The Good Life: The Autobiography Of Tony Bennett

by Tony Bennett

  I made my next album, Hometown, My Town, with the great orchestrator Ralph Burns. This and other albums I made with Ralph are a great example of the musical scene that was flourishing in New York in the late fifties and early sixties. This was the time when all the very best musicians were working in the city. Many of them—like Al Cohn, Urbie Green, and Zoot Sims—had started with Woody Herman and other big bands, and when they came off the road, they settled in New York. I’d see them in the recording studios, in the pit bands on Broadway, and jamming in the jazz clubs.

  It’s significant, then, that our first album together had New York City as It’s theme. It consisted of only six songs, some of which directly refer to the Big Apple, but most simply reflect a New York mood. I wanted a rich, lush, orchestral sound, but I didn’t want anything that sounded like “easy listening” music. I knew Ralph Burns was the perfect guy for the job.

  He had an apartment on Fifty-fifth Street and Seventh Avenue, and I’d go up there every day and wed work out the songs on the piano. And that’s the way I still work with Ralph Sharon today: we sit at the piano, figure out the tempos, the keys, and how the orchestration should go, and then we present it to the orchestrator and he does the rest. I told Ralph Burns that this might be the only “pop vocal” album he’d ever do where the overall quality of each track was the most important thing. I didn’t want to worry about making a commercial album filled with the standard three-minute pop songs. This was to be an album with no limitations.

  I included some of the songs from Hometown in my live appearances. I did “Skyscraper Blues” and “The Party’s Over” when I played the Copa in March 1959. It was customary to introduce fellow performers who were out in the audience, and on opening night Joey Bishop, whom I’d recently worked with at the Sands in Vegas, and many other performers were in the house. I introduced them all, and they stood up and took a bow. I started a song, and I looked over and saw Jack Carter sitting ringside and realized I hadn’t introduced him. So I decided to do it during the instrumental break in the middle of “Skyscraper Blues.” I gave the usual spiel: “Ladies and gentlemen, there’s a great comedian in the house tonight. How about a big round of applause for Jack Carter!” When I went back to the song, the next line was “When you’re walking in the streets of New York and you haven’t got a friend in town...” I sang that right after introducing Jack, and the whole place collapsed in laughter! Sorry Jack!

  Patricia and I finally moved into our first house. I was looking forward to having a home to return to for some sense of stability, and I thought it would do Patricia and me some good. It was a beautiful sanctuary. We designed the house after the style of Frank Lloyd Wright, building it mostly of redwood and glass. We were literally surrounded by nature. I had an art studio and a recording studio built in the basement, so I had a place to jam with my colleagues.

  In the early part of 1960 I recorded two more albums with Frank DeVol; To My Wonderful One and Alone Together. Later on that year I did my first, and for many years my only, songbook album, A String of Harold Arlen. The son of a cantor, Harold grew up in Buffalo. He became the musical director of the Cotton Club and originally wrote many jazz compositions. But his pop songs were dramatic and right up my alley. Arlen was known for the jazzy quality of his melodies, but Mitch thought it would be novel to give his songs a lush, symphonic treatment. He brought in Glenn Osser, a veteran record and show orchestrator, and his charts were just right. I felt free singing to Glenn’s arrangements. We used a big orchestra of mainly classical players, and they really enjoyed the recording session. That’s the only album I ever made where the musicians actually applauded after each take. Glenn and I did some singles together, and he came up with a lovely, quasi-oriental treatment of Richard Rogers’s “Love Look Away,” the lament from Flower Drum Song.

  I loved “When the Sun Comes Out,” and I thought that was a perfect opener for the Harold Arlen album. Then again, you can’t go wrong with any of Harold’s songs. His songs are perfect for an interpretive performer like me; I just love the tools he gives me to work with. You can give virtually any treatment to an Arlen tune. They can be sung dramatically or “straight out,” exactly as written.

  Harold’s attitude was the opposite of Richard Rodgers’s, who always insisted that his songs be performed exactly as he wrote them. Harold loved improvisation. He said, “Hey, change it anyway you want, as long as it works.” Anything you did was okay with him as long it pleased the audience. That was the most important thing to him. I’ve sung the music of so many wonderful composers that I’d rather be diplomatic and not name any one of them as the best, but I’d be lying if I said the songs of Harold Arlen didn’t occupy a very special place in my heart. He was a very debonair man, with a thin “French style” mustache, and he always kept a fresh flower in his lapel; he was the consummate artist. He wrote his own music, sat down and played a mean piano, and performed his own songs as well as anyone.

  In 1963 Harold wrote a song with André Previn’s wife, the lyricist Dory Langdon, called “So Long Big Time,” and I recorded it with Ralph and Marty Manning. Harold hadn’t attended any of the tapings for A String of Harold Arlen three years earlier, but he came to this session, probably because this was a new song. We were working with the song when Harold interrupted and started showing me more things I could do with the lyric, how I wasn’t getting enough out of it, how I could emphasize certain words. I liked what Harold told me so much that when the album, The Many Moods of Tony, came out, I gave Harold credit on “So Long Big Time” for conducting his own composition.

  I always wanted to be unpredictable, and so for my next project, I decided to go in the opposite direction from the big orchestral albums I’d been doing lately and cut an intimate piano-vocal album with Ralph Sharon. We booked time in the studio and pored through music books, trying one tune after another. The arrangements were spontaneous, and we finished each song in one or two takes. In one afternoon we laid down sixteen tunes—which must be some kind of record—twelve of which made it onto the album, which became 1961’s Tony Sings for Two, Mitch Miller showed up at the start of these sessions, furious that I was really going through with it. When he saw that there was no dissuading me, he turned to Frank Laico and said, “I’m leaving. I can’t support this.” Tony Sings for Two turned out to be one of my finest records ever.

  Ralph Burns and I got together again to do some singles, including “Smile,” and for our next album we changed gears again. Instead of the lush, ballad-style arrangements we had used on Hometown, My Town, we switched to a cookin’ jazz sound. The album is called My Heart Sings, and I simply love Ralph’s writing on this one. It’s really beautiful music.

  By the end of the fifties the music of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and disc jockey Alan Freed dominated the radio airwaves. Rock and roll music was being forced on the American public. I was fortunate that my own string of hits in the fifties more than established me as a household name and enabled me to make the kind of quality records that I needed to make in order to assure that I’d be considered a lasting artist. Little did I know that Ralph Sharon had my biggest hit of all time sitting at home tucked away in his dresser drawer.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  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, loo
king 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.