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comparison today.

    So at thirteen years old I was actively pursuing painting and performing, and getting advice about both from some very experienced professionals, but boy, was I an amateur! Early on I made so many mistakes that sometimes I can’t believe I’ve come as far as I have. Years later George Burns reinforcedsomething I’d always known. He said that it was very important for there to be little clubs where performers could have “the opportunity to get lousy before they get better,” that it takes at least ten years to learn one’s craft. The truth is, it took me much longer than that. In fact, even now at the age of seventy-two, I’m still learning.
    When you’re first starting out, you do a lot of things wrong, but that’s how you learn. If you want to succeed, you’ll need a lot of courage and a lot of faith, but eventually it will happen. You need to meet opportunity with preparedness. Many, many people told me that I’d never make it. And there certainly were lots of auditions where I didn’t get the job. This happens to all performers. Young people just starting out have to work long and hard and have the faith that eventually they’ll master their craft.
    Above all else, they must never lose heart.

    By the end of the thirties I got a chance to get a little theatrical training. There was an academy in Astoria run by a British woman named Mae Homer. Several well-known performers came out of that school—the movie star Nancy Kelly and the movie comic Eddie Bracken. It was primarily a dance school, but she taught all the rudiments of show business. I studied with her for a while, and I learned all the basics of performing in front of an audience, including how to tap dance while singing! I really loved her.
    Mae helped me get a singing gig that I’ll never forget. It was September, 1939. There was a special club for British officers in New York, basically their equivalent of the USO, and Mae Homer had some kind of connection to the club and arranged for me to perform there. I sang “There’ll Always Be an England.” It was a new song then, written at the start of thewar by Ross Parker and Hughie Charles. I got up on stage, and all these British officers were knocked out that this little Italian-American kid knew that song. It went over great—they even gave me an ovation.
    When I was fourteen, the time came for me to go to high school. I’d decided to pursue painting as a career, although I never retired my dream of becoming a singer. I just wanted to focus seriously on painting for a while and get some good solid training. The public school system in New York offered, and still does, the opportunity for students to go to specialized schools rather than the regular-curriculum, regionalized schools one would normally attend. I tried to get into the High School for the Performing Arts, the school made famous years later by the hit movie
Fame
. But the requirements were stringent, and I couldn’t get in. I was at a loss as to what to do next when my boyhood buddy Rudy DeHarak suggested I try to get into the High School of Industrial Arts (now known as Art and Design), which was on Seventy-ninth Street near the Metropolitan Museum. This was a new school, where the emphasis was on commercial art, and Rudy had been in one of the very first graduating classes.
    I met Rudy around 1938. My family had moved once again to what I always refer to as “the projects,” but what was actually a complex called the Metropolitan Apartments, residential developments created by The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company as a side investment. We were able to move into a four-room apartment at a very affordable rent. The buildings were modern and spacious for the time, and each had a courtyard with landscaped gardens. It was quite a change from what we were used to. Rudy came from California originally and had moved to New York with his sisters, who were dancers on Broadway. We lived on the second floor and they