Famous Friends
Raposo was a close friend of Frank Sinatra, Tom Lehrer, WNYC radio personality Jonathan Schwartz, and Academy Award-winning filmmaker Bert Salzman.
Sinatra recorded four of Raposo's songs on his 1973 album, Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back. Sinatra insisted the album be composed entirely of Raposo's compositions, but the record label balked and prevailed over Sinatra, limiting him to four. Jonathan Schwartz reports that Sinatra idolized and popularized Raposo and his music, frequently attending Raposo's parties at his and first wife Susan's New York apartment during the 1960s with glamorous friends and several cronies, including Leo Durocher. Schwartz's memoir adds that Sinatra was infatuated with Raposo's piano-playing skill and commonly referred to him to others, characteristically, as "Raposo at the piano", or "the genius".
Schwartz characterized Raposo as "a Harvard man," "a heavy, round-faced guy with wide-open brown eyes, puffy cheeks and jowls, and appetites more numerous than stars in a desert sky. He was carnivorous, anecdotal, hyperbolic, ambitious. He was Portuguese through and through and ingeniously musical, classically trained. He played the piano in a popular mode as well as anyone I had ever heard. He was simply a wunderkind in his twenties."
Read more about this topic: Joe Raposo
Famous quotes containing the words famous and/or friends:
““Why visit the playhouse to see the famous Parisian models, ... when one can see the French damsels, Norma and Diana? Their names have been known on both continents, because everything goes as it will, and those that cannot be satisfied with these must surely be of a queer nature.””
—For the City of New Orleans, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Those friends have left.
Only stumps remain
in the thickets
and we’ve grown old, besides.
Love’s been cut off
at the roots.”
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