Our partnership caused a lot of raised eyebrows when we first got together. What could Tony Bennett, a guy who was always turned out in a suit and tie and often a tux, have in common with the woman who wore a meat dress (raw flank steak, specifically) to the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards?
Well from the first, Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta and I discovered that we actually have a lot in common. We love and respect the music we sing—and each other.
We both appeared at a gala in May 2011 for the Robin Hood Foundation, a fine group that works to fight poverty in the New York metro area. I knew who Lady Gaga was; my son and manager, Danny Bennett, had made sure that I saw her HBO special in performance at Madison Square Garden.
In that show Gaga sang an especially dazzling version of “Born This Way,” the number one single that she wrote with Jeppe Laursen, which has become a kind of anthem for many young gays (“Don’t be a drag,” she sings, “just be a queen . . . ”). At one point, Gaga dropped all the thumping percussion and electric synth sounds and just sang a cappella (remember, I do that with at least one song in all of my shows, too). It was gorgeous and gutsy, strong and soaring.
I saw Gaga’s superlative stagecraft, flash, and pyrotechnics. But I also heard a superb vocal artist at work who combined great musical skill with a depth of human feeling.
The night of the gala, Gaga sang “Orange Colored Sky,” a great Nat “King” Cole song written by Milton DeLugg and Willie Stein. I love that song. I admired Gaga’s taste in choosing a song that her fans might not know and expect, and I appreciated the style and artistry she brought to it.
I went backstage to meet her. Gaga was there with her parents, who seemed delighted that I had enjoyed their daughter’s performance so much. It was one of the first things I liked about Lady Gaga: of all the people that the hottest singer in show business could bring to the MTV awards, she had brought her parents.
With no preamble and not much more than a handshake I said to Gaga, “Let’s do an album together.” She said, “Okay.” My son Danny is a great producer, so his idea of getting me and Lady Gaga together for an album was brilliant. Within just a few days, Lady Gaga and I were in the music business together.
Gaga told me that jazz had been the first music she loved, growing up in an Italian family on the Upper West Side. She loved Billie Holiday in particular, especially the way she seemed to put all she had been through and all that she felt into the dusky shadings of her voice.
“You can tell that she’s really been through something,” Gaga once said. “I find that to be more exciting and interesting.”
But her favorite was probably Ella Fitzgerald, for her total mastery and ability to improvise.
Of course, Ella and Billie were a couple of my favorites, too.
Gaga grew up listening to music that her father loved (so did I), and most of that music was classic jazz and blues. (And her father’s rock albums. In fact, Gaga’s name came from “Radio Ga Ga,” Freddie Mercury’s 1984 song with Queen.)
Lady Gaga’s parents were Manhattan Internet entrepreneurs. They had more means than my family in Astoria, Queens, had had. But both Gaga’s mother and father were hard workers who put fourteen hours a day into supporting their family, just as my parents worked long hours in a grocery store and a dress factory to support ours.
Gaga started performing when she was a kid, at about the same age as I was when I sang when Mayor La Guardia opened the Triborough Bridge.
Gaga went to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and studied art and design, as well as music. I studied painting and music at New York’s School of Industrial Arts before World War II began and went to the American Theatre Wing school when I came home from the army.
I worked as a singing waiter. Gaga was a waitress and coat-check girl. We both know what it’s like to work hard, study hard, put your life and dreams out there, and take a chance. We’ve both tried to steer our performing lives by the advice that Mimi Speer, my old teacher at the American Theater Wing school, once gave me: “Don’t imitate another singer. You’ll just become a member of the chorus if you do.”
And of course no one is like Lady Gaga.
We began our musical association by recording “The Lady Is a Tramp,” the great Rodgers and Hart song we both love, at Avatar Studios in New York City. One of the first things you see about Gaga when you work together in the studio is her utter professionalism and thoughtfulness. She doesn’t just sweep in, like some other stars, oblivious to others. She stops to shake hands and talk to the engineers, the musicians, the office personnel, and the people who run out for bagels and coffee. She is that rare, huge talent who knows that you need to nurture and encourage collaboration to become a truly big star.
Gaga and I got better together as we went along. But from the first, there were sparks, banter, and a kind of effortless back-and-forth that inspired improvisation. It was fun, and it was electric.
We followed our single in 2014 with an ambitious project, Cheek to Cheek, an album rooted in jazz. It included the title track, Irving Berlin’s song, Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes,” Duke’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing,” and a haunting solo by Gaga of Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life.”
Lady Gaga told me she had first sung “Lush Life” when she was thirteen, with the Regis High School boys’ choir. Billy’s song came out of his own boredom and doubts about nightlife in “come what may places” after a lost romance. It is a beautifully intricate, emotionally nuanced song about love, loss, and the holes in your heart that never quite heal.
Nat “King” Cole and Billy Eckstine did the classic versions, I think. Sarah Vaughan, Blossom Dearie, Chet Baker, and Linda Ronstadt have done great ones, too. Gaga’s belongs at the top of that select chart.
“I didn’t know what the song was about when I first sang it,” she once said. “Now I know everything that song is about.”
At the time we recorded that song, Lady Gaga had already enjoyed enormous success. She had also discovered how that often comes with a lot of self-doubts and questions. There were people who pretended to be her friends but mostly wanted to attach themselves to her trajectory into the stars—and her money.
Gaga sang “Lush Life” beautifully and truly. Then she came into the control room and wept. I know that feeling. She had felt the song in the center of her soul and put all that she is and who she is into each line until she had given everything.
“Am I a mess, Tony?” she asked me over and over. “You are not a mess,” I kept telling her. “You are a sophisticated lady.”
Cheek to Cheek, by the way, debuted at the top of the Billboard 200 when it rolled out. It made Gaga the first woman artist of the decade to have three number one albums and me the oldest artist ever to hold the number one spot.
There is no mistaking the fact that the collaboration I’ve enjoyed with Lady Gaga has made me and the music to which I’ve devoted my artistic life appreciated by a whole new generation. They have kept me going past the age of ninety. And they have kept the music going on and on and on, into new generations.
But her friendship has also helped me make new discoveries in old songs and brought a fresh dimension to me in all ways. When we began to work together, I told her, “Just be yourself.” And as so often happens, you realize that the advice you give someone else is really meant for yourself. Gaga helped me appreciate the artistic choices I’ve made in my career: Strive for quality. Don’t settle for what’s cheap and easy. Don’t go for the number one hit—build a whole career.
We’ve toured all over the world together, and I always learn something new from the discoveries she makes in songs that by now we’ve done over and over. I sometimes look across the stage as we sing that lovely Jimmy Van Heusen song “But Beautiful” and think when we get to the lines “Beautiful to take a chance / And if you fall you fall,” that Lady Gaga lives that with each and every song she sings.
I was so touched at my ninetieth birthday party on August 3, 2016, when Gaga sang “Orange Colored Sky” to mark our first meeting, and then “I Left My Heart in San Francisco”—my signature song, but in her signature way.
We were being interviewed once, and I heard Gaga say that one of the things she’s learned from our partnership is that “You don’t have to fear growing older. In my generation, this is like at the center of everything, especially in celebrity culture: it’s all about staying young and staying perfect and staying youthful. . . . But Tony has remained the same, and there’s nothing hipper. There’s nothing hipper than being talented at something that you love, in having passion, and that is classic, and that is timeless.”
Did you catch that? I think Lady Gaga called me hip.
Central Park, New York
Still Life, Crow Landing