On a hot night in New York in August 2021, on his 95th birthday, singer Tony Bennett performed what will surely be remembered as the most extraordinary concert of his career.
To the delight of an adoring crowd, he delivered his biggest hit, I Left My Heart In San Francisco, and powered immaculately through standards such as New York, New York and Fly Me To The Moon.
He also duetted with Lady Gaga, whom he saluted with delight when she came on stage at the Radio City Music Hall.
For a 95-year-old to undertake a pitch-perfect concert of this scale and length was remarkable enough. But by then, Bennett had been suffering from Alzheimer’s for five years and his short-term memory loss was severe.
According to family, there were occasional moments of clarity but his memory of events, people and places had largely vanished. He barely recognised everyday objects.
Yet, given the cue for a tune, he sang with peerless musicality, as if he were in the prime of his youth.
His wife Susan said simply: ‘He became himself. He just turned on. It was like a light switch.’
After performing The Lady Is A Tramp with Lady Gaga in 2011, he encouraged the pop star to see herself in a new light
Yesterday, it was announced that Bennett had died aged 96.
That concert in 2021 was surely a fitting conclusion to a record-breaking career that saw Bennett and his ‘cool’ rediscovered successively by generation after generation.
This through-the-ages appeal was perhaps most completely demonstrated by the story of his romance with Susan, his third wife.
Her mother Marion happened to have been a ‘Tonymaniac’ in the 1950s — one of the swooning teenage fans reduced to screams by the crooner back then, when he would sing lovelorn ballads such as Because Of You.
After Susan was born in 1966, she inherited her mother’s passion for the singer and became the head of Bennett’s local fan club. She met her idol backstage at one of his concerts when she was only 19 years old — he was 59 — and despite the age gap they were married in 2007.
Bennett said: ‘I can’t say that we didn’t notice the 40-year age difference when we met, but we barely notice it now. We are compatible in so many ways and share the same interests. Susan is a woman with a wise, mature character and has brought balance and contentment to my life.
‘Her goodness has helped me think straight, live well and, I’m quite certain, live longer.’
A 1994 live session with MTV resulted in one of the biggest-selling albums of his career, MTV Unplugged, which was followed by duets with everyone from Amy Winehouse to Sting, Queen Latifah and Elvis Costello
In later life his contentment was palpable, as was his passion for good works and charitable ventures. He was sometimes nicknamed ‘Tony Benefit’ as a result.
He founded a charity and also created the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, named in honour of his idol, in Tony’s home borough of Queens in 2001.
But his career was not simply a long series of successes. There were lows, too, most notably with the advent of The Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the Sixties, which swept him and his jazz repertoire out of vogue. Reduced to performing in Vegas supper clubs and heavily in debt, at his lowest ebb he was addicted to cocaine, too. After a near-fatal overdose, he begged his two sons for help — and they managed him, engineering a comeback beyond his wildest dreams.
A 1994 live session with MTV resulted in one of the biggest-selling albums of his career, MTV Unplugged, which was followed by duets with everyone from Amy Winehouse to Sting, Queen Latifah and Elvis Costello. The New York Times wrote: ‘Tony Bennett has not just bridged the generation gap, he has demolished it.’
The grandson of Italian immigrants, he was born Anthony Dominick Benedetto and grew up poor in Queens, New York. His father died from congestive heart failure when Tony was ten and his mother worked as a seamstress to support Bennett and his two siblings.
Every Sunday the extended Benedetto family would gather to share food and perform. The aunts and uncles would clap in time and the children would sing.
Likened since the start of his career to his friend and mentor Frank Sinatra (left), Bennett first tried to distance himself, but eventually followed much of the same path
Bennett said: ‘It was a warm and wonderful feeling. I realised, this is natural, the way it’s supposed to be. There was never a touch of loneliness, never a thought of what’s going to happen to me?
‘It’s funny that, in the middle of deep poverty, it was the warmest time of my life.’ At 16 he left school and worked as a copy boy and singing waiter to help support his family. In 1944, aged 18, he was drafted into the U.S. army and shipped to the front line as World War II drew to a close.
He said he was bullied for his Italian heritage by some fellow GIs. He was among those who liberated a concentration camp in Landsberg, near Dachau.
Back in America, he studied the expressive bel canto singing techniques used by opera singers, and launched himself as a performer with the stage name Joe Bari.
His habit of ‘conversational’ improvising drew attention, and his break came when Broadway singer Pearl Bailey asked him to perform with her at the Village Inn in Greenwich Village.
Superstar Bob Hope dropped by and loved his style but not his name, which he felt wasn’t elegant enough. It was Hope who chose the name Tony Bennett.
Signed to Columbia Records, he had huge commercial success with the hits Because Of You, Blue Velvet and Stranger In Paradise. He did seven shows a day at the Paramount Theatre in New York at the height of his success. In 1956, NBC hired him to front a Saturday night television variety show.
Icon: Bennett was still singing at his piano just days before his death, his family has revealed, and the final song he performed was his first number one hit, Because of You
His first album, Cloud 7, had a jazz tinge and the second, The Beat Of My Heart, delved farther into the genre.
He then released Basie Swings, Bennett Sings with the Count Basie orchestra.
Bennett was flying. He had further hits with Chicago, I’ve Got The World On A String and in 1962 the song that became his signature, I Left My Heart In San Francisco.
To his delight, he gained the respect and friendship of Frank Sinatra, who said in 1965: ‘For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business. He excites me when I watch him. He moves me.
‘He’s the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more.’
They first met at the Paramount Theatre in New York, and Sinatra helped him with stage fright.
‘He taught me that the audience are your friends, they come to see you,’ said Bennett.
Although the two men stayed close until Sinatra’s death in 1998, Bennett was never in Sinatra’s ‘Rat Pack’ which consisted of Sinatra himself, Sammy Davis Jr, Dean Martin, Joey Bishop and Peter Lawford and was notorious for partying and performing around the clock. Bennett demurred: ‘I had my singing and my painting, and with the hours they kept — whoa! — it’s just as well I wasn’t in that scene.’
At the peak of this early success, he married Patricia Beech. And he was quite a catch — 2,000 female fans dressed in black in mock mourning reportedly gathered outside the ceremony in 1952 at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan.
The couple had sons Danny in 1954 and Daegal in 1955.
But The Beatles, and the pop explosion that followed them, came close to killing his career. And Bennett’s professional decline helped to polish off the marriage, too — he and Patricia separated in 1965. It was a time of change: his label, Columbia, wanted him to do rock music. The result was Tony Sings The Great Hits Of Today in 1970, including Beatles covers. Legend has it that he vomited the first time he heard the record. He compared his distress at being asked to sing contemporary pop music to his seamstress mother having to make a cheap dress to order.
He left Columbia and set up his own label releasing jazz albums — but they didn’t sell.
By then, he was married to actress Sandra Grant, with whom he had two daughters, Joanna and Antonia, but that union was also failing. Meanwhile, he was struggling with an addiction to cocaine, which ‘flowed as freely as champagne’ at the Vegas clubs where he was scraping a living. His label folded, his mother died and the taxman came for his home. In 1979 Bennett passed out in a running bath and was saved from drowning by Sandra.
Starring role: Following his diagnosis, Bennett continued performing and even released a new album with his close friend and collaborator Lady Gaga in September 2021
Tributes flooded in for the music legend after his publicist Sylvia Weiner revealed he died in his hometown of New York, just days before his 97th birthday
He wrote about the near-death experience in his 2007 memoir, The Good Life: ‘A golden light enveloped me in a warm glow. It was quite peaceful; in fact, I had the sense that I was about to embark on a very compelling journey,’ he said.
‘But suddenly I was jolted out of the vision. The tub was overflowing and Sandra was standing above me. She’d heard the water running for too long, and when she came in I wasn’t breathing. She pounded on my chest and literally brought me back to life.’
He asked sons Danny and Daegal for help, telling them: ‘I’m lost here. It seems like people don’t want to hear the music I make.’
Danny became his manager, putting his father on a budget and moving him to a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. He put an end to the Vegas shows and got him signed, eventually, to Columbia again.
Danny worked on introducing his father to a younger audience, via small shows in colleges and a cameo on The Simpsons.
His first album, The Art Of Excellence, was a success in 1986 but the turning point came in 1994 with that Unplugged session for MTV. The resulting album won a Grammy award.
The album made enough money to buy Bennett a huge apartment overlooking Central Park and heralded a renaissance which turned out to last far longer than his original career.
Danny said: ‘We didn’t make it cool to like Tony Bennett. We just put him in places that were cool to be.’
Singers Celine Dion and Tony Bennett pose backstage during a tribute concert to Sinatra in Las Vegas in 2015
Dean Martin (left) appears with singer Tony Bennett on Martin’s show circa 1965
Throughout his sensational reinvention and the many duets and collaborations that followed, the rule was always that he would sing with anyone but it would have to be his music.
Bennett remarked: ‘I don’t want to minimise financial security but when you can finally be yourself, that’s the height of success. Hank Williams, he was himself. Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney — they were themselves.’
He unlocked aspects of artists they didn’t realise they had. After performing The Lady Is A Tramp with Lady Gaga in 2011, he encouraged the pop star to see herself in a new light.
‘The fact that Tony sees me as a natural-born jazz singer is still something that I haven’t gotten over,’ she said.
Their 2014 album of standards, Cheek To Cheek, was a No 1 hit. The follow-up, Love For Sale, was recorded in sessions between 2018 and 2020, by which point he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
In a documentary released alongside the album, Gaga was seen sobbing as he sang in the studio, with Bennett replying uncertainly to her prompts about their previous recording history.
She confided that for the past few years he would call her ‘sweetheart’ when they met in the studio, apparently unsure of her name.
But on that night in New York in 2021 when she walked on stage, he cried out: ‘Wow! Lady Gaga.’
She said: ‘I had to keep it together, because we had a sold-out show and I had a job to do. But I’ll tell you, when I walked out on that stage and he said “Lady Gaga”, my friend saw me and it was very special.’
It was, indeed, an enchanting moment, and one perfectly befitting the end of a career that was full of magic.
