There are so many wonderful things to say about my profession. The people I meet; the events I’ve experienced; the museums; the concerts, all have afforded me the opportunity to keep learning, and to keep growing into the person I strive to be. But there is a very tragic side to the entertainment business, and it can’t be ignored. I’ve known some of the best in the business who have been swallowed up by the pressure to perform at their peak all the time, while being under harsh constant public scrutiny. There are many pitfalls and hazards along the way; if you aren’t careful, they can sneak up on you, grab hold, and never let go.
The life of an entertainer might seem glamorous, and it has its moments—but it isn’t always that way. Although many aspects of life as an entertainer are very exciting, there is also a lot of downtime traveling and waiting to hit the stage. “Hurry up and wait” is a phrase that I like to throw around. The pressure is always on to hurry up and get to where you are going, but by the time you get there, you end up waiting for what seems like intolerable amounts of time. Cary Grant cited boredom as a major reason why I should avoid the movie business and stick to singing when I asked him for his advice on my future in film. It was also the reason why he retired from his screen career. As I mentioned earlier, he told me that he spent half of his life in trailers on a studio lot and on location. “Tony, that’s no life at all,” he added. At a certain point, he just left it all behind and put his energies into enjoying himself.
Unfortunately it’s when that boredom sets in that many entertainers turn to drugs or alcohol to fill up the time. They take pills to stay up, and then pills to go to sleep. It can be very easy to slip into this pattern and extremely difficult to get out of it. There have been times throughout my life that I fell victim to drugs, but fortunately I had the wherewithal to come to my senses. I am forever grateful that I did. I stay healthy, work out, try to learn something new every day, and never get bored. But many of my dear friends weren’t as lucky.
Noted film producer and manager Jack Rollins, who worked as Woody Allen’s manager and was my manager for a brief time in the seventies, told me that the comedian Lenny Bruce “sinned against his talent.” (That sentence changed my life. From that moment on, I stopped taking all drugs and got myself back in top shape.) What Jack was talking about was the fact that Bruce ruined his life and career by taking drugs. Rollins’s statement about sinning against one’s talent really resonated with me because I’ve had several good friends who were addicted. One was the legendary Bill Evans, who is considered by many to be the most influential postwar jazz pianist. Bill and I put out two records in the seventies, and as I described earlier, it was some of the best work I’d ever done.
I first met Bill in 1962, when I sang with Dave Brubeck at a White House concert. Bill had played with the Miles Davis Sextet and later had his own trio. He was the best-known jazz pianist in the world, so I was excited about the idea of working with him.
Bill and I really hit it off. We didn’t want anyone to distract us when we were recording, so we had just one engineer and Bill’s manager with us in the studio. I would suggest a tune, Bill would find a key, and we’d work it out together. The experience was so intense; we did nine songs in the first three days. I told the engineer not to wait for us to do a take; just to keep the tape running all the time, so we didn’t miss anything—but he said he would run out of tape if he did that. To this day, I wished we had recorded all the run-throughs. Later on, Bill said that working with me was one of the prime experiences of his life, which meant quite a lot to me.
The sad thing was, Bill was addicted to heroin. He said to me, “It’s the worst thing that ever happened to me. I need to shoot up just to feel okay.” He was a genius, and yet it was so hard for him to beat that stuff. He always told me, “I wish I would have knocked out the first person who stuck a needle in my arm.” He needed to have a shot just to feel normal. It was such a pity that he never could get over the habit. Yet even in the throes of his addiction, no one else has ever played piano like that. He was so good that when he played with a symphony, he sounded better than the entire orchestra.
Right before Bill died, he called me from a little town near Akron, Ohio, where he was working. “Tony, I want to tell you one thing: just go with truth and beauty, and forget everything else,” he told me. “Just do that.” Ever since then, truth and beauty have been the essence of what it’s all about for me.
Judy Garland was another close friend who never had a chance. She was incredibly talented, and such a beautiful person. Judy grew up in the film studio, signing with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as a young teenager. They had her cranking out a movie every six weeks; the pressure was intense, and they started pumping her with pills at a very early age. She was also exposed to the underbelly of the business, which meant that she had to grow up pretty quickly. On top of that, she was very insecure about her looks. Everything was managed for her, and most of her money was ripped off in the typical Hollywood style, leaving her with massive debts that became impossible for her to handle. Unfortunately, she died at only forty-seven years of age. To me, she was the most intelligent person in Hollywood.
More recently, one person I wish I’d been able to help was Amy Winehouse. Amy had thanked me for my influence in the liner notes of her first album, long before we’d even met. I also gave Amy her first Grammy Award when she won for Best New Artist in 2008. She came to three of my shows when I was in London—two at Royal Albert Hall, and one in Camden—and I had a chance to meet her and her family face-to-face. Later, she told me that seeing me at Albert Hall those evenings were two of the best nights of her and her father’s life. Later that year I invited her to sing with me on my second duets record. I was thrilled when she agreed, and we decided that she would perform “Body and Soul” with me. Sadly, it wound up being the last song she ever recorded.
Amy said that “Body and Soul” was her father Mitch’s favorite song in all the world. When Mitch heard what song we would be singing and asked Amy if she knew it, she told him, “Of course I know it; I’m your daughter.” It’s a great classic by Johnny Greene, and she was singing true jazz on the day we did it. Amy told me that she first began with jazz guitar and that she learned to sing by listening to jazz artists.
For the most part, contemporary musicians have listened to rock all their lives, but then along came Amy, who had such an innate sense and feeling for jazz.
When Amy came to record with me, she was a bit nervous at first because she wanted to get everything exactly right. She told me that she wasn’t a natural-born performer, and that she got quite shy onstage. To relax her a bit, I mentioned Dinah Washington, and when Amy told me she was her favorite singer of all time, I told her that Dinah had been a good friend of mine. Amy was excited to hear that and asked me to tell her all about her.
I told her that Dinah used to come in to the entertainment director’s office at Caesars Palace in Vegas without even having a booking; just with two suitcases in her hands. She’d come in and put the luggage down and say, “I’m here, boss.” He’d tell her, “All right, go to work,” and she’d stay as long as she wanted.
Dinah would go out and sing, and the club would be jammed. It was just word of mouth; no publicity or anything. She would stay up until ten o’clock the next morning, and then she’d ask, “What’s everyone going to bed for?” After I had told her these stories, Amy commented on the fact that Dinah died so young, before age forty, and at the time we touched lightly on the fact that Dinah had had a rough life.
Amy was truly one of the best artists I’ve ever known. She was entirely sober, focused, and professional the day we recorded “Body and Soul.” She was also a very spontaneous singer; she knew how to be in the moment. I sensed that in every note she sang, and I was knocked out by her voice; she was such a talent.
Everybody in Britain was rooting for Amy. She’d had a tough time with alcohol and substance abuse. I knew she had managed to get clean, but I was going to try to talk to her about it, since it’s so easy to slip back into bad things. She seemed very impressed with me, so I was going to tell her to keep a clear head and slow down.
Unfortunately, I never got a chance to do that. I was going to have her on the show with me when I did the Palladium for my eighty-fifth birthday in London. When she died, four months to the day after our recording date, she was just twenty-seven. I was on the road, and when Danny called me and told me, I started crying; I couldn’t believe it. After we recorded, I had told the BBC in London, “I want to talk to that girl because if she doesn’t keep clean, it’s going to kill her.” That’s the last thing I told them. She was a little angel; Amy was born to sing to us.
Billie Holiday was another great artist who succumbed to drug addiction. I had gotten to see her play with Duke many years earlier, and she was such an inspiration to me that eventually I dedicated a tribute album to her, called Bennett on Holiday. So many people only knew about the sad aspects of Billie’s life, but on the record, I focused on the more upbeat songs such as “What a Little Moonlight Can Do” and “Laughing at Life.” Bobby Tucker, Billie’s pianist for some time, helped me choose the songs for the record, which also wound up winning a Grammy.
People like Dinah, Bill, Judy, Amy, Billie, and Whitney Houston all had a touch of genius in them, and yet they were hooked. The world lost a lot of great music when each of them died.
The Zen of Bennett
To take drugs is to sin against one’s talent.
Go with truth and beauty, and forget everything else.
