The Good Life (26 page)

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’?”

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 for 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.