When I was young, one of my uncles arrived in New York from his native Italy. He was so taken by the welcome he received that he sewed together an oversized flag that combined the American flag with various other flags from around the world, and he hung it outside his house. This small token of appreciation predated the United Nations, but he didn’t realize that it was against the law to deface the American flag. The police came to his house and threatened to arrest him if he didn’t take it down. My uncle didn’t speak English, so at first he was very confused. But the point was made to him loud and clear, so he removed it.
Even so, America really was the melting pot that it promised to be for new arrivals from other countries. In fact, the United States still represents a world without borders. This country’s diversity has inspired me to appreciate the fact that people everywhere have each other in common; we truly are all neighbors.
Ella Fitzgerald used to say something to me over and over that drove home this very point. With this incredible warmth in her eyes, Ella would say, “Tony, we’re all here . . .” What she meant by this statement was that on this little planet called Earth, we’re not Italians, we’re not Jewish, Christian, or Catholic; instead, we’re all here together. That we are all really citizens of the world. And to me, that completely sums it up. We only live a short time; only a brief ninety or a hundred years at most, and that really goes by quickly. In order to appreciate the gifts we’ve been given, we need to learn the beauty of just being alive, and of being good to one another. That’s a big lesson that many of us haven’t yet embraced. We need to start putting down the greed and the racism. People who think, I’ve got mine; the hell with everybody else, aren’t contributing anything to society. You have to think in a more all-encompassing way and say, “Is this good for all of us on the planet?” It’s amazing to me that so many people still don’t realize this. If the human race is going to survive, we need to figure out how to get along. We Americans live in such a great country; it’s the first place where people of every nationality and every religion were allowed to live together. That’s one reason why America is great; we have so many philosophies to draw from here, and therefore we have a lot more to work with than other countries do. We need to accentuate this more, both in our schools and in society.
On Thanksgiving in 1945, I was in Mannheim, Germany, as part of the occupying American Army. The whole place had been demolished during the war by our bombers. I was walking around and by an amazing coincidence, I ran into my old buddy Frank Smith, a fellow serviceman who had played drums in our group in high school. I couldn’t believe I’d run into Frank over there. I was so happy to see a familiar face from back home, after fighting on the front line and being surrounded by strangers for so long. Frank took me with him to a service at a Baptist church, and then because I was allowed to invite one guest for the army’s Thanksgiving dinner in the mess hall, I asked him to join me.
When we got to the hall, a red-faced officer came up to me in a fury and screamed, “Get your gear, you’re out of here! I don’t like the people you associate with.” “Are you serious?” I asked. “He’s my friend from school.” But the officer just said, “I don’t care where he’s from. Get out.” He took a razor from his pocket and cut my stripes from my shirt, threw them on the ground, and told me I was no longer a corporal; I was being demoted to a private. For a minute I didn’t comprehend why he was doing this, but then I realized it was because Frank was African American, and therefore he wasn’t allowed in the segregated mess hall.
This was just unbelievable to me, even though I knew that prejudice was common in the Army back then. At that time, African Americans had to have their own barracks, bars, and everything. The Army actually felt that it was better to fraternize with the Germans than it was to be friends with a black man from our own country! I hadn’t been brought up that way, so it was a shock when the officer treated us so badly. Not only did we not get our Thanksgiving dinner, I was then put on graves registration duty. This meant that I had to dig up the bodies of soldiers who hadn’t been properly buried on the battlefields, and rebury them in individual graves. It was the most sad and depressing job I’ve ever had to do.
That day is seared upon my memory; I’ve thought about it often. We were just two homesick kids glad to see a familiar face, but for the Army, the only thing that mattered was the color of our skin.
Luckily, after a few weeks on grave duty, through the efforts of a friend, Major Letkoff, I was able to get reassigned to the radio network in Wiesbaden. But that incident with Frank Smith shaped my opinions forever. I had grown up listening to brilliant African American artists such as Art Tatum, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Dinah Washington; when I got to know them later on, they all were kind and generous to a fault. So where was the rationale for such bigotry?
During the fifties, when I was starting out, I ran into many instances of racism when I worked with African American musicians. Even a genius like Nat King Cole was discriminated against. Once I went to see Nat perform in Miami, and I invited him to join my table afterward. He told me that he wasn’t allowed in the dining room, so I’d have to visit him backstage if I wanted to see him. That kind of Jim Crow law revolted me; I just didn’t understand it. But these restrictions were the order of the day.
Natalie Cole and I spoke recently about the fact that even though he was up against these bigoted attitudes, her father’s multimillion-dollar record sales enabled the record company to construct the whole building for Capitol Records. It’s literally known as “the House That Nat Built.” People were listening to his music all over America and loving it, but in certain places the man who made the music and who made a lot of people a lot of money wasn’t allowed to eat in the same dining room as those he performed for—an absolute travesty.
When the Americana Hotel opened in Miami in the mid-fifties, Duke Ellington and I were performing there, but Duke wasn’t allowed to come to the press party afterward. He and his band couldn’t stay at the hotel, either; they had to lodge in a run-down joint in another part of town.
Nat and Duke were brilliant human beings who gave the world some of the most beautiful music ever made, yet they were treated like second-class citizens. The whole thing made me furious. When Harry Belafonte called me in 1965 and asked me to join Martin Luther King’s civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, he described to me what had been happening in the South. “It’s genocide,” he told me. “They’re doing horrible things to black people; there’s great injustice.” It was so awful that it took me only a couple of minutes to say, “I’m coming with you.”
Harry told me that earlier that month, Dr. King and the organizers had tried to march from Selma to Montgomery in support of voting rights, and that they were planning a third march. Dr. King wanted some celebrities along to attract the public’s attention and to entertain the marchers. Among others who came out were Leonard Bernstein, Sammy Davis Jr., and Shelley Winters.
The march began the week of March 21, and the police, all white, were extremely hostile; it reminded me of the Army’s attitude when I tried to bring my friend Frank to Thanksgiving dinner. Violence was a daily reality in the civil rights era, and as we headed out from Selma, jazz singer Billy Eckstine and I were very frightened. Fortunately, Harry reassured everyone on the route and kept the marchers calm.
On the evening of the twenty-fourth, the march organizers put together a rally called “Stars for Freedom,” in which all the performers put on a show. I sang a few songs, as did Harry Belafonte; Sammy Davis Jr.; Peter, Paul, and Mary; Frankie Laine; and Nina Simone. No stage was around, so ironically a local mortician brought a bunch of wooden coffins with which they built a platform. It was surreal to perform on a stack of coffins, but we did what we had to.
On Thursday, March 25, twenty-five thousand people marched to the steps of the state capitol, where King delivered the speech “How Long, Not Long.” When the march was over, we were all held up in a “safe house,” and various volunteers drove people to the airport or back to their homes. When it came time for Billy Eckstine and me to head out, we gave up our seats to others. We later found out that the driver was assassinated by the Ku Klux Klan on her way back. She was Viola Liuzzo, a white mother of five from Detroit who had come to Alabama to give her support. It was a horrendous tragedy that saddened us no end.
But the physical danger didn’t keep droves of people from coming out to support the effort, and the entire country was forced to take note. I have always felt proud to have been part of such a historic event, one that helped to change society’s views of African Americans and their struggle for equality, in the South and elsewhere.
Aretha Franklin recently gave me a letter that acknowledged my role in the movement:
Hi Tony,
A note to say thank you for the most absolutely gorgeous flowers on both occasions, and to applaud your humanity in the civil rights movement with Dr. King in the 1960s. Looking forward to keeping the music playing together.
All the best,
Aretha
Her comments made me feel very proud.
I was determined to perform with only the top musicians wherever I went, regardless of race, creed, or color. That’s how I was brought up—to believe in the fundamental American principle that all people are created equal and should be treated as such. As hard as it is to fathom, I was the first white performer to sing with Count Bill Basie. I insisted on having him alongside me at the Copacabana in New York; prior to that, they didn’t allow black musicians to set foot inside. Later, when Basie and I played a show at the Philadelphia Academy of Music, we were on first and the audience went wild. Joe Williams was singing, and the Basie band was smoking—we “wiped out the theater and greased up the walls,” as Basie put it. On top of that, we received ten standing ovations.
After the show, Basie and I were out in the parking lot commenting on how it had gone. “What an audience; wasn’t that great?” This white guy came up to Basie, threw him his keys, and said, “Hey, get me my car, will you?” He assumed that Bill was the parking attendant. “Get your own car,” Bill replied. “I’ve been parking them all night.” Even faced with that kind of bigotry, he still kept his dignity and sense of humor.
When I did a series of concerts in the mid-seventies with Lena Horne, whom I adored, the only thing that clouded the good vibes was this kind of bigotry. Lena was such a class act, a great lady with an incredible work ethic. We sang Harold Arlen songs that had been arranged as duets for us, and later both Cary Grant and Fred Astaire separately told me that the concert with Lena was the best show they’d ever seen in their lives. We went all over the place doing that show, and I loved it. Arlen’s songs are great for a jazz singer like me; you can do them as they were written or with your own interpretation, and any treatment works fine. Harold always said he loved improvisation; he’d tell me to change a song the way I wanted to. As long as the audience was happy, he was fine with what you did. And Lena and I had a magnificent time doing them as duets.
During rehearsals, we saw our managers talking in the wings. “I know what they’re saying,” Lena said. “They’re going to tell us to walk offstage in different directions, so it won’t seem as if we’re leaving together.” And sure enough, that’s what they told us to do. We could perform together, but we couldn’t appear to be friends or to be hanging out.
It was shocking to me how much prejudice there was, even in Hollywood; blacks and whites just weren’t allowed to get along, which was so ridiculous. Thank goodness some progress has been made since those days. I don’t think anyone back then could imagine that we would ever have an African American president and first lady in the White House. That fact alone makes me proud to be an American, and happy that we as a country are truly becoming citizens of the world.
It’s funny; sometimes when people who are well-off ask me where I’m from and I say Astoria, they laugh at me because it’s so down compared to the big skyscrapers in Manhattan. That’s really another form of prejudice. But I secretly laugh back at them, because I know that the greatest part of New York City is Astoria, since it’s where the secretaries, the teachers, the writers, the promising actors and actresses and directors live. Before they become famous, many of them start out there—as do the firemen and the policemen; everyone who makes the whole city work. You name it, they run it—and they take great pride in doing things right. And I loved growing up there.
You’ll find any country that you’ve ever been to represented in New York City. It’s a fabulous cultural center. There’s no place like it anywhere else, because you have a cross section of the entire world right here.
I believe it was my upbringing in such a culturally diverse place that has allowed me to connect to audiences all around the world. The classic songs of the Great American Songbook unite us all, regardless of class, color, or citizenship, and by performing them for people in other countries, I’m able to build relations with audiences everywhere—and I do mean everywhere.
Recording the duets albums brought me to many locations around the world as well. It was a thrill to be back in London to record “Body and Soul” with Amy Winehouse. We recorded it at the famous Abbey Road Studios, where artists like the Beatles and the London Symphony Orchestra had done some of their best work. Amy had never been to the studio, and she loved the whole setup, as I did. When I went to record with Andrea Bocelli, I went to his home in Pisa. He was so gracious, and served a fantastic Italian meal for the whole crew. The entire process was an unforgettable journey.
But when I initially started touring internationally, I had some groundwork to do. When I first went to Rio de Janeiro, I wasn’t well known at all. So when I performed in the original Copacabana in Rio, a beautiful hotel right on the beach, I played to maybe fifteen people a night. Even though the audience was sparse, I knocked myself out to communicate to them, and they all stayed until my show was over. Every evening, despite the small crowd, I gave it 200 percent; and every night, there would be only ten or so people in the seats.
The funny thing is, over the years, I’ve run into hundreds of people who tell me that they saw me at the Copacabana doing those performances. I think word of mouth got out that something special happened at those shows, and others wanted to claim they were there, too. But they couldn’t have been, because those audiences were so tiny. Yet through the years it keeps building. Today I get rave reviews and packed crowds, and I love the Brazilian people—they’re warm and welcoming.
In 2007, the United Nations gave me its Citizen of the World Award, and I received the Martin Luther King Salute to Greatness Award for my efforts against discrimination. It was a proud moment for me. But perhaps one of the best moments was when Stevie Wonder presented me with the Billboard Century Award. “My friend Tony Bennett had been there for my people early on, earlier than most, and has stayed the course ever since,” Stevie said in presenting me with the award. “He has helped demand the social, economic, and civil rights of every American. I grew up hearing his music and his name in my household.” As much as anything, that made me feel like a true citizen of the world.
I strongly believe that we must dedicate our lives to world peace and to putting down hatred. All people want is to be let alone to live their lives, in a place where their children can grow up free of fear and tyranny. It’s the greatest gift that we can leave for future generations.
The Zen of Bennett
In reality, we are not Italian, Jewish, Christian, or Catholic; instead, we are all citizens of the world.
In order to appreciate the gifts we’ve been given, we need to learn the beauty of being alive, and of being good to one another.
Before we do something, we need to ask ourselves, Is this good for all of us on the planet?
Citizens of all nations need to figure out how to get along; it’s the only way the human race is going to survive.
If we can learn to embrace some of our differences and coexist, everyone on the planet will benefit.
