The Good Life (18 page)

Over the years ninety different artists have recorded “Stranger in Paradise,” but my version remains the biggest. It was also the first record of mine to go over really big in England, and I sang it the first time I played there in 1955. In England the song has been recorded ninety-six times, but the public eventually made mine number one.

In 1956, Jule Styne came to me with “Just In Time,” the big song from his forthcoming show,
Bells Are Ringing
. The Columbia people told him, “If you want Tony to record a single of ‘Just In Time,’ you’ll have to let Columbia Records have the cast album.” That was standard policy for Columbia. Jule said, “I want Tony No one else!” So that was that. I recorded “Just In Time” in September. I had a hit with the song and the show opened at the Shubert Theater on November 29.

We eventually collected twelve show tune singles for my 1962 album
Mr. Broadway
. I did many more Broadway show tunes over the years—enough to fill a two-CD set. I think probably the most important part of my recording legacy is that I had the privilege of introducing all those wonderful show tunes to the general public.

My habit of recording songs from Broadway shows also endeared me to Goddard Lieberson. I would record a new Broadway song, and Columbia in turn got the cast album, which became the foundation of their catalogue. Goddard was a friend of both Rex Harrison’s and Alan Jay Lerner’s, and when he heard about the show
My Fair Lady
, he took Columbia’s involvement in the Broadway scene one giant step farther.
He persuaded William S. Paley to put some of Columbia’s money into the show, and Columbia was rewarded a thousandfold.

The show was the biggest hit in the history of Broadway up to that time: Columbia not only made a fortune with their original cast album (which they rerecorded in stereo in 1958 with the British cast); it was the biggest-selling cast album of all time, selling five million copies by the 1960s, When the producers of the show sold the movie rights to Warner Bros, for five million dollars, Columbia Records made out like a bandit. So did Goddard.
My Fair Lady
had opened on Broadway on March 15, 1956, and Goddard became president of Columbia Records that June.

With more and more hit records, my bookings got better and better. In April 1952, I opened at the El Rancho in Las Vegas for the first time.

Las Vegas was just getting started as a major entertainment town in the early fifties. The first hotel-casino had opened in 1941, featuring the now-standard showrooms, restaurants, and entertainment lounges. The Strip contained only two or three hotels in the forties, among them the Desert Inn and the El Rancho, and 1-95 was just a dirt road. But what followed in the fifties was a construction boom that gave us the glitzy gambling and entertainment capital we know and love today, Vegas thought big right from the start, and by the time I opened there, the Strip was packed with clubs and casinos and was already legendary. If you played Vegas, you knew you were famous. The underworld controlled just about every club and casino, but that was not news to me or anybody else who played there. It was a wild place where the attitude was “anything goes!”

Eventually I worked all the big hotels in Vegas: the El Rancho, the Sahara, the Sands, the Dunes, the Riviera, Caesars
Palace, you name it. Those were sensational days. Entertainers like myself, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Lena Horne, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Noel Coward, Marlene Dietrich, Harpo Marx, and Louis Prima really made that town happen. Playing Caesars Palace regularly came about because of my friend Dave Victorson. When I first started making it, Dave came to see me and told me, “I’m flat broke. I have to go to L. A. and try my luck.” I asked him how much he needed. He said, “Five hundred dollars.” So I gave it to him. About seven years later I got a call from Dave. He said, “You’re coming to work for me.” “What are you talking about?” I asked him. He told me he was the entertainment director for a new hotel called Caesars Palace, and remembering that favor cemented our long-term association.

My big opening of that year was in October at the Copacabana in New York City. All the superstars—Frank Sinatra, Nat “King” Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Jimmy Durante, and Joe E. Lewis—played there. Vegas generally took its booking cues from the Copa then, and at first neither venue was too keen on what they called “record acts,” which they figured were a bunch of fly-by-nighters who wouldn’t bring in the right type of customer. They preferred old-line show business legends like Sophie Tucker. Once I got out on stage, I won them over.

One of the great things about my first engagement at the Copa was getting to work with Joe E. Lewis. Today he’s primarily remembered as the character Frank Sinatra played in the classic movie
The Joker Is Wild
, in which Frank introduced the song “All the Way,” but in his day Joe E. Lewis was an immensely popular and well-respected comedian. It was a real honor to be on the same bill with him. I felt like an amateur opening for a giant like Joe, but he was great to me. Being
inexperienced, I couldn’t handle the crowd at the Copa; they never stopped talking, and I didn’t yet know how to hold a difficult audience like that, Joe gave me some great tips on how to grab the audience’s attention. When he found out that I was going to Texas, he wrote the critics in Houston and Dallas before I got there and told them to check me out. He was a real gentleman.

By 1953, I was on the road pretty much full-time. Along with my musicians I was traveling with a radio promotions man from Columbia Records named Danny Stevens and my road manager, Dee Anthony. Toward the middle of the year my piano player Gene di Novi left me to do a solo gig at an important cabaret in New York called the Show Spot.

I made an unusual choice for my next accompanist, the remarkable guitarist Chuck Wayne. I remembered when I first heard Bing Crosby in the early thirties he had a brilliant guitarist named Eddie Lang. I liked the soft, intimate sound that a guitar brought to the songs. Chuck was an accomplished musician and could conduct the band for me as well as any pianist I ever had.

Chuck and I had a lot of wild times on the road. One night in Florida I was asleep when the phone rang around eleven-thirty PM. It was Chuck and he said, “There’s a guy downtown who’s really bad-mouthing the hell out of you and our act. Should I take care of him?” I said, “Wait a minute; I’ll get dressed and come with you.” So we walked into this club, and there was a comic on stage. Sure enough, when he saw us come in, he started dumping on us: “Ah, there’s that Italian kid crooner Tony Bennett and his sidekick ukulele player Chuck Wayne. They think they’re hot stuff just ‘cause they’re from New York City” It started out pretty mild, but he went on
rapping us big time. By the time the set was over, Chuck and I were really steamed up and we went backstage to jump the guy. We walked right over to him and pushed him up against the wall. I put my hand around his neck, and Chuck put his knee in his crotch. Then I said, “Don’t ever mention us again. Ever.” He said, “You got it. You got it. You boys are serious.” “You better believe it,” I told him, and walked out. Well, I found out later the comedian’s name was Don Rickles. That was at the very beginning of his career—nobody had even heard of him then. That type of insult comedy was completely new, and a lot of people, myself included, found it shocking. He was like Howard Stern today, pushing the limits of what’s considered acceptable. Chuck and I laughed about the whole thing because our bark was always much bigger than our bite, but to this day Don only has nice things to say about me.

Luckily, my legion of bobby-soxer fans did not lose interest in me after I got married. In fact, my two most ardent admirers, Molly Siva and Helen Schulman, became even more determined to pursue me. For months on end, whenever I’d go anywhere in public in New York City, they were there. I’d be sitting in a restaurant, having a bowl of soup or something, and I’d look up to find them staring at me through the window. When they found out I was getting married, they sent me telegrams by the hour pleading with me to change my mind. They’d wait at the stage door at the theater where I was appearing, and when the show was over, they’d follow my cab home. When Patricia and I got back from our honeymoon, they camped out on our doorstep for days.

During one engagement at the Roxy, I gave a total of seventy performances. Molly and Helen were there for at least sixty-eight. There was a building across the street from the
theater that had an unoccupied office facing directly into my dressing room. Molly and Helen convinced the owner to lend them that office space for the month. There was a huge poster of me in front of the theater, and somehow the two of them managed to make off with it. They filled their special room with sandwiches, bottles of soda, and that enormous poster, and basically lived there. Most importantly, they had a phonograph and copies of all of my records that they blasted so loud that the neighborhood heard nothing but Tony Bennett for the entire month.

Once they took a bus all the way to Asbury Park, New Jersey, to hear me perform. They missed the last bus back and wound up stranded and came crying to me in my dressing room. I called their parents and assured them that everything was all right; then Patricia took them down to the local hotel and got them a room for the night. Another time they showed up for a performance at the Copa, but they’d drastically underestimated how expensive that famously high-priced nightspot could be and again wound up coming to me. I was happy to help them get into the show. Anything for such loyal, dedicated fans!

In those days, syndicated newspaper columnists occasionally invited celebrities to fill in for them. Once in 1954, when Dorothy Kilgallen took a vacation, I wrote one installment for her as a “guest columnist.” I devoted the entire column to the exploits of Molly and Helen, and that column inspired a novel by Nora Johnson called
The World of Henry Orient
, in which two schoolgirls become obsessed with a concert pianist (somehow they figured a classical musician was funnier than a pop crooner). The gag is that he’s always trying to make it with some chick, and these two little girls are forever following him around and messing up his plans. It was a very funny book and was later made into a
film starring Peter Sellers as Henry Orient (me!), as well as a 1967 Broadway musical entitled
Henry, Sweet Henry
, starring Don Ameche.

That June Patricia told me she was pregnant. Things couldn’t have been better. My career was in full swing, and now I could look forward to starting a family. Since our apartment wasn’t big enough to accommodate the new arrival, Patricia and I decided to look outside the city for a bigger place. We found an apartment at the Briar Oaks apartment complex right off the Henry Hudson Parkway a little north of the George Washington Bridge in Riverdale, New York. We lived in apartment 1012 in the first tower, a spacious four-room spread. This was much different from anywhere else I’d lived, and the view of the Hudson River and the New Jersey palisades was spectacular.

My first son, D’Andrea, was born on February 3, 1954. We were so pleased when he arrived, and Patricia wanted to choose a very special name for him. She liked the name “Andrea,” but didn’t want the baby to be called “Andy,” so we weren’t really sure about it. But then I thought of my singing teacher Pietro D’Andrea, of whom. I was very fond, so we decided to put a “D” in front of “Andrea.” Patricia started in right away calling him “Danny,” and I also liked the idea that I could call him “Danny” because once on Fifty-second Street I had heard the great Art. Tatum play “Danny Boy” so beautifully that it always stayed with me. So that’s how he got the name he goes by today.