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David Evanier is a critically acclaimed and award-winning author of both nonfiction and fiction. He was formerly senior editor of the Paris Review, and his work has appeared in Best American Short Stories. He is a recipient of the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction and the McGinnis-Ritchie Short Fiction Award. Evanier has written for the New York Times (including "Paper Cuts," its music blog), the New York Times Magazine, the Village Voice, the New Republic, the Nation, and many other publications. He has received residence fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Wurlitzer Foundation, is a full-time member of the Writers Room where he wrote this book, and has taught at UCLA. His other books include Making the Wiseguys Weep: The Jimmy Roselli Story, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Roman Candle: The Life of Bobby Darin.

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The first complete biography of singing legend Tony Bennett
 
"David Evanier's All the Things You Are is a work of profound empathy and musical understanding. Tony Bennett lives in these pages as a matchlessly joyous singer whose brilliance refracts from a deep and subtle soul."
--James Kaplan, author of Frank: The Voice
 
"Much as Tony Bennett's music is appreciated, so will be this insightful book about the man behind the music."
--Gay Talese
 
"Like the American songbook, Tony Bennett is indestructible. He has become the greatest champion of classic songs and thanks to his interpretation of them, they will go on and on. All the Things You Are is a stylishly written book that mirrors its subject. David Evanier has great knowledge and depth of understanding of Tony Bennett and his legacy. This is a significant work of art."
--Michael Feinstein
 
"The great thing about David Evanier's biography--beyond its reliable research, nuanced evaluations, and stylistic eloquence--is that by looking closer at a great artist than the artist might have wished, it uncovers a man even more worthy of our admiration than we knew: a valiant defender of civil rights as well as the classic American songbook and the singer's right to enhance it by his own light."
--Gary Giddins, author of Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams and Warning Shadows

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In All the Things You Are, award-winning author David Evanier offers an intimate and unvarnished portrait of one of the most beloved singers of all time. Among America's greatest entertainers, from Garland to Sinatra, Tony Bennett alone is still here and at the top of his game. He has led an amazing life. At age ten, he stood beside Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia at the dedication of New York City's Triboro Bridge and, leading the throng of people across it, sang "Marching Along Together." He fought in World War II and helped liberate a Nazi concentration camp. He was discovered by Pearl Bailey and Bob Hope. In the 1960s, he marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama, and several of his paintings are in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. And, of course, he sings, too.
 
Evanier probes deeply into the life and career of a genuine living legend. Drawing upon interviews with scores of Tony's friends, family members, and fellow musicians, as well as experts on the last fifty years of music, he vividly captures the musical history of an era. He brings deep insight into a man who has stayed perennially young because of his devotion to his art and to humanity. Friends speak affectionately of how Tony would rebuke them when they said that Tony was a better singer than his idol, Frank Sinatra. One friend tells how the singer's brief unannounced appearances at small music clubs lifted the hearts of mourning New Yorkers after 9/11. Another describes Tony's repeated visits to listen to and sing with his former music teacher during the last year of the teacher's life.
 
Evanier recounts Tony's impoverished yet happy childhood in Depression-era Astoria, Queens, and re-creates the heady early years of his career, as he produced one great hit record after another. He examines Tony's bleakest years, during the 1970s, when the singer struggled with addiction, a difficult second marriage, and evaporating interest in the Great American Songbook he loved to sing. Evanier also reveals the pivotal role Tony's children played in helping him relaunch his career by becoming popular music's ambassador to new generations of listeners. Today he is a musical statesman, America's troubadour, style model, mentor, and the unmatched interpreter of the greatest American composers of popular music, from Gershwin to Berlin to Rodgers and Hart and Cole Porter.
 
All the Things You Are is a story that includes some of the foremost personalities of the past sixty years: Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant, Duke Ellington, Bob Hope, Ray Charles, Count Basie, Jimmy Durante, Billie Holiday, Stevie Wonder, Diana Krall, k.d. lang, and many more.
 
Complete with candid assessments of Tony Bennett's life and career by the likes of legendary radio personality Jonathan Schwartz and the Wall Street Journal's Terry Teachout, All the Things You Are is a masterful, groundbreaking biography and must reading for anyone who has heard that voice and fallen in love with the artist behind it.

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All the Things You Are

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

I was a poor kid," Tony Bennett told music writers David Hajdu and Roy Hemming in Discovering Great Singers of Classic Pop, "like everybody in New York in the Depression, but there was great hope, skyscrapers were going up, and everybody felt we were going toward something great. It was a unique era, and it all still lives in the music that came out of that time."

Recalling that period in an interview with David Frost in 1967, Bennett also defined it as a period of sharing and egalitarianism: "It was the Depression, a time when we were all very hungry. There was a great camaraderie. Everybody was helping one another out." There is a rueful longing in his words, a sense that something was lost in the periods of affluence that came later.

That sense of hopefulness infused the early years of Tony Bennett, who came from a warm and loving family Duke Ellington described as "wonderful optimists."

Tony Bennett's paternal grandfather, Giovanni Benedetto, grew up in the village of Podargoni, above Reggio Calabria. The family were poor farmers, producing figs, olive oil, and wine grapes. His mother's family, the Suracis, also farmed in Calabria. Neither side of the family could read or write.

In the 1890s a widespread blight caused thousands of farmers, among them the Benedettos and the Suracis, to leave Italy. Bennett's family was part of the mass immigration of southern and eastern Europeans to the United States between 1880 and 1920. Eighty percent of that immigration came from southern Italy—the Mezzogiorno—and Bennett's family came from one of its provinces, Calabria. The south was generally looked upon with contempt by other Italians as an area of shiftless criminal elements, while the north was perceived as comprised of enlightened, conscientious, hard-working citizens. As the north of Italy reached a high level of industrialization, improving the life of the peasants, the south continued to suffer from poor wages, high taxes, widespread unemployment, usury, deforestation, and soil erosion. Drinking water was scarce; cholera and malaria epidemics were widespread.

There was a severe economic depression in 1887, followed by volcanic eruptions of Vesuvius and Etna that completely destroyed many villages. More than two million Italian men, women, and children would immigrate to the United States, primarily from the south, and by the 1920s there was an Italian population of five million in America. The passage by steerage across the Atlantic was horrific. The immigrants huddled together, lying in piles of blankets and rags. They arrived at Ellis Island exhausted and drained, but still hopeful.

In America they faced discrimination and prejudice, as they were viewed as an inferior, dark-skinned people. There were fierce debates about their racial classification. Italian American musicians such as violinists Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang (born Salvatore Massaro), writes Patrick Burke in his book Come In and Hear the Truth: Jazz and Race on 52nd Street, were widely regarded as "in-between people," those who ranked above African and Asian Americans but below whites in the hierarchy. The National Origins Quota system, which was instituted in 1924, decreed that "Italians were nonwhite with respect to immigration restrictions but were white for purposes of naturalization." This stigma persisted for many years. "Italian-Americans such as [singing star] Louis Prima were still perceived as racially indeterminate by many Americans in the 1930s," wrote Burke.

"The Americans," wrote Napoleone Colajanni in 1909 in his book Gli italiani negli Stati Uniti (Italians in the United States), "consider the Italians as unclean, small foreigners who play the accordion, operate fruit stands, sweep the streets, work in the mines or tunnels, on the railroad or as bricklayers." A large majority of Italian Americans were confined to a very low rung of the economic ladder.

Three thousand unskilled Italian laborers in New York State alone toiled in work camps for mining, quarrying, railroad, and lumbering crews, facing nightmarish conditions. Michael La Sorte wrote in La Merica that "the work camp immigrants came close to becoming the new American slaves of the post–Civil War era. Workers were held as prisoners in some camps; the only means of freedom was to escape. They had no protection of any national jurisdiction; only the laws of the camp applied. Living and working conditions were among the most primitive and oppressive that any immigrant group endured in America during those years."

In downtown New York City, Mulberry Street, the first and largest of the country's Italian enclaves and the destination of the Benedettos and the Suracis when they came to America, was described by Jacob Riis in his classic 1890 study How the Other Half Lives: By day, he wrote, "it was a purgatory of unrelieved squalor," and at night "an inferno tenanted by the very dregs of humanity where the new arrivals lived in damp basements, leaky garrets, clammy cellars, outhouses and stables converted into dwellings." The Italian, he wrote, "comes in at the bottom and he stays there." The windowless railroad tenements were cold, dirty, and dark. Most had no hot water. None had bathtubs or electricity.

Outside the ghetto, Italians faced deeply embittering prejudice and opprobrium. "A day did not pass that the Italian was not vilified in one manner or another," wrote Michael La Sorte. "The Americans laughed at his speech, his clothes, his customs, and where and how he lived. Such treatment caused Italians to be wary of all Americans." To many Americans, Italians were guineas, wops, dukes, dagos, tallies, macaronis, or spaghetti benders. In his classic study of Italian American history Blood of My Blood, Richard Gambino wrote of a typical raid in Chicago in 1909 when 194 Italian Americans were arrested. "The police charged en masse into Little Italy and collared anyone who appeared to be suspicious," wrote Gambino. "When the authorities were unable to produce any link whatsoever between the prisoners and crimes, the police reluctantly released all 194 men. In many cities these tactics designed to keep the Italian immigrants in line created a state of open hostility between police and Italian-Americans."

In the face of such discrimination, Italian American families such as Tony's slowly, determinedly, with character, grace, fortitude, culture—and always music—set about creating new lives of dignity and honor.

Tony Bennett's maternal grandparents were the first of his relatives to travel to the United States, in January 1899. His grandmother was one month pregnant with his mother, Anna Suraci. The ship entered New York Harbor after three weeks crossing the Atlantic. The family went to a five-story tenement building (still standing) at 139 Mulberry Street (near Mott and Hester streets) in New York's Little Italy. Tony's mother was born the following September.

Most of the Benedetto family arrived in the early 1900s. In 1906 the family sent for Tony Bennett's paternal grandmother and father. His father and grandmother sailed for America on a steamship with Italian immigrants from the south of Naples on April 2, 1906. Two days later a volcano erupted from Mount Vesuvius south of Naples. A huge tsunami rolled toward the ship, but tragedy...