BENNETT, Tony

(b. 3 August 1926 in Long Island City, New York), singer who, after an earlier career as a successful pop singles artist in the 1950s, reestablished himself in the 1960s as a masterful balladeer and concert performer, producing a series of highly regarded and commercially successful albums that flew in the face of the dominant rock music of the era.

Bennett was born Anthony Dominick Benedetto, the second son and third child of John Benedetto, a grocer, and Anna Suraci, a homemaker who later became a seamstress. He began singing in amateur contests as a teenager, worked as a singing waiter, and began to get jobs in local clubs. Bennett attended but did not graduate from the High School of Industrial Arts in New York City.

Turning eighteen during World War II, Bennett joined the U.S. Army and spent two years in the infantry, seeing combat in Europe. After returning to the United States he studied at the American Theatre Wing and came in second to Rosemary Clooney on Arthur Godfrey's talent show. In 1949, while appearing with the singer Pearl Bailey in Greenwich Village, he was spotted by the entertainer Bob Hope, who put him into his show and suggested the stage name of Tony Bennett.

In 1950 Bennett signed a contract with Columbia Records. The following year he scored his first hit when "Because of You" reached number one on the pop charts in September. It was succeeded at the top of the charts by his next single, a cover of Hank Williams's "Cold, Cold Heart." More hits followed before Bennett returned to number one in November 1953 with "Rags to Riches," followed by "Stranger in Paradise" in early 1954. With the rise of rock 'n' roll at mid-decade, musical tastes changed, and there was less of a market for the kind of big-voiced pop tenor represented by Bennett and others. He responded by moving more toward jazz and standards and began performing in nightclubs, where he was accompanied by the pianist Ralph Sharon. As he made the transition, his record sales fell, but he eventually found a whole new audience.

Bennett married Patricia Beech, with whom he had two children, on 12 February 1952. They divorced in 1971, and he married Sandra Grant on 29 December of that year. That marriage, which also produced two children, likewise ended in divorce, in 1984.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s Bennett released several impressive albums, including In Person!, recorded with Count Basie and His Orchestra, in 1959, and Tony Bennett Sings a String of Harold Arlen in 1960, neither of which reached the charts. It was at this point that Sharon showed him "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," a song written in 1954 by Douglass Cross and George Cory. Bennett recorded it in January 1962, and Columbia released it as a single. Coming from an artist whose career on the charts had seemed to be over, it took a long time to catch on, and even then succeeded across the country on a regional basis, achieving only a top twenty ranking, even though it remained on the charts for almost nine months. Meanwhile, the I Left My Heart in San Francisco LP became a gold-selling top five hit, and Tony Bennett at Carnegie Hall, a live double album also containing the song, reached the top forty. Bennett won Grammy Awards for record of the year and best solo vocal performance for the single.

Coming more than a decade after Bennett's initial success, "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" not only gave his career a second wind but also pushed it to a higher level. He was restored to commercial success on records, quickly scoring two more top-forty singles, "I Wanna Be Around" and "The Good Life," as well as the top-five LP I Wanna Be Around, and he was achieving this success with high-quality material. The arrival of the Beatles in February 1964 signaled another change in the direction of popular music, but Bennett at first continued to score with top-forty singles such as "Who Can I Turn To (When Nobody Needs Me)," from the musical The Roar of the Greasepaint, The Smell of the Crowd; and "If I Ruled the World," from the musical Pickwick, and such top-twenty LPs as The Many Moods of Tony and The Movie Song Album.

In 1965 Bennett temporarily split with Sharon and attempted to launch a movie career. But The Oscar, a universally panned flop released in 1966, turned out to be his only job as an actor. By 1967 the major record labels, recognizing the increased popularity of rock music, began to neglect classic pop artists such as Bennett. At Columbia Records company president Clive Davis encouraged the label's roster of pop singers to record contemporary material written by younger musicians. By 1969 Bennett was recording albums such as I've Gotta Be Me and Tony Sings the Great Hits of Today, which featured songs by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Jimmy Webb, and John Lennon and Paul McCartney. They did not restore his commercial fortunes, however, and in the early 1970s he parted ways with Columbia. At first he signed to MGM Records, then founded his own label, Improv. When it foundered, he stopped recording, although he continued to tour successfully during the rest of the 1970s and into the 1980s.

In 1986, managed by his son Danny Bennett, Bennett re-signed to Columbia and issued his first album in nine years, The Art of Excellence. By now his cheery demeanor, classy appearance, and continuing affection for pop standards were able to attract a whole new audience and launch a third stage of his lengthy career. Perfectly Frank, a tribute album to Frank Sinatra released in 1992, went gold, as did the following year's Steppin' Out, a tribute to Fred Astaire. In 1994 Bennett appeared on MTV's Unplugged series with Elvis Costello and k. d. lang, and the resulting platinum recording won the Grammy for album of the year. In 2001 Bennett toured the country with lang and celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday by releasing a duets album, Playin' with My Friends: Bennett Sings the Blues.

In a sense, Bennett in the 1960s can be thought of as a throwback to an earlier time, given that the main trend in popular music was toward rock, with which he had no affinity. In fact, however, he achieved even greater renown during the decade than he had in the 1950s; he continued to find contemporary songs that benefited from his musical approach; and his commitment to quality allowed him to maintain his audience and, eventually, attract a new one not yet born or in its infancy in the 1960s.

Bennett told his own story in The Good Life (1998), written with Will Friedwald. Tony Jasper, Tony Bennett (1984), is a reasonable account of his life, although it misses his late renaissance. Whitney Baillett's excellent profile of Bennett, first published in The New Yorker, is reprinted in his book American Singers (1988). The author's own biographical article, "Tony Bennett: FortyYears of 'Pure American Music,'" appeared in Goldmine (10 Jan. 1992).

William Ruhlmann