Tony Bennett, the New York singer who made I Left My Heart in San Francisco his signature number in a career that spanned seven decades and was built on American popular songs, jazz standards and show tunes, has died. He was 96.
(Bloomberg) — Tony Bennett, the New York singer who made I Left My Heart in San Francisco his signature number in a career that spanned seven decades and was built on American popular songs, jazz standards and show tunes, has died. He was 96.
His death in New York on Friday was reported by the Associated Press, which cited publicist Sylvia Weiner. He had suffered from Alzheimer’s disease.
Bennett vaulted to fame in the early 1950s with a string of emotional hits, including The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Because of You and Blue Velvet.
By his mid-20s Bennett was drawing hordes of screaming teenagers to Broadway’s Paramount Theater, singing tunes such as Rags to Riches and Sing You Sinners, and gaining new fans with his crossover version of Cold, Cold Heart, a Hank Williams country favorite.
Bennett said he reached a career “pinnacle” in his 30s when Frank Sinatra described him as “the best singer in the business.”
“That quote changed my whole life,” Bennett said in his memoir Tony Bennett: The Good Life. His idol’s praise, he said, was “probably the most generous act that one artist has ever done for another.”
Like Sinatra, Bennett built his career on live performances and recordings of hundreds of ballads comprising the so-called American Songbook, works by composers such as Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Harold Arlen and Richard Rogers.
‘Most Important’
He also relished any chance to sing jazz tunes, performing with Black artists from Count Basie and Duke Ellington to Nat King Cole. He loved jazz all his life and said improvisation and singing “in the moment is most important,” declaring he never sang a song the same way twice.
For all that, his favorite song wasn’t a jazz or show tune and was written by two unknowns. Scarcely promoted by his record label when he first sang it, the number brought Bennett his first Grammy.
He sang I Left My Heart in San Francisco at his first concert there, in January 1962, and it became the biggest record of his career. “I had big hits before but this song was off the map,” he said.
Later, after Bennett’s record label dropped him as his career stalled, San Franciscans claimed him “like an adopted son,” he said.
He would go on to mount an extraordinary comeback, collaborating with numerous, younger musical talents to connect with new generations of fans into his 90s.
Worst Memory
Anthony Dominick Benedetto was born Aug. 3, 1926, in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens, New York. He was the first member of his Italian-American family to be born in a hospital. His sickly father, a grocer, died when Tony was 10. His mother worked as a seamstress to support her three children.
In winter, the kitchen stove provided the only heat in the family’s four-room railroad flat above a candy store. Bennett said his worst memory was of his mother screaming in pain when a sewing-machine needle pierced her finger as she worked at home to supplement her meager pay.
He wanted to study music but failed to get into New York’s High School of Performing Arts, finding a place in the High School of Industrial Arts, where he perfected skills in painting, sketching and sculpture. He came to appreciate his time there when, years later, his paintings fetched thousands of dollars, with some ending up in museum collections. In 2009, to honor what would have been Ellington’s 110th birthday, Bennett donated a watercolor painting of the jazz great to the National Portrait Gallery in Washington.
At 16, Bennett dropped out of school to help support the family. Fired from his first job as an elevator operator, he worked at a laundry, at the Associated Press as a copyboy and as a singing waiter, until he was drafted into the Army in 1944.
War Service
He saw frontline action in Germany as World War II was ending. During the occupation, he was in a Special Services unit entertaining GIs when he and a Black soldier, a friend from high school, went to have a Thanksgiving Day meal together.
As they entered the mess hall, an officer saw Bennett and angrily told him the Army was still segregated. He demoted Corporal Bennett on the spot, transferring him to graves registration. Bennett eventually was reassigned to an Army radio station, where he sang numbers he would continue performing in civilian life.
After the war Bennett still had difficulty finding work as a singer. He studied sight reading and vocal technique and learned to imitate instruments rather than other singers, lest he sound like them.
He finally got a break when singer Pearl Bailey asked him to perform with her in a Greenwich Village club — and Bob Hope caught the show. The comedian told Bennett if he changed his stage name, Joe Bari, he’d put him on his show, then at the Paramount.
Columbia Contract
Soon after, the name Tony Bennett was in lights, and he was signed to a contract by Mitch Miller of Columbia Records. Miller liked Bennett’s rendition of Boulevard of Broken Dreams — “one of the few times that Mitch and I saw eye to eye on my repertoire,” Bennett remarked.
For years he fought Miller’s demands to record up-tempo novelty numbers. Bennett said their battles blinded him to the point where “they really had to tie me down” to record Rags to Riches, which became such a big hit that Martin Scorsese used it in the 1990 movie Goodfellas.
Bennett said he got through the Elvis Presley era “relatively unscathed.” In 1965, a telephone call from Harry Belafonte resulted in Bennett joining Martin Luther King Jr. on his famous march in Selma, Alabama, a notable event in a decade of upheaval.
A Rock Edict
Worse was in store at the record label. When attorney Clive Davis took over at Columbia, he issued an edict for all artists to record rock numbers. Columbia signed bands such as Paul Revere and the Raiders, Bennett said, and “I thought the world was losing its mind.”
The 1970s almost proved Bennett’s undoing after he moved to Los Angeles. There he found an endless round of drugs and partying.
“Cocaine flowed as freely as champagne, and soon I began joining in the festivities,” he said.
And so, along with the pot he smoked, Bennett’s career vanished in the mists of Hollywood. His second marriage was coming apart, the Internal Revenue Service was pursuing him for back taxes, and the Columbia label dropped him.
Bennett hit rock bottom in 1979, when he collapsed in his bathtub from drug use and had to be rushed to a hospital. The close call drew Bennett’s son Danny from New York. He took charge, brought his father back East and set him up in a New York apartment. He then went about reviving his dad’s career as well as his spirits.
Revived Career
As his manager, Danny made sure Tony sang songs he was comfortable with. Unlike in the 1960s, when he was told “to change my music in order for the kids to accept me,” Bennett said, he was “encouraged to be myself and the kids will come to me.”
And so it came to pass that Bennett performed with the likes of Elvis Costello and K.D. Lang, introducing a new generation of young listeners to the songs and jazz numbers he sang all his life.
The late-career boost that Bennett got by connecting with the MTV crowd elated him on several counts. First, it proved record companies erred trying to make him sing “contemporary” music in the 1970s that ill-suited him. And it showed how mistaken they were thinking young people wouldn’t enjoy the Cole Porter and Ellington melodies that Bennett had been singing all along.
In 1995, at 68, he won a Grammy Album of the Year award for Tony Bennett: MTV Unplugged. It was the best-selling album of his career, to that point.
Into the next century, Bennett recorded duets with musical legends including Elton John, Bono, Amy Winehouse, Aretha Franklin and John Mayer. He continued collecting Grammys for his work. He had a long and close collaboration with Lady Gaga, with whom he toured and recorded two albums.
In 2021, Bennett’s family announced that he had Alzheimer’s disease.
He was married three times and had four children.
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