GLENYS ROBERTS: The day Tony Bennett took my hands and sang Fly Me To The Moon

When the plane landed in Los Angeles that summer in the 1970s, I was as unhappy as can be.

My marriage to tailor Doug Hayward was falling apart and I had decided to take a break from it all by visiting my best friend Sandy, the wife of American singer Tony Bennett, who passed away last month at the age of 96. .

When Tony was working in London in 1969, Sandy and I were pregnant together. Doug made Tony’s suits and liked to take him home for dinner, so the Bennetts spent a lot of time in our flat in Mayfair. Tony was a man of few words, but he kept coming back for my path in the hole.

Sandy was – and remains – one of the funniest women I’ve ever met. My daughter and I still call her in Las Vegas, where she now lives, if we ever want to beat a fit of depression.

After the kids – Joanna, named after one of Tony’s songs, and my lovely Polly – were born barely two weeks apart, we were so relieved to have our grades back that we spent a lot of time on London’s Bond Street shopping for clothes. to buy.

Sandy would tidy up at the Yves Saint Laurent boutique on the way to my husband’s dining club at Savile Row where we would meet Tony.

Many times by the time Sandy got home she had decided she didn’t like what she bought and she would give it to me. And so I became the owner of a beautiful silk chiffon Halston dress – the designer only made two, one for Jackie Kennedy, the other for Sandy.

I don’t think Tony cared what we wore. He didn’t like the high life and wasn’t particularly impressed with the stars – except when it came to Frank Sinatra, who he thought was the best in the business.

He really just loved working and painting, which he did under his real name Benedetto. Whenever he had a loose end, he was tempted to pick up a Biro and any old piece of paper and start scribbling. That’s how he came to do a sketch of me that still hangs in my bedroom.

Looking back, it now seems clear that neither Sandy nor I were the kind of woman men wanted at the time. In Cambridge, my supervisor had actually refused to read my essays. ‘What is the purpose of?’ he said. “You’ll only end up in the sink with your hands.”

Sandy was the daughter of a Louisiana sharecropper, one of 12 children who escaped her mother’s toil and father’s violence because of her beauty and wit. She was not easy to tame.

But then the four of us had great times in London, spent evenings at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in Soho, where Tony jammed with singer Annie Ross, and watched Doug play football in Hyde Park on Sundays.

When Tony’s work brought them back to the US, he was so sure they would return to London that he gave me his record player and vinyl collection for safekeeping.

They never came back to life. Instead, they bought a beautiful house in Beverly Hills – and now they invited me to stay in their guest room while I took care of my private life.

When I pulled into their driveway after an 11-hour flight in my rental car, Tony was standing at the door in tennis whites, brandishing two rackets, a big smile on his face.

“Come on,” he said, opening the door of his Rolls-Royce, then drove me to the courthouse of the Beverly Hills Hotel and insisted on playing five sets. Exercise was one of his recipes for banishing the blues.

Another lay in the midday sun with a tinfoil screen behind his head to magnify the rays. He told me he asked actor Cary Grant about the secret to his fame and that Grant replied, “Get a tan.” But that summer his career was in the doldrums.

With the advent of The Beatles, the big band era was extinct. Sandy thought she knew the answer to revive his fortune, but so did Tony’s son from his first marriage. It was a classic recipe for family conflict. Tony’s response was to go to the pool house at the end of the yard and smoke drugs with his favorite backing musicians.

But despite his problems, Tony was very generous to me. When he went to perform in Hawaii, he took me with the rest of the family. Only then did I really see the pressure he was under.

His musicians’ wages, and all their flights, room and board—and mine—came out of his lump sum. He could no longer afford huge orchestras, even if he wanted to.

In Honolulu, we were greeted ecstatically, given garlands around our necks, and driven in open carriages to the hotel, where the entire top floor was at our disposal.

We ran into John Sturges, the film director who made The Great Escape, who now lived on a crab boat in the harbour. He was a hard-drinking man who had decided to give up everything and live like the hero of Hemingway’s The Old Man And The Sea.

John decided he wanted to write a screenplay with me. He put me in a hotel near the beach in Los Angeles where we could work – and from where he could watch the paramedics speedboating to boating accidents.

It was what his friend, the actor Steve McQueen, would do, he told me. Steve loved mechanical things so much that he could watch a washing machine run for hours.

One day my hotel room caught fire due to a faulty television. Sandy arrived in her personalized Mercedes in a long white mink coat – it was July – and apparently with all the diamonds Tony had ever given her.

“I’m Mrs. Tony Bennett,” she announced to the hotel manager. “You tried to kill my friend and I’m going to take you to court.” I went back to the Bennetts’ zebra-striped guest room.

Tony was traveling all the time and Sandy and I were often with him. In Las Vegas, we shivered through the show in our thin designer dresses because of the over-the-top air conditioning.

One day we visited casino owner Bill Harrah’s home, which had an underwater dining room that overlooked the depths of Lake Tahoe. Bill pointed the searchlights at the lake and assured us it was common to see bodies floating by, sent there after the mob strikes.

At Christmas, Sandy always splashed out and half of Beverly Hills would be invited to come over – songwriter Sammy Cahn lived next door, Gene Kelly across the street.

When I had to travel to Mexico for work, the Bennetts insisted that my eight-year-old, Polly, stay with them. I don’t think it helped their marriage that she started howling as soon as my car pulled out of the driveway and would only be comforted when she slept between them in the matrimonial bed.

Unfortunately, we were all different characters, and when our inevitable breakups happened, I got custody of Sandy while Tony got custody of Doug. I often saw Doug and Tony cross our London street to avoid me, giggling like a bunch of schoolboys behind their hands.

“Psst, there’s the enemy,” Tony would say. But behind the scenes he was a gentle soul who always took care of us.

My fondest memory of him is when he invited me to hitch a ride on a private jet to New York. It was a small plane that bounced horribly in the hot desert wind. I hate flying at the best of times and when he saw how I was feeling he sat across from me, took my hands, looked me in the eye and sang Fly Me To The Moon.

He performed the same song at the London Palladium in 2011, for his 85th birthday. But I will never forget that privileged private performance or the kindness behind it.

You won’t get better memories.