by Tony Bennett
I was set to open on September 19, 1951. Ray Muscarella and Sid Ascher, the press agent he’d hired, were determined that this would be a big deal. Ray owned a whole fleet of trucks as part of his family’s wine business, and he had them all specially wired for transmitting sound. The trucks made a parade starting in Little Italy, playing “Because of You” as loud as they could all the way to the Paramount in midtown Manhattan. You could hear it in Astoria and Brooklyn! It got louder and louder as the trucks approached the Paramount, and by the time they were parked in front of the theater, it was a virtual Tony Bennett wall-of-sound.
Apart from his sound trucks, Ray used other publicity stunts to promote the Paramount appearance. He hired skywriters to write “Tony Bennett—New York Paramount” across the Manhattan skyline, and on opening day I gave away American Beauty roses and handkerchiefs monogrammed “Borrowed from Tony Bennett” to the first five hundred girls. It was really quite a show. I was overwhelmed by what was happening to me: everybody knew who I was, and young girls mobbed me wherever I went.
The greatest thing about that gig was getting the chance to work with Louis Prima, another of my show business heroes. He was terrific. I always called him “The Chief” Prima was a genius of a showman, a wild man on stage that you just couldn’t take your eyes off Louis grew up in New Orleans, and he had been surrounded by gambling all his life. He knew more about it than anyone I’ve met, before or since. When they started building casinos and resorts in Vegas, Louis was the one who showed them how to do it. He told them where to put the casino, where to put the lounges, where to put the showroom, how to make it work. But they weren’t loyal to Louis. When he came to them and wanted to open his own golf course in Vegas, they wouldn’t help him out. That broke his heart.
People wondered why I was so happy to follow a strong act like Louis Prima. In fact, there are a lot of big stars, and I’m not going mention any names, who always make it a point to get a weak act to open for them; that way the “big star’ can feel confident the audience can’t wait for him to go on.
I’ve had Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Lena Horne, and the great drummer Buddy Rich in front of me on the bill. Of course they knocked everybody out, but I’ve worked hard at being able to follow the best in the business, and I realize that the best way to win over an audience is to give them something great right off the bat. I believe the audience deserves the best from start to finish. Every time I opened with a very dynamic act like the Step Brothers, the Nicholas Brothers, or even Louis Prima, by the time I got on stage the crowd was wide awake and at the edge of their seats. They’re all thinking, “What’s gonna happen now? How can anybody follow what we just saw?” Then, I just came out and did it. If the program is strong all the way through, from the first act to the last, then the public never feels cheated.
I know how important it is to reach the kids—then and now—and I was the first entertainer I know of to make a point of playing at high schools. I played three schools a day in Chicago, New York, or wherever I happened to be performing. I’d sing a few songs and then tell the kids how much I enjoyed playing for them, and I thanked them for listening to my records. It was a great way to reach an audience that otherwise would never get a chance to see me perform live.
But I was once so badly mobbed that I really got scared. I had agreed to appear at a graduation at a girl’s school in Brooklyn. They were holding the ceremony in the Botanical Garden. The young ladies hadn’t been informed beforehand that I was going to be there, and as soon as this very proper teacher got up on the stand and said, “Girls, don’t get too excited, but we have Tony Bennett here...” the “ladies” went wild and started chasing me all over the park. They tore my clothes, took my cigarettes and everything that I had in my pockets, and made me run for my life. I had to hide in a little stone house in the park. They had me trapped like a rat!
All this attention, of course, meant that I really had made it. The first thing I did with the money I was making was buy a house for my mom. It was a nice place at 76 Valley Road in River Edge, New Jersey and I felt so proud that I’d finally achieved my life’s ambition: getting my mom to stop working. That’s all I was interested in. Everything else I’ve done ever since has essentially been a free ride. I would have stopped singing altogether after “Because of You” and “Cold, Cold Heart” if I hadn’t loved it.
But do you know what? Life is funny When my mom was working, she was never sick a day in her life, but she fell apart the minute she stopped going to her job every day. I thought I was doing something great for her, but it was more like a curse. She couldn’t afford to get sick during the years that she was struggling to take care of my father and raise her family, but I guess once she was able to relax, it hit her all at once. She was like her brother, our uncle Jim, who had been a cab-driver. It wasn’t until the end of his life that he found out he’d had two heart attacks and never even felt them. He just knew he had to show up the next day for work.
If she’d kept working, maybe she’d have stayed strong. My mom was never the same. Mary and her husband, Tom Chiappa, moved in with her in River Edge, and for many years they took care of her. Mary set up my office for me, now that things were really under way, and she worked for me through most of the fifties. She’s very gregarious and always great to everyone she meets. She organized my first fan club, “The Bennett-Tones,” even before I was with Columbia Records, and after everything started happening for me Mary kept track of the day-to-day business. I can’t say too often how much I love her. We also hired a very nice woman named Natalie Sanders as her assistant to help out around the office.
After the success at the Paramount, I was booked to appear in Miami, Chicago, Cleveland, and Buffalo. I did some further touring with Jan Murray and Rosemary Clooney and as Mitch had predicted, my price had gone up considerably In 1950 I was getting a hundred dollars a week, but after the success of “Because of You” I was commanding over three thousand dollars a week, top dollar at that time. Rosie and I played the Capitol Theater in Washington in October 1951, and the local press sent out their “inquiring photographer” to do a story on us. The novice reporter was a young woman named Jacqueline Bouvier, who later became Mrs. John F. Kennedy
My asking price went up so fast that one sharp club owner was able to take advantage of it. I first worked for Ben Maksik’s Town and Country, which was sort of the “Copacabana of Brooklyn,” in early 1951. To get the gig, Ben insisted I come back later in the year and work at the same price. I took the deal. After all, you never know what will happen, right? And then a few months later “Because of You” became a hit. Ben called in my contractual obligation in August, when I was really soaring. People lined up around the block to see me, but all Ben had to give me was the one thousand dollars that he’d paid me six months earlier, a third of what I was getting everywhere else. It was Christmas in August for Ben.
Of all these early gigs, my biggest personal triumph was playing Chicago, and that was entirely due to Nat “King” Cole, a wonderful man and a great artist, I don’t think people fully comprehend the extent of his brilliance. He was a magnificent piano player, and he could sing like an angel. Songs like “I Realize Now,” Embraceable You,” and “Its Only a Paper Moon” are mesmerizing, Nat and I had the same agent, Buddy Howe, of General Artists Corporation (GAC), I came into the GAC office one day and there Nat was, all six feet and change of him. I told him I’d just come from visiting my mom in New Jersey. He asked, “Did you take a limousine?” I told him, “No. I don’t use a limo. I took a bus in.” He was shocked that I had all these records on the chart and I was taking the bus in from my mom’s house. That knocked him out and we became friends.
At this time I was very big in New York City, but I hadn’t made a dent in Chicago. It happened that Nat was booked into the Chez Paree there, but he had to cancel when he was asked to sing at the White House. He needed to have someone fill in for him, so he told the owners of the club, “Get Tony Bennett.” I did the show, a
nd I went over big.
The Chez Paree was an important gig for me. I was on the bill with Sophie Tucker, one of the all-time great ladies of show business. I’ll never forget the opening night with the Step Brothers, Ford and Hines, and Sophie Tucker. The show hit so big that Sophie told us, “You guys can relax, because our contract’s gonna be picked up, and well be here all month.” And sure enough, I spent the whole month there. Miss Tucker had been such a big headliner for so many years that she always insisted on top billing. But I wanted to get at least equal billing. We resolved it by writing “Sophie Tucker and Tony Bennett” on one side of the marquee and “Tony Bennett and Sophie Tucker” on the other side. The club very carefully arranged to drive Sophie in from the “correct” direction, so she never saw the side that gave me top billing.
The audiences in Chicago were wonderfully receptive to me. They’d never seen me before, but they knew my records, and called out requests. Sophie used to stand in the wings and monitor the opening acts to make sure we didn’t grab any extra stage time or go over too big with the audience. One night I wound up staying on stage for longer than my allotted time, and Sophie was fuming. When it was clear I was going to keep singing, she marched up to my road manager and hollered, “Tell your friend to get off stage!”
I met and fell in love with a young woman named Patricia Beech in July of 1951. I was singing at Moe’s Main Street in Cleveland, Ohio, and one night she came in with a date. I could see her from the stage—she was sitting ringside—and I was taken with her beauty. After the show her date asked me to join them at their table, so of course I took that opportunity to introduce myself to her. I found out that she was from a little town south of Cleveland called Mansfield and that she had just graduated from high school and moved to Cleveland. Even with my newfound fame and all the attention I was getting, that night was the first time I’d met someone I wanted to see on more than a casual date.
That night was probably Patricia’s first time in a nightclub. She was a big jazz fan, though, and used to listen to radio broadcasts by the famous disc jockey “Symphony Sid” Torrin. He played jazz records all night long, and as a teenager she’d stay up and listen to his show. She’d heard my singing before, but didn’t own any of my records until after we met. She loved art, and had come to Cleveland in the hope of being admitted to that city’s excellent art school. I was twenty-four and she was eighteen.
I managed to get her telephone number, and since I was in Cleveland for a couple of days doing promotion, I called her the next day and asked her out. That Saturday we had our first date, an unusual one since I didn’t have a lot of free time in those days: we spent the day picking out neckties for me to wear on stage. She had great taste! We hung out together as much as we could, but soon I had to leave Cleveland and get back on the road. For the next couple of months we had a long-distance relationship. I called her every day, and we talked on the phone for hours about jazz and art and all kinds of things. She always came to my shows when I was playing around Ohio, which was a big market in those days, so we got to see each other quite a bit. But not enough.
Two months after we met, I invited Patricia to come and visit me in New York in time for the big show at the Paramount. I wanted her with me so that she could get a taste of what my life was like. Shed never been to the city before, and the only address she had for me was the Paramount Theater, so when she arrived she took the bus from Newark Airport right into midtown Manhattan. She was astonished to see thousands of screaming bobby-soxers surrounding the theater and clamoring for me. There were so many kids they had to be held back by police barricades. She had no idea it would be like this—the only place shed seen me perform was in Ohio, and I guess I neglected to mention that New York City would be a little different. So different that Patricia almost didn’t get in to see me because the police thought she was just another teenage Tony Bennett fan and they refused to let her backstage. She was standing there at the stage door trying to convince the doorman that I’d invited her to the show when Billy, my drummer, happened to walk by and he rescued her. What a welcome Patricia had that day!
Soon after, I convinced her to move to New York City so we could be together more often. She found a job working for a broker on Forty-fourth Street as a gal Friday. I was on the road a lot that year, but New York was always my home base, so I got to see her a lot more often than I would have if she had stayed in Ohio. While I was on the road with the band, Patricia stayed at Jack Medoff’s empty apartment in the West Seventies until she found her own place at the Henry Hudson Hotel on West Fifty-seventh Street. It wasn’t very long before I decided that I wanted to marry Patricia, and I wanted to propose to her in a dramatic way. I was headlining the Paramount again for the Christmas holidays, and I thought that New Year’s Eve would be the perfect night. So during my show I announced my intentions to the world, which was a surprise to Patricia since I’d never actually asked her. I was fortunate that she wanted to marry me as much as I wanted to marry her, otherwise that would have been the most embarrassing night of my career.
My manager, Ray Muscarella, was also very surprised, although not as pleasantly. He didn’t like the idea that his star client would have a wife, or that somebody else would be more closely involved with me than himself. He believed that if I married I wouldn’t be as attractive to all the young female fans who, he thought, harbored the fantasy of someday marrying me themselves.
Ray’s attitude toward Patricia was one of the major reasons that Ray and I eventually split. He constantly did little things to discourage me from marrying her. One day she was on her way to meet me at a club when she noticed that some guy was following her. He waved a wad of money at her and tried to force her to take it. He said, “Hey, lady! I won it at the track. I don’t need it. I don’t want it. Here, you take it.” It was frightening and bizarre. Of course she didn’t take the money, and when she got to the club, Ray and his brothers were hanging around waiting for her. She told me what had happened, and we figured that it was a stunt Ray had pulled—I guess he expected her to walk into the club holding a pile of bills, tell a ridiculous story about a strange man who had given the money to her, and somehow compromise herself in my eyes.
Ray pulled his biggest stunt on my wedding day. Patricia and I were originally set to get married on February 11, 1952, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, one of the most spectacular churches in America. But Ray decided we should get married on the twelfth. We didn’t know why, but Patricia and I agreed. Well, it turned out that Monday February 12, was Lincoln’s Birthday, which meant that all my teenage fans would be out of school and able to show up at the church on Fifth Avenue, create a huge scene, and turn our wedding day into a publicity stunt. Ray arranged for thousands of screaming girls to mob the church; he even supplied black mourning veils for them to wear! It was so crazy that Patricia had a hard time getting into the church—the girls didn’t want to let her up the steps—and Patricia never forgave Ray for it.
We honeymooned at Nassau in the Bahamas for a week, and when I got back my first gig was at Copa City in Miami with Sophie Tucker and Jack Carter. That March we visited Patricia’s family in Mansfield, Ohio, and I invited everybody to come down when I played the Loew’s State Theater in Cleveland. We had a great time. Patricia traveled everywhere with me, and for the first few years of our marriage we were always on the road, though we did get an apartment at Riverside Drive and Eighty-sixth Street. This was our first real place together, and we spent our time there when we weren’t traveling.
By 1952 I felt I had matured both as a performer and as a person. I was a married man, I’d proven that I could create hit singles, and I was ready for the next stage in my development as an artist. I wanted to try something beyond the familiar Tony Bennett—Percy Faith sound that had given me five chart hits in 1951. Mitch had a knack for finding these snappy little novelty tunes, things like Rosemary Clooney’s “Come On-A-My House,” Frankie Laine’s hit “Hambone,” Doris Day’s “Sugarb
ush,” Jo Stafford’s “Chow Willy,” and Guy Mitchell’s “Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.” All of these songs were hits, but I wasn’t interested in singing that type of song. Yet Mitch kept trying to push these kinds of tunes on me, and as much as we liked each other, there was always tension between us. I wanted to sing the great songs, songs that I felt really mattered to people.
Rosemary Clooney who was recording for Columbia at the time, felt differently about this than I did. Like me, she knew from the time she was a child that she’d make her living singing. But she couldn’t have cared less if she was in Maysville, Kentucky; Cincinnati, Ohio; or if she was on the road with Tony Pastor. Essentially it was just a job to her. And so for her the object of this job, like any other, was to please the people who signed the checks. When Mitch Miller gave her a song called “The Canasta Song”—she told me that she couldn’t believe how bad it was, that it was just awful—she didn’t think about it; she just did it. She worked for Mitch, and she sang whatever he told her to.
Rosie told me that when Mitch played her “Come On-A-My House,” she hesitated. She asked him, “Do you think this song is a song that people will understand? And do you think that if they hear me sing this, that they’ll realize I’m a singer who can do other things too?” Mitch explained the situation to her in his own sensitive way: “If you don’t want to sing this song, don’t bother showing up at the session tomorrow, or ever again.”
Rosie was amazed that I stood up to Mitch, but she respected me for it. She knew I wasn’t being disrespectful to him, or obstinate, or hard to deal with. She understood that I just could not sing a song I didn’t like.
Fortunately, Mitch and I came to an understanding. We were still doing four tunes per recording session at that time, so we worked out a deal. He picked two songs and I picked two songs. Of course, even then there were certain songs he’d come up with that I just couldn’t do. But on the other hand, not everything that Mitch picked was a novelty, He often showed me that he still knew a thing or two about good songs. As a result I ended up having some great sessions with Mitch. But I always had the sword out, and I was always verbally dueling with him.