With a Song and a Paintbrush in My Heart
By Jerry Tallmer
On a Monday in August 2005, Benedetto the painter was at work on a canvas of “Venice at Night.” Venice is over there. Benedetto’s studio is over here, a room in his apartment overlooking New York City’s – his city’s – Central Park.
“I’ve gone to Italy once a year for the past five years,” said Anthony Dominick Benedetto, whose name was shortened by Bob Hope to Tony Bennett something like 55 years ago. “I usually stay in Zubin Mehta’s villa in Florence. I go to Rome, Venice, Positano, all over, painting the whole month. They don’t know me too well over there,” said Tony Bennett, with a mixture of amusement and wonder. “It’s funny, Columbia [Records] only exploited me in Britain, Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand – English-speaking countries. I don’t say this to be egotistical, but it’s a little like Edith Piaf outside France.”
Could be. Could also be that millions of people of all varieties and all ages around the entire world instantly recognize the golden voice of Tony Bennett whenever and wherever it reaches. And maybe his beaming, weathered, ageless, golden face too, thanks to newspapers, magazines, television, and a few movies (Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal’s Analyze That, for one).
At 8 p.m. on Tuesday, October 25, 2005, Benedetto the painter and Harold Holzer, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s senior vice president for external affairs, are to join forces in a discussion and slide show of “The Art of Tony Bennett.” Mr. Holzer and the public will ask questions; the singer/painter will do his best to answer them. One work that may be mentioned is a Benedetto watercolor of Abraham Lincoln brooding before a tattered stars and stripes – the cover illustration of a new edition of the 2004 Lincoln on Democracy, a compilation co-edited by Harold Holzer and Mario Cuomo.
Bennett/Benedetto has said in the past that Mario Cuomo, former governor of New York State, was his favorite American. And said it again now, for NYC Plus. “He’s so well read. A humanist, you know. Anti-violence. The other guys,” said Tony Bennett, “are compromising all over the place. Not Cuomo.”
Being the subject of an evening at the Met “is quite a thrill for me,” said artist Benedetto. What does he expect to happen?
“Harold Holzer and the audience will ask: ‘Why do you paint?’ ”
And you’ll answer?
“Because I have to. I’ve got to sing, I’ve got to paint. My passions. The only two things that have excited me since I was a child – being able to sing and being able to paint.
“My family, you see” – back there in Astoria, Queens, where his father ran a grocery store – “was very, very poor. My father died when I was 10, and my mother, I don’t know how she did it, she went to work as a seamstress and raised three children” – Tony, older brother John, and older sister Mary.
“What happened was our relatives – uncles, aunts – made a circle around us. They’d come to the house, take out guitars and mandolins, and we kids would sing and dance. One moment everybody remembers,” Bennett said with the warmth of recall, “was when I was 4 or 5. The radio in those days had Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor doing songs in blackface. I went into my mother’s bedroom and came out with powder on my face, singing ‘Mammy’ like a white ghost.”
Multiply that anecdote against this:
“The Army changed my life, but before the Army I was in art school – the High School of Industrial Arts – with a beautiful guy named Frank Smith. A black guy. We were great friends. So in what I guess was 1945 I was at a repple-depple [replacement depot] in Mannheim, Germany, a town where all the buildings had been flattened … except the Ford Motor plant,” Bennett tossed in dryly.
“One day I ran into [fellow GI] Frank Smith. He invited me to come with him to a Baptist church. Then I invited him to dinner. At the time we were allowed one guest at dinner at the Mannheim Hotel. I took him. We got to the lobby and this captain came up and stopped us. One of those bigots, you know? ‘Benedetto,’ he said” – Bennett reproduces the snarling tone –
“ ‘get your gear! We don’t like your friends.’ Then he ripped off my corporal’s stripes and spit on them. He sent me to Graves Registration – digging up the bodies of dead Americans and reburying them. Horrible.
“A Major Letkoff heard about it. He took me out of that and made me a music librarian in a great orchestra that once a week would go to Wiesbaden and perform.”
This is the same Tony Bennett who owes everything he knows to Pearl Bailey, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong & Co. (along with Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Fred Astaire, Maurice Chevalier, and everybody else) and would one day march with Martin Luther King at Selma.
“I was the first white guy to sing with a black band,” Bennett now remarked matter-of factly. The band was Basie’s. “Basie was my best teacher. I just adored him. He showed me how to perform, how to get people tapping their feet.” It was also Count Basie who, when a young Bennett was thinking of experimenting with styles, said to him: “Why change an apple?” Which Bennett never has.
It was Edward Kennedy (Duke) Ellington – man of a thousand talents – who advised the young Bennett: “Do two things,” sing and paint.
It was Mimi Spears, a vocal coach for the American Theater Wing where the young veteran of “the good war” took classes on the GI Bill, who gave him another crucial pointer. “She lived in a brownstone on 52nd Street. Down the block there were all these awnings with all these names, Stan Getz, Basie, Billie Holiday. ‘Look out there,’ she said. ‘You should listen to musicians instead of singers.’ I liked Art Tatum and Stan Getz, and I listened, and that’s where I got my style.”
It was Chevalier who went a step further: “Show off your musicians.”
And Armstrong?
“Well, Armstrong is The Source, you know. He invented Swing,” said the performer who firmly believes the only two things America ever invented that will last are jazz and baseball. “See, Swing is not a category. It’s an American musical language. Strictly American. Nobody else knows how to do it. Swing was an expression of optimism coming out of the Depression, a determination to pull everybody up by their bootstraps, make things work, and it did work.
“Armstrong influenced Billie Holiday, Sinatra, everybody. He invented scat singing. He invented Be-bop. Dizzie Gillespie said: ‘Without Louis Armstrong, there is no me.’ To this day, in the music business, be it The Guns, or the Ginzos, or whatever” – said Bennett facetiously – “you’ll find Armstrong got there first.”
One of the strongest works by artist Benedetto, in one viewer’s opinion, is a sparse scratchboard head and shoulders of Louis Armstrong in pain and shadow – black, brown, a touch of red, of blue, and, coming in from Armstrong’s right, half revealing the strained, somber face, a shard of white light.
Once upon a time, late in Armstrong’s life, this journalist had an opportunity to interview America’s ambassador to the world. Toward the end of the interview the said journalist came up with something of genius like: “Well, Mr. Armstrong, now we have such as The Beatles and the Rolling Stones and all that. What do you think?”
Louis Armstrong looked the journalist straight in the eye and then growled – in Satchmo’s one and only gravel voice: “Old soup warmed over.”
“What did he say?” Tony Bennett exclaimed on hearing the journalist tell it. The journalist repeated those four words, gravel approximation and all – “Old soup warmed over” – and Bennett burst into all-out laughter. In a way, that verdict of Armstrong’s might be said to post bond for the entire career of the Tony Bennett who, in an age of cultural and corporate degradation, never gave in to trash, while collecting Emmys like donuts and planting 50 years of albums like apple seeds along the route. “The fighter who never took a dive,” is how Tony Bennett has quietly, proudly phrased it.
“At the Stage Delicatessen 45 years ago” – a favorite Bennett anecdote – “I asked [Jimmy] Durante what he thought of rock-’n’-roll. ‘They play three chords,’ Durante said, ‘and two of them are wrong.’ ”
None of the chords, or the emotions, are wrong in “The Art of Romance,” a recent Bennett CD (in collaboration with conductor/arranger Johnny Mandel) that’s on a par for purity and richness with the unamplified “Fly Me to the Moon” that this same Tony Bennett will on occasion personally send out into the vastness of Radio City Music Hall, or Carnegie Hall, in his own natural (did somebody not say golden?) voice, after asking that all the microphones be turned off.
Some years back, the present writer spent a morning being driven around Queens while Bennett searched for the house of his boyhood. He never did find it, and we ended up standing on the Queens edge of the East River, staring over at the skyline of Manhattan just as Anthony Dominick Benedetto in his teens had more than once longingly done from more or less the same exact point on the waterside.
Now, six and a half decades later than that adolescence, high up in an apartment house on the Manhattan side of the East River, a reflective Tony Bennett said: “My father used to swim in that water; that was when it wasn’t polluted.” There was a moment’s silence. Then he said:
“This is a complex day for me. My brother died last night. He wants his ashes put in the East River.”
Tony’s brother John, age 83. As good as died, actually. “He had every kind of illness you can imagine, and came back, and back, and back. He was feeling great, down there in Jupiter, Florida, and then he had a terrible headache and a massive stroke and his heart stopped. Last night. He’s on wires right now; they’re going to pull the plug on him.
“He was a great influence on my life,” said John Benedetto’s kid brother. “When he was 14 he sang solo parts at the Met [Opera]. He was fantastic. They called him ‘the Little Caruso.’ But he didn’t like the discipline. He wanted to go out and play baseball.
“In his life he worked for Edie Adams, he was a hair stylist, he had a restaurant, Benedetto’s, in Houston. A great cook. Loved to fish … ”
Pause, and another pause.
“This is a funny year for me,” said Tony Bennett. “My sister, Mary Chiappa, died seven months ago, very peacefully, of pancreatic cancer. My daughters, nieces, nephews, all went to see her. Lots of love there. A gorgeous lady.”
Bennett’s daughters, now in their 30s, are Joanna, a model, and Antonia, a singer with whom he often proudly appears. His sons are Danny, 51, and Daegal, called Dae, 50, who runs a film and recording studio in New Jersey. The boys’ mother was Bennett’s wife No. 1, Patricia (Sandy) Beech. Another Sandy, Sandra Grant, wife No. 2, is the mother of his daughters. Tony’s girlfriend these past 16 or 17 years has been Susan Crow, who is not all that much older than his daughters. The other beloved creature around the house is Boo, a white Maltese, age 14.
“Daegle’s studio is where I make all my records: the Bennett Studios, on Dizzy Gillespie Boulevard, in Englewood.” Danny is Tony Bennett’s manager and the person who, in the late 1970s and early ’80s, put the fraying, frazzled singer (IRS troubles, career troubles, domestic troubles, two divorces, drug troubles, a near fatal overdose) back together, back on his feet – financially and otherwise. Here, in the invidious so-called music world ever since disc jockey Alan Freed had blasted the music of America into mediocrity – if you like, into mindless noise – was a survivor who never took his eye off beauty, the prizefighter who never took a dive and never quit. Much to the delight and awe, mind you, of the MTV generation and such of Tony’s sudden new co-stars as k.d. lang and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Two causes for which Tony Bennett works his heart out are cancer and diabetes. One of his four grandchildren – he blocked on the name – has diabetes. “Wait a minute. The name will come to me. At my age, there’s a delayed reaction. You have to wait a few beats.”
Beat. Beat. The light went on. “It’s Austin, Dae’s son … I’m about to do an album before a live audience at the Harms Theater, in Englewood, proceeds to go to the Children’s Diabetic Society.”
Another project dear to Bennett’s heart – in fact he founded it and gave it its name – is the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, a two-year-old creative-oriented (music, painting, sculpture, drama, dance) public high school somewhat parallel to the onetime High School of Industrial Arts “that Roosevelt and LaGuardia had set up in the 1930s to teach basic skills” to kids like Anthony Benedetto. Ultimately to be located in a spanking new building in Astoria, next to the Kaufman Studios and American Museum of the Moving Image, the Sinatra School has entered life in temporary quarters on the campus of LaGuardia Community College, Long Island City.
“I love what’s happening there,” says Bennett. (He also loves its vice-principal, Susan Crow.) “All good kids,” he says of the school’s 485 students. “Not one bad kid. You have to audition to get in. It’s just dynamite.”
Some of them may be as lucky as the 11-year-old Anthony Benedetto, whose talents as a chalk-on-sidewalk artist were first spotted, and encouraged, by James McWhinney, a teacher back at Industrial Arts all those years ago.
“I just now got a diploma from that school,” said the Tony Bennett of 2005. “I’m a slow learner.”
A fellow student at Industrial Arts, but one he only met later, was Everett Raymond Kinstler, the portrait painter whom Bennett/Benedetto considers “the John Singer Sargent of today – you can see his stuff all over the Players’ Club.” Bennett has said in the past that painting provides “a magnificent sanity in my life,” and Kinstler, as his art teacher, has helped him toward that sanity. Bennett actually has four art teachers – Kinstler, Charles Reid, Robert Wade, Basil Baylin – strung out over several hemispheres, depending on where the singer who lives out of a suitcase while he performs all over the map happens to be at any given moment. Bennett also drops in at the Art Students’ League whenever he can.
Lives out of two suitcases. One is just for his watercolors and brushes. “It’s functional for me when I travel. Not messy. Watercolors are like jazz, full of happy accidents. You paint what you see, and if you happen to do a good one, you turn it into an oil when you get home.”
As for the real John Singer Sargent: “He’s Kinstler’s god. I’m very influenced by Sargent myself. Nobody’s been able to touch him.” But painter Benedetto’s own actual gods are Rembrandt and Velasquez. “Base your work on that, and you’re on your way.”
And Manet’s no slouch either. Or Monet.
The travels that take Tony Bennett everywhere enable him to virtually take up residence in museums and galleries everywhere.
“I was just in Chicago and saw a Lautrec show and a Picasso ‘Night Life of Paris’ influenced by Lautrec. Fantastic! Beautiful! What color! The best thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Depending on where you look, the birth date of Anthony Dominick Benedetto is given as August 3, 1926, or August 13, 1926. Benedetto himself (the name means “blessed one”) says it’s August 3, but Tony Bennett doesn’t much like to talk about birthdays. “I don’t deal in demographics,” says the man who long ago elected not to sing to any one age group but to the whole family.
“Remember Joe Venuti?” he said now. “Great jazz violinist. The older he got, the better he got. I met him once in front of P.J.’s. He told me: ‘You don’t know it yet, but you’ll be singing when you’re 100 years old.’ I don’t know how my life will work out,” says Tony Bennett, “but if I could live long enough, I’d want to still be right in there singing without a wobble.
“Rosemary Clooney and I,” he said, “were the first American Idols. The record companies used to threaten us: ‘Come up with a hit, or else.’ We got taught our trade by Basie, by Ellington. That’s all gone now. Kids come up, and six months later they’re alcoholics or on drugs or bankrupt. And the agents and producers and publicists and cynics sneer: ‘Why don’t you go drive a truck.’ ”
You can’t plan life, Tony Bennett has been heard to say. Life plans you.
“And that’s true,” he insists. “Getting back to my brother: Who knew two days ago that he was going to die?”
But there’ll be a change in the weather, a change in the sea …
Tony Bennett has just been notified that he’s to be one of this year’s Kennedy Center honorees. And this: “The Smithsonian Institution has taken one of my paintings into its permanent collection. A huge painting of Central Park, with the public filing into the park. I’m going to be up there in the Smithsonian with Sargent and Winslow Homer. One of the great things in my life.”
Okay, Mr. Benedetto, maybe you’re not going to have to drive that truck.
