The disturbing drug incident that changed Tony Bennett forever

Tony Bennett got involved with drugs – marijuana and cocaine – in the 1960s. And what started out as recreational use began to escalate. “I was involved,” he told the Daily Mail. “When the Kennedys and Martin Luther King were assassinated in the 1960s, our country took a terrible turn. Everyone sucked. […] People get addicted and everything changes for the worse.”

On the day in 1979 when he woke up in the tub to find his wife, Sandra Grant, standing over him, Bennett learned how close he had come to dying. When Grant got into the bathroom, Bennett wasn’t breathing. “She hit my chest and literally brought me back to life,” the singer recalled on The Good Life. As the ambulance rushed Bennett to the hospital, he thought back to a conversation he had years earlier with Jack Rollins, his former manager who also worked with seminal comedian Lenny Bruce. Rollins’ words shook Bennett to the core.