Life Is a Gift: The Zen of Bennett

by Tony Bennett

  Several times in my life I’ve benefited purely by chance. In the mid-sixties, I was working the Hollywood Bowl with Count Basie, with Buddy Rich on drums. There must have been eighteen thousand people there. I was in the middle of singing “Lost in the Stars,” a Kurt Weill song, when all of a sudden the whole audience let out a gasp and a “Wow!” I thought maybe I’d hit a particularly strong note or something. But when I came offstage and asked why they did that, a crew member said, “Didn’t you see what happened? When you were singing the song, a shooting star fell over the Bowl. It was incredible.”

  The next morning I got a call from Ray Charles, who was in New York. I said, “Good morning, Ray,” and he said, “How’d you do that?” Later on we became good friends, and he always reminded me of the shooting star that fate handed me.

  Sometimes life hands you gifts like that shooting star, and I am also a firm believer that karma has something to do with moments like that: what goes around in life tends to come back around. This has certainly been true for me a number of times. When I first started making it in the business, I was hanging out with a guy I was friendly with, Dave Victorson, who told me, “I’m flat broke. I want to go to L.A. and try my luck there, but I don’t have a cent to my name.” I asked him how much it would take, and he said five hundred dollars. I gave it to him, to help him out—and then I forgot all about it.

  Some seven years later, Dave called me out of the blue. “You’re coming to work for me,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  Dave told me he’d just been named the entertainment director for a new Vegas hotel. He always remembered my loaning him the money, and he ended up paying me back a thousand-fold by booking me regularly at what turned out to be Caesars Palace. I wound up having a lifetime contract there.

  I’ve seen this kind of thing over and over: someone does someone else a favor, not expecting anything back, and at a point in time—whether it’s a month later, or several years in the making—the favor is repaid. It’s yet another way in which life rewards us. It definitely pays to be kind.

  Throughout my career, audiences have been amazing to me. The fact that I can still perform to full houses internationally is a great privilege, and my relationship with the people of Great Britain has been particularly enriching. I’ve always had a fantastic time in that country, and I’ve been performing there for over fifty years. One especially nice trait about the people of England is that once they know you, you become part of their family. It’s very unusual; you never go out of style, because they’re so loyal. Then that generation grows up, and their children wind up coming to see you, too. Every time I go there, it’s a real treat to put on a show for them.

  I’ve done seven command performances in London, and each one was incredibly special. There is a protocol; the royalty sits on the left in the balcony at the Palladium, and you’re not allowed to look at that box. Instead, you sing to the proscenium audience. At the end of the concert, traditionally you turn to the box and bow to the queen.

  I was present in the fifties when Jack Benny was the closing artist at one of these performances. He came out at eleven at night, looked out at the audience, and then up toward the queen and said directly to her, “They told me to be here at eight.” I’ll tell you, I never heard a bigger laugh from an audience in my life. He changed the whole history of Britain with that one line; everyone left the place chuckling.

  Playing at the one hundredth anniversary of Royal Albert Hall in 1971 was something else. We had the London Philharmonic Orchestra as well as fifteen fantastic British jazz artists onstage, and I performed a lot of classic pieces and many of my big hits to that date. The concert sold out, and the audience seemed to love every minute of it. NBC showed a tape of the concert in the United States and it got very strong ratings. It was another high point in a career that has handed me many gifts.

  So many people look at life with regret instead of joy. They’re tired, angry, or bigoted—but that’s such a waste of time. I wish I could take all of those individuals and help them feel good or hopeful about themselves; I try to achieve this through my show. It’s my wish that everyone in the audience can pick up something from a song, or a moment in the show, that becomes unforgettable to them. If I can make them feel that, then I’m repaying some of the rewards that I’ve received.

  I feel that what I do for a living is a very noble job; I’m on a journey to communicate how beautiful our daily experience can be. Life is a gift, and we should all cherish it. It’s as simple as that.

  The Zen of Bennett

  Be ready to recognize the gifts of life when they arrive at your doorstep.

  Remember that what goes around comes around. If you are good to someone, at some point in time that act of kindness will come back to you.

  Sometimes gifts arrive in the form of a happy accident. Be prepared to accept these rewards.

  Being angry is a waste of time. Instead, count your blessings every day.

  Make a real effort to appreciate the gifts that life has given you.

  London

  18

  Citizen of the World

  When I was young, one of my uncles arrived in New York from his native Italy. He was so taken by the welcome he received that he sewed together an oversized flag that combined the American flag with various other flags from around the world, and he hung it outside his house. This small token of appreciation predated the United Nations, but he didn’t realize that it was against the law to deface the American flag. The police came to his house and threatened to arrest him if he didn’t take it down. My uncle didn’t speak English, so at first he was very confused. But the point was made to him loud and clear, so he removed it.

  Even so, America really was the melting pot that it promised to be for new arrivals from other countries. In fact, the United States still represents a world without borders. This country’s diversity has inspired me to appreciate the fact that people everywhere have each other in common; we truly are all neighbors.

  Ella Fitzgerald used to say something to me over and over that drove home this very point. With this incredible warmth in her eyes, Ella would say, “Tony, we’re all here . . .” What she meant by this statement was that on this little planet called Earth, we’re not Italians, we’re not Jewish, Christian, or Catholic; instead, we’re all here together. That we are all really citizens of the world. And to me, that completely sums it up. We only live a short time; only a brief ninety or a hundred years at most, and that really goes by quickly. In order to appreciate the gifts we’ve been given, we need to learn the beauty of just being alive, and of being good to one another. That’s a big lesson that many of us haven’t yet embraced. We need to start putting down the greed and the racism. People who think, I’ve got mine; the hell with everybody else, aren’t contributing anything to society. You have to think in a more all-encompassing way and say, “Is this good for all of us on the planet?” It’s amazing to me that so many people still don’t realize this. If the human race is going to survive, we need to figure out how to get along. We Americans live in such a great country; it’s the first place where people of every nationality and every religion were allowed to live together. That’s one reason why America is great; we have so many philosophies to draw from here, and therefore we have a lot more to work with than other countries do. We need to accentuate this more, both in our schools and in society.

  On Thanksgiving in 1945, I was in Mannheim, Germany, as part of the occupying American Army. The whole place had been demolished during the war by our bombers. I was walking around and by an amazing coincidence, I ran into my old buddy Frank Smith, a fellow serviceman who had played drums in our group in high school. I couldn’t believe I’d run into Frank over there. I was so happy to see a familiar face from back home, after fighting on the front line and being surrounded by strangers for so long. Frank took me with him to a service at a Baptist church, and then because I was allowed to invite one guest for the army’s Thanksgiv
ing dinner in the mess hall, I asked him to join me.

  When we got to the hall, a red-faced officer came up to me in a fury and screamed, “Get your gear, you’re out of here! I don’t like the people you associate with.” “Are you serious?” I asked. “He’s my friend from school.” But the officer just said, “I don’t care where he’s from. Get out.” He took a razor from his pocket and cut my stripes from my shirt, threw them on the ground, and told me I was no longer a corporal; I was being demoted to a private. For a minute I didn’t comprehend why he was doing this, but then I realized it was because Frank was African American, and therefore he wasn’t allowed in the segregated mess hall.

  This was just unbelievable to me, even though I knew that prejudice was common in the Army back then. At that time, African Americans had to have their own barracks, bars, and everything. The Army actually felt that it was better to fraternize with the Germans than it was to be friends with a black man from our own country! I hadn’t been brought up that way, so it was a shock when the officer treated us so badly. Not only did we not get our Thanksgiving dinner, I was then put on graves registration duty. This meant that I had to dig up the bodies of soldiers who hadn’t been properly buried on the battlefields, and rebury them in individual graves. It was the most sad and depressing job I’ve ever had to do.

  That day is seared upon my memory; I’ve thought about it often. We were just two homesick kids glad to see a familiar face, but for the Army, the only thing that mattered was the color of our skin.

  Luckily, after a few weeks on grave duty, through the efforts of a friend, Major Letkoff, I was able to get reassigned to the radio network in Wiesbaden. But that incident with Frank Smith shaped my opinions forever. I had grown up listening to brilliant African American artists such as Art Tatum, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Dinah Washington; when I got to know them later on, they all were kind and generous to a fault. So where was the rationale for such bigotry?

  During the fifties, when I was starting out, I ran into many instances of racism when I worked with African American musicians. Even a genius like Nat King Cole was discriminated against. Once I went to see Nat perform in Miami, and I invited him to join my table afterward. He told me that he wasn’t allowed in the dining room, so I’d have to visit him backstage if I wanted to see him. That kind of Jim Crow law revolted me; I just didn’t understand it. But these restrictions were the order of the day.

  Natalie Cole and I spoke recently about the fact that even though he was up against these bigoted attitudes, her father’s multimillion-dollar record sales enabled the record company to construct the whole building for Capitol Records. It’s literally known as “the House That Nat Built.” People were listening to his music all over America and loving it, but in certain places the man who made the music and who made a lot of people a lot of money wasn’t allowed to eat in the same dining room as those he performed for—an absolute travesty.

  When the Americana Hotel opened in Miami in the mid-fifties, Duke Ellington and I were performing there, but Duke wasn’t allowed to come to the press party afterward. He and his band couldn’t stay at the hotel, either; they had to lodge in a run-down joint in another part of town.

  Nat and Duke were brilliant human beings who gave the world some of the most beautiful music ever made, yet they were treated like second-class citizens. The whole thing made me furious. When Harry Belafonte called me in 1965 and asked me to join Martin Luther King’s civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, he described to me what had been happening in the South. “It’s genocide,” he told me. “They’re doing horrible things to black people; there’s great injustice.” It was so awful that it took me only a couple of minutes to say, “I’m coming with you.”

  Harry told me that earlier that month, Dr. King and the organizers had tried to march from Selma to Montgomery in support of voting rights, and that they were planning a third march. Dr. King wanted some celebrities along to attract the public’s attention and to entertain the marchers. Among others who came out were Leonard Bernstein, Sammy Davis Jr., and Shelley Winters.

  The march began the week of March 21, and the police, all white, were extremely hostile; it reminded me of the Army’s attitude when I tried to bring my friend Frank to Thanksgiving dinner. Violence was a daily reality in the civil rights era, and as we headed out from Selma, jazz singer Billy Eckstine and I were very frightened. Fortunately, Harry reassured everyone on the route and kept the marchers calm.

  On the evening of the twenty-fourth, the march organizers put together a rally called “Stars for Freedom,” in which all the performers put on a show. I sang a few songs, as did Harry Belafonte; Sammy Davis Jr.; Peter, Paul, and Mary; Frankie Laine; and Nina Simone. No stage was around, so ironically a local mortician brought a bunch of wooden coffins with which they built a platform. It was surreal to perform on a stack of coffins, but we did what we had to.

  On Thursday, March 25, twenty-five thousand people marched to the steps of the state capitol, where King delivered the speech “How Long, Not Long.” When the march was over, we were all held up in a “safe house,” and various volunteers drove people to the airport or back to their homes. When it came time for Billy Eckstine and me to head out, we gave up our seats to others. We later found out that the driver was assassinated by the Ku Klux Klan on her way back. She was Viola Liuzzo, a white mother of five from Detroit who had come to Alabama to give her support. It was a horrendous tragedy that saddened us no end.

  But the physical danger didn’t keep droves of people from coming out to support the effort, and the entire country was forced to take note. I have always felt proud to have been part of such a historic event, one that helped to change society’s views of African Americans and their struggle for equality, in the South and elsewhere.

  Aretha Franklin recently gave me a letter that acknowledged my role in the movement:

  Hi Tony,

  A note to say thank you for the most absolutely gorgeous flowers on both occasions, and to applaud your humanity in the civil rights movement with Dr. King in the 1960s. Looking forward to keeping the music playing together.

  All the best,

  Aretha

  Her comments made me feel very proud.

  I was determined to perform with only the top musicians wherever I went, regardless of race, creed, or color. That’s how I was brought up—to believe in the fundamental American principle that all people are created equal and should be treated as such. As hard as it is to fathom, I was the first white performer to sing with Count Bill Basie. I insisted on having him alongside me at the Copacabana in New York; prior to that, they didn’t allow black musicians to set foot inside. Later, when Basie and I played a show at the Philadelphia Academy of Music, we were on first and the audience went wild. Joe Williams was singing, and the Basie band was smoking—we “wiped out the theater and greased up the walls,” as Basie put it. On top of that, we received ten standing ovations.

  After the show, Basie and I were out in the parking lot commenting on how it had gone. “What an audience; wasn’t that great?” This white guy came up to Basie, threw him his keys, and said, “Hey, get me my car, will you?” He assumed that Bill was the parking attendant. “Get your own car,” Bill replied. “I’ve been parking them all night.” Even faced with that kind of bigotry, he still kept his dignity and sense of humor.

  When I did a series of concerts in the mid-seventies with Lena Horne, whom I adored, the only thing that clouded the good vibes was this kind of bigotry. Lena was such a class act, a great lady with an incredible work ethic. We sang Harold Arlen songs that had been arranged as duets for us, and later both Cary Grant and Fred Astaire separately told me that the concert with Lena was the best show they’d ever seen in their lives. We went all over the place doing that show, and I loved it. Arlen’s songs are great for a jazz singer like me; you can do them as they were written or with your own interpretation, and any treatment works fine. Harold always said he
loved improvisation; he’d tell me to change a song the way I wanted to. As long as the audience was happy, he was fine with what you did. And Lena and I had a magnificent time doing them as duets.

  During rehearsals, we saw our managers talking in the wings. “I know what they’re saying,” Lena said. “They’re going to tell us to walk offstage in different directions, so it won’t seem as if we’re leaving together.” And sure enough, that’s what they told us to do. We could perform together, but we couldn’t appear to be friends or to be hanging out.

  It was shocking to me how much prejudice there was, even in Hollywood; blacks and whites just weren’t allowed to get along, which was so ridiculous. Thank goodness some progress has been made since those days. I don’t think anyone back then could imagine that we would ever have an African American president and first lady in the White House. That fact alone makes me proud to be an American, and happy that we as a country are truly becoming citizens of the world.

  It’s funny; sometimes when people who are well-off ask me where I’m from and I say Astoria, they laugh at me because it’s so down compared to the big skyscrapers in Manhattan. That’s really another form of prejudice. But I secretly laugh back at them, because I know that the greatest part of New York City is Astoria, since it’s where the secretaries, the teachers, the writers, the promising actors and actresses and directors live. Before they become famous, many of them start out there—as do the firemen and the policemen; everyone who makes the whole city work. You name it, they run it—and they take great pride in doing things right. And I loved growing up there.