Tony Bennett, the legendary American singer who has died at the age of 96, might have been expected to have had a keen rivalry with Frank Sinatra: the 20th century’s other great crooner. After all, although Sinatra was over a decade Bennett’s senior, the two men were at their professional peak at the same time, in the Fifties and Sixties,competingfor gigs, exposure and even record sales.
Yet in an industry so often beset by animosity and bad feeling between its most famous stars, the relationship between Bennett and Sinatra was a rare friendship that encompassed mutual professional respect, great warmth and a willingness to extol the other’s virtues. As Bennett wrote in Vanity Fair in 2009, “Frank Sinatra was my best friend.”
When Bennett was growing up in Long Island in the Thirties, he became aware of the then-19-year-old Sinatra when he was singing with the Hoboken Four, a group who had won a talent contest called Major Bowes’s Amateur Hour. As the then-11-year-old Bennett tuned in, he was impressed by the youthful Sinatra’s self-assurance; as Bowes boomed “Who will speak for the group?”, Sinatra swiftly replied “I will. I’m Frankie. We’re looking for jobs – how ’bout it? Everyone that’s ever heard us liked us.” Both Bowes and Bennett were amused by the young man’s show of bravado, but it was swiftly justified. By the end of the Thirties, he was a big deal. As Bennett recalled: “When I would see Frank at the Paramount in Manhattan, the streets were so crowded with people hoping to get into his shows that it looked like New Year’s Eve in Times Square, every day.”
When Bennett, by then aged 26, released his first studio album, Because of You, in 1952, Sinatra had already had a meteoric career but was in the midst of a severe slump, caused by financial woes, the death of his publicist and his marital difficulties. Yet shortly after Bennett had an enormous hit with his album’s title track, which went to the top of the charts, Sinatra had his own great success with his role in the war film From Here to Eternity – for which he won an Oscar – and he never looked back. Bennett was forging a career in his idol’s shadow, recording acclaimed albums such as 1957’s The Beat of My Heart and his best-known song, 1962’s I Left My Heart in San Francisco, but it seemed impossible that he could ever emulate Sinatra’s towering success. One man was an icon; the other a well-known and talented singer.
Yet Bennett had also come to Sinatra’s attention, and the two men first met when Bennett was finally playing at the ParamountTheatrehimself, after selling two million records. A trepidatious Bennett asked Sinatra for advice, and the older man – who he had been warned could be “very tough” - settled his nerves, after greeting him by saying “What’s going on, kid?” As Bennett later recalled, “he said that it was a good thing that I was nervous as that showed I cared, and the audience would sense that as well and they would root for you.” Sinatraended by saying “Just stay with great songs.” Bennett called this “great advice, which I’ve stuck to, and insisted on, and it’s really helped me survive.”
If he had any doubt that the imprimatur was being handed down to him by the man who was known, admiringly, as “the Chairman of the Board”, it would be settled by Sinatra’s declaration to Life magazine in April 1965, when asked about which artists he admired.He replied:“For my money Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business. [He] gets across what the composer had in mind, and probably a little more.”
He subsequently doubled down when he introduced Bennett on stage, saying “Tony’s gonna come out now and he’s gonna tear the seats outta this place for you. He’s my man, this cat. He’s the greatest singer in the world today, this man, Mr Tony Bennett! I said it publicly in the paper and I’m gonna say it again, he’s the greatest thing in the world today.” Bennett later said of this generouspraise: “I like to think that what he heard in my singing was the same honesty that I, and millions of others, found in his.”
Although Bennett was never a member of the so-called Rat Pack with other intimates of Sinatra,whichincluded Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Junior, on the grounds that his schedule would never permit him to take part, he remained an aficionado of all of the group. “All the Rat Pack, Sammy Davis Junior, Dean Martin, and Frank – they all had the training,”he said.
Yet it was Sinatra he reserved the highest praise for, saying: “He was just the very best of all the singers.” This was repaid in spades by Ol’ Blue Eyes, both professionally and personally. On one occasion, while performing on the TV show The Main Event, Sinatra, knowing that Bennett’s dying mother would be watching, announced that “Tony Bennett is my favourite guy in the whole world.” As Bennett recalled, “My mother’s face lit up like a Christmas tree – this image will stay with me as long as I live. That was the kind of small thing he would do that would make such a big difference.”
It was inevitable, given the mutual admiration and eventual friendship forged between the two men, that they would seek to perform together. They had a high-profile collaborationon Sinatra’s 1977 TV series Sinatra and Friends, during which they sang a duet of Sinatra’s My Kind of Town. Bennett was by this stage in a career slump of his own, mired in drug addiction, dumped by his record label and about to have a near-fatal cocaine overdose. It was testament to Sinatra’s loyalty – and foresight – to invite Bennett on to his show, in the belief that he would soon be restored to success once again.
He was correct. By the beginning of the Nineties, Bennett was once again highly regarded, and it was due acknowledgement of his rehabilitated status that he would be invited to duet with Sinatra on his 1993 album Duets, singing – perhaps inevitably, and certainly appropriately – New York, New York with his friend. He had already paid homage to Sinatra the previous year by recording an album of his music – Perfectly Frank – which had won a Grammy, and the two men were now firmly linked together in public imagination, the two great crooners of the century together.
Although the album attracted criticism for the parts being recorded virtually, so the participants did not sing together, it still represented the side of Sinatra that was perhaps little acknowledged, in his lifetime and subsequently: an unerring generosity and care towards those he cared about. As Bennett wrote in a Time magazine tribute in 2015, “Loyalty: That one word overrides anything else you need to know about Sinatra. And of course it worked both ways with him. If he loved someone, he loved them for life. It didn’t matter if you were the queen of England or a waiter.”
Sinatra was as generous towards Bennett in private as he was in public, too. One evening in the 1970s, when Bennett was performing at Caesar’s Palace, he was telephoned by Sinatra’s saxophonist Vido Musso, and invited to an intimate dinner, along with his pianist Ralph Sharon, at a small restaurant off the Vegas strip. As Bennett later recalled about the evening, “It was just the four of us, and the meal and conversation were memorable. Frank reflected on his life … the ups and downs … the amazing path he’d travelled from that evening with the Hoboken Four in 1935 to becoming “King” of the entertainment world.”
Atthe end, Sinatra asked Bennett to sing, accompanied by Sharon, and as the singer wrote in Vanity Fair, “In this small room, late in the evening, with Frank Sinatra sitting only a couple feet away, and inspired by our time together that night, I sang a Jerome Kern song. It was a moment I will never forget: “Yesterdays / Yesterdays / Days I knew as sweet / Sequestered days.… Sad am I / Glad am I / For today I’m dreaming / Of yesterdays.”
Sinatra’s health faded before his death from a heart attack in 1998, and he was inactive for several years before then, but Bennett sang at his funeral, as well as declaring “[Sinatra] will never die — he’ll be like [Enrico] Caruso.” There was also a more practical aspect to his admiration, too. In 1999, Bennett and his wife Susan came up with the idea of founding an institution in New York that would honour Sinatra, combining academic education with tuition in song, dance and acting, amongst other things. The Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, as it was called, eventually opened in Astoria, Queens in 2001, funded by the non-profit organisation Exploring the Arts. Appropriately, it was Bennett who opened the school; yet another gesture of homage to a man who had inspired and praised him.
Bennett continued to pay homage to his friend, mentor and colleague for decades after. “Sinatra conquered every aspect of his world, the entertainment world,”he noted.“He was the two masks of the theatre—the comedy, the tragedy. Underneath it all, he was a very, very sensitive, nice person.”
Yet even as Bennett praised his mentor, he must have been aware that much the same could have been said of him. His death, at a remarkable age, brings to a close one of the greatest legacies in American music. And it also, finally, brings down the curtain on a wonderful friendship between two remarkable men, who have brought untold joy to millions for decades.
