me to live, work, and sing in any city on the globe. It changed my whole life. I was especially touched by an article I read one Sunday in The New York Times near the end of the Vietnam War. It described lonely, homesick soldiers sitting around a campfire singing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” When I’m asked to name my favorite song, you can bet I don’t hesitate. The wonderful response I always get from the audience makes the song fresh and new for me every single night. When people ask me if I ever get tired of singing “San Francisco” I answer, “Do you ever get tired of making love?” That usually leaves them speechless.
The unprecedented success of “San Francisco” and the constant touring intensified the strain on my family life. Try as I might, I couldn’t get the two worlds in sync. After months of trying to pull things together, Patricia and I felt it was best to separate so I moved into an apartment in the city on East Seventy-second Street. Patricia and I hoped that we’d gain perspective by stepping back and giving each other a little breathing space. But being away from my family devastated me. On one hand my career was flying higher than ever, but emotionally I was hitting rock bottom. I was very lonely. So I threw myself into my work.
If I thought I was busy before, I really didn’t know what busy was until after “San Francisco” hit big. I didn’t have a manager, and by this time my road manager Dee Anthony and I had gone our separate ways. It was getting more and more difficult to handle the day-to-day business with Columbia, which was still trying harder than ever to get me to record novelty songs. I didn’t have someone to speak on my behalf, so out of necessity I had to deal with all the executives at Columbia myself, which was in retrospect not the best way to handle matters. I found it’s always best to have somebody I trust take care of the business, leaving my head clear to concentrate on my work. “Trust” is the operative word here, and I just couldn’t find someone I felt could do the job.
I’d pretty much gotten into the habit of doing without producers. I’d do a take; then I’d walk into the control room and use Frank Laico as a sounding board. Eventually Frank set up the studio the way I liked it, and we ran the sessions ourselves from start to finish. It was ridiculous that I had to go through this, but things once again worked out for the best. It gave me freedom to do what I wanted to do. In addition to Tony Sings for Two, I released one more album in 1961, My Heart Sings. But in 1962, I made four albums: Mr. Broadway, I Left My Heart in San Francisco, On the Glory Road (Ralph and I taped twelve tracks for this album, but Columbia never released it), and a live album called Tony Bennett at Carnegie Hall.
When “San Francisco” was peaking in early 1962, I was invited to appear at Carnegie Hall for the first time. Carnegie Hall had never featured a “pop” singer like myself as a solo performer. It was unprecedented. To my surprise, Columbia backed me completely. Goddard said, “You’ve got to play Carnegie Hall, and we’d love to make a record out of the concert.”
I wanted everything to be right. I called my old army buddy Arthur Penn and asked him to help me stage the show. He very graciously agreed even though he’d just directed his Oscar-winning film The Miracle Worker and wasn’t exactly staging shows anymore. He brought in Gene Saks, the famous Broadway director, and together the three of us worked out what would be done at Carnegie Hall. I asked Arthur what songs he thought I should sing, and he said, “Sing whatever you want. All I’m going to do is make sure nothing distracts you. I’m going to make a nice environment for you on the stage.” Under his direction Gene Saks gave the whole theater a truly spiritual look with his elegant, understated lighting. Carnegie Hall never looked better. My dear old friend Arthur really came through for me.
I put everything I’d been studying for the last twenty years into practice for that show. During the fifties I’d opened with swingin’ numbers like “Sing You Sinners” or “Taking a Chance on Love,” and sometimes I didn’t grab the crowd right away like I wanted to. One night when I was hanging with Count Basie I was talking to him about this, and he said, “Why open with a closer? Start with a medium-tempo number like ‘Just In Time,’ and give the audience a chance to settle in.” He understood that if you ease the audience into your world, later on you can hit them with an up-tempo number and it will be twice as effective. With that in mind I decided to start with “Lullaby of Broadway,” slightly slower than usual, and then do “Just In Time,” just like Basie suggested. By my fourth number I’d go way up with “Fascinating Rhythm.”
Now that I had figured out how to open the show, I needed something really special to close with. I’d start out with old favorites, but I wanted to end with something that nobody had ever heard me sing before, something unexpected. Tony T. suggested the spiritual “Glory Road.”
Ralph had never heard this tune before I laid it on him, and the score went on for pages—the song is nearly nine minutes long! But Ralph managed to arrange it for me, and did his usual bang-up job. Two weeks before the concert, I was in Chicago in a bistro on Rush Street called the Living Room. Ralph was rehearsing day and night in preparation for our Carnegie Hall show. The jazz vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross were working across the street and Jon Hendricks and I ended up jamming in every joint on Rush Street. By the end of the two weeks I was ready for opening night.
The concert was held on June 9, 1962. Backstage I had a healthy case of the butterflies and reflected on Sinatra’s advice about the jitters. From the minute I hit the stage all the nervousness disappeared, and I knew I was gonna nail it. I’m proud to say the concert was an absolute triumph. Candido added to the success of “Glory Road” by playing a wonderful solo in the middle of it that drove the crowd wild. In fact, I had a whole percussion section with me on that night. In addition to Billy Exiner, Candido, and Sabu, I had Eddie Costa on vibes and Bobby Rosengarden on timpani. I was able to put together the most amazing orchestra imaginable, including Al Cohn on tenor, Frank Rehak on trombone, guitarist Kenny Burrell, and trumpeter Nick Travis, who had been with me in the 314th in the army. These men were the absolute greatest players of a great era.
“Glory Road” went over better than I could have hoped for, but the biggest hit of the concert was, not surprisingly, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” Ralph is fairly unflappable, so when he told me he thought the show was a real winner, I knew I had hit the mark. Mary later told me that when the show was over, the audience was cheering for me to sing an encore of “San Francisco,” but I was already in my dressing room and didn’t hear what they were saying. If I’d known, I certainly would have obliged.
My whole family was in the audience that night. I was particularly proud that my mother was there; that made me feel like a million bucks. It was the biggest night of my life. My mom couldn’t believe how far I’d come. She was sitting between Mary and Tom, and as the crowds were cheering for an encore, she kept turning to Mary and asking, “Why don’t they let Anthony go home and rest? He must be exhausted after two and a half hours of singing.” She was so precious, she meant everything to me.
Columbia was able to get Tony Bennett at Carnegie Hall released by the end of August. We got the greatest sound on our album, better than any other album I’d recorded. Frank Laico did a terrific job, not only recording the music, but beautifully capturing the enthusiasm of the crowd.
I wouldn’t give up nightclubs for a while, but now that I had a faithful audience I wanted to encourage them to go to places like Carnegie Hall, to all the beautiful concert halls across the country, which are my favorite places to perform.
That same great year President Kennedy invited me to the White House to appear with the leading modern jazz group of the era, the Dave Brubeck Quartet. The occasion was a special concert held on the White House lawn in honor of journalism students, and there were thousands of press people there. I’d done some campaigning for Kennedy during his run for president, and it was a glorious day for me. Kennedy was always kind and generous to me throughout his years in office and I later became one of the twelve founding fathers of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
Later that year I appeared at the White House with Count Basie. The windows had luxurious green velvet drapes with rich tassels. Basie grasped the tiny ball hanging from a tassel, pinched it between two fingers, and said to me under his breath, “My taxes paid for this.” A typical Basie line. What a little devil he was.
Between 1960 and 1961 I’d been in and out of every major American city at least six times. I was on the road constantly, and I only made it back to New York to make records during the day and work the Copa, the Waldorf-Astoria, or the Town and Country in Brooklyn at night. In 1962 I was away from home even more. Obviously there wasn’t much time to try to patch things up with Patricia, but I stayed in touch with her and the kids by telephone as much as I could. I felt we were making some headway toward a reconciliation, and so we decided to give it another try and I moved back into the house in Englewood. I was relieved.
In addition to my jazz excursions I became part of another musical trend that year. I was working at the Copacabana in Rio de Janeiro for the first time. I wasn’t yet well known in South America. There were only twenty-five to fifty people a night in a thousand-seater house—boy, did I have the blues—so I decided to sing my heart out. The audiences were really wonderful and inspired me to do my best. I played for two and a half hours every night. At least a thousand people say they saw me at the Copacabana while I was there—talk about word-of-mouth! Now every other year I perform to huge audiences there.
I fell in love with Rio. I still have great affection for that city and long to return. The beaches are forty miles of the whitest sand you can imagine, and Sugarloaf Mountain is one of the most spiritual places I’ve ever seen. In fact I recently did a painting of that very spot that I feel is one of my most successful. The whole country is filled with music and poetry. Each language has a philosophy, and there’s something about the rhythm and the sound of Portuguese that’s so poetic and truthful, and the people are full of life and love.
One morning my bass player, Don Payne, woke me up and said, “You’ve got to come down to the beach right now.” Right there on that beautiful beach was where I met Joao and Astrud Gilberto, singing and playing. Later they introduced me to Antonio Carlos Jobim’s songs and there was no turning back.
Bossa nova was a new soft and swinging rhythm very closely tied to jazz, and I fell in love with it instantly. Billy Exiner got excited about it because it was a whole new beat for him too. When I came back to the States, I opened in San Francisco and told the San Francisco disc jockeys about my discovery, and they raved. Bossa nova spread across the country like wildfire.
Once when Joao Gilberto was in the States I invited him to my home in Englewood and he brought his five-year-old son with him. We had a jam session in my basement studio, and Joao took out his guitar and started singing as his son lay on the floor playing with a toy. It was a beautiful day; the sun was shining down on all of us through the window. I looked at his son, and the little boy was quietly crying. I asked what was wrong, and Joao asked him in Portuguese. He said something to his father that I’ll never forget. Joao translated it for me: “I hope this day never ends.” I felt the same way.
In the early sixties I’d frequently appeared on Hugh Hefner’s TV show Playboy’s Penthouse. Cy Coleman had written and recorded an instrumental opening for Hef’s TV series. Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh had long been my favorite composers of that period. I’d done their songs “Firefly.” “Walk a Little Faster,” “On the Other Side of the Tracks,” “It Amazes Me,” and many others. I thought this new song was very catchy and wanted to sing it, so I called Cy to ask if there were lyrics. He told me there were, but he said if I liked his “Playboy’s Theme,” he had another song that had a similar groove that he thought I’d like even better.
That song was “The Best Is Yet to Come.” Cy played it for me and I agreed that it was a great tune. I recorded it the next day. I couldn’t get any of my usual top-drawer arrangers on such short notice, though I did find a writer who was able to turn it around overnight. The next day he dropped by the studio and unceremoniously dumped the chart on me about an hour before the session and then split. We didn’t have a conductor, but Cy was there and when we started going over the orchestration, we realized it wasn’t what we wanted, so Cy rewrote it. When it was finally finished we knew we had a winner. “The Best Is Yet to Come” became one of my biggest alltime hits, and the next in a series of wonderful songs I had on the charts in the early sixties.
Another big number from 1962 was “I Wanna Be Around,” a Johnny Mercer tune that I had the honor of introducing to the world. What a thrill when I found out that Johnny said my version was his favorite interpretation of any song he ever wrote.
“I Wanna Be Around” has a particularly interesting history. The song was originally conceived by a lady in Youngstown, Ohio, named Sadie Vimmerstedt. Sadie wasn’t a professional songwriter, but she was a fan of great songs, especially Johnny’s. One day she came up with two lines: “I wanna be around to pick up the pieces/When somebody breaks your heart.” She thought they sounded like they belonged in a Johnny Mercer song, so she sent them to him along with a letter explaining how she thought the lyrics would make a good song. She had no idea exactly where Johnny lived, so she addressed the envelope, “Johnny Mercer, Songwriter, Los Angeles, California,” and somehow the letter got to him.
Johnny agreed that the two lines made an ideal opening for a song, and he proceeded to write one (one of the rare instances when Johnny wrote the music as well as the lyrics), and then asked me to sing it. We recorded it in October 1962. I had Marty Manning arrange the song and conduct the band, and Ralph played a great piano part.
Johnny very generously gave Sadie fifty percent of the publishing rights to the song, and she did very well indeed. For years I got postcards from Paris, Italy, and Spain; she was able to leave her job and travel for the rest of her life.
Both those songs wound up on my next album, I Wanna Be Around, which was released in March 1963. One of my favorite songs on that album was the opening track, “The Good Life,” a French tune by singer-songwriter Sacha Distel. I love the philosophy of that number, which is why I chose it for the title of this book. It’s intriguingly ambiguous: what does he mean by “The Good Life”? Is it to be single and unattached, or is it to have somebody and not be alone? The conflict between the two ideas makes it exactly the kind of lyric I love to do. My old friend Duke Niles, the last of the old-time song pluggers, gave me the first crack at this song in America, and I’ve always been grateful to him.
Immediately after that record was released I decided to record a trio record for the first time using Ralph on piano, Billy Exiner on drums, and Hal Gaylord, who had by this time replaced Don Payne, on bass. We recorded twenty-four songs, and I chose Benny Carter’s tune When Lights Are Low for the album’s title, because of the intimate connotation.
I found a wonderful illustrator named Bob Peak to do a picture of me for the cover, and it came out great, but I got flak from Columbia over the artwork. It was a battle every step of the way. The woman who ran the art department really blew her top! She told Goddard Lieberson, “If the artist starts telling us what to put on the album cover, I’m out of here.” She really wreaked havoc for me, and when it was all over, Bob’s illustration was out and I received quite a scolding from the front office for upsetting the art department. Bob later did the cover for Barbra Streisand’s Funny Girl, the cover for My Fair Lady, and the poster for Apocalypse Now. He was a great illustrator, and became one of the industry’s favorite graphic artists.
In April, a week or so after we finished recording When Lights Are Low, Columbia decided that they wanted another live album, this time from the Las Vegas Sahara, with Ralph and conductor Louis Basil. Frank Laico flew in with all of his remote recording equipment, and he spent all day setting up. Milton Berle, Danny Thomas, and Mickey Rooney were all in the audience that night, and they came right up on stage and started kibitzing. It was hilarious, and the crowd went crazy. It’s all on the tape, but nobody’s ever heard it because Columbia has never released it! That year we also recorded and released This Is All I Ask, my third and last full album with Ralph Burns.
The following year I got the chance to work with Judy Garland for the first time when she invited me to sing on her CBS television special. It was the beginning of a long and treasured friendship. Just like everyone else in America, I’d fallen in love with Judy in 1939 when I saw her sing “Over the Rainbow” in The Wizard of Oz. She was always a fantastic entertainer, and like Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, and Jimmy Durante, one of my major artistic influences. Judy was only a few years older than me, but since she’d been a child star, I’d been her fan my entire life.
I first met Judy in 1958 when she came backstage after my show at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and congratulated me on my performance. It was a thrill that never wore off She was a true original, full of life and fun. She was intelligent, a one-of-a-kind lady, and a great artist, but sadly, she led a very troubled life. As we got to know each other, Judy told me stories about how badly she’d been treated when she was making movies at MGM. She was just a kid, but they gave her all kinds of uppers and other drugs so she could finish one of those high-energy movies in just five weeks. She also had to deal with the sexual advances of the executives and all kinds of verbal and psychological abuse. She had a reputation for sometimes being out of control, but how can you grow up normal if that’s how you’re forced to spend your childhood? It’s such a shame, because she was so wonderful.
Judy told me there were only two people in her entire career who were really good to her: Lionel Barrymore and Mickey Rooney. No one else befriended her during those early years at MGM. She told me Mickey would fight like crazy for her, and wouldn’t tolerate anybody insulting her. One night he ran into the famous society girl Brenda Frasier, and she made a lousy remark about Judy. Mickey pulled her hat over her face and pushed her into an ash can. The next day it made front-page news.
Over the years, Judy talked to me about all aspects of her life and career, and once she said to me, “You know, I’ve never had money in my hand. Someone always gives a check to my accountant and he pays the bills.” One time, backstage before one of Judy’s shows, the promoter kept asking me, “What can I do that would make her happy? What would she like?” Remembering what she’d told me, I suggested he give her some of her fee in cash, that she’d get a big kick out of that. He said he’d do it. I went to her dressing room after the show, and there she was, jumping up and down on the couch, playing with the money, throwing it up in the air, rolling around in it—acting like a little kid. She said, “Tony! Look what I got! I got money. It’s the first time in my life! I’ve got money!” It was wonderful to see her so happy.
She gave me an interesting piece of advice one night. She said, “You always have to do only the finest songs, but then every once in a while it’s okay to sing a number that just hits the back of the house, like ‘Mammy—give ‘em a real show stopper, one that everybody digs.” She had a really good point. That’s why I don’t mind singing a song like Cy Coleman’s “Firefly,” which is a real crowd pleaser.
I went to see Judy every chance I could get, of course, but what surprised me was the number of times she came out to see me. It was always a pleasure to look out into the audience and see her. When Billboard did a special tribute issue called “Twenty Years of Tony Bennett” in 1968, Judy contributed an interview in which she talked for a whole page about how much she enjoyed watching me perform. Imagine how thrilling it was for me to read that she thought I was “... the epitome of what entertainers were put on earth for. He was born to take people’s troubles away, even if it’s only for an hour. He loves doing it. He’s a giver.” It’s the best compliment I’ve ever received.
I don’t know if Judy treated everyone she knew so well, but she always made me feel special. There was a really “in” club in Hollywood called the Daisy. Judy wanted to check it out, so I escorted her there. We ran into the Rat Pack—Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Peter Lawford, and Frank Sinatra. They knew Judy was in trouble with drugs, so they gave us the cold shoulder. She turned to me and said, “Don’t ever forget this: someday they’ll regret that it was you instead of them that I was with.”
I was opening at the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan, and as I was walking through the wings, about to go on stage one night, the stage manager stopped me and told me I had a phone call. I couldn’t imagine what could be so important that he’d interrupt me at such a moment, but when he said, “It’s Judy Garland,” I grabbed the phone. She said, “Tony, I’m in my room at the St. Regis Hotel. There’s a man here and he’s beating me up!” She was crying and sounded terrified. We all knew Judy had a tendency to exaggerate, but she sounded desperate, and I believed her.
I told her, “I’m about to go on stage, Judy. I don’t know what I can do.” Then I thought: I’ll call Frank. I put in a call to the Fontainebleau in Florida, where Sinatra was appearing, and explained the situation to him. He said, “I’ll call you back in fifteen minutes.” The second I got off the stage, the stage manager told me there was another call from Judy. I picked up the phone and she said, “I wanted help, but this is ridiculous! There are nine hundred cops downstairs and five lawyers in my room!” Frank certainly took care of the situation for her in grand style. He’d just finished making a movie called The Detective with my old friend Abby Mann, and since they wanted it to be as realistic as possible, they’d worked closely with the New York City Police Department. All the police loved Frank, so they rallied to Judy’s aid when he asked for their help. Sinatra called me back later and said, “Is that all right, kid?”
I was glad that Judy knew she could count on me when she needed a friend, since many people in her life did nothing but take advantage of her. The last time I saw her was in London in April 1969, when I was there doing a TV special with Count Basie. After the show she came backstage to see me, and the last thing she said to me was, “You’re pretty good!” She died two months later. I’ve never gotten over it. She was so kind, so talented, such a dear friend. When I look back, it’s hard to believe that most of the time she was just trying to hold on for dear life.
By the time 1964 rolled around, America was becoming a hotbed of activity on all fronts. Like everyone else, I was shocked and appalled by Kennedy’s assassination. It was a sad time for this country, the end of the age of innocence. We had survived the Cuban missile crisis, but the Cold War and the threat of a nuclear confrontation still hung over our heads. The papers and the television were filled with news of Dr. Martin Luther King’s fight for civil rights. It was hard to comprehend the injustice and the discrimination that was going on right here in our own backyard. I was sympathetic to the movement and I did whatever I could to help the cause.
At the same time America was experiencing a new wave of rock music called “the British invasion.” I’d managed to get through the first wave—the Presley phenomenon—relatively unscathed, and now they were cramming the airwaves with the sound of a new group called the Beatles, and the marketers were hard at work creating what would soon be dubbed “Beatlemania.” Rock music was becoming big business, and Columbia quickly jumped on the bandwagon. They signed bands called the Byrds and Paul Revere and the Raiders; I thought the world was losing its mind. This music was starting to take priority over artists like Barbra Streisand and Johnny Mathis, and I became more determined than ever to find songs that would break through the rock and roll hype like a blade of grass through asphalt. My efforts paid off. I found hit songs like “When Joanna Loved Me,” by Jack Segal and Bob Wells, and introduced it on my album The Many Moods of Tony.
I also had hits with two songs by the great British lyricist Leslie Bricusse: “Who Can I Turn To,” cowritten with Anthony Newley, and the title track to my 1965 album, If I Ruled the World (Songs for the Jet Set), which he wrote with Cyril Ornadel. That album also included a song that’s always been very special to me: “Sweet Lorraine.” I dedicated it to Nat Cole, who had died a month earlier in April 1965. I was heartbroken when I heard that Nat had passed away. Bobby Hackett and I were working at the Palmer House in Chicago, and it seemed appropriate to pay tribute by recording Nat’s signature tune while we were in his hometown. (Bobby, whose instrument was normally cornet, surprised us all by playing ukulele on this record; his buddy Joe Marsala played clarinet.)
I have a lot of fond memories of Nat. I was fortunate enough to be working in Las Vegas when he was playing the Sands around the time of his big hit “Rambling Rose.” Since we were always working on the same nights, I couldn’t catch his show, but I visited him during rehearsals. I was standing in the back of the room in the shadows while Nat was going over his cues one day. Jack Entratter, who ran the Sands, was there too, and I heard Nat tell him that he planned to walk through the audience while he was singing. But Jack Entratter objected, so I stepped out of the shadows and said, “Don’t worry, Nat, you have the number one song in the country. Do whatever you want.” They turned to me and both cracked up laughing.
The Sands treated Nat like the king he was. Jack threw him a special party, and I was privileged to be invited. It was held in one of the big ballrooms upstairs, and Nat’s wife, Maria, his kids, and his extended family were all there.
During dinner Nat said to me, “I’ve got a big item for you. There’s a theater that’s opening up in Los Angeles next year, and I want just you, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, and me to perform. Nobody else. Put it on your calendar.” Every couple of months he’d call me and ask me, “Are you blocking that date off?” I didn’t even know which theater it was, but it didn’t matter; I was happy to sing anywhere Nat asked me to. It turned out to be the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and Nat’s friends owned the place and wanted him to open it with a spectacular show. He had it all planned: Basie would open; then I’d come out and close the first half of the show with the Basie band. The second half would feature Ella and Nat with Basie, and then we’d all close the show together with a big jam session.
About three weeks before the show was scheduled to open, I was talking to Dean Martin. I asked him how Nat was doing, since I hadn’t spoken with him for a while. Dean told me that Nat had cancer and that it was bad. He died a few days later.
The show at the Pavilion was turned into a memorial for him. Sinatra took over the planning, and it was huge. It seemed like everyone who had ever known Nat was on the bill.
Since I’d been out on the road with Basie for a while, and the music was really tight, I was looking forward to doing a half-hour set with him, but there were so many stars on the bill I only did two numbers. It was an exciting night, and the audience went wild. I think Nat would have been proud of the show.
Unfortunately, I’ve run into far too many incidents of racism involving the many great Black musicians I’ve worked with throughout the years. It’s a shame that a genius like Nat had to be subjected to discrimination, but as I knew from my experiences in the war, racism could be disgustingly blatant. I once went to see Nat in Miami and I invited him to come join me at my table after the show. He told me he wasn’t allowed in the dining room, that if I wanted to see him. I’d have to go backstage. When the Americana Hotel opened in Miami in the mid-fifties, Duke Ellington and I played the first show. The hotel threw a big press party, but, of all things, Duke wasn’t allowed to attend. In fact, the band couldn’t even stay at the hotel; they had to bunk in some dingy joint in another section of Miami.
I’d never been politically inclined, but these things went beyond politics. Nat and Duke were geniuses, brilliant human beings who gave the world some of the most beautiful music it’s ever heard, and yet they were treated like second-class citizens. The whole situation enraged me. That’s why when Harry Belafonte called me up and asked me to join Martin Luther King’s civil rights march to Selma, Alabama, in 1965 I accepted.
I’d known Harry since the late forties when we met at New York’s Hanson’s Drug Store on Fifty-second Street, the hangout for struggling musicians and entertainers. At that time it was anybody’s guess as to which of us would make it, but none of us had any doubts about Harry. We knew he was going to be a big star. He was virtually the only entertainer in the fifties who had the courage to make social statements, and he continued that crusade through the sixties, right up to the present time.
Harry told me that the march had been planned by Martin Luther King to draw national attention to the fact that Blacks were still being denied the right to vote. Dr. King thought it would be a good idea to have some celebrities on the march to attract some media attention and to entertain the marchers at the end of each day, so he also invited my old pal Billy Eckstine, Leonard Bernstein, Shelley Winters, Sammy Davis Jr., Adolph Green, Betty Comden, and other popular performers of the day.
When the march started, I had a strange sense of déjá vu. I kept flashing back to a time twenty years earlier when my buddies and I had fought our way into Germany. It felt the same way down in Selma: the white state troopers were really hostile, and they were not shy about showing it. There was the threat of violence all along the march route, from Montgomery to Selma, some of which was broadcast on the nightly news and really helped to make the country aware of the ugliness that was still going on in the South. Billy and I were really scared. Fortunately Harry was there to reassure us, and the way he kept his cool was an inspiration.
One night, early into the march, the performers put on a show and I sang a couple of numbers. We were in the middle of a clearing, and there was no stage available, so a local mortician volunteered eighteen heavy wooden coffins for us to use as a stage. It was bizarre to be singing on top of a pile of coffins, but we made do with what we had. Twenty years later Abby Mann asked me to re-create that scene for his TV miniseries King.
The fifty-four-mile march lasted from March 7 to March 25. Neither Billy Eckstine nor I could stay for the entire march, but while we were there we tried to act cool and pretend we weren’t terrified by the violence that surrounded us. We shared a room in a broken-down hotel. When it was time to leave, we hurriedly packed up our stuff and headed out. The next day when I was in New York, Billy called me from L.A. and said, “Where are my f————pants?” We were so nervous when we were packing up to leave that I put on his pants and he put on mine—he’s six feet two, and I’m five feet nine—but we didn’t even notice.
One of Dr. King’s supporters, a white woman from Detroit who had three children, took Billy and me to the airport when it was time for us to leave. We were horrified to learn that she was murdered by anti—civil rights men on her drive back to Selma.
I’m enormously proud that I was able to take part in such a historic event, but I’m saddened to think that it was ever necessary and that any person should suffer simply because of the color of his skin.
Fortunately I could continue to express my sentiments in song. A year after the Selma march Carmen McRae came to me with a song called “Georgia Rose.” It was a 1921 vaudeville tune that Black entertainers loved to sing, a lullaby about a Black woman singing to her baby as she rocks him in his carriage. One of the lines goes, “Don’t be blue because you’re Black.” It’s an affirmative song, and its message is that Black is beautiful. Carmen and Ralph Burns had recorded it for Decca, but the company pretty much sat on the master and no one heard it. I fell in love with the song, and I got Ralph to write a new arrangement for me that we recorded in June 1966.
Columbia released it right away, but they claimed that someone from the NAACP had called to complain about the song, which was absurd, because the song was nothing if not pro-Black. I later found out that the story wasn’t true at all; the NAACP had never called Columbia; it’s just that the label wanted to stay away from anything even remotely controversial that could hurt sales down South. Columbia suppressed the single, although I did include it on my album A Time for Love in 1966. The whole incident still irritates me.
On April 23, 1965, I reached a pinnacle in my career: that was the week that Frank Sinatra told the whole world that I was his favorite singer. He put it like this, in Life magazine:
For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business. He excites me when I watch him. He moves me. He’s the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more.
That quote changed my whole life. After fifteen years there were still some people in the industry who didn’t take me seriously, who thought I was just a flash in the pan. Well, not after the Chairman of the Board named me his number one. From that point on, Sinatra’s audience began to check me out. It was probably the most generous act that one artist has ever done for another.
Frank had long since proven himself the biggest booster I’d ever had. When I was working with Duke Ellington at the Americana Hotel in 1960, Frank found out that there was a convention of hotel owners in town. He and Joe E. Lewis rounded up every hotel owner they could find—at least fifteen of them—and brought them all in to see my act. From that one show I got bookings in places like the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, the Hilton in Las Vegas, and the Palmer House in Chicago for the next twenty years. What great guys they were to do that for me. I wish more entrepreneurs and artists today were as generous as they were.
When the Life story came out, I knew it was a great honor, but it was a responsibility as well. From that point on, I had to work even harder to live up to Frank’s praise. That really made me buckle down and apply more discipline and technique to my singing.
For years I’d been asked to do films, but since they always wanted me to play an Italian gangster, I just wasn’t interested. But in 1965, I was offered a role in a film called The Oscar. It was based on the novel of the same title by Richard Sale and was a story about double-dealing and back-stabbing in Tinseltown. While Paramount Pictures was in the process of casting the film, producer Clarence Greene and director Russell Rouse happened to catch me on television. They thought my personality would translate well to the big screen, so they contacted me to see if I’d be interested in playing Hollywood agent Hymie Kelly. I was. They flew me out to California, where I passed my screen test and started production on the film.
It was loaded with great character actors, many of whom had won Oscars for their work in the past—Stephen Boyd, Elke Sommer, Milton Berle, Eleanor Parker, Joseph Gotten, Jill St. John, Edie Adams, Ernest Borgnine—in fact, I was the only unknown quantity. I was thrilled to meet all those wonderful artists.
During a break in filming, I met a young woman named Sandra Grant. She knew some people who were working on the set, and we gradually became friends and started to see a lot of each other. Sandra was a beautiful aspiring actress and we had a lot of things in common. I was still married to Patricia, though by now things had really fallen apart. One day Patricia called me at my hotel and Sandra answered the phone. We were officially separated from that moment on.
I once again threw myself into my work. The filming went well, and when we finished the picture we had a grand premiere party, a black-tie event at the Riviera in Las Vegas, The entire cast and all the Paramount executives attended, Mike Douglas was host and later ran a tape of it on his television show.
The Oscar premiered at the Civic Auditorium in Santa Monica. But it was not a success with the critics, The reviews of my performance were okay, and though I did get offers to make other movies, my heart just wasn’t in it. Acting just didn’t hold the charm for me that performing, making records, and painting does. In fact, I learned from that experience that I should only work on something that I have a real passion for.
The best thing about The Oscar was the theme song that Percy Faith had written, called “Maybe September,” which I recorded for the original soundtrack album. Later I rerecorded it with the great musician Bill Evans. The whole movie-making process, though, inspired me to make my next and all-time favorite record, The Movie Song Album.
So many of the songs being written for films were great and I thought it would be fantastic to record a whole collection of them—and even better if I could get all the original composers to conduct. I had a lot of old friends, composers, and orchestrators like Neal Hefti and Quincy Jones whose work I loved, and who were now breaking into movie writing. So I got ahold of them.
After hearing about the project, a music publisher contacted my producer Ernie Altschuler with a new song by Johnny Mandel called “The Shadow of Your Smile,” from a film called The Sandpiper. I loved “The Shadow of Your Smile,” and also “Emily” which Johnny had already written for a James Garner—Julie Andrews comedy called The Americanization of Emily, so I enlisted him as my overall musical director on the album.
In addition to Johnny’s two songs, I got Neal Hefti and Quincy Jones to arrange and conduct their songs “Girl Talk” (from Harlow), and “The Pawnbroker” (from The Pawnbroker). Luiz Bonfa also played guitar on his songs “Samba De Orfeu” (from Black Orpheus), and “The Gentle Rain” (from The Gentle Rain). I asked Al Cohn to do scores on three older film songs, “Smile,” “The Second Time Around,” and a swinging treatment of “The Trolley Song” that had an outstanding tenor solo by Zoot Sims. Except for the three selections conducted by Neal, Quincy and David, Johnny conducted the rest of the album with Tommy Flanagan, Jimmy Rowles, and Lou Levy playing piano on different cuts.
“The Shadow of Your Smile” was my big song from the album, “Emily” had a lyric by Johnny Mercer, and when Mandel got the commission to do “Shadow of Your Smile,” he brought the melody to Mercer, who turned him down flat. He thought it reminded him too much of “New Orleans,” an old Hoagy Carmichael song. Mandel then went to Paul Francis Webster, who’d already written words for several Oscar-winning songs, including “Secret Love” and “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing.” He provided a lovely lyric for “The Shadow of Your Smile.” Mercer regretted not working on “Shadow,” even before it won the Academy Award.®
It’s a great song, and it became one of my all-time most requested numbers. It hit the charts, and it meant a lot to me that I performed my version at the Oscars in 1966 and it won the award.
Both The Movie Song Album and Sinatra’s Life magazine story climaxed a great era in my career. I had the honor of singing “If I Ruled the World” at a command performance for the Queen Mother of England. After the song, Bobby Hackett, who was playing with me at that time, leaned over to me and whispered, “What do you mean ‘if’?”