The Good Life by Tony Bennett

Irish waiters there who taught me all the great standards right on the spot. I really cut my teeth as a performer at that job.
    One night I ran into this wonderful old-time booking agent, a Danny Rose kind of a character. He was a chubby little guy. He invited me down to his office every once in a while, and when I arrived, the first thing I saw was the back of his fedora. He’d have one phone on each ear, and he’d be saying to one guy, “Kid, will you take fifteen dollars?” and then he’d say to the club owner on the other phone, “The kid says he’ll do it for fifteen dollars.” He got me a spot in a Paramus, New Jersey, club called the Piccadilly. This was the first time I used the stage name “Joe Bari.”
    I had taken a stage name because in those days performers believed that it was important to have a snappy, “eight-by-ten glossy” kind of a name that was easy to remember. I had been told that Anthony Dominick Benedetto, or even just Anthony Benedetto, was too long and sounded too ethnic. I had come up with the last name “Bari” because it was short and it was the name of both a province and city in Italy, as well as an anagram of the last part of my grandparents’ birthplace, Calabria. And to my ears “Joe” sounded pretty American.
    Earle Warren, the bandleader at the Piccadilly, had been with Count Basie for many years, playing alto saxophone and singing in a sweet tenor voice. Since this was one of my first jobs, I was extremely nervous, but Earle calmed me down. Hesaid, “You’re going to be all right, kid.” And I was. The whole experience was a big adventure for me, and with Earle’s help, I got an early taste of the fabulous things that were in store for me in the future.

    In 1939 Germany invaded Poland, In the years that followed, while I was busy going to school and setting my artistic career in motion, the newspapers and radio were filled with talk of Nazis, separationists, Lend-Lease, preparedness, and Hitler: words that were ever-present but had not fully permeated our consciousness, The war in Europe was escalating, but its consequences were not fully understood. We were just getting used to the idea of “The New Deal,” and President Roosevelt was leading our country out of the depths of the Depression. Then one day, while my family was returning home from one of our traditional Sunday family get-togethers, we heard the newsboys in the street shouting, “Extra! Extra!” The big news was that some place we’d never heard of—Pearl Harbor—had been attacked by the Japanese. The next day we all sat around the radio along with millions of other Americans and listened intently while our president passionately declared December 7, 1941 “... a date which will live in infamy.”
    One minute it was a peaceful Sunday afternoon, and the next we were at war.

C HAPTER F OUR

    I was fifteen years old in 1941, and war was about the last thing on my mind. Like most kids, I was interested in my own world: music, drawing, baseball, roller-skating, and hockey. The war seemed very far away. But once Pearl Harbor was attacked, it wasn’t long before I saw my friends and relatives being drafted and sent away.
    My brother John, who was three years older than me, was drafted into the air force in 1942 and stationed in Blackpool, England. Of course, we were all worried about him and anxiously awaited his letters and any news we could get about what was happening over there. Fortunately, he was never wounded. But soon it was 1944 and the war was still going strong. Things in Europe had reached a crisis point. We all realized that Hitler had to be stopped and that every available man was needed. I turned eighteen that August, and on November second, I received my draft notice. Soon both my mother’s boys would see combat.
    I went down to the induction center and stood in line with a bunch of other eighteen-year-olds, wondering what was going to happen to me. When my name was called, I went up to