Tony, the last legend

The difference between Tony Bennett in his youth and now? Then he was just great. Now he is beyond compare. Let's hear it from Reggie Nadelson

New York. Castellano. "Tony. Tony, how ya doing? Hi, Tony." Before he even gets to the door of this Italian restaurant on 55th Street, the fans flock to him. He smiles back. "Hello, sweetheart, nice to see you. Thank you. That's beautiful." The owner rushes out to greet him. The coat- check girl whisks away the Brioni overcoat. Suits from the record industry drop their forks to pay him court because, without losing his fans of 50 years, he now has the kids at his feet.

Tony Bennett redux. Bennett at 70, as big with the green-haired as with the blue rinses. He sits at his table. Raises a glass of red wine so the iced New York light coming in the window catches it, along with the silver hair, the lavish smile, the contented features of a man at the top of his form. "New York," he says. "As a young boy, you know, it's full of dreams. You say, some day I'd like to make it in this big city. It's all about dreaming."

We're in making a film about Tony Bennett and his city and this is a lunch break, here on 55th Street, where Bennett sits down to eat and talk.

He's a gregarious man. Effusive. He says "beautiful" a lot. "Wonderful", too, but he's no slouch intellectually, and, between the showbiz tales, the passion for painting and art, the knowledge of music, the reverence for learning typical of the New York immigrant, are evident.

It was a few blocks south, on 52nd Street, that Bennett heard Tatum and Getz, Gillespie and Parker. Just down Broadway was the Paramount where Bennett was mobbed by girls, like Sinatra before him. A block east is St Patrick's where he was first married in the Fifties (the fans wore mourning veils), and four blocks north the new apartment on Central Park South that he shares with his girlfriend, Susan Crowe, a PhD student at Columbia University.

Sinatra went West. Bing Crosby was always California. But Tony Bennett stayed in New York. He has its accent, its style, he sings its songs. But you were thinking, New York? New York?! I thought this guy was ...

"Everybody thinks I live in San Francisco," Bennett smiles.

The tiny irony is, of course, that this quintessential New York singer has as his emblem "I Left My Heart In San Francisco". No other song is so completely identified with one singer, except maybe "White Christmas" with Bing Crosby, and, after "White Christmas", "San Francisco" is the biggest hit ever. It was a fluke. In 1961, before a trip to San Francisco, Ralph Sharon, Bennett's pianist and arranger of 30 years, found the sheet music he'd stuffed into a shirt drawer. He suggested they try it. Says Sharon, "If I hadn't looked in that drawer ..."

Twenty minutes from midtown Manhattan, Tony Bennett was born, Antonio Dominick Benedetto, in 1926. It was a typical immigrant childhood. Bennett's father died during the Depression; his mother sewed to raise the kids. "She came home at night, her fingers bleeding."

Radio was kind when Bennett was a kid and the crooner came of age. For a kid who wanted to sing, Manhattan in the Thirties was the centre of the world. The love-affair between New York and its musicians, the stew of talent, politics, style, wit and money, produced the great American song book. Bennett, who grew up on it, has become its last great apostle now Sinatra's retired, Ella dead. "The greatest folk music in the world," he calls it. "The combination of black music and Jewish music, Broadway, the movies, Gershwin, Berlin, Porter, Kern ... there is nothing else like it."

Just out of high school, Bennett was drafted. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge, the last big conflict of the Second World War. In the Army he first saw the racism he came to hate, the kid who had grown up in a colourblind household. "My mom welcomed everyone to our house," heremembers.

Stationed in Germany at the end of the war, Bennett invited a black GI he knew to Thanksgiving dinner. Fifty years later, his face tightens with anger as he recalls the incident.

"All of a sudden, a southern officer says, `Pack your gear, you're pulling out of here.' So I said, `what for?'. He said, `We don't like who you were sitting with; the man was black.' A half hour later I was on a truck reassigned to Graves Registration where I had to dig up bodies and put them in graves. It was a form of punishment."

"I'm not political," Bennett insists. "I'm an entertainer." But his stand on racism has been the subtext of the performing life. He refused to play Sun City. He was the first white man to play with Basie - there are two legendary albums, from '58, and '59. He was a committed player in the Civil Rights movement. When Harry Belafonte asked him to join the epic march on Selma, he went, along with Sammy Davis and Leonard Bernstein. "We went to the funeral parlour and got 18 caskets and made them into a stage and we entertained."

A classic New York liberal, Bennett is still angry about McCarthy. "I've played seven White Houses - all of them except Nixon's," he grins. "Clinton's is the friendliest and the nicest."

The veal comes and goes. Wine flows. The conversation changes to music. By the time Bennett came home from the war, pretty boy Italian crooners were big: Vic Damone, Perry Como. "Everybody told me to get a nose job so I'd look like Tony Martin," he laughs. But Bennett kept his nose and did it his way. In the Forties, he looked for work. Don't call us, we'll call you, he was told over and over, before Pearl Bailey gave him a job, Bob Hope gave him a name (Benedetto became Bennett) and Mitch Miller gave him a recording deal.

Miller was the first great mogul of the age of mass-produced mechanical music, as big on the East Coast as the Hollywood tycoons in the West. He invented stars - Johnny Ray, Johnny Mathis, Rosemary Clooney. Miller groomed Bennett; he turned him into the proto pop crooner, the biggest recording artist in the country. But there was always the tension, Bennett the crusader for class versus Bennett the cog in the Miller machine. "They went with a formula; they saw I was good on ballads, but Mitch used to say, `Every time he gets successful he wants to do jazz.'" It was jazz that always had Bennett's heart, and he credits Louis Armstrong with the invention of American popular singing.

"He was an absolute genius, right back in the Twenties. You have to phrase like Louis if you're an American singer. If you don't, you're not singing American music. And then came Bing. Bing listened to Louis and he learned," Bennett says. "Bing Crosby taught us to be cool."

And so Louis begat Bing and Bing begat Sinatra and Sinatra handed the torch on to Tony Bennett. He has known them all - Ellington, whom he compares to Bach or Mozart; Ella, who coaxed him to sing to the balconies. His next album - his 97th, out next spring - is a tribute to Billie Holliday.

Bleak times for Bennett came in the late Sixties and the Seventies. The business changed; rock and roll had come. Bennett's first marriage broke up and his jazz label floundered. He made two great albums with Bill Evans - cult classics. But he was, it seemed, yesterday's man.

Then something happened. Tony Bennett's eldest son, Danny took over his career. A marketing genius, Danny Bennett saw a gap in the market. He understood a whole new generation needed Tony before they knew it themselves. Suddenly, in the late Eighties, Bennett was everywhere, in stylish videos on MTV, winning Grammys, as spokesman for Nike, on stage with kd lang, Elvis Costello, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. He did guest shots on The Simpsons, on Cybill, on The Muppets. The New York Times anointed Tony Bennett King of Cool for a generation fed up with grunge.

It wasn't just about style, though. Tony Bennett is nice. He is good. As the New Yorker jazz critic Whitney Balliet wrote, "He has a quality that lets you in. It even suggests that you'll see him later at the beer parlour. It has a joyous jubilant quality. That quality comes from who he is."

Tony Bennett gets up. Retrieves his coat, says "so long" to everyone and strides into the New York street, jaunty after a good lunch.

"Performers should never retire, you know. They love it too much. You don't even think of age after a while," he says. "You just keep going".

`Tony Bennett's New York', an `Arena' special, Sunday 22 December, BBC2, 8.30pm.