The Good Life (28 page)

As touching a tune as “Country Girl” was, Bob’s number one asset was that he was one of the greatest orchestrators of pop music. Sinatra dubbed Farnon “The Guv’nor.” Recording with him was one of the high points of the late sixties for me. His music gives me the chills.

I had met Bob Farnon in early 1952, when I was playing the Casino in Toronto. He then came to the United States in 1954 to work with his friend Don Walker on the orchestrations for
The Girl in Pink Tights
, Tony T. found him a
house right next door to my mother’s in River Edge, New Jersey.

Even back then, Bob wanted us to record together, but I had such reverence for his work that I told him I wasn’t ready. I just didn’t feel like I had developed enough as an artist to make an album with him. I thought I’d have to wait about twenty years before I sang with Bob, and I was pretty close, because we didn’t work together until 1967.

We decided to do a Christmas album together. The title,
Snowfall
, was inspired by Claude Thornhill’s most famous composition and struck me as a beautiful title. We taped six tracks in New York and four tracks in London. The project inspired Bob to work at his highest level, and his orchestrations were superb. I especially liked “Christmasland,” an original song Bob and his brother Brian wrote for the album.

The New York recording session for
Snowfall
was amazing. Farnon had conducted for American singers before, like Sinatra and Sarah Vaughan, but this was the first time he’d actually come to the U.S. to do it. The clique of New York orchestrators who’d studied Farnon’s writing—including Don Costa, Marion Evans, and Torrie Zito—all showed up at the session.

Everybody wanted to know how Bob worked, and the second he left the room the curious arrangers rushed up to the podium to study his score.

Quincy Jones threw a party for him, and every musician and orchestrator in New York City was there. There were so many celebrated music makers in that one room that Quincy cracked, “If a bomb goes off in this apartment, there won’t be any more records made!”

We went an hour overtime at the London session. Paul McCartney had booked the studio after us, but he was very obliging and agreed to wait until we were finished. I had met
Paul a number of times before that; in fact, in 1965 I had presented the Beatles with their first award at an annual New Musical Express event. I recently ran into Paul at a party at David Frost’s house in London. For years people have been coming up to me and saying, “My mom thinks you’re the greatest!” and my automatic tongue-in-cheek response is always, “Tell her she has good taste.” When I met Paul, my good friend Susan told him that my son Danny is a big fan of his. He responded with the same line that I always use, “Tell him he has good taste.” From the beginning, I always felt Paul was the one in the group with real star power.

I was delighted with
Snowfall
but Columbia didn’t share my enthusiasm. They thought the title was too “uncommercial,” and again they didn’t like the cover illustration, which I’d had Bob Peak do. Columbia had nixed the one he did for
When Lights Are Low
, and again, they balked.

That Columbia didn’t put any effort into promoting
Snow-rail
was hardly a surprise. “For Once in My Life” had been my last hit single, and by 1967 it seemed that the company was ready to wash their hands of me. I was still making records for them, but they weren’t doing much about trying to sell them. Judy Collins tells a Duke Ellington story that I think applies particularly well to what was going on with me at this time. In the early sixties Duke was having trouble with Columbia. They asked him to come into their offices and sat him down and told him they were going to drop him from the label because he wasn’t selling enough records. Duke thought for a moment and responded, “I guess I must be mistaken. I thought I was supposed to make the records and YOU were supposed to sell them.” Right on, Duke. That sums up my situation in a nutshell.

Clive Davis took particular pride in getting what he called “middle of the road” artists—a term I dislike—to “cover” contemporary hits. In his book,
Clive: Inside the Music Industry
, he admits that he’d come up with a formula for figuring out exactly how many copies an album of cover tunes could sell and then went about making records according to that formula. He told me the only way he’d get behind me was if I agreed to record some of the current material he was pushing. I couldn’t do that, so we were at a stalemate.

In fact, all my recent albums,
For Once in My Life, Yesterday I Heard the Rain
, and
Something
contained wonderful new songs by great songwriters like Cy Coleman, Johnny Mercer, Richard Rodgers, Stephen Sondheim, Jule Styne, Leslie Bricusse, Anthony Newley, Michel Legrand, Sammy Cahn, Jimmy Van Heusen, Marilyn and Alan Bergman, Jack Segal, Bob Wells, and Gene Lees. They were all writing wonderful contemporary songs, but Columbia didn’t see it that way.

I had no objection to doing songs that were already hits, provided I thought they were good and that I could sing them with a different interpretation. I recorded a number of Burt Bacharach hits, but I did them in my own style. I had Torrie Zito write me a swinging big band version of “What The World Needs Now,” which I thought was really on the money, and it went over big every time I sang it. I even sang it once on the
Ed Sullivan Show
with Duke Ellington’s orchestra.

I was doing three albums a year, and all this pressure started bringing me down. On top of it all, I’d been separated from Patricia for close to three years, and we couldn’t seem to reach an understanding. Although the last thing I wanted to do was get involved in a nasty legal battle, attorneys entered the picture. I was served with divorce papers. After that, all I heard was “See you in court.”

In 1968 I celebrated my twentieth anniversary in show business, and I did a tour with Duke Ellington and his Orchestra. We opened a series of twenty-five concerts at the New York Philharmonic on March 3, and it was a sellout show. In fact I was selling out concert halls all over the world, so when Columbia claimed that they weren’t able to sell my records, I couldn’t help but wonder what they were doing wrong.

I’d first worked with Duke about ten years earlier, at the Bal Masque, part of the Americana Hotel in Miami, a dream come true. When I was a kid one of the greatest shows I ever saw featured Duke Ellington, Ethel Waters, and the tap dance trio Tip, Tap, and Toe. It was absolutely tremendous, and I was hooked on Duke’s music from then on.

Ralph hoped to realize a long-held dream of his during that engagement at the Americana, but it didn’t exactly work out that way. Since he was a jazz arranger and composer himself, he’d always wanted to have a look at Ellington’s music, so early one morning Ralph went down to the rehearsal room to sneak a peek. He looked everywhere, but there wasn’t a page of written music to be found. Later Ralph asked Duke’s great baritone sax player Harry Carney about it, and Harry said, “Oh, we don’t have music. We know all our parts.” When Duke wrote something new, the band had to learn it. They were playing the most intricate, intense music you’ve ever heard from memory!

Whenever I worked with Duke—or with Basie for that matter——I deliberately violated some advice that Louis Prima had given me years earlier in Vegas. He’d said, “Whatever you do, wherever you work, make sure you get top billing. Go ahead and work a smaller room, but even if it’s a sawdust joint, be the headliner.” But I went against his great advice where
Basie and Ellington were concerned because I wanted to show respect for them. The only other times I settled for second billing were when I played with Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra, and I’m sure I don’t have to explain why.

Duke was a mystic. He told me that after he’d read the Bible, he knew everything he needed to know. We were on a plane together once and he told me a story about writing an upcoming concert of sacred music. When he started working, he called his writing partner, Billy Strayhorn, in New York and told him he wanted to start the concert with a musical motif inspired by the Book of Genesis. A month later he called Billy to see what he had come up with. Amazingly, they had written the exact same notes to the same opening words, “In the beginning there was God.”

Another time, Duke and I were both working in Boston and staying at the Somerset Hotel. I was hanging out in my room with Bobby Hackett, who was talking about how he’d really love to have a jam session. The phone rang, and it was Duke. He said, “I’m downstairs and I have a song for you. Come to the Grand Ballroom.” When Duke began playing he realized that the middle octave of the piano was shot. But that didn’t deter Duke: he played for us anyway, using the remainder of the keyboard. That song was “Love Scene.” He played a whole hour for us, everything he could think of. I looked over at Bobby, who was so moved he was quietly crying tears of joy.

Duke had a lovely habit of sending me a dozen roses whenever he’d written a new song. It was a beautiful gesture from a great man, and it later inspired me to do a watercolor painting of Duke in front of a bouquet of roses, which I entitled “God Is Love.” To this day it’s one of my favorite paintings, and though I always show it, I would never sell it. In fact, it’s the only one of my own paintings I’ve hung in my home.
I’ve sung so many of his songs over the years, including “I’m Just a Lucky So and So,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart,” “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” “Love Scene,” and “Reflections,” to name only a few. I’ve concluded many concerts with a special medley of Ellington songs, always climaxing with “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).” When the great Louis Bellson was playing with me, that medley was a feature for him, and we still do it today to spotlight my wonderful drummer Clayton Cameron. Few people know that Duke composed more music that anyone else in the history of music, including ballet suites, tone poems, sacred concerts, and popular songs.

We got together whenever we could, whether it was on the road, in a club, or staying up all night jamming. Duke and I celebrated his seventy-second birthday together. I was working at the Waldorf-Astoria that night, and Duke was out in the audience. I introduced him and he came up and played a few numbers, charming the entire room. I brought out a huge cake, and everybody sang “Happy Birthday.” What a night!

By 1968 my life was in a complete uproar. My divorce battle with Patricia was raging in the courts, and in April, Sandra told me she was pregnant. My mom started to get really sick and became bedridden; all I could do was think back to the time when we were all in Astoria and she worked so hard to take care of us. Now the tables were turned. I ran back and forth between New York and Jersey to see her whenever I could. After every visit I rode back to the city thinking it might be the last time I’d ever see her. It was about as much as I could take.

My first daughter was born on January 9, 1969. At the suggestion of my friend and television producer Dwight
Hemion we named her Joanna, inspired by my song “When Joanna Loved Me.” I’d always thought that was a lovely song and an enchanting name. Joanna was a beautiful child and it was really exciting and comforting to have a new daughter in my life.