Bennett Memoir Keeps Sunny Side Up

Toward the end of his recently published autobiography, Tony Bennett is discussing one of his latest albums, a tribute to Billie Holiday. “People often focus on the negative aspects of Billie’s short and tragic life,” he writes. “But I wanted to concentrate on the optimistic side of her legacy.”

No kidding. It’s the same approach he has taken to pretty much everything in this book, from the title--”The Good Life”--right on through. (Pocket Books, 299 pages including discography, $25. Co-written by Will Friedwald.)

It doesn’t always work. He brings up intriguing aspects of his life and career, but in his effort to ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive, he can leave the reader frustrated. He tells us, for instance, that “the underworld controlled just about every club and casino” in Vegas--and that’s about all he tells us. How did the mob make its presence felt among the musicians? How did he handle it?

Similarly, he drops a few hints that he smoked a few numbers and snorted a line now and then. But there’s nothing to prepare us for the revelation that he almost died of a cocaine overdose in the late ‘70s, which seems unbelievable as a result.

On the other hand, would you expect anything else from Tony Bennett? This is, after all, a man who thusly describes an uncle who kicked chairs out from under him and made him sleep on the floor: “Not a bad guy, [just] not particularly sensitive.”

The truth is that “The Good Life” is of a piece with the rest of Bennett’s work: music and painting that always has been more up--gentle and soothing, reassuring and reaffirming--than angry, probing or provocative.

Bennett’s great gift is that he is able to take us down the sunny side of the street--a side often eschewed by respected postwar artists, a side generally left to the Manilows and Kenny Gs--without coming off namby-pamby and dumb. There’s always been not just an essential decency, but a jazzman’s intelligence reflected in Bennett’s work, a depth and a style that inform this book as well, holes and all.

Plus, we get some great factoids:

* His parents were first cousins.

* He lost a job as an elevator operator because he “couldn’t figure out how to get the elevator to stop at the right place. People ended up having to crawl out between floors. I got fired the first day.”

* Anthony Dominick Benedetto made his first record as “Joe Bari,” a name he chose because his grandparents had come from Calabria in Italy. The record was “an Italian-style novelty called ‘Vieni Qui’ ” backed with George Gershwin’s “Fascinating Rhythm.” It went nowhere.

* He recorded “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” in one take on Jan. 23, 1962. Columbia released it as a flip side, hearing more commercial potential in Bennett’s recording of “Once Upon a Time,” a tune from a now-forgotten Broadway show called “All American.”

The book is packed with stories about Bennett’s fellow artists: Erroll Garner, Marlon Brando, Pearl Bailey (“One night when Pearl was dancing [on stage], this girl got behind her and started mimicking her dancing, trying to make a fool of her. So Pearl, without missing a beat, just turned around and knocked her out! Then she turned to the audience and said ‘That’s the end of the show, folks. I can’t top that!’ ”), Lenny Bruce, Joao Gilberto, Bobby Hackett, Paul McCartney, Orson Welles.

His favorites: Frank Sinatra (who taught him never to cross his legs while sitting on the bandstand “because it takes the crease out of your trousers”), Jimmy Durante and Louis Armstrong. Among today’s crop, he likes Elvis Costello and k.d. lang. He doesn’t name a favorite composer, but allows that he has a soft spot for Harold Arlen.

The person who had the most influence, though, well may have been his mother. She took in piecework when Tony was growing up, and “even though she got paid by the dress, she’d sometimes pick one out and throw it aside.

“When I asked her why she did that, she told me, ‘I only work on quality dresses.’ She wasn’t intentionally teaching me a lesson about integrity, but many years later, when producers and record companies tried to tell me what types of songs to record, in the back of my mind I could see my mother tossing those dresses over her shoulder. . . .”