Tony Bennett, a singer whose melodic clarity, jazz-influenced phrasing, audience-embracing persona and warm, deceptively simple interpretations of musical standards helped spread the American songbook around the world and won him generations of fans, died Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 96.
Bennett learned he had Alzheimer’s disease in 2016, his wife, Susan Benedetto, told AARP The Magazine in February 2021. But he continued to perform and record.
From his initial success as a jazzy crooner in the early 1950s, through his late-in-life duets with younger singers from a range of genres and generations — most notably Lady Gaga — he was an active promoter of both songwriting and entertaining as timeless, noble pursuits.
He reached the height of stardom in 1962 with a celebrated concert at Carnegie Hall and the release of his signature song, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”
“I wanted to sing the great songs, songs that I felt really mattered to people,” he said in “The Good Life” (1998), an autobiography written with Will Friedwald.
He won his first two Grammy Awards, for “San Francisco,” in 1963, and his last, for the album “Love for Sale,” with Lady Gaga, last year. Altogether there were 20 of them, including, in 2001, a lifetime achievement award. By some estimates, he sold more than 60 million records.
Anthony Dominick Benedetto was born Aug. 3, 1926, in the Queens borough of New York.
He had just begun to get paying work as a singer, using the stage name Joe Bari, when he was drafted.
He arrived in Europe toward the end of World War II, serving in Germany in the infantry. He spent time on the front lines and was among the troops who arrived to liberate the prisoners at the Landsberg concentration camp, a subcamp of Dachau.
After Germany surrendered, Bennett was part of the occupying forces, assigned to special services, where he ended up as a singer with Army bands.
He returned to New York in August 1946 and sang in nightclubs in Manhattan and Queens.
Bob Hope liked Joe Bari so much that he asked him to open for him at the Paramount Theater. He didn’t like the name Joe Bari, however, and christened the young singer Tony Bennett.
Producer Mitch Miller signed Bennett to Columbia Records in 1950.
By mid-1951, Bennett had his first No. 1 hit, “Because of You.” That same year, his version of the Hank Williams ballad “Cold, Cold Heart” also hit No. 1.
In the 1950s, Bennett toured for the first time, played Las Vegas for the first time and got married for the first time, to Patricia Beech. The marriage would flounder in the 1960s, but their two sons would end up playing roles in Bennett’s career: the older one, D’Andrea, known as Danny, became his father’s manager, and Daegal, known as Dae, became a music producer and recording engineer.
But as the 1960s proceeded and rock ‘n’ roll became dominant, Bennett’s popularity began to slip.
His second marriage, a tumultuous one to actress Sandra Grant, collapsed and he had begun using marijuana and cocaine heavily.
Bennett turned to his older son for help. Danny Bennett took over the management of his career.
As the century changed, he was once again touring, giving up to 200 performances a year, and recording prolifically.
In 2007 Bennett married a third time, to his longtime companion, Susan Crow.
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