The Good Life (7 page)

Another great thing about Industrial Arts was that it gave me the opportunity to come into Manhattan every day. It was a very liberal school, and sometimes the teacher would give me four days’ worth of work and tell me, “We don’t have to see you for the rest of the week, but you must come back with four days’ worth of paintings.” So, as long as I did my work, I had the freedom to catch all the big band shows I could.

It was at one of these shows that I discovered Frank Sinatra, my favorite singer. I first heard him at the Paramount Theater, down in Times Square, where all the biggest shows were put on; every major star who came to New York played there. I was one of the original Sinatra groupies. Frank had just left Harry James’s band to sing with Tommy Dorsey. He was big in Dorsey’s band, and then, of course, he just broke out. I used to stay for seven shows a day just to watch him and the band over and over again. Just imagine; in those days you had Tommy Dorsey’s band with Jo Stafford, the Pied Pipers, Buddy Rich, Ziggy Elman, plus a dance team and a great juggler or a comic. All that plus Frank Sinatra and a movie for seventy-five cents! (To force a bit of a turnover, the management would sometimes make us kids check our lunchbags, knowing we couldn’t hold out hungry!)

The whole Sinatra saga really took off from there. Even in the Dorsey days, there was the most incredible furor over
Frank. The band’s press agent, for instance, would spread the word around that Sinatra was going to be in the Gaiety Record Shop on Broadway with Buddy Rich at such and such a time, and he would also arrange for news photographers to be there. The place could hold only about seventy-five people, but thousands of kids would try to cram themselves into that little store! Broadway looked like it does on New Year’s Eve. No one had ever seen anything like that before, and it was certain to get Frank and the band a two-page spread in the
Daily News
.

I feel Sinatra exemplifies the best music that ever came out of the United States. Not only was he a great interpreter, but he had a magic voice. I’ve mentioned that Bing Crosby had really invented intimate singing, but Sinatra took it a step further, in a way that no one could have imagined. He communicated precisely what he was feeling at any moment. He knocked down the wall between performer and audience, inviting listeners inside his mind. Before Sinatra, no one had ever told such vivid and beautiful stories through song.

I encountered another amazing musician during my Industrial Arts years. A girl I went to school with was really sweet on me and her dad had some kind of connection to the legendary Copacabana nightclub in Manhattan, One day she got me in to hear Jimmy Durante. Now, that was an unbelievable act—Clayton, Jackson, and Durante. They never stopped moving, jumping, and running around. It was part of Durante’s shtick to yell out “Stop the music! Stop the music!” every once in a while, but the tempo never slowed and the music never stopped. After the show, we went backstage and saw the famous “schnozzola” himself, standing in the doorway in such a way that we could only see his nose. It cracked us up. Then he walked in and entertained us with his charm and wit.

Many years later I got to know Jimmy and even shared a bill with him. I’ll never forget the things he told me. He said that back when he was first starting out, all the Broadway theaters were really on the Great White Way, Broadway itself, and the stars—Will Rogers, Fanny Brice, Al Jolson—and the shows themselves—
The Ziegfeld Follies
and
Earl Carroll’s Vanities
, those big, gaudy musicals of the golden era—-were always upbeat. But later, the “legit” theaters moved to the side streets, and, Jimmy said, “That’s when everything went psychological!” referring to dark, brooding dramas à la Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, Jimmy also used to brag about how all the great songwriting teams had composed music for him: “Rodgers and Hart, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter and Cole Porter.” He then explained that he dropped Cole Porter’s name twice because “he wrote both the words and the music.”

I loved Jimmy. He was another reason why I wanted to go into show business—I wanted to entertain people the way he did. Nothing could be better than that. My three favorite performers to this day are Frank Sinatra, Jimmy Durante, and Louis Armstrong. They always gave a hundred percent of themselves.

Unfortunately, I didn’t stay at Industrial Arts long enough to graduate. We moved again in the early forties to a larger and more affordable apartment that was on the first floor of the house that my grandparents originally bought when they first arrived in Astoria. What goes around, comes around, as they say. It was a five-room apartment. My sister shared a room with my mom, and my brother and I had our own bedroom. In addition we had a kitchen, dining room, and a living room. We lived in that house for the rest of the time we were in
Astoria. My grandfather lived upstairs with my aunts, but he died not long after we moved in at the age of seventy-two. My mom was working harder than ever to make ends meet, and I felt I just had to find a job to help out. I was forced to drop out of school, one of the biggest regrets of my life.

So at sixteen I hit the pavement looking for employment. Not surprisingly, because of my intensive art studies, I didn’t have the practical skills I needed to make a living. I once worked as an elevator operator, but I couldn’t figure out how to get the elevator to stop at the right place. People ended up having to crawl out between floors. Of course, I got fired the first day. I lasted a few days longer working for a laundry that did uniforms for the navy, but eventually I couldn’t take it. I did manage to hold down a job as a copy boy for the Associated Press. All day long I ran around with papers. But my bosses complained that I wasn’t moving fast enough. Since I studied drawing, what I really wanted was to get a look at the art department and see the cartoonists at work. But my bosses refused to let me; it was as if they were imitating the way movies depicted hard-boiled journalists and showing a kid any sort of kindness like that would have blown their image.

I started doing what they used to call “amateur shows” in clubs all over Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. Anyone could get up and perform, and at the end of the night, the audience chose the act they liked best. The winner got paid a percentage of the box office and it was a good way to earn money as a teenager. I’d enter as many of these shows as I could, and I was lucky enough to win many of them. They were fun. There was one contestant who wore a sailor’s uniform, although he wasn’t a sailor, and he had a phony cast on his leg. He’d come out on stage and make everyone think he was an injured serviceman. To top it all off, he’d sing “My Mother’s Eyes.” When he was through, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Whenever he
showed up, I knew I didn’t have a chance. I’d see him and think, “God, there goes my week’s salary.” He’d win every time. It really broke me up.

I decided that I would do everything I could to earn a living performing music. I became a singing waiter for a while at Ricardo’s Restaurant in Astoria. We’d get a request from a customer and then I’d run back into the kitchen to work out the arrangements. There was a wonderful staff of Irish waiters there who taught me all the great standards right on the spot. I really cut my teeth as a performer at that job.

One night I ran into this wonderful old-time booking agent, a Danny Rose kind of a character. He was a chubby little guy. He invited me down to his office every once in a while, and when I arrived, the first thing I saw was the back of his fedora. He’d have one phone on each ear, and he’d be saying to one guy, “Kid, will you take fifteen dollars?” and then he’d say to the club owner on the other phone, “The kid says he’ll do it for fifteen dollars.” He got me a spot in a Paramus, New Jersey, club called the Piccadilly. This was the first time I used the stage name “Joe Bari.”

I had taken a stage name because in those days performers believed that it was important to have a snappy, “eight-by-ten glossy” kind of a name that was easy to remember. I had been told that Anthony Dominick Benedetto, or even just Anthony Benedetto, was too long and sounded too ethnic. I had come up with the last name “Bari” because it was short and it was the name of both a province and city in Italy, as well as an anagram of the last part of my grandparents’ birthplace, Calabria. And to my ears “Joe” sounded pretty American.

Earle Warren, the bandleader at the Piccadilly, had been with Count Basie for many years, playing alto saxophone and singing in a sweet tenor voice. Since this was one of my first jobs, I was extremely nervous, but Earle calmed me down. He
said, “You’re going to be all right, kid.” And I was. The whole experience was a big adventure for me, and with Earle’s help, I got an early taste of the fabulous things that were in store for me in the future.

In 1939 Germany invaded Poland, In the years that followed, while I was busy going to school and setting my artistic career in motion, the newspapers and radio were filled with talk of Nazis, separationists, Lend-Lease, preparedness, and Hitler: words that were ever-present but had not fully permeated our consciousness, The war in Europe was escalating, but its consequences were not fully understood. We were just getting used to the idea of “The New Deal,” and President Roosevelt was leading our country out of the depths of the Depression. Then one day, while my family was returning home from one of our traditional Sunday family get-togethers, we heard the newsboys in the street shouting, “Extra! Extra!” The big news was that some place we’d never heard of—Pearl Harbor—had been attacked by the Japanese. The next day we all sat around the radio along with millions of other Americans and listened intently while our president passionately declared December 7, 1941 “... a date which will live in infamy.”

One minute it was a peaceful Sunday afternoon, and the next we were at war.

I was fifteen years old in 1941, and war was about the last thing on my mind. Like most kids, I was interested in my own world: music, drawing, baseball, roller-skating, and hockey. The war seemed very far away. But once Pearl Harbor was attacked, it wasn’t long before I saw my friends and relatives being drafted and sent away.

My brother John, who was three years older than me, was drafted into the air force in 1942 and stationed in Blackpool, England. Of course, we were all worried about him and anxiously awaited his letters and any news we could get about what was happening over there. Fortunately, he was never wounded. But soon it was 1944 and the war was still going strong. Things in Europe had reached a crisis point. We all realized that Hitler had to be stopped and that every available man was needed. I turned eighteen that August, and on November second, I received my draft notice. Soon both my mother’s boys would see combat.

I went down to the induction center and stood in line with a bunch of other eighteen-year-olds, wondering what was going to happen to me. When my name was called, I went up to the desk, and the induction officer asked me if I preferred the army or the navy. I said, “Navy,” and the guy stamped “Army.” I thought, “Oh, boy, so that’s the way it’s going to be.” Little did I know what I was in for.