Tony Bennett’s Toupee
Hearing of Tony Bennett’s death at the age of 96, I immediately thought of the Great Toupee Scandal.
In the mid-1970s, I was dispatched by the Toronto Sun to write about Bennett, who was opening at the Royal York Hotel’s Imperial Room.
The Imperial Room, off the hotel lobby, was one of the last of the old-fashioned night clubs. The publicist and, if memory serves, the room’s talent booker, was an eccentric Brillo pad-haired little fellow named Gino Empry. Gino was also Tony Bennett’s manager and thus Bennett was a regular visitor to the Imperial Room.
Back then, he was best known for his hit song, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” and as Frank Sinatra’s favorite singer.
The Imperial Room was packed for his performance. He bounced onstage, very much at home in the intimacy of the room. He sailed through the American song book standards for which he would be revered throughout his 70-year career, ending, of course, with “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” The audience loved him, and I was certainly impressed.
Late that night I hammered out a rave review in which I said something to the effect that when he arrived onstage, Bennett was outfitted in a tux that fit him almost as well as his hairpiece, although I think I called it a toupee.
The next day, when the review appeared, the poop hit the fan.
Gino Empry, enraged, was on the phone screaming at me: “How could you do this?”
“Do what?” I demanded in confusion. “What have I done?” This was not the first time I had battled with and had been yelled at by the mercurial Gino.
“You wrote about Tony’s…toupee!”
According to Gino, the Imperial Room was also upset, Tony’s people were upset, and, worst of all, Tony himself was upset.
Continuing to scream into the phone, Gino announced that he had intended to run my review as a full-page ad in Variety, the pre-eminent showbusiness publication. Now he couldn’t do that.
“Why not?” I asked meekly.
“Because you wrote about his…toupee!” Gino seethed.
The Sun’s publisher, Doug Creighton, happened to be lunching at the Imperial Room that day. Gino appeared at his table, still in high dudgeon, demanding that I be fired. Creighton, who knew nothing about the toupee furor, and was not at all pleased to be disturbed in the act of consuming his luncheon martini, demanded to know what Base had done now that would warrant his firing.
“He wrote about Tony’s…toupee!” cried Gino.
Creighton, thankfully, told Gino to get lost. He wasn’t firing anyone over a toupee.
Years later—by now it is the mid-1980s—I found myself in director Norman Jewison’s downtown Toronto office, having been invited by Norman to watch the Academy Awards telecast. The door opened and in popped Tony Bennett, outfitted in his trademark tux, fresh from a concert performance, accompanied by two beautiful young women. Norman introduced me. Bennett grinned amiably and we shook hands. I couldn’t take my eyes off his hairpiece.
It looked great.
