The Good Life (16 page)

It was amazing. Everywhere I went that summer I heard the song blaring from car radios, and record stores set up
speakers outside and played the song to attract customers. My family was thrilled, of course, and couldn’t stop telling me how proud they were that I had made it. It was wonderful.

“Because of You” sold a million copies, and
Billboard
put me on the cover with Mitch Miller and Harry Siskind, owner of one of the country’s leading jukebox companies. Suddenly my songs were being played everywhere, and my records were selling. I was really enjoying my success, but the funny thing was, I couldn’t help thinking that I had jinxed myself when I took that monthlong trip to Miami right after my initial success with “Boulevard.” It taught me never to take a vacation when the public is clamoring for you.

We recorded fifteen more songs that year. Those sessions turned out to be a gold mine. “Cold, Cold Heart” also hit
Billboard’s
number one spot, and three other songs from those sessions were all in the top twenty: “I Won’t Cry Anymore,” “Blue Velvet,” and “Solitaire.” That was kind of the moment of truth for me. All of a sudden I had to deliver, and I did. I felt the way I imagine a baseball player feels when he hits a home run when the bases are loaded.

When Mitch first played me Hank Williams’s “Cold, Cold Heart,” I have to admit I didn’t think I should sing it. In those days country artists still used the old-time fiddle, and I told Mitch that I couldn’t do it. He told me just to listen to the words and music, pointing out how beautiful the ending was: “Why can’t I free your doubtful mind/And melt your cold, cold heart?” He convinced me, and I recorded it. The song started out slowly at first, but it caught on, and it kept climbing the charts until it was number one.

I’d never heard of Hank Williams before then, though I soon learned that he was the single most important figure in
all of country music. Back then there wasn’t the “crossover” between different styles of music that there is today. If you listened to country music, you probably never heard pop music, and vice versa. Williams had reached the top of the country ladder in 1949 when he joined the cast of the Grand Ol’ Opry, and by then virtually all of his records were hits in the Bible Belt and the Midwest. All you have to do is listen to Hank’s records to understand why he was so popular. He was the greatest.

Thanks to “Cold, Cold Heart,” Hank’s songs finally caught on with the rest of the country. This was the first time a country song had crossed over to the top-forty mainstream chart-it even became an international hit. I never met Hank in person, but one day he called me on the phone and said, “Tony, what’s the idea of ruining my song?” He obviously had a sense of humor. We sold two million copies of “Cold, Cold Heart,” and I’m sure he did quite well by it. Later, Hank’s friends told me how much he loved my recording and said that whenever he passed a jukebox, he’d put a nickel in and play my version.

Hank died in 1953 when he was only twenty-nine years old. A few years later I had the privilege of being invited down to Nashville to pay homage to his memory on
The Grand Of Opry
TV show. In those days they were very strict about what was authentic country music and what wasn’t: just violin, bass, and guitar. Anything else, including drums, was off limits. When I passed out my arrangement to the Opry musicians, one of the guitar players put the arrangement aside and said, “You just sing and we’ll follow you.” So I sang it the same way I always did, and they accompanied me beautifully.

Mitch customarily reserved Monday afternoons to audition new material, and songwriters and demo singers lined up the entire length of the hall outside Mitch’s office. When songwriter Bernie Wayne got his chance to play “Blue Velvet” for Mitch, he got as far as the first line, “She wore blue velvet...” when Mitch interrupted and said, “How about Tony Bennett?” Bernie said, “Don’t you want to hear the rest of the song?” and Mitch answered, “Quit while you’re ahead!”

I was on a roll. With a second hit single I was getting a lot of bookings and having a great time on the road, but the one thing that made me unhappy was Columbia wouldn’t let me use my musicians when we recorded. Mitch and Percy Faith insisted on using their guys, who were great, but I was building up a rapport with my trio that’s hard to duplicate with studio musicians. My great drummer Billy Exiner had been with me from the beginning, but it wasn’t until 1955 that I was able to have him at my Columbia recording sessions.

Billy was something of a legend among musicians: he’d never even touched a drumstick until he was twenty-four years old. When he was a merchant seaman, he was at a dance when the drummer, who had to leave the stand, asked him to take over. He did, even though he’d never played before. He eventually became one of the great drummers of all time.

My pianist throughout 1951 was a fine musician from Boston named Jack Medoff. When Jack left in 1952 I was able to get Gene di Novi, an old friend of Billy’s. I knew Gene from Charlie’s Tavern and the other musicians’ hangouts in New York. He’d been one of the original bebop pianists on Fifty-second Street in the late forties. Back in those days there were only a few piano players who could handle the new music, and Gene was one of them. He had the honor, at a
very young age, of playing with jazz giants like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, and Lester Young, just to name a few.

All my records were hitting the charts at the same time. I was on a real lucky streak. While “Because of You” and “Cold, Cold Heart” were still hot, I was booked into the Paramount as a headliner. This was the first time I was the main attraction, and I was thrilled. I was on the same bill as Louis Prima and his Orchestra, featuring Keely Smith and the Vanderbilt Boys, and the movie feature was
The Flying Leathernecks
, starring John Wayne.

The shows were more fun to watch than they were to perform in, let me tell you: I did seven shows a day starting at ten-thirty in the morning—I’m still numb just thinking about them! There were at least three distinct audiences coming in to see the shows. In the morning we had kids, some who had probably ditched school the way I had in the early forties. In the afternoon came the senior citizens, and then in the evening the young lovers and married couples. Bob Whitman and Nat Shapiro, managers of the Paramount, insisted that we do material that would appeal to everybody not just one age group, so we had to find songs that everybody loved. Today It’s completely the opposite. I dislike the concept of demographics—targeting certain segments of the market—because it puts everyone in categories. There’s no reason that if you sing good songs the whole family won’t like them. On this subject, Duke Ellington always quoted Toscanini: “Music is either good or it isn’t. It’s not someone’s opinion.”

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.