Tony Bennett
The Times Magazine, April 2004
On the cover of a newly-released boxed set of five CDs is a photograph of the man for whom Fifty Years: The Artistry of Tony Bennett is a retrospective career celebration. It shows him De Niro-like in a tuxedo, hip-swinging and finger-clicking his assured, even definitive way through some standard or other - For Once In My Life, say, or I Get A Kick Out Of You. Perhaps thirtysomething when it was taken, he appears virile, iconic but yes (his smile and the bleached colours combine to introduce a note of near-irony) just a little cheesy. If we didn't know who it was pictured, and just what he has gone on to achieve, we might think him to be a lounge lizard from long ago, some footnote to popular music history. As it is, he's the closest thing we've had to a Sinatra since Frank Sinatra died.
For the past seven years, Bennett has lived in a rented apartment on New York's Central Park South, just across the horn-honking street from where horses and traps stand in line, awaiting tourists. A painter before ever he was a singer, he chose the suite of rooms 15 floors up because it was high enough to offer perspective, but low enough for detail not to be lost (and that view is magnificent one, encapsulating the treetopped, oblonged whole of Central Park, bordered to right and left by the Upper East and West Sides, and with the skyline of Harlem linking the two several miles further on, close to the horizon). It's a serious address, but not dauntingly so. And similarly, once inside his door, the sense is of a fortunate, functioning, comfortable home, not some expensive exercise in interior design. "Come in. Come in. You're welcome," he says.
Bennett is 78 now, but there's only the slightest senior citizen shuffle of moccasin-soft shoes on polished wood to authenticate that improbable age. Tracking past a small, black Gladstone bag that waits on the floor of the hallway, he is all solicitation and easy charm, and has put on suit and tie for the occasion. And when we are settled by one of the picture windows, coffees in hand, and I enquire conversationally how far away and in which direction is his boyhood community of Astoria, Queens, he is instantly back on his feet, gesturing north-east and talking me through a 20 minute journey, traffic-permitting. "In London terms, it's like your Acton," he offers (he has been an Anglophile since his version of Stranger In Paradise topped the UK charts in 1955, and will drop into the conversation such words as 'mates' and 'telly'). "I love the old neighbourhood, and go back there all the time. To play tennis, mainly."
It's a sentimental thing, of course, for clay courts (his preference) can be found far closer, even amid the concrete and steel of Manhattan. Anthony Benedetto was born and grew up where he did because his grandfather, an Italian immigrant, had chosen Astoria two generations earlier: "He said, 'I'm not looking for another Italy. This is America. I want to live where people from every country are represented.'" And as a result of that community's ethnic diversity, the Italian grocery supply business he founded was both a novelty and a roaring success, enabling him to retire at 45. His son, Benedetto/Bennett's father, was less fortunate. A garment-maker or seamster, he was "well-loved but not well, and pretty much confined to the home." Little recollecting him, "other than by a memory sense of good, warm vibes", his younger son knows from an older brother and sister that "my dad" was the neighbourhood's agony uncle, sought by all and sundry for advice whenever problems would arise. He died suddenly when Bennett was 10.
All these years on, he speaks of this bereavement and the events that followed in a way that makes old pain feel recent and real. "I got ripped away from the family, and sent to live with an uncle who had a general store in a lumber community up near the Canadian border: a place so small that it's no longer there, having been totally returned to nature. It was to help my (American) mother cope - to survive even. I know that now; after all, she'd been left to bring up three children on her own. But at the time, I couldn't understand it one bit, and I felt very deserted by those I loved most. It took me a long, long time to figure it out and to calm down about the whole thing."
Sent back in due course to reduced familial circumstances, and full of suppressed anger, he was accepted into the High School of Industrial Arts, where he majored in painting and singing, but then was co-opted to Europe to serve as a G.I. in the latter stages of World War II. "Unlike after Vietnam, when the returning soldiers were put down and villified, we were given the very best schooling to make up for what we'd missed," he says of that second homecoming."
Having sung during active service with the US Army's entertainment unit, Bennett opted to puruse a musical path. "And was given access to the most amazing teachers. I studied Bel Canto with one, Pietro di Andrea, and it was another, Mimi Spier in her brownstone on 52nd Street, who gave me what remains to this day my particular style, or approach. She said, 'Don't imitate other singers. Imitate those musicians whom you most admire.' Well, I looked down from her window at the awnings of little nightclubs across the street and see the names billed there - Miles Davis, Erroll Garner, Art Tatum, George Shearing - and I knew what I had to do."
Yet despite this imput and the sense of direction it afforded, Bennett describes himself as "a graduate of the school of hard knocks." Other people use that term from inverse snobbery, as a way of signalling disdain for the advantages enjoyed by those who have come along after. In his case, one senses (and looking around a room thick with books) it has inspired a subsequent and on-going thirst for formal knowledge. "It's not about where you start out, but where you finish," he reminds.
Old privations have shaped Bennett in another way, meanwhile: he is anti-excess, anti-acquisitveness, "totally against the age of super-greed in which we're living. It's a matter for shame, the growing gulf between the haves and have-nots today. I grew up in The Depression, a tragic time in our history, when ordinary people really were starving. Remembering that, I figure, 'If I have enough, why should I want more?'"
Which isn't humbug or hypocrisy speaking: despite those 50 years close to or at the top of his profession, he owns no property, doesn't even drive a car. "If I'm playing Carnegie Hall and it's not raining, I'll walk," he says smiling gently, aware perhaps that interviewers today are more used to meeting celebrities reluctant even to cross the road on foot if there's a chance they might be carried. "I find it humorous at best, the notion that any one of us is more important than another.
"Ella Fitzgerald was a great friend, and she'd say this thing to me: 'Tony, we're all just here', meaning that everyone's on earth together, period, no one of us less worthy of consideration or respect. To my way of thinking, that's exactly so. I'm a Lincoln-esque kind of guy politically, and am convinced that in 50 or 100 years he'll be viewed as our Confucius: give everybody work, and in doing so give them dignity. I travel a great deal through my music, to the extent that the United Nations has honoured me as a World Citizen, and what I've learned is that despite their apparent differences, people everywhere are the same.
"They all love their children and all aspire to a better life, both for themselves and for those who follow. What's so frightening, about that? The United States is currently fearful of those from outside its borders, but that's a recent thing and will change again in time. With proper leadership, we'll appreciate once more the many cultures and religions which make this nation what it is and see how much they have to offer. Bigotry will not prevail."
The Canadian singer kd lang, a woman normally resistant to hyperbole, speaks of the man with whom she collaborrated on 2002's Louis Amstrong-inspired album of duets, What A Wonderful World, in stardust-sprinkled terms: "It's an educaton by osmosis, just being in the same room as him," she insists. "Knowing him has had a tremendous impact on me, not just musically - although in that sense his influence has been profound - but in terms of my approach to life in general. The graciousness, the elegance, the joy and ease he represents is just beautiful to behold. He takes everything in his stride.
"You walk through an airport with him and people will come up and say (as they do to anyone they recognise) the most inane and annoying things. "Thank you!' he'll reply, smiling and keeping right on walking. "Thank You!' They're left happy, he's happy, and it's just so damn simple that you wonder why you never thought of it yourself. He's a wonderful man, and spending time with him has been one of the greatest lessons of my life."
Perhaps Bennett achieves such equanimity because he long since recognised celebrityhood for what it is. "Years ago, and when he was still new and at his height, I did this thing to Tom Jones, whom I really like, to illustrate a point," he recalls. "We'd both apppeared on some multi-artist bill in Vegas and, as everyone was filing out afterwards, maybe 10 or more policemen formed themselves into a ring around him, and all the girls in the crowd started to scream. Well, I drew him out of that circle of security and stepped into it myself ... And the screaming just continued, but directed at me."
Meaning? "That it's not about who's inside the magic circle. It's just about the happening itself. The event. The illusion of someone being extra-special. All of us in the public eye should remember that."
This from a man whose own first steps to stardom were taken as a club vocalist, one eventually talent-spotted and promoted by the late Bob Hope. He signed to Columbia Records in 1950 and, after an ebb and flow of ballad chart successes, enjoyed his biggest-ever US hit 12 years further on with I Left My Heart (In San Francisco), to this day his signature song.
That ascendancy coincided with the years of industry-dominance by the Vegas-based Rat Pack. Bennett still hails its leader Sinatra as the greatest interpretative singer of all and offers up example after example of personal and career favours shown to him by his idol (who himself cited the younger man as his favourite vocalist in interviews). But he never sought to become a member of that infamously louche group and, with the exception of a few years spent in Los Angeles during the 1970s, has preferred to remain based on the east coast, rather than the west.
Recently though, and in homage, he helped found the Frank Sinatra School of the Performing Arts in his own home borough of Queens, enabling a largely disadvantaged annual intake to combine a normal academic curricula with specialist teaching preparing them for future careers in showbusiness. His partner Susan Crow, some 40 years his junior (Bennett is twice married, and has four grown-up children) is its assistant principal, and together they watched its first class of 42 students graduate this past summer. "They didn't want to leave," grins Bennett. "They'd had the very best time, with some of the biggest names around coming to the School to share their knowledge."
While I am with him, one of his daughters, Antonia, drops by for a catch-up and some impromptu lunch with her father ("This is from Sinatra's favourite Italian restaurant in New York," he tells me, serving take-out pasta to us both, and pouring glasses of red wine). Son Danny, meanwhile, and at his father's request, now manages the Bennett career, presiding over what has been an Indian summer of accelerated critical and commercial acclaim.
Having weathered the original Britpop invasion of the early '60s, plus all subsequent musical fads and fashions, and by refusing to deflect from his chosen course of quality songs, impeccably sung, Bennett found himself becoming an unlikely popular hero during the 1990s. While other performers far younger than he decried the growing importance of video as a marketing tool for music, he told his son, 'Get me on MTV!', and so became the first artist to be featured in the network's popular 'Unplugged' slot. And in 1998 he accepted the invitation to perform on the same bill as the Foo Fighters, Sonic Youth and Bob Dylan at a spectacularly wet Glastonbury. "I walked to the stage on hay bails, so that my blue silk suit didn't get muddied up," he chuckles. "No-one could believe I looked so clean."
He recalls nothing but respect from the other musicians he talked to there. "All of them wanted morre than anything to sustain, and asked for advice on how to do so. 'Enjoy what you do, and have fun with it," I told them, 'cos that's what's worked for me." Which means that he continues to perform and to record (a new CD, The Art Of Romance, shows his voice and technique to be undiminished), and to indulge celebrity fans ranging from Paul McCartney (who asked him to record a version of The Very Thought Of You especially for his first post-wedding dance with Heather Mills) to Whitney Houston (who this very day has sent a request that he record something - anything - with her on a forthcoming album).
And in between and daily, he draws and paints (work by Anthony Benedetto now sells for tens of thousands of dollars). Each August is spent in Italy to this end ... Florence, Sienna, Positano. "Thanks to my son's best efforts I'm now in a position where I could retire, so you might ask why I don't just do so, in order to devote myself full-time to art. Because I don't want to, and because there's still a lot I want to achieve with music. That's why."
Bennett says that the thought of growing older, or of death itself, holds no particular fear for him. "Of course, you look in the mirror some times and think, 'Who the hell is that?' But the simple facts are that we're born, we live and we die, so why on earth get panicked about it? Go with it. Live in the moment. Do your best and enjoy, enjoy."
As he speaks, his daughter is making preparations to leave, and I am aware that I should do so too. What else does the day hold for him, I wonder. More painting? Some quiet time? He looks at his watch. "Let's see, two-thirty. There's a car coming at three to take me to the airport. I'm performing in Toronto tonight and tomorrow. My quartet is meeting me there." No entourage, then, and no fuss. Amazing. "All I need with me is packed into that little bag right there," he says, gesturing towards the Gladstone on the hallway floor and before turning to kiss his grown-up child goodbye.
Copyright © 2020 Alan Jackson