by Tony Bennett
It was now 1939, I was a teenager, and my mind was set on becoming a singer. Although I was passionate about music, painting and drawing had always been just as important to me. I amused myself during school by drawing caricatures of my teachers and classmates. Although this didn’t go over too well with the teachers, it made me quite popular with the kids. After school I spent hours drawing in the street with a piece of chalk, creating little masterpieces that got washed away with the next rainstorm or by someone’s garden hose.
My first art teacher, James MacWhinney, encouraged me to study painting. When I was twelve years old, a few days before Thanksgiving, I was outside creating another one of my “murals” with colored chalk, a big picture on the sidewalk of the Pilgrims and Indians. I saw a shadow fall slowly across the sidewalk. I looked up, and there was this big, handsome Irish guy standing above me, watching me draw.
He asked me what school I attended, and I told him P.S. 141. He said he was Mr. MacWhinney, the art teacher at my school, and told me he thought I was doing great work. As it turned out, he lived in my building, but I had never run into him before. Then he told me that he went out watercoloring every Saturday, and said if it was all right with my family, he would love to take me along and show me how it’s done. I couldn’t believe that someone was giving me so much encouragement! So I ran home right away and told my mom what had happened, and she gave me permission to go.
I loved our weekly outings. For me these afternoon sessions were pure magic, transporting me to another place. Each week we went someplace different, and we’d work side by side. During the week I would finish the painting I’d started on the weekend, and he’d critique my work the next time we met.
James MacWhinney has been a huge influence on everything I’ve done. His wife, Julie, is a beautiful, intelligent lady. She taught English at our high school, and together the two of them directed my cultural education. They took me on day trips into Manhattan, where I went to the opera, visited museums, and saw my first Broadway musical, Carmen Jones. It was all so new and fascinating to me, a tremendous revelation. Later, I was able to join his class in school, and I was so enthusiastic about it all that I actually helped him clean up afterward! All the other kids ran out the door when they heard the bell, but I hung around and washed brushes and cleaned up everyone else’s mess. I’d do anything I could just for the opportunity to soak up more training.
Even today, when I put brush to paper to do a watercolor, I think of those glorious days. It was the first time I learned how important it is to be honest with yourself in order to do good work. I believe that one must always step back from one’s work, try to be as objective as possible, and be willing to do the work needed to make it better. It’s a great lesson to learn. In fact, years later I was fortunate enough to become friends with the great Fred Astaire, and he had the same philosophy. He told me that when he worked on a show and felt that it was perfect, that’s when he’d pull out fifteen minutes. Now that’s perfectionism!
James and I still keep in touch. The last time I saw him he compared the two of us to the Renaissance painter Cimabue and his pupil Giotto, who eventually outshone his master. One day Cimabue discovered Giotto drawing on the sidewalk, and asked him to make a circle. Giotto drew it perfectly, freehand, without the use of a compass. Cimabue was amazed and immediately took him on as a student.
I’m still flattered by the comparison today.
So at thirteen years old I was actively pursuing painting and performing, and getting advice about both from some very experienced professionals, but boy, was I an amateur! Early on I made so many mistakes that sometimes I can’t believe I’ve come as far as I have. Years later George Burns reinforced something I’d always known. He said that it was very important for there to be little clubs where performers could have “the opportunity to get lousy before they get better,” that it takes at least ten years to learn one’s craft. The truth is, it took me much longer than that. In fact, even now at the age of seventy-two, I’m still learning.
When you’re first starting out, you do a lot of things wrong, but that’s how you learn. If you want to succeed, you’ll need a lot of courage and a lot of faith, but eventually it will happen. You need to meet opportunity with preparedness. Many, many people told me that I’d never make it. And there certainly were lots of auditions where I didn’t get the job. This happens to all performers. Young people just starting out have to work long and hard and have the faith that eventually they’ll master their craft.
Above all else, they must never lose heart.
By the end of the thirties I got a chance to get a little theatrical training. There was an academy in Astoria run by a British woman named Mae Homer. Several well-known performers came out of that school—the movie star Nancy Kelly and the movie comic Eddie Bracken. It was primarily a dance school, but she taught all the rudiments of show business. I studied with her for a while, and I learned all the basics of performing in front of an audience, including how to tap dance while singing! I really loved her.
Mae helped me get a singing gig that I’ll never forget. It was September, 1939. There was a special club for British officers in New York, basically their equivalent of the USO, and Mae Homer had some kind of connection to the club and arranged for me to perform there. I sang “There’ll Always Be an England.” It was a new song then, written at the start of the war by Ross Parker and Hughie Charles. I got up on stage, and all these British officers were knocked out that this little Italian-American kid knew that song. It went over great—they even gave me an ovation.
When I was fourteen, the time came for me to go to high school. I’d decided to pursue painting as a career, although I never retired my dream of becoming a singer. I just wanted to focus seriously on painting for a while and get some good solid training. The public school system in New York offered, and still does, the opportunity for students to go to specialized schools rather than the regular-curriculum, regionalized schools one would normally attend. I tried to get into the High School for the Performing Arts, the school made famous years later by the hit movie Fame. But the requirements were stringent, and I couldn’t get in. I was at a loss as to what to do next when my boyhood buddy Rudy DeHarak suggested I try to get into the High School of Industrial Arts (now known as Art and Design), which was on Seventy-ninth Street near the Metropolitan Museum. This was a new school, where the emphasis was on commercial art, and Rudy had been in one of the very first graduating classes.
I met Rudy around 1938. My family had moved once again to what I always refer to as “the projects,” but what was actually a complex called the Metropolitan Apartments, residential developments created by The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company as a side investment. We were able to move into a four-room apartment at a very affordable rent. The buildings were modern and spacious for the time, and each had a courtyard with landscaped gardens. It was quite a change from what we were used to. Rudy came from California originally and had moved to New York with his sisters, who were dancers on Broadway. We lived on the second floor and they lived on the ground floor.
Rudy was a great kid and encouraged me in my love of both art and music. He became a dear friend of my family’s, and even came to think of my mom as his “other mother.” We both went to P.S. 141, although Rudy was a few grades ahead of me. But we hung out together because of our mutual love of jazz and drawing. In fact, Rudy took up the saxophone as a kid. I remember it well because in the summertime, when everybody had their windows wide open, the whole building could hear Rudy blowing away, learning his scales. Eventually, he became quite a proficient sax player.
Rudy’s career became sort of the mirror image of mine: he had great success as a graphic artist and loves to make music on the side. His graphic design has been exhibited internationally and is in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Rudy lives way up in Maine now, but he and I still get together from time to time. He’s the oldest friend I have—he’s been a part of the family for sixt
y years, and whenever we get in touch, we just naturally pick up where we left off.
Taking Rudy’s advice, I applied to the High School of Industrial Arts, and I got in. I traveled into the city every day to my new school, and the experience was a real eye-opener for me. I really enjoyed the school, but I always had this little pang of regret that I didn’t get into Performing Arts until fifty years later when I met Everett Raymond Kinstler, one of America’s most renowned portrait artists. I was in my sixties at the time, and he came up to me at a dinner we were both attending and said, “Your name is Anthony Benedetto, you went to the Industrial Arts school, you’re sixty-three years old, and your birthday is August third, 1926.” I was a bit startled by this, but it turns out that we attended Industrial Arts at the same time. The evening that we met he told me that he had been given a scholarship at Performing Arts, On his first day of class the instructor had told him, “I want you to paint what you feel” He told the teacher, “I’m only fourteen years old; I don’t have a clue what I’m supposed be feeling. What I need is technique.” So he closed his book, walked out of that school forever, and switched to the High School of Industrial Arts, where he received the technical art education he was looking for. We have since become the best of friends. In fact, he has become a mentor and has opened up a whole new world of painting for me.
Everett really turned my head around and made me appreciate the education I received. Industrial Arts gave kids the chance to develop all sorts of skills so that they would be suited for a wide variety of careers. They taught everything: oils, watercolors, silk screen, photography, advertising, sketching, sculpting, painting—even how to make stained-glass windows.
Whenever I have a creative dilemma, I always refer back to what I was taught at Industrial Arts. All art requires technique. The great drummer Louis Bellson taught me, “If you want to understand free form, you must first learn form before you can be truly free to experiment. You can’t successfully break the rules until you learn what rules you’re breaking.”
Sometimes I can be working on a painting or drawing for hours and I think I’m not accomplishing anything at all. Other times I get so focused that I can nail it instantly. I remember when I started at Industrial Arts I did a sketch of my grandfather sleeping. It was perfect! I doubt that even sixty years later with all my training I could do it any better. That proves to me there’s always a push and pull with the creative process. That’s why I learned never to give up, even if it feels as if it’s not happening the first time around. Keep going, keep plowing through it. It’s all a matter of skill.
As I’ve said, although I was studying commercial art in school, I was still determined to pursue music. I had a wonderfull teacher named Mr. Sondberg, who told me he liked the way I sang and encouraged me to sing as much as possible. Eventually three friends from school and I put together our own vocal quartet, which included my good friend Frank Smith. Frank and I practiced singing all the time. He kept time by pounding on his desk, and he got so into it that his fingers would bleed from pounding so hard—that’s how much he loved to make music.
Another great thing about Industrial Arts was that it gave me the opportunity to come into Manhattan every day. It was a very liberal school, and sometimes the teacher would give me four days’ worth of work and tell me, “We don’t have to see you for the rest of the week, but you must come back with four days’ worth of paintings.” So, as long as I did my work, I had the freedom to catch all the big band shows I could.
It was at one of these shows that I discovered Frank Sinatra, my favorite singer. I first heard him at the Paramount Theater, down in Times Square, where all the biggest shows were put on; every major star who came to New York played there. I was one of the original Sinatra groupies. Frank had just left Harry James’s band to sing with Tommy Dorsey. He was big in Dorsey’s band, and then, of course, he just broke out. I used to stay for seven shows a day just to watch him and the band over and over again. Just imagine; in those days you had Tommy Dorsey’s band with Jo Stafford, the Pied Pipers, Buddy Rich, Ziggy Elman, plus a dance team and a great juggler or a comic. All that plus Frank Sinatra and a movie for seventy-five cents! (To force a bit of a turnover, the management would sometimes make us kids check our lunchbags, knowing we couldn’t hold out hungry!)
The whole Sinatra saga really took off from there. Even in the Dorsey days, there was the most incredible furor over Frank. The band’s press agent, for instance, would spread the word around that Sinatra was going to be in the Gaiety Record Shop on Broadway with Buddy Rich at such and such a time, and he would also arrange for news photographers to be there. The place could hold only about seventy-five people, but thousands of kids would try to cram themselves into that little store! Broadway looked like it does on New Year’s Eve. No one had ever seen anything like that before, and it was certain to get Frank and the band a two-page spread in the Daily News.
I feel Sinatra exemplifies the best music that ever came out of the United States. Not only was he a great interpreter, but he had a magic voice. I’ve mentioned that Bing Crosby had really invented intimate singing, but Sinatra took it a step further, in a way that no one could have imagined. He communicated precisely what he was feeling at any moment. He knocked down the wall between performer and audience, inviting listeners inside his mind. Before Sinatra, no one had ever told such vivid and beautiful stories through song.
I encountered another amazing musician during my Industrial Arts years. A girl I went to school with was really sweet on me and her dad had some kind of connection to the legendary Copacabana nightclub in Manhattan, One day she got me in to hear Jimmy Durante. Now, that was an unbelievable act—Clayton, Jackson, and Durante. They never stopped moving, jumping, and running around. It was part of Durante’s shtick to yell out “Stop the music! Stop the music!” every once in a while, but the tempo never slowed and the music never stopped. After the show, we went backstage and saw the famous “schnozzola” himself, standing in the doorway in such a way that we could only see his nose. It cracked us up. Then he walked in and entertained us with his charm and wit.
Many years later I got to know Jimmy and even shared a bill with him. I’ll never forget the things he told me. He said that back when he was first starting out, all the Broadway theaters were really on the Great White Way, Broadway itself, and the stars—Will Rogers, Fanny Brice, Al Jolson—and the shows themselves—The Ziegfeld Follies and Earl Carroll’s Vanities, those big, gaudy musicals of the golden era—-were always upbeat. But later, the “legit” theaters moved to the side streets, and, Jimmy said, “That’s when everything went psychological!” referring to dark, brooding dramas à la Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, Jimmy also used to brag about how all the great songwriting teams had composed music for him: “Rodgers and Hart, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter and Cole Porter.” He then explained that he dropped Cole Porter’s name twice because “he wrote both the words and the music.”
I loved Jimmy. He was another reason why I wanted to go into show business—I wanted to entertain people the way he did. Nothing could be better than that. My three favorite performers to this day are Frank Sinatra, Jimmy Durante, and Louis Armstrong. They always gave a hundred percent of themselves.
Unfortunately, I didn’t stay at Industrial Arts long enough to graduate. We moved again in the early forties to a larger and more affordable apartment that was on the first floor of the house that my grandparents originally bought when they first arrived in Astoria. What goes around, comes around, as they say. It was a five-room apartment. My sister shared a room with my mom, and my brother and I had our own bedroom. In addition we had a kitchen, dining room, and a living room. We lived in that house for the rest of the time we were in Astoria. My grandfather lived upstairs with my aunts, but he died not long after we moved in at the age of seventy-two. My mom was working harder than ever to make ends meet, and I felt I just had to find a job to help out. I was forced to drop out of school, one of the biggest regrets
of my life.
So at sixteen I hit the pavement looking for employment. Not surprisingly, because of my intensive art studies, I didn’t have the practical skills I needed to make a living. I once worked as an elevator operator, but I couldn’t figure out how to get the elevator to stop at the right place. People ended up having to crawl out between floors. Of course, I got fired the first day. I lasted a few days longer working for a laundry that did uniforms for the navy, but eventually I couldn’t take it. I did manage to hold down a job as a copy boy for the Associated Press. All day long I ran around with papers. But my bosses complained that I wasn’t moving fast enough. Since I studied drawing, what I really wanted was to get a look at the art department and see the cartoonists at work. But my bosses refused to let me; it was as if they were imitating the way movies depicted hard-boiled journalists and showing a kid any sort of kindness like that would have blown their image.
I started doing what they used to call “amateur shows” in clubs all over Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. Anyone could get up and perform, and at the end of the night, the audience chose the act they liked best. The winner got paid a percentage of the box office and it was a good way to earn money as a teenager. I’d enter as many of these shows as I could, and I was lucky enough to win many of them. They were fun. There was one contestant who wore a sailor’s uniform, although he wasn’t a sailor, and he had a phony cast on his leg. He’d come out on stage and make everyone think he was an injured serviceman. To top it all off, he’d sing “My Mother’s Eyes.” When he was through, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Whenever he showed up, I knew I didn’t have a chance. I’d see him and think, “God, there goes my week’s salary.” He’d win every time. It really broke me up.
