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1 Beginnings was a poor kid,” Tony Bennett told music writers David Hajdu and IRoy Hemming in Discovering Great Singers of Classic Pop, “like everybody in New York in the Depression, but there was great hope, skyscrapers were going up, and everybody felt we were going toward something great. It was a unique era, and it all still lives in the music that came out of that time.” Recalling that period in an interview with David Frost in 1967, Bennett also defi ned it as a period of sharing and egalitarianism: “It was the Depression, a time when we were all very hungry. There was a great camaraderie. Everybody was helping one another out.” There is a rueful longing in his words, a sense that something was lost in the periods of afflCOPYRIGHTED uence that came later. MATERIAL That sense of hopefulness infused the early years of Tony Bennett, who came from a warm and loving family Duke Ellington described as “wonderful optimists.” Tony Bennett’s paternal grandfather, Giovanni Benedetto, grew up in the village of Podargoni, above Reggio Calabria. The family were poor farmers, producing fi gs, olive oil, and wine grapes. His mother’s 19 CCH001.inddH001.indd 1199 55/20/11/20/11 33:50:55:50:55 PPMM 20 all the things you are family, the Suracis, also farmed in Calabria. Neither side of the family could read or write. In the 1890s a widespread blight caused thousands of farmers, among them the Benedettos and the Suracis, to leave Italy. Bennett’s family was part of the mass immigration of southern and eastern Europeans to the United States between 1880 and 1920. Eighty percent of that immigration came from southern Italy—the Mezzogiorno—and Bennett’s family came from one of its provinces, Calabria. The south was generally looked upon with contempt by other Italians as an area of shiftless crimi- nal elements, while the north was perceived as comprised of enlightened, conscientious, hard-working citizens. As the north of Italy reached a high level of industrialization, improving the life of the peasants, the south continued to suffer from poor wages, high taxes, widespread unemploy- ment, usury, deforestation, and soil erosion. Drinking water was scarce; cholera and malaria epidemics were widespread. There was a severe economic depression in 1887, followed by volcanic eruptions of Vesuvius and Etna that completely destroyed many villages. More than two million Italian men, women, and children would immigrate to the United States, primarily from the south, and by the 1920s there was an Italian population of fi ve million in America. The passage by steerage across the Atlantic was horrifi c. The immigrants huddled together, lying in piles of blankets and rags. They arrived at Ellis Island exhausted and drained, but still hopeful. In America they faced discrimination and prejudice, as they were viewed as an inferior, dark- skinned people. There were fi erce debates about their racial classifi cation. Italian American musicians such as vio- linists Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang (born Salvatore Massaro), writes Patrick Burke in his book Come In and Hear the Truth: Jazz and Race on 52nd Street, were widely regarded as “ in- between people,” those who ranked above African and Asian Americans but below whites in the hierarchy. The National Origins Quota system, which was instituted in 1924, decreed that “Italians were nonwhite with respect to immigration restrictions but were white for purposes of naturalization.” This stigma persisted for many years. “ Italian- Americans such as [sing- ing star] Louis Prima were still perceived as racially indeterminate by many Americans in the 1930s,” wrote Burke. CCH001.inddH001.indd 2200 55/20/11/20/11 33:50:56:50:56 PPMM beginnings 21 “The Americans,” wrote Napoleone Colajanni in 1909 in his book Gli italiani negli Stati Uniti (Italians in the United States), “consider the Italians as unclean, small foreigners who play the accordion, operate fruit stands, sweep the streets, work in the mines or tunnels, on the railroad or as bricklayers.” A large majority of Italian Americans were confi ned to a very low rung of the economic ladder. Three thousand unskilled Italian laborers in New York State alone toiled in work camps for mining, quarrying, railroad, and lumbering crews, facing nightmarish conditions. Michael La Sorte wrote in La Merica that “the work camp immigrants came close to becoming the new American slaves of the post–Civil War era. Workers were held as prisoners in some camps; the only means of freedom was to escape. They had no protection of any national jurisdiction; only the laws of the camp applied. Living and working conditions were among the most primitive and oppressive that any immigrant group endured in America during those years.” In downtown New York City, Mulberry Street, the fi rst and largest of the country’s Italian enclaves and the destination of the Benedettos and the Suracis when they came to America, was described by Jacob Riis in his classic 1890 study How the Other Half Lives: By day, he wrote, “it was a purgatory of unrelieved squalor,” and at night “an inferno tenanted by the very dregs of humanity where the new arrivals lived in damp basements, leaky garrets, clammy cellars, outhouses and stables converted into dwellings.” The Italian, he wrote, “comes in at the bottom and he stays there.” The windowless railroad tenements were cold, dirty, and dark. Most had no hot water. None had bathtubs or electricity. Outside the ghetto, Italians faced deeply embittering prejudice and opprobrium. “A day did not pass that the Italian was not vilifi ed in one manner or another,” wrote Michael La Sorte. “The Americans laughed at his speech, his clothes, his customs, and where and how he lived. Such treatment caused Italians to be wary of all Americans.” To many Americans, Italians were guineas, wops, dukes, dagos, tallies, macaronis, or spaghetti benders. In his classic study of Italian American history Blood of My Blood, Richard Gambino wrote of a typical raid in Chicago in 1909 when 194 Italian Americans were arrested. “The police charged CCH001.inddH001.indd 2211 55/20/11/20/11 33:50:56:50:56 PPMM 22 all the things you are en masse into Little Italy and collared anyone who appeared to be suspicious,” wrote Gambino. “When the authorities were unable to produce any link whatsoever between the prisoners and crimes, the police reluctantly released all 194 men. In many cities these tactics designed to keep the Italian immigrants in line created a state of open hostility between police and Italian- Americans.” In the face of such discrimination, Italian American families such as Tony’s slowly, determinedly, with character, grace, fortitude, culture— and always music—set about creating new lives of dignity and honor. Tony Bennett’s maternal grandparents were the fi rst of his relatives to travel to the United States, in January 1899. His grandmother was one month pregnant with his mother, Anna Suraci. The ship entered New York Harbor after three weeks crossing the Atlantic. The family went to a fi ve- story tenement building (still standing) at 139 Mulberry Street (near Mott and Hester streets) in New York’s Little Italy. Tony’s mother was born the following September. Most of the Benedetto family arrived in the early 1900s. In 1906 the family sent for Tony Bennett’s paternal grandmother and father. His father and grandmother sailed for America on a steamship with Italian immigrants from the south of Naples on April 2, 1906. Two days later a volcano erupted from Mount Vesuvius south of Naples. A huge tsunami rolled toward the ship, but tragedy was averted as the captain gained control. The Benedettos also settled in Little Italy but soon escaped the claustrophobic ghetto when grandfather Antonio Suraci moved the family to Twelfth Street, between First and Second avenues, and started a wholesale fruit and vegetable business catering to pushcart owners. Tony’s grandfather worked from dawn until late in the evening. He gave his wife all his earnings, which she hid in a trunk under the bed. By 1918 his father’s sister Antoinette and her husband opened a grocery store on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fifty- second Street and lived in an apartment above it. His father worked for them and moved into a spare room. On November 20, 1919, Tony’s mother and father, who were fi rst cousins, were married. His father continued to work in his uncle’s grocery store, and the married couple lived at his uncle’s apartment. CCH001.inddH001.indd 2222 55/20/11/20/11 33:50:56:50:56 PPMM beginnings 23 Tony’s maternal grandparents, the Suracis, moved to Astoria, Queens, and purchased a two- family house at 23 – 81 Thirty- second Street. He recalls that his grandmother had a goat and chickens and a huge garden. Just a few minutes from Times Square on the elevated subway, Astoria was almost farm country in those days. Soon the rest of the Suracis and the Benedettos moved to Astoria, and the house on Thirty- second Street became the center of family life for many years. Tony’s parents followed the path of his grandparents and opened up a grocery store of their own in Astoria. Soon their fi rst child, Mary, was born in 1920, and John Benedetto Jr. (Giovanni) was born in 1923. The children lived with their parents in the apartment above the store. In 1923, soon after John was born, Tony’s father became ill and began to deteriorate rapidly. His father would be sickly from then on, and it became too diffi cult to keep running the store.

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