The Good Life (23 page)

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.

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, looking 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.

“Glory Road” went over better than I could have hoped for, but the biggest hit of the concert was, not surprisingly, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” Ralph is fairly unflappable, so when he told me he thought the show was a real winner, I knew I had hit the mark. Mary later told me that when the show was over, the audience was cheering for me to sing an encore of “San Francisco,” but I was already in my dressing room and didn’t hear what they were saying. If I’d known, I certainly would have obliged.

My whole family was in the audience that night. I was particularly proud that my mother was there; that made me feel like a million bucks. It was the biggest night of my life. My mom couldn’t believe how far I’d come. She was sitting between Mary and Tom, and as the crowds were cheering for an encore, she kept turning to Mary and asking, “Why don’t they let Anthony go home and rest? He must be exhausted after two and a half hours of singing.” She was so precious, she meant everything to me.