Tony Bennett ∑ Still a bankable star at age 89,
Bennett is heading up a monster lineup for the CBS special Sinatra 100—An All-Star Grammy Concert, which was recorded December 2 at Encore Theater at Wynn Las Vegas and will air December 6. The night’s array of stars includes Celine Dion, Harry Connick Jr., Lady Gaga, Garth Brooks, Trisha Yearwood, Alicia Keys, Carrie Underwood, John Legend, Adam Levine and Usher. Bennett is the singular voice among them who was a contempo-
rary of Sinatra. He remembers when it all started. “When I got out of the service, after World War II, Frank Sinatra was just getting big. He’d left the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra and went out on his own,” Bennett says. “He was 12 years older than I was, and I was on the jazz scene. He was already one of the biggest singers in the world at the time, a beautiful singer, and I was always kind of following him. I loved the way he sang, and I idolized him from the beginning.” Bennett hit commercial success in his own recording career in the early ’50s, with the singles “Because of You”
> timeless voices Sinatra and Bennett in 1980 in Reno. “I loved the way he sang,” Bennett says.
photograph by associated press
and “Cold, Cold Heart” hitting 1 million sales. “I was given the opportunity to be a summer replacement guest on [television’s] Perry Como Show, a very big opportunity at the time, and Sinatra was at [Times Square’s] Paramount Theatre, and I had the chance to meet him then,” Bennett says. “He had me come up to his dressing room before the show, and I was very nervous about this TV appearance. It was a very small stage; they had very few guest artists at the time.” Sinatra took a look at the young singer and said, “What is it, kid?” “I told him, ‘I am very nervous about this audience,’” Bennett recalls. “I didn’t know what to expect, even though I’d had a couple of million-sellers. But he said, ‘The audience is your friend. They are nice enough to come and see you, they appreciate you, and you should respect that. Give them a good show, because they are with you.’ “I never forgot that advice. It really created my career.” Bennett is one of the few entertainers still performing who can speak to the era before Sinatra was famous. “There were some very good singers before him, you know. Rudy Vallee was a good singer, but Sinatra had a way of picking the right songs and really delivering them,” Bennett says. “A song like, ‘I Get Along Without You Very Well,’ is just so intimate. It’s a great saloon song, a song you would hear in a nightclub. One of my favorites. He had so many, of course, but more than anything he was a friend until the very end.” Late in his life, Sinatra told Bennett he was concerned that Bennett had moved back to the East Coast and that it seemed “a boring kind of existence.” But Bennett has long been an active live performer, selling out theaters and arenas for decades whether solo or, today, in tandem with Lady Gaga. As he says, Sinatra made that boxoffice success possible, too. “Years ago he did the interview with one of the great magazines, Life magazine, and was asked, ‘Everyone listens to you, but who do you listen to?’ He said, ‘For my money, Tony Benedetto is the best singer in the business. He gets to me every time.’” Bennett chuckles. “That was 50 years ago,” he says, “and it changed my whole career. People were saying, ‘If Frank said that, we need to check him out.’ To this day, I sell out all over the world. They are still checking me out, because of Frank Sinatra.”
Steve Wynn ∑ First, the resort mogul who hired Sinatra to perform at the Golden Nugget in Atlantic City in the early 1980s explains what he wasn’t. “I wasn’t his running mate. I wasn’t his crony. I was too young—he was born the year before my parents,” Wynn says. “He wasn’t my dad, but I was the right age to be his son. I wasn’t his boss, either. I was his colleague.” But for all of those qualifiers, Wynn reflects, “I spent a lot of time with Frank Sinatra.” Wynn says the introduction could not have been more vintage Vegas: at the Sands’ Copa Room in December 1965, a Rat Pack performance that marked the 13th anniversary of the hotel-casino so often linked to the group. “I ended up there on a Saturday night in the 500-seat Copa Room, in an audience with Elizabeth Taylor and Gregory Peck and Lucille Ball, everyone you could imagine,” Wynn says. “When [the Rat Pack] walked onstage, it was an unbelievable experience. I was so dazzled. I mean, it was the small Sands, there were 150,000 people in this town and there were at least 10,000 of those people trying to get inside that building and get a glimpse of what was going on.” Wynn lets out a sigh, as if letting the memory marinate. “And that was it,” he says. “That’s one of the reasons I stayed here.” Over the years, Wynn has named one of his restaurants at Encore for Sinatra, and once presented a stage show at Encore Theater, Dance With Me, a series of dance numbers set to Sinatra classics. But the bond between the two was cemented through Wynn’s ownership of the Golden Nugget in Atlantic City, when he booked Sinatra and Martin for a run of performances beginning in 1982. Wynn typically picked up the two superstars on his private jet in Palm Springs and flew them back to Atlantic City for the shows. “On these flights back, Frank always did The New York Times crossword puzzle—with a pen,” Wynn recalls “Pretty good, huh?” The two recorded a series of TV commercials, a dozen total, that aired on the East Coast (these spots are particularly remarkable for Wynn’s 1980s-coiffed hair). “Whenever I get lonely, I put on one of those commercials,” Wynn says. “I have a disc with all of them on it.” December 3–9, 2015 LasVegasWeekly.com
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