The Good Life (30 page)

I started my recording contract with MGM/Verve the same way I ended with Columbia: by making the best album I
possibly could. Once again I worked with Bob Farnon. The album,
The Good Things in Life
, began and ended with a wonderful title track by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley from their musical
It’s
a
Funny Old World
, I thought this song really expressed the way I’d been feeling for the last few years, and ending the album with a reprise of the same song was a musical concept that appealed to me.

I went back to England in 1971. Derek had made a lot of show business contacts there over the years, my new record company was located in London, and we figured that concentrating on that market for a while would be time well spent. So Sandra, baby Joanna, and I packed up and left for what would turn out to be a yearlong stay. Ted Lewis, the famous vaudevillian and bandleader had told me—this was before I’d ever played England—“Do yourself a favor. Play England every year. The fans there are unlike anywhere else. They’re loyal. They never forget you.”

Mr. Lewis was right. I’d gone back in 1958 to do a television broadcast,
Sunday Night at the London Palladium
, and I’d made my proper London nightclub debut at Pigalle, in Piccadilly in 1961, to smash reviews. Each time I toured the British towns—London, Manchester, Liverpool, Harrogate—my fans came out to support me. My recording sessions for MGM/Verve were done in England, and between sessions I did a provincial tour with a big band featuring Kenny Clare on drums, Arthur Watts on bass, and my pianist John Bunch, who’d accompanied me from the States. All my engagements were “standing room only” In February of 1972, I gave concerts all over England and set a record when tickets for the shows sold out in thirty-five minutes. It was truly rewarding to be so enthusiastically welcomed by the British public. England has been good to me over the years; I’ve done six royal command performances, and I go back to perform as often as I
can. In fact, my biggest fan club, or “appreciation society” as they like to call it, is based there.

I taped a television series—thirteen half-hour shows done in a concert format—at Talk of the Town, a restaurant theater in London. The guests were fabulous—I had Annie Ross, Matt Monro, and one night I had both Sarah Vaughan and Billy Eckstine. You can’t get any better than that! Every show featured one segment that took place outside the studio: a camera followed me while I went sightseeing with Joanna, and these scenes were accompanied by some gorgeous instrumentals by Bob Farnon.

I worked hard while I was in England, but I also took some time out for my personal life, something I hadn’t done in years. Sandra, Joanna, and I took in the lovely English sights and got to spend some good times together. I’d been painting whenever I could, but it was during this year in London that I really started to get serious about it. I found a wonderful professor of art, John Barnicort, who gave me private instruction. I was staying in a flat next to the American embassy in Grosvenor Square, and he’d come over to my place and give me some lessons on technique. I became more serious about painting than I’d ever been, and I’ve never looked back I was determined to become a skilled painter, no matter how hard I had to work at it.

I took up tennis too. Whenever we got to a new town, the first thing John Bunch did was find out where a game of tennis was going on. I’d never really played before, but I’d enjoyed watching the game as a kid, and the fact that John felt so passionate about it really got me interested. John’s girlfriend Chips (who’d been raised by Winston Churchill) took me to a very nice tennis court the first time I played. I later found out that it was center court at Wimbledon! Soon I started taking professional lessons, and it wasn’t long before I was hooked.
Today I play at least twice a week. Whenever I’m in New York, I head out to the courts at the East River Tennis Club in Astoria, usually with my drummer Clayton Cameron—who plays tennis better than he plays the drums, which is saying a lot!

I also had some time to tape another television show, a one-hour TV special at the Palladium with the fabulous Lena Home. To me Lena is synonymous with class, and when someone proposed the idea that she and I should do a concert together, I jumped at it. The show was produced by Lord Lew Grade, and featured John Bunch on piano and the great English drummer Jack Parnell. After the show, we toured our act around England during 1972 and 1973, toured the States with the package in 1974 and 1975, and then brought it back to the Palladium in London in 1976.

Nineteen seventy-two was a rough year for Lena. Within a very short period of time shed lost the three most important men in her life: her father, her son Teddy, and her husband of twenty years, Lennie Hayton. Yet you’d never know it from looking at her. She was probably the most professional performer I’ve ever worked with. She never missed a show and she always gave one hundred percent. Lena taught me a lot about discipline. Even at rehearsals she was thrilling to watch. I’d never seen that kind of intensity in anyone before, that determination to do everything just right.

I thought it would be more effective to start with something subtle, so we opened the show singing two songs together, usually “The Look of Love” and “Something.” Then Lena and her conductor, Robert Freedman, did a forty-five minute set together, which included some of her perennial hits. After intermission, I performed. Lena and I then closed the show together with a medley of Harold Arlen songs that was seventeen minutes long. What a night!

John Bunch moved on in the fall of 1972 and Bernie Leighton replaced him for a few months and played on my second MGM/Verve album,
Listen Easy
.

Then Torrie Zito took over and stayed with me for six years, as my pianist, conductor, and orchestrator. Over the years we worked together on three albums,
Once in My Life, Yesterday I Heard the Rain
, and
I Gotta Be Me
.

While I was with MGM/Verve, Columbia tried to patch things up with me, particularly after Clive Davis left in May of 1973. They approached Derek and offered a very generous deal: an imprint label within Columbia—which meant that I would be running my own record label, deciding what albums I wanted to make, and bringing in other artists to record for me. But I wasn’t ready to go back to Columbia yet.

When I returned to the States in late 1972, my old buddy Dave Victorson was running the Las Vegas Hilton. He offered me an eighteen-month contract, giving me the run of the house, letting me put on whatever kind of shows I wanted—all because I once helped him when he was down on his luck.

So in May 1973 Dave and I had installed an 109-man philharmonic orchestra in the Hilton. I can still see all those men up there on stage: we’d flown them in from all over the country the most spectacular band that ever played Vegas. Bob Farnon did the orchestrations, and Louis Bellson joined us on stage. It was a fantastic show.

When I was ready to go back on the road, I put together the great trio that worked with me all through the 1970s: John Giuffrida on bass; Chuck Hughes and then, for most of the decade, Joe Cocuzzo on drums; and Torrie Zito on piano. Joe is a world-class drummer, particularly sensitive when playing with singers. We’d first worked together back in 1969 when I
was on tour with Louis Bellson. Louis was going out to play and conduct for his wife, Pearl Bailey, and I needed a drummer right away for an upcoming show at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington. Joe Soldo—who hired musicians for me when I was on the road—heard that Joe was available, and he came in and played the whole show for me without a rehearsal. After the show I told him, “You know what? I just had Louis Bellson play for me all last week, and tonight you’re there with the best of them.” That was my way of saying, “Welcome aboard.” Joe played for me pretty regularly between 1969 and the start of my “English period” in 1971, and then came back and joined my trio in 1973.

My main focus in late 1973 became the brilliant trumpet playing of Ruby Braff. I’d known Ruby since 1951 when I first played Chicago. Ruby heard George Barnes and Bucky Pizzarelli playing at the St. Regis Hotel in New York, and he sat in with the two guitarists. He loved the way that combination sounded, and suggested to George that they start a group. They gradually worked out a lineup of two guitars, a trumpet, and a bass. When I heard about this group, I had to check them out. I thought they were great, and Ruby said to me, “Why don’t you come and sing a couple of tunes with us, and relax for a while, you know?” I was singing almost exclusively with big bands then, and even with a good sound system I always had to belt it out to be heard above the music.

I liked the groove I got into with this intimate group so much that I did two special concerts with them at Alice Tully Hall in New York. Ruby and George played the first half instrumentally, and then I came out in the second half and sang with them—two entire evenings of Rodgers and Hart. Two weeks later I recorded twenty-four Rodgers and Hart songs with Ruby and George, with Frank Laico as engineer. It was later released as
Tony Bennett: The Rodgers and Hart Songbook
.

On April 7, 1974, Sandra gave birth to our second daughter. We named her Antonia in keeping with the long tradition of Antonios and Antoinettes in the Benedetto and Suraci families. Many years later I asked Bob Wells and Jack Segal, who had written “When Joanna Loved Me,” to write a song for Antonia, since I wanted to honor both of my daughters in song. They came up with a beauty, and I recorded “Antonia” in 1989.

I now had two beautiful daughters and we moved to Los Angeles and started living the glamorous Hollywood lifestyle—the good and the bad. We had the big beautiful house in Beverly Hills, the celebrity friends, and the endless round of parties.

On top of everything else, the seventies drug scene was getting out of control. At every big party I’d go to, people were high on something. Cocaine flowed as freely as champagne, and soon I began joining in the festivities. At first it seemed like the hip thing to do, but as time went on it got harder and harder to refuse it when it was offered. Compounded with my pot smoking, the whole thing started sneaking up on me.

Sandra thought that I might want to get back into making pictures, but I just didn’t have a passion for it. Cary Grant set me straight about that. He loved the idea that I traveled all over the world doing concerts, and one time he said to me, “Tony, what you do is beautiful, the way you go out and meet the people where they live. Making movies would be boring for you. You sit around for hours while somebody changes a lightbulb. You were right not to get mixed up in it.” He actually envied me for being able to work in front of live audiences all over the world. What a life, what an education. There’s nothing like performing.

I got to see a lot of Cary Grant during this period of my life. There were some actors that I had infinite admiration for, and Mr. Grant was one of them, so it was nice to be able to count him among my friends. One day I got a call from Cary and he’d seen my painting “South of France” when I showed it to Johnny Carson on
The Tonight Show
, He told me, “I want to buy that painting!” I was thrilled that he liked it, and I told him I’d be happy to give it to him as a gift, but he insisted on buying the painting, and he hung it in his home in the Hollywood Hills.

But the greatest thing about living in L.A. was the chance to get to know two of my biggest idols, Fred Astaire and Ella Fitzgerald. Fred was well over seventy by the time we got acquainted, but he was still very active. Every morning he’d take his daily constitutional, and bed walk right past my house. He was so graceful he actually looked like he was floating as he strolled by.

My friend the dancer John Brascia introduced me to Fred Astaire. Fred told me that he was no longer athletic and that he only acted and wrote songs these days. We were sitting in a little art studio I had, completely separate from the rest of the house, and listening to the local jazz station. I had to go back to the main house for a few minutes to answer the phone. When I returned, I caught Fred Astaire dancing to a song on the radio. It was tremendous. He stopped as soon as he noticed me and his face turned red. He asked me who that was singing the blues, and I told him Big Joe Turner. Fred said, “It’s always been that way. When I hear the right beat, I just
have
to dance.” Where was my video camera when I needed it?