Tony Bennett: Forget Me Not (Entertain Me Pictures, 1091 Pictures, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The 2022 documentary Tony Bennett: Forget Me Not was written and directed by Ramani Ramchaitar-Jackman, and it tells a good vest-pocket version of the life story of this remarkable singer and entertainer. I found the movie annoying in its sheer amount of stock footage, often purportedly representing events they couldn’t possibly have had access to film of, starting with a baby being pulled out of his mother’s womb. Ramchaitar-Jackman tries to make this off as footage of Tony Bennett’s actual birth, which of course it isn’t, and he uses this stratagem throughout this film, including a bit of stock footage of an amphibious landing in World War II to make it look like a battle in which Bennett was involved, which it isn’t. Bennett was drafted during the last stages of World War II and assigned to fill out a unit that had been decimated during the Battle of the Bulge, and while he arrived too late to see much in the way of combat he did participate in the liberation of at least one of the concentration camps, and as with everyone else who saw the results of the Nazis’ tyranny and genocide up close, it deeply affected him for the rest of his life. Though he was born Antonio Dominicci Benedetto in San Francisco in 1926, he eventually settled in New York after his parents broke up when he was 10, and it was in New York where he began his career as a singing waiter. After World War II he studied acting at a theatre school in New York and also made his first record in 1949 for a tiny label called Leslie, a duet with Pat Easton on a song called “Vieni Qui” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qq15sBf_FBE) backed with George Gershwin’s “Fascinating Rhythm,” both under the name “Joe Bari” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5f-e3Wajq4). Neither sounds much like the Tony Bennett we know and love from his later recordings, particularly the ones he made under Mitch Miller’s tutelage at Columbia, where he signed in 1951 and almost immediately had a huge hit with “Because of You.”

This 48-minute film offered a whirlwind view of Bennett’s career – he got his big break from Bob Hope, who picked Bennett to open for him at the Paramount Theatre and also gave him his stage name, simply “Anglicizing” his real one to “Tony Bennett.” (Where “Joe Bari” came from, I have no idea, though I’d heard of “Vieni Qui” from the book Simon Says by music critic George T. Simon, who co-wrote “Vieni Qui” and reported that Leslie’s pressings were so cheap his copy of the record had literally disintegrated.) Bennett kept his career going throughout the early 1950’s, and when rock ‘n’ roll became popular in the mid-1950’s his response was to break out into jazz. Though it’s oddly not mentioned in this documentary, Bennett had his biggest hit, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” in 1962 – an uncertain period in pop music in which death (Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, J. P. “Big Bopper” Richardson, Eddie Cochran), scandal (Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis), the church (Little Richard) or the draft (Elvis Presley) had decimated the ranks of the early rockers and there was still space for a pre-rock crooner to squeeze his way back to the top of the charts. (A decade earlier Tony Bennett had covered Hank Williams’ “Cold, Cold Heart” – therefore he’d already dipped his toes into the country music that, along with Black R&B, formed the basis of rock ‘n’ roll.) In the late 1960’s Bennett came under pressure from Clive Davis, newly appointed president of Columbia Records, to move in a more rock direction. Bennett recalled Davis making the ridiculous suggestion that he record a tribute album to Janis Joplin (though Janis herself had dipped her toes into Bennett-style repertoire, recording Gershwin’s “Summertime” for the Cheap Thrills album and the Rodgers and Hart “Little Girl Blue” for Kozmic Blues).

Davis’s recollection was that Bennett actually made an album called Something (after the George Harrison song stunningly recorded by The Beatles for the last album they made together, Abbey Road), which included rock ballads carefully arranged to suit Bennett’s voice. Davis was so pleased with that album he even wrote the liner notes personally, something he almost never did. Davis’s thinking was that older audiences wanted to hear the new songs, but toned down and with the voices of artists familiar to them; he’d already revitalized Andy Williams’s career with this approach and he thought he’d do the same for Bennett. Bennett fought him all the way and left Columbia for MGM Records, which put him on their jazz label, Verve. Later they dropped him and Bennett formed a label of his own, Improv, but he couldn’t find a major company willing to distribute it for him. Bennett made three albums with pianist Bill Evans for the Concord Jazz label in the late 1970’s, but as his career spiraled down he got hooked on cocaine and his sons Danny and Dae did what is now called an “intervention” to get him off drugs and point him towards a comeback. Danny Bennett took over as his dad’s manager and settled his back tax debts to the Internal Revenue Service. He also decided in the mid-1980’s to market Tony Bennett as a timeless artist whose commitment to the old songs marked him as an icon of quality. Danny Bennett negotiated a new contract for Tony with Columbia, and his first album under the new deal was called The Pursuit of Excellence, an indication of the sort of image his son was building for him.

The rest, as they say, is history; Tony Bennett became an icon of the timeless music of the “Great American Songbook” and the composers he revered: George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers and such lesser-known but still important names like Harry Warren. He made two Duets albums that differed from the ones Frank Sinatra had made in the early 1980’s in that, unlike Sinatra, Bennett insisted on actually having his duet partners in the same studio at the same time instead of allowing them to add their parts later electronically. The Duets albums included Amy Winehouse’s last recording – a duet with Bennett on Johnny Green’s classic “Body and Soul” – which ironically made Bennett the oldest artist ever to top the pop charts. Bennett’s last two albums were duets projects with Lady Gaga (true name: Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, and therefore like Bennett of Italian-American ancestry), Cheek to Cheek and Love for Sale, and he also recorded with k. d. lang for what amounted to a tribute album to Louis Armstrong, though it wasn’t advertised as such. Lady Gaga partnered superbly with Bennett because, even though she’d built her reputation on electronic dance music, she had a loose enough sense of rhythm to handle the standards repertoire and meet Bennett on his own turf. (Now that Bennett’s gone I’d love to see Lady Gaga do a standards album of her own.) Despite its ups and downs, Tony Bennett had a great career and my sense of loss at his passing is mitigated by the length of time he was around and the fact that he continued as a creative artist well past the time most people of his generation were either retired or dead.