The Good Life (25 page)

She gave me an interesting piece of advice one night. She said, “You always have to do only the finest songs, but then every once in a while it’s okay to sing a number that just hits the back of the house, like ‘Mammy—give ‘em a real show stopper, one that everybody digs.” She had a really good point. That’s why I don’t mind singing a song like Cy Coleman’s “Firefly,” which is a real crowd pleaser.

I went to see Judy every chance I could get, of course, but what surprised me was the number of times she came out to see me. It was always a pleasure to look out into the audience and see her. When
Billboard
did a special tribute issue called “Twenty Years of Tony Bennett” in 1968, Judy contributed an interview in which she talked for a whole page about how much
she enjoyed watching me perform. Imagine how thrilling it was for me to read that she thought I was “... the epitome of what entertainers were put on earth for. He was born to take people’s troubles away, even if it’s only for an hour. He loves doing it. He’s a giver.” It’s the best compliment I’ve ever received.

I don’t know if Judy treated everyone she knew so well, but she always made me feel special. There was a really “in” club in Hollywood called the Daisy. Judy wanted to check it out, so I escorted her there. We ran into the Rat Pack—Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Peter Lawford, and Frank Sinatra. They knew Judy was in trouble with drugs, so they gave us the cold shoulder. She turned to me and said, “Don’t ever forget this: someday they’ll regret that it was you instead of them that I was with.”

I was opening at the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan, and as I was walking through the wings, about to go on stage one night, the stage manager stopped me and told me I had a phone call. I couldn’t imagine what could be so important that he’d interrupt me at such a moment, but when he said, “It’s Judy Garland,” I grabbed the phone. She said, “Tony, I’m in my room at the St. Regis Hotel. There’s a man here and he’s beating me up!” She was crying and sounded terrified. We all knew Judy had a tendency to exaggerate, but she sounded desperate, and I believed her.

I told her, “I’m about to go on stage, Judy. I don’t know what I can do.” Then I thought: I’ll call Frank. I put in a call to the Fontainebleau in Florida, where Sinatra was appearing, and explained the situation to him. He said, “I’ll call you back in fifteen minutes.” The second I got off the stage, the stage manager told me there was another call from Judy. I picked up the phone and she said, “I wanted help, but this is ridiculous! There are nine hundred cops downstairs and five lawyers in my room!” Frank certainly took care of the situation for her in grand style.
He’d just finished making a movie called
The Detective
with my old friend Abby Mann, and since they wanted it to be as realistic as possible, they’d worked closely with the New York City Police Department. All the police loved Frank, so they rallied to Judy’s aid when he asked for their help. Sinatra called me back later and said, “Is that all right, kid?”

I was glad that Judy knew she could count on me when she needed a friend, since many people in her life did nothing but take advantage of her. The last time I saw her was in London in April 1969, when I was there doing a TV special with Count Basie. After the show she came backstage to see me, and the last thing she said to me was, “You’re pretty good!” She died two months later. I’ve never gotten over it. She was so kind, so talented, such a dear friend. When I look back, it’s hard to believe that most of the time she was just trying to hold on for dear life.

By the time 1964 rolled around, America was becoming a hotbed of activity on all fronts. Like everyone else, I was shocked and appalled by Kennedy’s assassination. It was a sad time for this country, the end of the age of innocence. We had survived the Cuban missile crisis, but the Cold War and the threat of a nuclear confrontation still hung over our heads. The papers and the television were filled with news of Dr. Martin Luther King’s fight for civil rights. It was hard to comprehend the injustice and the discrimination that was going on right here in our own backyard. I was sympathetic to the movement and I did whatever I could to help the cause.

At the same time America was experiencing a new wave of rock music called “the British invasion.” I’d managed to get through the first wave—the Presley phenomenon—relatively unscathed, and now they were cramming the airwaves with the sound of a new group called the Beatles, and the marketers
were hard at work creating what would soon be dubbed “Beatlemania.” Rock music was becoming big business, and Columbia quickly jumped on the bandwagon. They signed bands called the Byrds and Paul Revere and the Raiders; I thought the world was losing its mind. This music was starting to take priority over artists like Barbra Streisand and Johnny Mathis, and I became more determined than ever to find songs that would break through the rock and roll hype like a blade of grass through asphalt. My efforts paid off. I found hit songs like “When Joanna Loved Me,” by Jack Segal and Bob Wells, and introduced it on my album
The Many Moods of Tony
.

I also had hits with two songs by the great British lyricist Leslie Bricusse: “Who Can I Turn To,” cowritten with Anthony Newley, and the title track to my 1965 album,
If I Ruled the World (Songs for the Jet Set)
, which he wrote with Cyril Ornadel. That album also included a song that’s always been very special to me: “Sweet Lorraine.” I dedicated it to Nat Cole, who had died a month earlier in April 1965. I was heartbroken when I heard that Nat had passed away. Bobby Hackett and I were working at the Palmer House in Chicago, and it seemed appropriate to pay tribute by recording Nat’s signature tune while we were in his hometown. (Bobby, whose instrument was normally cornet, surprised us all by playing ukulele on this record; his buddy Joe Marsala played clarinet.)

I have a lot of fond memories of Nat. I was fortunate enough to be working in Las Vegas when he was playing the Sands around the time of his big hit “Rambling Rose.” Since we were always working on the same nights, I couldn’t catch his show, but I visited him during rehearsals. I was standing in the back of the room in the shadows while Nat was going over his cues one day. Jack Entratter, who ran the Sands, was there too, and I heard Nat tell him that he planned to walk through the audience while he was singing. But Jack Entratter
objected, so I stepped out of the shadows and said, “Don’t worry, Nat, you have the number one song in the country. Do whatever you want.” They turned to me and both cracked up laughing.

The Sands treated Nat like the king he was. Jack threw him a special party, and I was privileged to be invited. It was held in one of the big ballrooms upstairs, and Nat’s wife, Maria, his kids, and his extended family were all there.

During dinner Nat said to me, “I’ve got a big item for you. There’s a theater that’s opening up in Los Angeles next year, and I want just you, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, and me to perform. Nobody else. Put it on your calendar.” Every couple of months he’d call me and ask me, “Are you blocking that date off?” I didn’t even know which theater it was, but it didn’t matter; I was happy to sing anywhere Nat asked me to. It turned out to be the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and Nat’s friends owned the place and wanted him to open it with a spectacular show. He had it all planned: Basie would open; then I’d come out and close the first half of the show with the Basie band. The second half would feature Ella and Nat with Basie, and then we’d all close the show together with a big jam session.

About three weeks before the show was scheduled to open, I was talking to Dean Martin. I asked him how Nat was doing, since I hadn’t spoken with him for a while. Dean told me that Nat had cancer and that it was bad. He died a few days later.

The show at the Pavilion was turned into a memorial for him. Sinatra took over the planning, and it was huge. It seemed like everyone who had ever known Nat was on the bill.

Since I’d been out on the road with Basie for a while, and the music was really tight, I was looking forward to doing a half-hour set with him, but there were so many stars on the bill I only did two numbers. It was an exciting night, and the
audience went wild. I think Nat would have been proud of the show.

Unfortunately, I’ve run into far too many incidents of racism involving the many great Black musicians I’ve worked with throughout the years. It’s a shame that a genius like Nat had to be subjected to discrimination, but as I knew from my experiences in the war, racism could be disgustingly blatant. I once went to see Nat in Miami and I invited him to come join me at my table after the show. He told me he wasn’t allowed in the dining room, that if I wanted to see him. I’d have to go backstage. When the Americana Hotel opened in Miami in the mid-fifties, Duke Ellington and I played the first show. The hotel threw a big press party, but, of all things, Duke wasn’t allowed to attend. In fact, the band couldn’t even stay at the hotel; they had to bunk in some dingy joint in another section of Miami.

I’d never been politically inclined, but these things went beyond politics. Nat and Duke were geniuses, brilliant human beings who gave the world some of the most beautiful music it’s ever heard, and yet they were treated like second-class citizens. The whole situation enraged me. That’s why when Harry Belafonte called me up and asked me to join Martin Luther King’s civil rights march to Selma, Alabama, in 1965 I accepted.

I’d known Harry since the late forties when we met at New York’s Hanson’s Drug Store on Fifty-second Street, the hangout for struggling musicians and entertainers. At that time it was anybody’s guess as to which of us would make it, but none of us had any doubts about Harry. We knew he was going to be a big star. He was virtually the only entertainer in the fifties who had the courage to make social statements, and he continued that crusade through the sixties, right up to the present time.

Harry told me that the march had been planned by Martin Luther King to draw national attention to the fact that Blacks were still being denied the right to vote. Dr. King thought it would be a good idea to have some celebrities on the march to attract some media attention and to entertain the marchers at the end of each day, so he also invited my old pal Billy Eckstine, Leonard Bernstein, Shelley Winters, Sammy Davis Jr., Adolph Green, Betty Comden, and other popular performers of the day.

When the march started, I had a strange sense of déjá vu. I kept flashing back to a time twenty years earlier when my buddies and I had fought our way into Germany. It felt the same way down in Selma: the white state troopers were really hostile, and they were not shy about showing it. There was the threat of violence all along the march route, from Montgomery to Selma, some of which was broadcast on the nightly news and really helped to make the country aware of the ugliness that was still going on in the South. Billy and I were really scared. Fortunately Harry was there to reassure us, and the way he kept his cool was an inspiration.

One night, early into the march, the performers put on a show and I sang a couple of numbers. We were in the middle of a clearing, and there was no stage available, so a local mortician volunteered eighteen heavy wooden coffins for us to use as a stage. It was bizarre to be singing on top of a pile of coffins, but we made do with what we had. Twenty years later Abby Mann asked me to re-create that scene for his TV miniseries
King
.

The fifty-four-mile march lasted from March 7 to March 25. Neither Billy Eckstine nor I could stay for the entire march, but while we were there we tried to act cool and pretend we weren’t terrified by the violence that surrounded us. We shared a room in a broken-down hotel. When it was time
to leave, we hurriedly packed up our stuff and headed out. The next day when I was in New York, Billy called me from L.A. and said, “Where are my f————pants?” We were so nervous when we were packing up to leave that I put on his pants and he put on mine—he’s six feet two, and I’m five feet nine—but we didn’t even notice.

One of Dr. King’s supporters, a white woman from Detroit who had three children, took Billy and me to the airport when it was time for us to leave. We were horrified to learn that she was murdered by anti—civil rights men on her drive back to Selma.