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Lang, James Taylor, Sting, the late Amy Winehouse and Lady Gaga, who has become a devoted protégé. He was crucial to the mid-1990s career rebirth that made Tony (then in his late 60s) an unlikely staple of MTV - and which culminated in a 1994 best album Grammy for Tony Bennett: MTV Unplugged. Since then, Danny has masterminded a steady stream of memorable duet recordings featuring Tony and John Mayer, K.D. Danny, an affable 66-year-old in black jeans and a Nehru-style jacket, has acted as his father's manager for the last 40 years. Tony glanced up, with a slight smile and nod, before returning silently to his picture book. Ten minutes into my visit, Tony's eldest son, Danny, joined us in the studio. Mundane objects as familiar as a fork or a set of house keys can be utterly mysterious to him. Although he can still recognize family members, he is, according to Susan, not always sure where he is or what is happening around him. He stared into its pages not with the air of warm reminiscence but like a man struggling to recall why these images seemed familiar. Such short-term memory loss is a hallmark of Alzheimer's stealthy onset, but long-term memories also progressively vanish - which lent an extra poignancy to the fact that the picture book that so gripped his attention was Tony Bennett Onstage and in the Studio (2018), a lavishly illustrated volume that featured photos from every stage of his life, from babyhood onward. At one point, as Susan and I stood chatting, he looked up suddenly from the book in his lap and, flashing that familiar smile, asked me in his soft, sueded whisper, “How's the weather outside?” Had I not known that he and Susan had just returned from walking their dog in the park, I might not have suspected that anything was amiss. Even his increasingly rare moments of clarity and awareness reveal the depths of his debility. But there was little doubt that the disease had progressed. Bennett, first diagnosed in 2016, has so far been spared the disorientation that can prompt patients to wander from home, as well as the episodes of terror, rage or depression that can accompany Alzheimer's frightening detachment from reality and, indeed, he might never develop these symptoms.
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Alzheimer's is characterized by a progressive memory loss that robs its sufferers of many of the gifts that we all take for granted - speech, understanding, treasured memories, recognition of loved ones - and leaves them utterly dependent on caregivers. Tony Bennett has Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of age-related dementia. He looked expressionlessly into my eyes before returning wordlessly to his book. He's come to talk to us about the new album.” She spoke into his ear, a little loudly perhaps, in a prompting, emphatic register, as if trying to reach her husband through a barrier that had fallen between him and the rest of the world. Instead, his expression had a masklike impassivity that changed only slightly to dim awareness when Susan, a slim, fine-featured 54-year-old, placed a hand on his shoulder, leaned over and said: “This is John, Tone. Missing, however, was the easy, ever-present smile that helped brand him the nice-guy singing idol of his generation - more approachable than the volatile Sinatra, or the jokily “drunken” Dean Martin. Nattily dressed in a blue blazer over an open-collared shirt, dark slacks and white running shoes, he was, at 94, startlingly youthful in appearance and instantly recognizable: the blue, heavy-lidded eyes, the iconic Roman nose, the coiffed salt-and-pepper hair.
TONY BENNETT LADY GAGA BABY ITS COLD OUTSIDE WINDOWS
This was clearly the space of a working artist: the walls papered with sketches, a messy table heaped with brushes and curled paint tubes, an easel by the window holding a work in progress - a black-and-white drawing of the park, the distant buildings expertly evoked with impressionistic flicks of charcoal.īennett himself was seated at a desk along one wall, his chair turned toward the windows as he paged slowly through a coffee-table book open on his lap. Over the last quarter century, he has spent untold hours in this sanctuary, a converted bedroom turned art studio where I was brought to meet him by his wife, Susan.
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The sprawling three-bedroom apartment's wall of windows opens on a heart-stopping view of the park and floods the rooms with a steady north light - “a painter's dream,” as Bennett once said - which matters, because as well as being one of the world's greatest singers, he is also a serious visual artist. On an afternoon in early November, I arrived at Tony Bennett's home on the 15th floor of a high-rise on the southern edge of New York City's Central Park.