The good life
Iam driving home from the gym, listening to satellite radio, not paying very close attention. Suddenly Tony Bennett’s “The Good Life” cuts bel canto through the summer afternoon malaise.
You probably know the song:
Oh, the good life, full of fun, seems to be the ideal
Mm, the good life, lets you hide all the sadness you feel
A lot of people have recorded the song over the years—Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Julie London, Billy Eckstine—but it’s most closely associated with Bennett; maybe his best-known after “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” and “Cold, Cold Heart.” It’s so identified with him that he used the title for his autobiography. He performed it in his “MTV Unplugged” set years ago and rerecorded it as a duet with Billy Joel.
It’s also a time capsule, a piece of bittersweet American pop from December 1962, pre-Beatles, pre-JFK assassination, pre-’60s if you aren’t slavishly attached to the myth of calendars. It’s swank and warble, two minutes and 15 seconds of brandy-toned masculine mink oil delivered unironically.
It’s Bennett, accompanied only by the subtly elegant strains of John Bunch’s piano, in a spacious studio (97 feet long by 55 feet wide) in what had originally been a Presbyterian church, the Columbia 30th Street Studio at 207 E. 30th St., between Second and Third Avenues in Manhattan. That’s where Miles Davis recorded “Kind of Blue” and Glenn Gould made both his “Goldberg Variations” albums. There’s a highrise apartment building there now.
“The Good Life” is kind of a break-up song, one where the singer tells his wayward lover that when she gets tired of playing the brave and sophisticated little jet-setter, she can bring it on home to him and kiss “the good life goodbye.”
That’s what the lyrics say; Bennett’s smooth vocal has a way of cutting back against the grain and complicating the issue. This singer is no rube. He knows the ennui of this jaded “good life” firsthand too. He’s over it, he realizes it’s empty, and he wants her to understand it’s a dead end, but knows she’s going to have to figure it out for herself. It’s droll and—on this particular afternoon—unspeakably sad.
Bennett always struck me as an affable singer. The largest part of his appeal was an openness, a willingness to accommodate an audience while serving a song, that compensated for a lack of technical perfection. His tone could be thin or hoarse—he wasn’t sniper-precise like Sinatra— but always warm and buttery. Frank could turn his voice into an ice pick. Tony didn’t have anything like murder in his soul.
But there is a little edge to “The Good Life” I hadn’t noticed before.
The song was written by French singer and bon vivant Sacha Distel for Roger Vadim’s “Pride” segment in the anthology film “Les Sept Péchés capitaux (The Seven Deadly Sins).” Distel allegedly wrote it for Vadim’s ex- Brigette Bardot.
The story goes that Bardot, who married Vadim in 1952 when she was 18 (her parents objected but relented after she stuck her head in a burning oven) and divorced him in 1957, plucked Distel from obscurity after she saw him playing guitar in a St. Tropez night club. They embarked on a romance, and Bardot’s interest in Distel may have helped push his first single “Scoubidou” up the pop charts.
When starstruck Distel proposed, Bardot turned him down, possibly because she was also involved with Jean-Louis Trintignant at the same time. (Distel doesn’t even rate a mention in People Magazine’s survey of “Brigette Bardot’s Dating History.”)
While songwriter Jack Reardon gets credit for the English lyrics, he did a good job of preserving the spirit of Distel’s original. (A literal translation of the opening lines cited above might read: “The good life, without love without worry, without problems/Oh the good life, you’re alone, you’re free and you love it …”) This is a record made by grownups. Bunch, who’d go on to be Bennett’s musical director, had dropped bombs on Germany during World War II. His plane had been shot down; he’d spent six months in a camp until it was liberated in April 1945, about the same time PFC Anthony Dominick Benedetto was among the soldiers liberating the Kaufering Concentration Camp, the largest sub-camp of the Dachau complex.
Such were the résumés of the people who lived in those days, a year I barely remember.
I used to think I would never listen to much old music, that what was relevant to me was what would (or would not happen), that the past was irrelevant as it was finished and filed away. In the early ’70s, Buddy Holly seemed corny, Clark Kent with a Stratocaster hiccoughing his way through bubblegum. In the early ’70s, Tony Bennett was granny music.
You grow up a little, you might be embarrassed by the certainty of youthful judgments.
I’d heard the song hundreds of times before and received it as so much cocktail pop. But this afternoon.,“The Good Life” almost made me cry.
Some of that might have to do with my realization that everyone who had anything to do with the record is dead. Bennett, who died last month at the age of 96, was the last to go. Bunch died in 2010; Distel in 2004; Reardon in 2013; producer Ernie Altschuler in 1973.
Bardot is alive, married to an industrialist who was an adviser to National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen.
It should not be lost on us that we are living in an age of miracles, where ghosts can speak across a distance of 60 or 70 or 100 years. Tony Bennett can come out of nowhere, from 1962, to pin us back in our seats with his theatrical tenor, with an understated song about the futility of desire and the limits of materialism.
It’s a lesson that goes back to at least Socrates, who’d argue it’s far better to suffer wrong than to commit it; that a good person who is tortured to death is better off than the corrupt who profit from duplicity.
Plato developed this idea further in “The Republic,” explaining that a moral person has a kind of inner harmony that the wicked cannot achieve no matter how rich and powerful they become. Being a jerk is its own punishment, Plato would tell you; the materialistic pleasures of “the good life” are fleeting.
Or at least it’s pretty to think so.