by Tony Bennett
This was another unbelievable example of the degree of prejudice that was so widespread in the army during World War II. Black Americans have fought in all of America’s wars, yet they have seldom been given credit for their contribution, and segregation and discrimination in civilian life and in the armed forces has been a sad fact of life. The War Department believed that Black soldiers had to be separated from whites or all sorts of problems would arise. The type of “problems” they cited were standard-issue racial prejudices, and I don’t even like thinking about it after all these years. Blacks had their own units, their own mess halls, barracks, and bars. It was actually more acceptable to fraternize with the German troops than it was to be friendly with a fellow Black American soldier! I just hadn’t been brought up to think this way about people, and neither had Frank. Needless to say it was a terrible shock when this officer treated us both with such contempt. And this institutional racism continued until Harry Truman officially integrated the military after the war ended. In the meantime we all suffered because of it.
As a result of my inviting Frank to eat with me, we were denied Thanksgiving dinner and I was immediately reassigned to Graves Registration, which was just as horrible as it sounds. During the heavy battles that had been fought earlier in the war, there often hadn’t been time for the soldiers to properly bury the men who died on the battlefield. The surviving soldiers often had to wrap the bodies in the dead soldiers’ own mattress bags and bury them in common graves. Men like myself in Graves Registration came along later to retrieve them. I’d spend all day digging up dead bodies and reburying them in individual graves. They fed us horrible, starchy foods like rice and potatoes to dull our senses.
For a while the whole affair soured me on the human race. Frank was one of the sweetest guys I ever met. I couldn’t get over the fact that they condemned us for just being friends, and especially while we served our country in wartime. I’ve thought back to that incident so many times. There we were, just two kids happy to see each other, trying to forget for a moment the horror of the war, but for the brass it just boiled down to the color of our skin.
Luckily a certain Major Letkoff found out that I’d been assigned to Graves Registration and was able to pull some strings. Through the efforts of this man I was assigned to the American forces radio network in Wiesbaden, and that led to one of the great experiences of my life.
The 314th Army Special Services Band of the European Theater was the brainchild of Warrant Officer Harold Lindsay “Lin” Arison. Lin was the only one in either of my army bands who was a “lifer,” that is, someone who spent his whole career in the military and government services. He’d begun organizing army bands as early as 1941 and had been greatly influenced by the most celebrated of all military orchestras, Glenn Miller’s Army Air Force Band. Miller’s AAF Band was a milestone in both military and musical history and had a huge impact on us all. Miller was in active service when his plane disappeared over the Atlantic in December of 1944, and it was a huge loss to the entire country. It was devastating. His band valiantly continued to perform without him for about a year.
After the AAF Band was sent back to the States the chief of Special Services of the European Theater asked Lin to put together another band to take its place, and that’s when the 314th was formed. It had been Lin’s dream to put together a new band with new music that was on par with what was happening back in the States, a first-class American pop-jazz orchestra, and he got the go-ahead.
It was crucial that the new band’s home base be in occupied Germany. It was obvious that the German people felt animosity toward the occupying army, and we saw the new band as an opportunity for us to raise morale and serve as unofficial goodwill ambassadors. So in late 1945, Lin set up shop at the Herzog Hotel in Bad Schwalbach and announced that he was holding auditions for first-rate musicians. He immediately landed some great players, many of whom went on to successful civilian careers in music after the war, among them sax player Dick Stott and trombonist George Masso. In addition to being a tremendous trombonist, George is one of the great orchestrators of all time. Whenever we played one of his arrangements, the whole orchestra applauded. His pieces were simple to play, and it just felt great to perform them.
I was originally appointed as the band’s official librarian, but when Lin heard me sing, he said, “For Chrissake, take care of the library, but I want you to sing a couple of songs a week with the band!”
Our duty was to do a weekly broadcast of a show called It’s All Yours over the Armed Forces Network, the title being our gift to American GIs stationed in Germany and to our former enemies as well. We broadcast from the Wiesbaden opera house every Sunday, and our theme song was a number I later recorded, “Penthouse Serenade.” Wiesbaden was one of the few German towns that was left comparatively untouched by the Allied bombing raids. The British and Americans had agreed not to drop any bombs on the town, since they wanted to use it as headquarters once Germany was taken. Unfortunately a British plane had once messed up a raid and dropped its payload over Wiesbaden, but by and large the town was still standing, which was more than you could say for most of the rest of Germany. The opera house was acoustically perfect, and sometimes we’d cram in as many as two thousand GIs. Once we even performed a special show that was transmitted back home to the United States via shortwave radio.
The band was the whole focus of the It’s All Yours show, much as the Glenn Miller band had been spotlighted on the I Sustain the Wings transmissions. As an added attraction, the USO usually sent over a guest star, like Paulette Goddard or Bob Hope, to do a sketch or a monologue. The band was extremely versatile. On one hand we were a swing band, like Benny Goodman’s or Count Basie’s, and could play the dance music and current hits of the day. On the other hand, we could play light classical numbers by composers like David Rose or André Kostelanetz. At its peak, the orchestra included fifty-five musicians, including a fully symphonized string section.
We got another shot in the arm and an influx of new sounds with the arrival of Jack Elliott in 1946. Our first piano player, Bob Jacobs, was leaving, and we were so glad to get a new guy that Lin assigned a master sergeant to pick him up and carry his bags. Needless to say, that didn’t happen very often to a private, particularly one who’d spent most of his enlistment thus far doing guard duty. When Jack began to play for us, we heard a new kind of music we’d never been exposed to before. He explained that it was called bebop, and that it was the latest thing to hit jazz back home. We loved it. The first time I’d ever heard of Dizzy Gillespie was through Jack Elliott.
It was to the credit of Lin Arisen that he was able to incorporate new sounds into the band so successfully He was a remarkable guy who was able to inspire us all and draw out our best performances. Even though he was regular army, he wasn’t strictly by the book. Sometimes he’d come out and conduct a rehearsal wearing an outrageous pair of fuzzy green bear slippers—not exactly standard issue duds. Eventually Lin’s wife, Janie, came in from the States, and the two of them took care of us all.
I was one of four vocalists in the band, and I usually got to do one or two numbers per show. There were two “boy singers,” Bob Lawrence, who did the straight romantic ballads, and myself. At that time I was still using the name “Joe Bari.” (To this day Arthur Penn and Freddy Katz think of me as “Joe.”) I usually did the rhythm tunes, the blues numbers, and the novelties. The “girl singers” were similarly divided; Judy Brines handled the love songs and Janie Thompson was the army’s answer to Betty Hutton. On numbers like “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief” Janie was loaded with energy and excitement, and she really thrilled the crowd when she launched into a boogie-woogie number and accompanied herself on the piano. That’s one thing we had that the Glenn Miller AAF Band never had: female singers.
While we were staying at the Herzog Hotel, the first thing we did was find the wine cellar. The Germans were crazy about wine and champagne, possibly even more than the French. The cellar was behind a heavy,
locked gate, but we figured out a way around that. Pretty soon we were sneaking our way in there every night. We stashed champagne everywhere. Since we didn’t have any refrigerators, the only way to keep the bottles cool was to run cold water over them, so of course every sink in that hotel was full of cold water and had a bottle of champagne in it. This being the army, we weren’t supposed to be drinking at all, but Lin made a rule that you were, allowed to bring alcohol into the hotel, so long as it was only one drink. Pretty soon the guys were carrying in bowls and buckets full of hooch and counting that as a single drink. We even made contact with a couple of guys from the air force who were flying in marijuana from Algiers, This was the first time I ever smoked pot. But after what we’d been through, we felt that anything that would help us forget was worth looking into.
There was a USO office across the street from our hotel, and soon some of the guys worked out a scheme to attract the attention of the ladies who worked there. Irv Luden, who played baritone saxophone in the band, would go over to the USO lobby with Jack Elliott. Jack would start playing piano in this melodramatic, hearts-and-flowers fashion, while Irv would recite poetry. Gradually, the ladies noticed these two guys doing their act, and they’d wander over to listen. It was only when they got closer that they discovered that Jack wasn’t reading poetry at all. He was reading aloud from the works of one of the leading writers of Victorian erotic fiction, Frank Harris. Jack was actually describing sex acts disguised in florid prose. Usually the serenade continued in private up in the ladies’ rooms.
During this period in the army I enjoyed the most musical freedom I’ve ever had in my life. I could sing whatever I wanted, and there was no one around to tell me any different. I remember I heard an Armed Forces Radio Service broadcast of Frank Sinatra doing Johnny Mercer’s “Candy,” and I felt like I just had to do that song. So I did. It was as simple as that. I heard all the latest songs on V-discs, which was an amazing collection of music. The first time I ever heard the voice and piano of Nat Cole was on a V-disc, and I fell in love with his sound right then and there. Postwar Germany was a hell of a place to discover an American institution like Nat.
I sang a lot of numbers in Germany that I did later on in my career, like “Body and Soul” and “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” which I did as a duet with Janie Thompson. But my big number was “St. James Infirmary.” I must have done that every other week, and I never stopped getting requests for it. Some of the shows were preserved on sixteen-inch radio transcriptions, the medium that most studios used to document live shows before tape was invented, and as far as I know, that’s the only vocal of mine with this band that still survives.
The whole band felt the same musical freedom. Whatever I wanted to sing, I sang; whatever the musicians wanted to play, they played. We couldn’t get enough music. When we weren’t playing or rehearsing, we were having jam sessions in the basement of the hotel. Lin gave us complete freedom to come up with the best and most interesting music. It was like a musical workshop, particularly for the arrangers, since it was free from all commercial constraints. What’s more, everything they wrote went over big. The GIs were the greatest audience in the world. They were never critical or judgmental, and they loved everything we did. Some of the pieces that George and Dick Dorsheck wrote were highly experimental. In many ways, they presaged some of the things that Stan Kenton did years later with his Innovations and Neophonic Orchestras. They were very “progressive” or even “avant-garde,” but the guys loved it. That’s really proof to me that the public is much more aware than they’re given credit for. I learned a big lesson with that group; an artist should never underestimate the public’s taste.
So many of my army buddies did well in the music world after the war, George Duley went into Les Brown’s band; George Masso began his postwar career playing trombone for Jimmy Dorsey and later became a composer; Dick Dorsheck became the principal composer for the BBC Radio and Television Orchestra; Red Mitchell was for many years the leading bass player on the West Coast jazz scene; Janie Thompson, a devout Mormon, has devoted her life to music education at Brigham Young University; and Jack Elliott became a major composer of movie and television soundtracks.
By August 1946, I had finally accumulated enough points to come home and I sailed home on the SS Washington, While on board I ran into my old friend Charlie Russo. I’d met him in Mannheim, where he was leading a quartet at the Truman Hotel and also putting on jam, sessions in the basement. He was organizing a big band concert featuring all the musicians who were traveling home on the ship and invited me to sing “St. James Infirmary” One of the soldiers on board had a portable disc-recording machine. He cut a disc of me singing “St. James,” and I played it for my family back in Astoria, but I don’t know what ever happened to that record. Chuck Russo later became a great classical clarinet player, one of the best in the world.
On August 15, I was officially honorably discharged as a private first class. I still remember coming into New York harbor a few weeks later. My mother and my aunt were waiting on the dock, and when they saw me holding a cigarette, they started crying. I had never smoked before I went to Europe. They couldn’t believe it, and neither could I. I was all grown up, and I was home.
CHAPTER FIVE
After I was discharged I moved back in with my family, Everything was different than it had been before. “The Good War,” as Studs Terkel calls it, had changed everything in ways I couldn’t explain. All I knew was that I wanted to get my life started again as soon as possible.
One of the first things I did when I got home was get in touch with Freddy Katz. We had grown so close during the war that I couldn’t wait to see him again. He lived in New York City too, so it was easy to get together, and soon we were hanging out all the time. I got to know his whole family, and I became buddies not only with Freddy, but with his brothers, Stan and Abe, and their father, a learned man who taught me many things. They became my second family.
They were a very close family who all had a deep respect for music, art, and literature. I swear I received the equivalent of a university education from hanging around the Katz family. Mr. Katz, a dentist, was a Russian-Jewish intellectual who could talk about any subject. Listening to him was like going to hear a great lecturer. We sat around and discussed music and philosophy over coffee: Marx, Plato, Spinoza, music theory, all the great subjects. All three brothers were terrific musicians—Abe was first trumpet player in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. He taught me how to breathe correctly when I was singing.
The Katzes hosted an informal “musicale” every Friday night, and great musicians around the city dropped by to jam. We went into the library and somebody would pull the music for, say, a string quartet off the shelf, deliberately one they’d never played, and those guys would sight-read (that is, read the music and play it straight off the page without ever having heard the piece before) it right on the spot. It was amazing. One Friday night there was a terrible blizzard that virtually shut down the city and Freddy figured that nobody was going to come. I was already there, of course—no snow storm was going to keep me away from my beloved Friday night ritual—and I guess everybody else felt the same way too, because by eight-thirty there were about thirty people in the house. Those Friday evenings were incredibly inspiring. By the end of the night I was so elated when I walked out of their house I felt like I was three feet off the ground. Sometimes I didn’t leave at all; I slept over so I could do it all again in the morning.
I was now determined to do whatever I had to do to become a professional singer. This meant pounding the proverbial pavement of New York City and knocking on the door of every booking agent, club, and promoter in town. Believe me, I got a lot of rejections, which was a bit of a shock after all the success I’d enjoyed in Germany, but I didn’t let it get me down. I just kept at it I went on so many auditions, but for years I couldn’t get work as a singer. I even tried out for the chorus of a Broadway show, but with no luck. I kept singing wherever
I could—not for money mind you, because at that time there was none to be made—for the experience and the chance to work with some great talents. As an unknown singer I was amazed at the caliber of the jazz musicians I was able to perform with and learn from as a result of my persistently hanging around the good clubs.
The first time I sang in a nightclub was at the Shangri-La. It was right under the El train in Astoria and was a very fancy, hip place in 1946. The great trombonist Tyree Glenn—who earlier in his career had played with Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, Benny Carter, and Cab Calloway—was leading the band. I sang informally at the bar, and when Tyree saw how much I loved his band, he said to me, “Come on up and sing with us.” What a thrill! After he heard me and saw the audience’s reaction, he gave me a job. It didn’t last long, though, because a few months later Tyree joined Duke Ellington’s orchestra, and after that became one of Louis Armstrong’s All-Stars. But those were very successful moments for me, and they encouraged me to keep going. I knew if I just had the chance to get up in front of an audience, I’d win them over.
I “worked” all kinds of clubs in Queens and Manhattan. I sang once or twice at the old Venice Gardens in Astoria, although mainly I used to go there to dance and look for girls. For a while I was once again a singing waiter, this time at the Pheasant Tavern and the Red Door in Astoria. Occasionally I sat in at the Yukon Bar on Fiftieth Street in New York, and for a while I performed at the Bal Tabarin on Broadway around Forty-fifth Street. That was the biggest job I’d had yet, and when I got it I said to myself “I’ve hit the big time, I’m right on Broadway!”