by Tony Bennett
I’m not saying that I was always right. I absolutely hated “Rags to Riches” the first time I heard it in 1953. They really had to tie me down on that one. But Mitch laid down the law. “I don’t care what you hate. You have to record this,” so I went along with him. Thanks to Percy’s innovative arrangement, which included what he called a “double tango” in the instrumental break, I had another colossal hit and a gold record. More importantly, I grew to like the song and to enjoy singing it. Years later “Rags to Riches” was in Martin Scorsese’s hit film Goodfellas and it became popular all over again.
There was one source for new songs that both Mitch and I agreed on. When I first came to Columbia, Cole Porter’s lawyer, Jack Spencer, was trying to interest the label in me at the same time they were negotiating for the rights to Kiss Me, Kate. By 1953, the situation had reversed itself. I became so hot as a pop singles artist that all the Broadway producers and composers came running to Mitch pleading for me to record one of their songs.
In 1953, there was a huge newspaper strike in New York that lasted so long it actually closed down two or three newspapers permanently. Reporters couldn’t review openings. The producer of Kismet had a brainstorm. He compelled Columbia to have me record “Stranger in Paradise”—then had New York radio stations play it over and over again weeks before the opening. It hit the charts in November, making it all the way to the number two spot. On opening night in December, when the audience heard “Stranger in Paradise,” it stopped the show cold. Word of mouth had made the song—and the show—a smash hit.
Over the years ninety different artists have recorded “Stranger in Paradise,” but my version remains the biggest. It was also the first record of mine to go over really big in England, and I sang it the first time I played there in 1955. In England the song has been recorded ninety-six times, but the public eventually made mine number one.
In 1956, Jule Styne came to me with “Just In Time,” the big song from his forthcoming show, Bells Are Ringing. The Columbia people told him, “If you want Tony to record a single of ‘Just In Time,’ you’ll have to let Columbia Records have the cast album.” That was standard policy for Columbia. Jule said, “I want Tony No one else!” So that was that. I recorded “Just In Time” in September. I had a hit with the song and the show opened at the Shubert Theater on November 29.
We eventually collected twelve show tune singles for my 1962 album Mr. Broadway. I did many more Broadway show tunes over the years—enough to fill a two-CD set. I think probably the most important part of my recording legacy is that I had the privilege of introducing all those wonderful show tunes to the general public.
My habit of recording songs from Broadway shows also endeared me to Goddard Lieberson. I would record a new Broadway song, and Columbia in turn got the cast album, which became the foundation of their catalogue. Goddard was a friend of both Rex Harrison’s and Alan Jay Lerner’s, and when he heard about the show My Fair Lady, he took Columbia’s involvement in the Broadway scene one giant step farther. He persuaded William S. Paley to put some of Columbia’s money into the show, and Columbia was rewarded a thousandfold.
The show was the biggest hit in the history of Broadway up to that time: Columbia not only made a fortune with their original cast album (which they rerecorded in stereo in 1958 with the British cast); it was the biggest-selling cast album of all time, selling five million copies by the 1960s, When the producers of the show sold the movie rights to Warner Bros, for five million dollars, Columbia Records made out like a bandit. So did Goddard. My Fair Lady had opened on Broadway on March 15, 1956, and Goddard became president of Columbia Records that June.
With more and more hit records, my bookings got better and better. In April 1952, I opened at the El Rancho in Las Vegas for the first time.
Las Vegas was just getting started as a major entertainment town in the early fifties. The first hotel-casino had opened in 1941, featuring the now-standard showrooms, restaurants, and entertainment lounges. The Strip contained only two or three hotels in the forties, among them the Desert Inn and the El Rancho, and 1-95 was just a dirt road. But what followed in the fifties was a construction boom that gave us the glitzy gambling and entertainment capital we know and love today, Vegas thought big right from the start, and by the time I opened there, the Strip was packed with clubs and casinos and was already legendary. If you played Vegas, you knew you were famous. The underworld controlled just about every club and casino, but that was not news to me or anybody else who played there. It was a wild place where the attitude was “anything goes!”
Eventually I worked all the big hotels in Vegas: the El Rancho, the Sahara, the Sands, the Dunes, the Riviera, Caesars Palace, you name it. Those were sensational days. Entertainers like myself, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Lena Horne, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Noel Coward, Marlene Dietrich, Harpo Marx, and Louis Prima really made that town happen. Playing Caesars Palace regularly came about because of my friend Dave Victorson. When I first started making it, Dave came to see me and told me, “I’m flat broke. I have to go to L. A. and try my luck.” I asked him how much he needed. He said, “Five hundred dollars.” So I gave it to him. About seven years later I got a call from Dave. He said, “You’re coming to work for me.” “What are you talking about?” I asked him. He told me he was the entertainment director for a new hotel called Caesars Palace, and remembering that favor cemented our long-term association.
My big opening of that year was in October at the Copacabana in New York City. All the superstars—Frank Sinatra, Nat “King” Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Jimmy Durante, and Joe E. Lewis—played there. Vegas generally took its booking cues from the Copa then, and at first neither venue was too keen on what they called “record acts,” which they figured were a bunch of fly-by-nighters who wouldn’t bring in the right type of customer. They preferred old-line show business legends like Sophie Tucker. Once I got out on stage, I won them over.
One of the great things about my first engagement at the Copa was getting to work with Joe E. Lewis. Today he’s primarily remembered as the character Frank Sinatra played in the classic movie The Joker Is Wild, in which Frank introduced the song “All the Way,” but in his day Joe E. Lewis was an immensely popular and well-respected comedian. It was a real honor to be on the same bill with him. I felt like an amateur opening for a giant like Joe, but he was great to me. Being inexperienced, I couldn’t handle the crowd at the Copa; they never stopped talking, and I didn’t yet know how to hold a difficult audience like that, Joe gave me some great tips on how to grab the audience’s attention. When he found out that I was going to Texas, he wrote the critics in Houston and Dallas before I got there and told them to check me out. He was a real gentleman.
By 1953, I was on the road pretty much full-time. Along with my musicians I was traveling with a radio promotions man from Columbia Records named Danny Stevens and my road manager, Dee Anthony. Toward the middle of the year my piano player Gene di Novi left me to do a solo gig at an important cabaret in New York called the Show Spot.
I made an unusual choice for my next accompanist, the remarkable guitarist Chuck Wayne. I remembered when I first heard Bing Crosby in the early thirties he had a brilliant guitarist named Eddie Lang. I liked the soft, intimate sound that a guitar brought to the songs. Chuck was an accomplished musician and could conduct the band for me as well as any pianist I ever had.
Chuck and I had a lot of wild times on the road. One night in Florida I was asleep when the phone rang around eleven-thirty PM. It was Chuck and he said, “There’s a guy downtown who’s really bad-mouthing the hell out of you and our act. Should I take care of him?” I said, “Wait a minute; I’ll get dressed and come with you.” So we walked into this club, and there was a comic on stage. Sure enough, when he saw us come in, he started dumping on us: “Ah, there’s that Italian kid crooner Tony Bennett and his sidekick ukulele player Chuck Wayne. They think they’re hot stuff just ‘cause they’re from New York City” It started ou
t pretty mild, but he went on rapping us big time. By the time the set was over, Chuck and I were really steamed up and we went backstage to jump the guy. We walked right over to him and pushed him up against the wall. I put my hand around his neck, and Chuck put his knee in his crotch. Then I said, “Don’t ever mention us again. Ever.” He said, “You got it. You got it. You boys are serious.” “You better believe it,” I told him, and walked out. Well, I found out later the comedian’s name was Don Rickles. That was at the very beginning of his career—nobody had even heard of him then. That type of insult comedy was completely new, and a lot of people, myself included, found it shocking. He was like Howard Stern today, pushing the limits of what’s considered acceptable. Chuck and I laughed about the whole thing because our bark was always much bigger than our bite, but to this day Don only has nice things to say about me.
Luckily, my legion of bobby-soxer fans did not lose interest in me after I got married. In fact, my two most ardent admirers, Molly Siva and Helen Schulman, became even more determined to pursue me. For months on end, whenever I’d go anywhere in public in New York City, they were there. I’d be sitting in a restaurant, having a bowl of soup or something, and I’d look up to find them staring at me through the window. When they found out I was getting married, they sent me telegrams by the hour pleading with me to change my mind. They’d wait at the stage door at the theater where I was appearing, and when the show was over, they’d follow my cab home. When Patricia and I got back from our honeymoon, they camped out on our doorstep for days.
During one engagement at the Roxy, I gave a total of seventy performances. Molly and Helen were there for at least sixty-eight. There was a building across the street from the theater that had an unoccupied office facing directly into my dressing room. Molly and Helen convinced the owner to lend them that office space for the month. There was a huge poster of me in front of the theater, and somehow the two of them managed to make off with it. They filled their special room with sandwiches, bottles of soda, and that enormous poster, and basically lived there. Most importantly, they had a phonograph and copies of all of my records that they blasted so loud that the neighborhood heard nothing but Tony Bennett for the entire month.
Once they took a bus all the way to Asbury Park, New Jersey, to hear me perform. They missed the last bus back and wound up stranded and came crying to me in my dressing room. I called their parents and assured them that everything was all right; then Patricia took them down to the local hotel and got them a room for the night. Another time they showed up for a performance at the Copa, but they’d drastically underestimated how expensive that famously high-priced nightspot could be and again wound up coming to me. I was happy to help them get into the show. Anything for such loyal, dedicated fans!
In those days, syndicated newspaper columnists occasionally invited celebrities to fill in for them. Once in 1954, when Dorothy Kilgallen took a vacation, I wrote one installment for her as a “guest columnist.” I devoted the entire column to the exploits of Molly and Helen, and that column inspired a novel by Nora Johnson called The World of Henry Orient, in which two schoolgirls become obsessed with a concert pianist (somehow they figured a classical musician was funnier than a pop crooner). The gag is that he’s always trying to make it with some chick, and these two little girls are forever following him around and messing up his plans. It was a very funny book and was later made into a film starring Peter Sellers as Henry Orient (me!), as well as a 1967 Broadway musical entitled Henry, Sweet Henry, starring Don Ameche.
That June Patricia told me she was pregnant. Things couldn’t have been better. My career was in full swing, and now I could look forward to starting a family. Since our apartment wasn’t big enough to accommodate the new arrival, Patricia and I decided to look outside the city for a bigger place. We found an apartment at the Briar Oaks apartment complex right off the Henry Hudson Parkway a little north of the George Washington Bridge in Riverdale, New York. We lived in apartment 1012 in the first tower, a spacious four-room spread. This was much different from anywhere else I’d lived, and the view of the Hudson River and the New Jersey palisades was spectacular.
My first son, D’Andrea, was born on February 3, 1954. We were so pleased when he arrived, and Patricia wanted to choose a very special name for him. She liked the name “Andrea,” but didn’t want the baby to be called “Andy,” so we weren’t really sure about it. But then I thought of my singing teacher Pietro D’Andrea, of whom. I was very fond, so we decided to put a “D” in front of “Andrea.” Patricia started in right away calling him “Danny,” and I also liked the idea that I could call him “Danny” because once on Fifty-second Street I had heard the great Art. Tatum play “Danny Boy” so beautifully that it always stayed with me. So that’s how he got the name he goes by today.
It was thrilling and at the same time a little bit frightening to think that I was now a father. Great responsibility comes with being a parent, and I didn’t want to miss a day of my son growing up. I was determined that we stay together even though my career required extensive travel. Patricia agreed and we traveled with Danny from the time he was three weeks old.
Traveling was quite different then than it is today. We were all basically still kids. I was twenty-eight and Patricia was only twenty-two, and we were traveling with the whole crew. We went from city to city, often performing in one town one night and opening in another town the next. We did get to travel by plane, but again, this was back in the fifties. The planes were prop jobs, they barely flew above the clouds, and we were subjected to some pretty bumpy rides. On top of that it took twice as long as it does today to get anywhere.
We’d pack up our luggage, the baby, and all the musicians every day, get into cabs, and rush to the airport. We’d invariably arrive at the last minute. Now remember, I was traveling with some pretty hip jazz musicians, and we were all known to partake in a little recreational pot smoking; everyone but Patricia, that is. I remember one time when Patricia was learning how to make my moms special spaghetti sauce. My mom came over to our house and showed Patricia her secret ingredients: a package of aluminum foil filled with a “stash” of herbs. Coming from a small town, Patricia had never seen oregano before and in her astonishment she thought, “Oh, my god, Tony’s mom uses pot in his favorite recipe!”
The musicians’ “extracurricular activities” made the organization a little less than organized. Getting everybody up and going in the morning was quite a feat. On top of that, the stand-up bass, which is about six and a half feet tall, was always too big to fit in the cargo compartment of the plane and had to have It’s own seat, and this was always a last minute hassle. But somehow we never missed a show in all those years, and we had a great time.
I had two more top-ten hits in 1954, Hank Williams’s posthumous hit “There’ll Be No Teardrops Tonight” and a novelty tune—Mitch’s idea, of course—called “Cinnamon Sinner.” I was especially fond of a song I recorded that year called “Funny Thing,” which was credited to the excellent lyricist Carl Sigman and a little-known composer named “Arthur Williams.” Actually “Arthur Williams” was a pseudonym adopted for publishing reasons by the great tunesmith and my great friend Jimmy Van Heusen, Van Heusen had also written “Somewhere Along the Way” in the same undercover fashion, and though I also recorded that, the hit on that 1951 classic belonged to Nat “King” Cole. I thought “Funny Thing” was a great song and a likely hit, and I was disappointed when it didn’t go anywhere.
At this point in my career, I became dissatisfied with just trying to turn out one pop hit after another, I wanted a hit record as much as anybody, but I knew that there was more to music than trying to beat out all the other pop singers for a top spot on the charts. I had wanted to do an LP ever since I signed with Columbia, but Mitch Miller felt that the public was really only interested in singles. Capitol, Decca, and other labels were starting to release full-length albums and were doing well with them; in fact, George Avakian, who ran Columbia’s jazz div
ision, had released albums a couple of years earlier. But Mitch really missed the boat. It wasn’t until the advent of stereo sound in 1956-57 that Columbia really got behind LPs.
I was already singing a lot of jazz numbers live, and I continued to plead with Mitch and everybody else at Columbia to allow me to record a full-length jazz album. Finally perhaps out of fear that I’d leave the label, they relented and let me have my way.
I started recording that album. Cloud 7, in August 1954. Two years earlier, Columbia had released an LP called Dedicated to You, but that was only a collection of hit singles and not an original album. Cloud 7 was, to use a latter-day term, a genuine “concept album,” and it was one of Columbia’s first twelve-inch long-playing records.
Among the great musicians I was able to bring to that session were my old friend and idol, the great Al Cohn, alto saxophonist Davey Schildkraut, who like me was a big fan of Charlie Parker, and drummer Ed Shaughnessy, who later became famous as the linchpin of the Tonight Show band. I also brought back Gene di Novi on piano. Columbia had never wanted me to use Gene when he was officially part of my touring band in 1952 and 1953 because they thought he was too much of an upstart bebopper.
The most important player on Cloud 7 was Chuck Wayne. He worked out all the arrangements with me, and we featured his sensitive guitar work on every song. Chuck was also smart enough to clue me in to the fact that one of the songs we included on the album, “My Reverie,” was actually based on classical composer Claude Debussy’s “Reverie.” So here I was, a pop singer, doing an album that had both jazz and classical inspirations.