The Good Life (19 page)

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 division, 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.

We did
Cloud
7 very inexpensively, using just six musicians on each of the two recording sessions, the first in August, the second in December, 1954.
Cloud
7 included the song “While the Music Plays On,” which Miles Davis later told me was one of his favorites. It was released in February 1955.
Cloud
7 wasn’t a smash hit like’ “Because of You,” but then I wasn’t expecting it to be. This was a record I wanted to make to show the world that I was capable of doing something beyond hit singles. It was a long-term investment in my career, not a fast-buck hit. Though Mitch wasn’t thrilled with the
album, be wasn’t opposed to doing something a little high-minded once in a while.

As far as I was concerned,
Cloud
7 was a triumph. It proved that I was ready for some major changes in my career.

I parted company with Ray Muscarella in 1955. My career really got started during the early years with Ray, and though I appreciated how much he had helped me, I questioned some of the engagements that were being presented to me—they weren’t exactly the kind of career moves that I wanted to be making. I didn’t feel that I had my finger on the pulse of my career, and I wanted to have more control over my own destiny. I had my lawyer negotiate an agreement with Ray that gave him ten percent of everything I earned for the next five years. Even then, Ray was reluctant to let me go, but the offer was a very generous one, and my lawyer convinced him to take the deal. I made sure I never missed a payment, and when the five years were finally over, I felt a new freedom. My sister Mary stepped in and managed my career.

As a result of the success of “Stranger in Paradise” in the U.K., where it went all the way to number one, I was invited for the first time to appear there.

I must say that the circumstances under which I visited Europe were much more agreeable than they had been in my previous visit during the war. But my first “tour” consisted of only two cities, Glasgow, where I played for a week at a theater called the Empire, and Liverpool, where I played a week at another club called the Empire. This wasn’t my English dream tour, not yet. English commentators at the time thought it was unusual that I didn’t perform in London, but I did lay down some good groundwork. I filmed what I believe to be the first music video—I was shot walking in Hyde Park along the Serpentine while my recording of “Stranger in Paradise” was played. The clip was distributed to all the local TV stations in the U.K. and America, where it was aired on shows like Dick Clark’s
American Bandstand
.

I also made my first of many appearances on Perry Como’s show around this time. Como’s NBC variety show was a Saturday night institution. He was by far the most successful singer on television, and his shows were beauties. The first time I met him I went to one of his rehearsals. Don’t forget I was a kid who grew up on the streets. He took one look at me and said, “Come with me.” I thought he was taking me to lunch. He walked me down to Tenth Avenue and Fifty-eighth Street and took me into St. Paul’s Church. Perry led me right to the confessional and said, “All right, now step in!” That was part of Perry’s great humor—always doing the unexpected, but always the right thing.

I went over well on the Como show, so much so that in 1956 NBC decided to let me take over his time slot as host of the summer replacement show. It was a great opportunity for me, and an intimidating challenge. When Perry did the show, it was a big production with great sets, a huge budget, all kinds of big name guest stars, and a full vocal chorus. I soon realized I wasn’t going to get any of those big budget advantages, including the high-powered guest stars who could pull in the ratings. To make
things even tougher, they stuck me on an empty stage with a ten-piece band. I was still a little jumpy about going out on stage in general, but the idea of having to appear in front of an audience, with very little assistance, really made me nervous.

It occurred to me that maybe Frank Sinatra could give me some advice. He was always my number one hero, and I figured if anybody knew what to do in the spot I was in, it was him. He was in New York that summer, sharing the Paramount bill with the Tommy Dorsey orchestra and one of his own movies,
Johnny Concho
. I told my friends I was going to go backstage at the Paramount and talk to Sinatra. Some of them told me it wasn’t a good idea—that sometimes he was unpredictable. But I didn’t care what they said. I believed in my heart that he would have some good advice for me.

I went over to the theater and asked for permission to see him. He said yes, and they led me back to his dressing room. The door opened, and there was Mr. Sinatra. He looked at me and without batting an eye said, “Oh, hello, Tony, come on in.” So much for the cynics. I told him about my predicament, about how nervous I was. He said not to worry about that, people don’t mind when you’re nervous. On the contrary, he said, it’s when you’re not nervous that you’re in trouble. If you don’t care about what you’re doing, why should the audience? When people see how much this means to you, they’ll adore you. They’ll see that you really want to please them, he told me, and they’ll support you. Frank Sinatra taught me a great lesson, one that I carry with me to this day. I learned that anxiety is a very essential part of performing. “Will the lights work? Will I remember the words?” I focus on these elements when I do a show, and as a result I get butterflies, but that’s part of being a good performer. In the end, I got through that TV series fine. Three summers later, in fact, I was again invited to star on
Perry Como Presents
, another summer Saturday hit.

My second son was born on October 15, 1955. Patricia went to the hospital in the middle of the night, but by the time the baby was born, it was morning and the sun was shining. We took that as a good omen and named him Daegal, a Scandinavian name Patricia liked that means “day.”

By this time we were on the road all the time, and Danny was getting to the age where he suffered from the lack of a stable home environment. He’d begun walking and talking before he was a year old, and believe me, he hit the ground running. Nobody could keep up with him. His feats became legendary within the entertainment community. In fact, the comic Joey Bishop did a bit about how Danny totally exhausted Joey’s pet dog! When the new baby came, we felt that Patricia needed to stay at home with the kids, especially since I was scheduled to start an extensive tour that would last until the end of January. Not being together was a big adjustment for all of us. Having two children running around a small apartment was more difficult than we had expected, and after the tour, Patricia and I decided it was time to get a house out in the suburbs where the kids could spread out.