Every year for nearly three decades, Tony Bennett drew a picture for the American Cancer Society’s holiday greeting card. By 2018, the cards had raised more than $800,000 for cancer research.
Bennett died on July 21 at 96, after fighting Alzheimer’s disease for the better part of a decade. The twenty Grammy Awards and songs like “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” are what most people remember. His charity work ran just as deep. In the 1990s his steady fundraising earned him the nickname “Tony Benefit.”
Benefits and causes
He played benefits for the Rainforest Foundation, the Walden Woods Project and the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation. For the last of those he raised millions. At a 1999 Senate hearing on diabetes among young people, he said: “I don’t consider myself an expert on diabetes but I had enough first-hand experience with those who have suffered its consequences to know what havoc it can wreak on the human body.” His grandson and fellow musicians Ella Fitzgerald and Bobby Hackett had lived with the disease. He set up his own research fund at the foundation and gave concert tickets and paintings to a 2010 auction for a cure.
Bennett painted, and well. One of his paintings hangs in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the United Nations and the Kentucky Derby commissioned his work.
In 2007 the UN High Commissioner for Refugees gave him its Humanitarian Award, the year he also helped raise money for victims of violence in Darfur. The Martin Luther King Center gave him its Salute to Greatness Award for his civil rights work, which included marching with Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. He gave the proceeds of his 2011 duet of “Body and Soul” with Amy Winehouse to the foundation set up in her name. In 2012 he hosted two charity events in Miami that raised nearly $500,000 for arts education and youth tennis programs.
A school in Astoria
The gift people point to most is a high school. In 1999, Bennett and his wife, Susan Benedetto, began talking about starting one focused on the arts. With help from the New York City Department of Education, they founded the Frank Sinatra School of Arts in 2001. It is a public school in Astoria, Queens, where Bennett was born and raised, and it is named for his close friend.
In a 2003 interview he listed musicians from Queens such as Louis Armstrong and Ethel Merman. “We look across the East River at the Empire State Building and we dream of doing great things,” he said.
He launched a nonprofit, Exploring the Arts, to fund the school’s creation, and afterward it kept supporting the school’s arts program and scholarships. It now partners with 56 schools across New York and Los Angeles. It has given more than $3 million to schools hit by arts budget cuts or serving high-need communities.
In an Instagram post, the school said its thousands of students “are forever changed” because of Bennett. “His passion for the arts was unbridled and he wanted to be certain his legacy was for young people to have an opportunity to learn and share their art with the world.”
Exploring the Arts has set up a fund in his honor. “Tony’s influence has left an indelible mark on our students, families, schools, staff and communities,” it said in a statement.
