Joe Raposo - Famous Friends

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."