The Good Life

by Tony Bennett

  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’?”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Although my career was at a high, my private life was falling apart. Christmas of 1965 was the lowest point in my life. Patricia and I were split up, I wasn’t welcome at my home in Englewood, and I spent the holiday in a lonely room at the Gotham Hotel. Being away from my boys was devastating to me.

  I was alone in my hotel room and feeling sorry for myself, when I heard music. I thought I’d left the TV on, but it was off Then I thought it was my portable tape recorder, but that was off too. I finally realized the music was coming from the hallway, and when I opened the door a choir was singing the Burton Lane—Alan Jay Lerner song “On a Clear Day (You Can See Forever).” Duke Ellington was giving a concert of sacred music at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, and he’d heard from Louis Bellson I was in a bad way, so he sent the choir over to cheer me up. It was his Christmas gift to me, the most beautiful I have ever received. It was a moment that made me believe in people, no matter how difficult things might become for me.

  My relationship with Sandra Grant continued to grow, and we became a couple. After I left Englewood and moved into the city in 1966, Sandra joined me. We lived on Riverside Drive for two years, then moved over to East Seventy-second Street.

  But things weren’t perfect. It was a difficult relationship from the start, filled with the classic pushing and pulling that comes when two strong-willed people get together. Initially things were exciting, because Sandra took a great interest in my career. This really appealed to me, since I always felt better when I had somebody on my side watching out for my best interests. For a long time it had been my sister, Mary, but she had become too busy raising her own family to take care of my busy career.

  Sandra wanted to take on more responsibility than I was comfortable giving her. It’s a rare couple who can remain emotionally close while arguing about the day-to-day running of a career—especially in show business. At least I’ve found that to be the case, and that’s the way it was fo
r Sandra and me. It was a really difficult time for me personally, and I don’t think it would have been easy for any woman I was involved with.

  After all those years of sparring with Columbia, I finally started to feel secure. I thought I was out of the woods—until I realized just how much rock and roll was dominating the scene. In 1966 an attorney named Clive Davis—originally head of business affairs for Columbia Records—took over as president of the label. It was the first time that someone without any musical background was put in charge of a record company. He took a trip to the Monterey Pop Music Festival in 1967, and when he returned he traded in his Brooks Brothers suits for Nehru jackets and love beads and signed Janis Joplin. He began to insist that all his artists record rock and roll tunes and was convinced that nothing else would sell. At one point he was even trying to convince Barbra Streisand to record an album of Bob Dylan tunes. The whole thing was ridiculous and resulted in chaos for most of Columbia’s top-selling artists.

  It was a tough time for all traditional pop singers, and it took the recording industry years to adjust. But I continued to have a string of hits, and to perform to packed houses wherever I went. It was all about perception, and about the inability of the record companies to come up with some creative ideas to market my music properly. But I knew that never compromising my music would ultimately be the key to my success. Count Basie calmed me down when I asked his advice about whether I should change my act. He quickly replied, “Why change an apple?” His comment reassured me that I was on the right course.