A Heart Lost and Found in Hot Springs, Arkansas

On a street in Manhattan in 1960, piano player and accompanist Ralph Sharon ran into two songwriters who had been trying to sell him songs for his singer to try out.  As a favor to them, he took one of them, an old song written in 1953, and at home he shoved it into a drawer and forgot about it.  A year later, while packing for a series of gigs across the country, he sees the song and thinks “we’re playing that city later in the tour– maybe we can use this” and sticks it in his suitcase.  

In Hot Springs, Arkansas, they do a singing date in a club called The Vapors, a 60's modern new nightclub  owned by gangster and former Cotton Club owner Owney Madden.  A 15 year old local boy, an aspiring musician, later recalls peeking in the window to see the performance that night.  After the show, Sharon pulls out the song and plays the tune for his singer.  He says, “We’re heading there soon – this might be a good local tune for you to try out.”  They run through the song together at the piano in the bar of the Vapors before an audience of one:  the bartender.  He tells them “If you record that song, I’ll be the first to buy it.” 

In December of 1961, at the Venetian Room of the Fairmount Hotel in San Francisco, the singer performs the song for the first time in public.  He later says “That song helped make me a world citizen.  It allowed me to live, work and sing in any city on the globe.  It changed my whole life.”  

He recorded it the following month, as the B side to another song.  But the disc jockeys liked the B side, it received all the airplay, and it won the Grammy for Record of the Year in 1962.  The song, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco”, became the signature song for the singer, Tony Bennett. The song also made a fortune as well for the two struggling songwriters, George Cory and Douglass Cross, two Bay Area natives who had moved to New York but expressed their longing for home in their city by the bay.

The club where the song was first sung by Tony Bennett did not fare as well.  The state of Arkansas finally cracked down on the illegal gambling that had been tolerated in Hot Springs, and so the illegal casinos were closed.  The Vapors continued on as a nightclub and restaurant, and limped through the disco era into the 1990’s, but the glory days of Hot Springs as a mecca for gamblers, gangsters and baseball players was long gone.  The club closed and the building that was so “Modern” in 1960 was sold in October 1998.  The Tower of Strength Ministries moved in and held church services for years in the building, on the highway leading into the town.  The iconic sign remained, proclaiming the current occupant.  

In 2020, the club re-opened as a performance venue, the Legendary Vaporshttps://www.thelegendaryvapors.com/, but has been temporarily closed due to the coronavirus outbreak.  The building is a survivor.  Let's hope it can weather the storm. 

And the budding 15 year old musician who was peering in the windows that night?  

His musical career did not really take off, but his political career certainly did.  He had a 12 year run as Governor of Arkansas, and then another 8 years as President of the United States.  William Jefferson Clinton grew up in Hot Springs and told Tony Bennett that though he was too young to enter the nightclub that night, he was there, outside at the window, listening in.