By DAVID RICHARDS
Published: August 30, 1992
Sammy Davis Jr. sent word down from heaven to Frank Sinatra. "Don't hurry to get here now that Sonny Averona has joined our Angel Entertainer's Society. We have someone who sounds like you and cooks better sauce." -- Pinky Kravitz in Whoot!, South Jersey's Entertainment, Casino and Dining Newspaper, July 23, 1992
Up to the time he died, which was suddenly on the morning of July 4, Sonny Averona lived in the shadow of Frank Sinatra.
He sounded uncannily like Sinatra. He had the Sinatra phrasing and cultivated a lot the Sinatra mannerisms. If you'd had a few drinks and weren't looking closely, you could even convince yourself that a certain physical resemblance was there.
The head shot of him on the sign in the lobby of Caesars Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City showed him looking a little portly but smooth in an early 1960's fashion, and somehow a bit boyish in spite of himself. "Sonny Averona Sings the Songs of Sinatra in the Wee Small Hours of the Morning," it read underneath. "Every Friday and Saturday in the Forum Lounge."
And when you made your way through a maze of plush hallways and up a couple of staircases to the dimly lit Forum Lounge, there he was, snapping his fingers and singing "The Summer Wind" or "Too Marvelous for Words" or "I Only Have Eyes for You," which he'd preface by saying it was "absolutely my favorite song."
His name was not one many people knew, or thought they should. And his death went unnoticed in the world at large. If show business were organized, like Dante's vision of hell, into concentric rings, the lounge would probably be somewhere near the bottom. Yet there was in Sonny's life the stuff of countless lives, pledged to the big break that is always about to happen, to a stardom that will really never be, and to a glamour that, observed close up, proves a bit frayed at the edges. The huge presence of Frank Sinatra hovered over Sonny's days and the late, late nights. But it could have been any superstar -- an Elvis Presley or a Marilyn Monroe -- who exerts a tight grip on our imagination, shapes our ambitions and colors our dreams. Sonny liked to believe he was his own man. But in the end, he was probably the prisoner of an illusion.
On the other side of the smoke-colored floor-to-ceiling windows that shield Caesars from a tawdrier reality, the crowds stream restlessly up and down the boardwalk. On the dark beach beyond, the waves are engaged in a fretful come-and-go of their own. But the Forum Lounge, by design, is above all that, literally and spiritually. Those Friday and Saturday nights when it was Sonny's room, it offered a respite from time and gambling losses, which the management naturally hoped would be significant.
Waitresses in abbreviated toga outfits circulated among the tables as Sonny crooned "I only have eeeeyes for yoooouuu!" to someone who had requested it or had gone bust in the casino and needed distracting. A black handkerchief, edged in gold, protruded from his tuxedo pocket and occasionally the spotlight would glint off the diamond pin in his lapel, which depicted the Statue of Liberty's torch. He was backed by a three-piece combo, and sometimes, when Sonny told the customers that his pianist knew "10,000 songs," the pianist would quip, "You don't listen to me, Sonny. I said I know 10,000 bartenders."
For much of his life he'd been in the junkyard business. Then, through a fluke, he'd snuck in the back door of show business. Now, at the age of 55, he was in his element, although to say so was not part of the image he cultivated. He played it laid back and usually found a moment, late in the evening, to undo his black bow tie and let it hang loosely around his neck.
Between sets, he'd drink Big Mamas -- a mixture of hot water, lemon and Grand Marnier -- and schmooze with the customers. He was born in South Philadelphia and believed there was nobody he couldn't talk to. "Most entertainers are cheap; they won't spend a penny," says Debbi Fitzpatrick, Sonny's longtime agent and close friend. "Not Sonny. He'd spend $150 a night buying drinks for people who had come in to see him. 'They're my people,' he'd say."
Only rarely, when he was discouraged, would Sonny admit to himself that maybe he had walked into a glittering trap and that the trap had somehow snapped shut. "It's tough for a guy like me," he said in the last interview he gave, a few days before his death. "I try to do my own thing. I do show tunes. I do Tony Bennett, Vic Damone, Al Martino. I sing as good as all of them. But the people won't let me. The minute I get on the stage, they shout out, 'My Way' or 'The Lady Is a Tramp' or 'New York, New York.' And so I end up staying in that Sinatra vein."
"He felt there was something about him that was like Sinatra," says Roseann Averona, Sonny's widow. "His real name was Robert Francis Averona, and Frank's is Francis Albert Sinatra. They were both only children. They both had aggressive mothers who pushed their sons. Sonny just related to him in some way. He loved Sinatra's music, but he respected everything else about him, too. Even the arrogance. He'd say to me, 'This man walks around and even if he doesn't open his mouth, people flock.' He wanted that for himself. It was coming to that."
Sonny wasn't so sure. "I tell people Frankie got a head start," he'd joke, but it wasn't always a joke.
After all, by the time he turned lounge singer, he was 45, married and the father of three sons. Nothing that had gone before had prepared him for the abrupt career change. When he was 11, his mother arranged for him to take weekly singing lessons, but until she caught him and put an end to the practice, he used the money to shoot pool or take his pals to the movies. As a singer, he was entirely self-taught.
"Believe me, being 11 years old in the 1940's in the tough Italian neighborhood I grew up in, there was no way I was taking singing lessons," he said. "I would have had to fight just to get back into the house. In the 1950's, it became the in thing. You had guys like Fabian and Frankie Avalon doo-wopping on the corner. I knew them all. I used to baby-sit Fabian. But I was a different generation. I learned to sing by listening to Frank Sinatra records. I have thousands. I never did anything to make my voice sound like his, though. It's just my voice."
The back-slapping gregariousness seemed innate, too. "You're born a certain place, you're a product of that environment, is what I think," he explained. "I mean, my education isn't that great. It's sort of a street education. But South Philly is a unique place. You can just walk into people's houses and say, 'Hi, put the coffee on.' Other places, that don't happen. Other places, they sit and look at you across the table, and you think, 'When's this guy gonna bring out a cake or something?' I noticed that a lot in California. California, forget it! But coming from South Philly, I can sit with anybody. I could sit and have a conversation with Richard Burton. I did once."
He dropped out of Bok Vocational High School in the 11th grade, married his teen-age sweetheart and went to work as an auto mechanic. Even today, there are people in South Philadelphia who will tell you nobody rebuilt a transmission better than Sonny Averona. But eventually the endless grease got to him. So in 1967, he bought himself a junkyard. Before long, he'd parlayed it into three. The money was good. It allowed him to move his expanding family to a split-level house in Cherry Hill, N.J.
In the mid-1970's, he also acquired an abandoned Baptist church in South Philadelphia, spent months renovating it, and opened it as a nightclub, the Roman Gardens. Why? At the time, he had no intentions of performing professionally, although he'd often sing around the house. Maybe it was a preparatory step. Like buying scuba gear before learning to swim.
Roseann Averona says that the goal was "to meet Frank Sinatra and bring him to the club," but Sonny's idol never performed there. One weekend, Frank Sinatra Jr. did. So did groups like the Shirelles and the Chiffons. "I used to do a Gong Show, once a month, which really attracted people," Sonny recalled. "They would win prizes. The place would be packed. But then it tapered off. So I turned it into a disco -- big sound system -- and the place started to get crowded again.
"Then one night we had a problem. This young kid was acting up in the balcony. The two bouncers went up, grabbed him by the collar and escorted him out the door. The next thing you know, the kid takes out a gun and shoots one of the bouncers dead. Big headlines, front page. I'm telling you the truth. That night the police took away 90 under-age kids. They'd gotten into the club with phony drivers' licenses. We found them ripped up, all over the place. That hurt me a lot. I got out of the club after that and went back to the junk business."
Sonny's middle son, Michael, says "the experience aged my father 10 years." Even now, Roseann Averona wishes she could erase that whole period from their lives.
The junkyard business continued to flourish, however. As president of the South Philadelphia Auto Wreckers Association, Sonny was widely known and liked. So he received a big hand when he allowed himself to be lured up on stage at the association's annual dinner and show in the spring of 1982. It was held at Palumbo's, a sprawling 1940's-style nightclub in South Philadelphia that functions these days mainly as a social hub for the tightly knit Italian community.
Sonny never tired of the story. "I was sitting ringside that night," he said. "Julie DeJohn was the comic. She's jolly. She spots me and says, 'What are you doing down there? Get up here and sing a few songs.' So I sang 'All of Me' and a couple of others. My friends were cheering and everything. I walked off the stage, never thinking a couple of executives from the Playboy casino club in Atlantic City were there. Afterward, they called me over to their table and said, 'How'd you like to sing at the Playboy?'
"I had a voice. But I had no stage presence. No arrangements. But I know in their minds what they saw. They saw all these people that I sort of controlled. And they knew that junkyard people make a lot of money. They figured they'd bring me down there and I'd bring a lot of gamblers with me.
"They gave me a Monday night, a dark night, in the main room of the Playboy casino. I opened up on June 28. And, sure enough, they were waiting in line to see me. Everyone there claimed to be my aunt or my uncle. I sang four or five bars of 'Come Fly With Me' behind the curtain. Then they opened the curtain and the crowd went wild. My first time on a stage. I've got a 16-piece orchestra behind me and I'm shaking like crazy."
That night, the casino registered one of its biggest "drops" (money lost at the gaming tables) for a Monday. The "junkyard singer" was invited to stay on for the next six Monday nights. Roseann Averona considered it all "a lark" and was sure it wouldn't last. But Sonny saw a new life opening up and, as his wife observes, "there was nothing you could say to change his mind." Three years later, he turned the junkyard business over to his three sons. From then on, he was, first and last, a singer.
Judging from his 10-page resume, Sonny didn't do badly for someone who was known as a "Sinatra singalike" or, as one Finnish newspaper called him, when he was appearing at the Ramada Presidentti Hotel in Helsinki, "the poor man's Frankie-boy." At one time or another, he appeared in the lounges of most of the big, glitzy hotels in Atlantic City -- Bally's Grand, Trump Plaza, Resorts International, Claridge's, Harrah's, Caesars and the Trump Taj Mahal.
Some engagements were a bit less glamorous -- Cozy Morley's Club Avalon in Wildwood, N.J., for example, or Papa Dom's in Voorhees, N.J. -- and for a while, in 1989, he sang on a cruise ship that shuttled between Stockholm and Leningrad. But in a good week, after he'd paid his musicians, Sonny could clear $2,500. The junkyards had been more lucrative, perhaps, but you didn't get to rub shoulders with Telly Savalas or Red Buttons in a scrapheap. And you couldn't boast, "One night I sat with Tom Jones until 8 in the morning. We polished off seven bottles of Dom Perignon."
In 1985, Sonny made two appearances on the TV series "Remington Steele." Predictably, he played a nightclub singer who, as one joke went, had everything that Sinatra did except "Sinatra's paycheck." With the ex-heavyweight boxing champion, Smokin' Joe Frazier, he put together a singing act and dubbed it "The Main Event." ("Joe Frazier 'verses' Sonny Averona," promised the posters.) But it never caught on. Neither did "The Lady on the Island," the 45 he cut to celebrate the centennial of the Statue of Liberty, although he had hoped it would become the monument's official theme song.
At one point, he thought "Sonny's Sizzlers," his own brand of hot peppers, would be the passport to fame. He prepared them himself in the kitchen, had special labels made up and even took them around to stores in Philadelphia. "He was making them by the cases. It took over his life," says Roseann. "That was another dream."
The biggest dream, however, was to play the main room, as the stars did, and Sonny dreamed it right up to the end. "I can do a show for five or six people," he explained. "But there's nothing like the adrenaline that flows through you when you're working before 1,000 people. It's like a basketball player. He throws the basketball up to the hoop. If there's no backboard, the ball keeps going. The action comes when it hits the backboard. Well, the audience is the backboard. It can build you up to a frenzy where you just sing your heart out."
On a few occasions, he had that opportunity. Mostly, though, Sonny stuck to the lounge, singing the other guy's songs.
"It's my experience that most performers who start out in lounges stay in lounges," says the singer Clint Holmes, who worked the circuit early in his career. "The thing is, they're not individuals. They do other people's material or else top-40 songs from the radio. Sonny wasn't trying to rip off Sinatra. But that was the appeal. He did a real good job with those songs and, believe me, there are an awful lot of Sinatra fans in the world. With Sonny, they could get the taste of Sinatra without paying Sinatra prices."
For Bruce Klauber, the author of "The World of Gene Krupa" and the percussionist in Sonny's band, the phenomenon is prevalent in South Philadelphia, also his hometown. "Sinatra has one of the biggest followings in the world there," he notes. "People absolutely worship him. He came from nothing and made it to the pinnacle. He's Italian and South Philly is largely Italian. It goes without saying that 99.9 percent of these people are never going to meet Sinatra. But here's this other guy, who does a Sinatra imitation, so they latch on to him. It's as close to the real thing as they'll come. And somehow they get it into their minds that he is Sinatra.
"It's weird, I know. But I've seen it happen time and again. After awhile, Sonny realized he was between a rock and a hard place. He was trying to break out of the mold. I even think the true Sonny Averona was starting to emerge. Was it too late? I don't know."
Sonny didn't either.
"Maybe you should do something like dye your hair orange," Roseann said to him one afternoon, shortly before he died. Sonny was in the kitchen preparing a large pot of pasta fazool.
"You mean be an original," he answered.
"That's one way," she laughed.
He gave the pot a stir, then added, "Well, people want to see young up there. They don't want to see old. But here's the real corker. My son Michael wants to be a singer. He's 31, handsome. He gets up on the stage, the girls go crazy. He sings the same stuff I do. He just brought over a couple of tapes he made."
Sonny disappeared into the family room and put one of them on the tape deck. Michael is singing along to lush prerecorded orchestrations -- as you would for fun in an amusement arcade. His voice is lighter than his father's and not so burnished, but surprisingly confident. It could be Sonny 15 years ago. Then again, it could be Sinatra. Michael has never taken a singing lesson, but as he later points out, "Dad had Sinatra on the radio all the time. I was forced to listen."
After a few minutes, Sonny was back at the stove, stirring his pasta. "I'll tell you one thing," he said quietly. "Michael's got a better shot at it than I did."
Death came swiftly. When he was performing in Atlantic City, Sonny and Roseann regularly spent the night at Debbi Fitzpatrick's house in nearby Ocean City. Sonny didn't get to bed until 5 A.M. and habitually slept till noon. On July 4, however, he woke his wife at 8 to complain about a pain in his chest.
"He said he'd had a hot dog before going to sleep," Roseann remembers. "I thought it must be indigestion. But he said, 'No, it's worse than that, Rose. You know something? I'm going to die.' I told him that was ridiculous. He was strong as a bull. I drove him to Shore Memorial Hospital in Somers Point. We talked all the way. He was holding his chest. I kept saying to him, 'You are not going to die. You are not going to die.' "
Orderlies rushed Sonny into the emergency room. Roseann never saw him alive again. By 10:27 A.M., he had succumbed to a massive heart attack.
For the funeral at the Queen of Heaven Church in Cherry Hill, they played "You and Me," "Our Father" and "My Way."
His father's death has only stiffened Michael Averona's resolve to quit the junkyard business and become a singer too. It's what Sonny would have wanted, he tells himself. And although he has no more preparation than his father did, he says, "I'm Sonny Averona's son. He was loved by everybody. Who's going to turn me down?"
It is possible, in a roundabout way, that Sonny even prepared for the succession. Last June, he was scheduled to appear as part of a variety show at Palumbo's, but a last-minute conflict obliged him to pull out. So he proposed that Michael take his place. There, where the father had made his inadvertent debut 10 years earlier almost to the day, the son followed suit.
"This ventriloquist with life-sized dummies of Elvis and Sinatra was on before me," Michael says. "So actually Sinatra's dummy introduced me. I brought my tapes with me and I sang 'Come Fly With Me' and 'The Summer Wind.' A lot of my friends were out there. It was like being on the front lines. My hands were shaking. So I squeezed the mike. Then it was shaking. So I lightened up my grip. The mike was still shaking. So I sang with a shaking mike. But you know something? The voice wasn't shaking."
On Oct. 3, Debbi Fitzpatrick says, she is going to produce "A Tribute to Sonny Averona" in the main room at Bally's Grand in Atlantic City. She's still lining up the acts and someone to deliver a eulogy to the client who was like a brother to her. One thing is certain: Michael will be part of it. "He'll do two songs," she says.
Michael hopes to take some lessons and "polish myself" beforehand, because "you have to feel confident with yourself before you can sing for other people."
Sonny's drummer, Bruce Klauber, was skeptical at first. But he's come to believe Michael is serious. "Look at Harry Connick Jr.," he says. "What the hell is he doing? Frank Sinatra, 1944. Well, Michael naturally sings in tune. He's got the Sinatra shtick down. The kid has potential. Who knows? You could very well see the Sonny Averona Story all over again."
A Singer Does It Frank's Way Sonny Averona Used To Run A Junkyard; Now He Has A Singing Career Emulating Sinatra August 18, 1986|By Jack Lloyd, Inquirer Staff Writer
ATLANTIC CITY — The sounds drifting out of the Bay Cabaret in Harrah's Marina Hotel Casino had a ring that was oh-so-familiar. Passers-by would come to a dead stop in front of the lounge with regularity. Could it really be Him, the one and only Ol' Blue Eyes?
Not quite. The singer was Sonny Averona, a former South Philadelphia auto- junkyard operator who parlayed his passion for Sinatra into a late-blooming show-business career.
On stage, Averona is Frank Sinatra. Or so it seems. The moves, the mannerisms are all there. Even his between-song chatter, paying homage to the songs' writers and arrangers, is pure Sinatra.
"Now we're going to do a Cole Porter song," Averona said before he and conductor Carmen Dee's band broke into "I Can't Remember Where or When." ''Let's do an old one," he continued. " 'Teach Me Tonight.' This one goes back to, oh, '54, '55. . . . Here's some Rodgers and Hart, 'The Lady Is a Tramp.' . . . And now we have a request - 'My Way.' . . . "
A little later, Averona relaxed between sets during his last Harrah's engagement, chatting with his manager, Debbie Fitzpatrick, and Dee, who also serves as conductor for the house band at Palumbo's in South Philadelphia. The singer opens again tonight at the Bay Cabaret, where he will appear through mid-September.
For those who suspect that Averona, who will turn 50 on Nov. 9, is a fluke, a novelty act who will disappear as quickly as he arrived, it should be noted that his popularity has built steadily over the last four years. Averona has performed regularly in Atlantic City hotel-casino lounges for the last couple of years and is now signed to an exclusive deal with Harrah's. He also recently made his Las Vegas debut, appearing for a month at the Tropicana West, where he is scheduled to return in the near future.
Heck, his belated singing career is going so nicely that Averona has turned his junkyard business at 61st Street and Passyunk Avenue over to his three sons: Bobby, 28; Michael, 25, and Stephan, 24.
"Things really started taking off for me in 1982," Averona said. "I was at Palumbo's for a show with Jimmy Darren and Julie DeJohn. Well, Julie knew I did some singing and asked me to come up on stage. She almost had to carry me up there and, well, I sang a couple of songs.
"It turned out there was an executive from Playboy (now the Atlantis Casino Hotel) in the audience. We talked, and he realized I had a lot of friends in South Philly. I was president of the Auto Wrecking Association, and we were involved with a lot of causes. So he asked if I thought I could fill up Playboy's showroom if they brought me in for a special show.
"I said sure, and I ended up doing seven Monday nights and the Fourth of July weekend. A problem was that the place was so packed every night that people would come and couldn't get in. A guy would say, 'Hey, that's OK, I can go down and hear Sonny sing at the junkyard.' A great bunch of people."
Offstage, Averona is realistic about his Frank Sinatra fixation. He knows it presents certain problems.
"People say to me that I don't need this, I don't have to emulate Sinatra," Averona said. "Record people have told me that if I got away from the Sinatra thing, they might be interested.
"But that's how I learned to sing, listening to Sinatra records. As far back as I can remember, I've loved Frank's music. I listened to the records all the time, and so I learned to sing that way - the phrasing, everything. But the voice you hear is me, it's my voice. Besides, really, I just don't sing Sinatra songs. I have other arrangements."
Sure he does. It's just that out of the 175 arrangements Averona does, 140 of them are Sinatra arrangements. "You have to remember," he said with a smile, "Frank has recorded just about every good song ever written."
Averona said he and Sinatra were friends. They met on the stage of the old Latin Casino in Cherry Hill in 1976 when Averona presented a citation to Sinatra on behalf of the Roman Gardens Social Club.
"We hit it right off," Averona said. "Later we went out to dinner at Bookbinders on Walnut Street. . . . During the times we've been together since I started making my living at this, the subject has never come up; it's just something that's not talked about."
Averona - who for the last several years has lived with his wife, Roseann, in Cherry Hill - was born and raised in the area around Seventh and Federal Streets. Naturally, he knew the likes of Darren, Freddie Bell and Fabian ("I used to baby-sit Fabian"). But a show-business career was not high on his list of priorities, much to the chagrin of his mother, Mary Salvatore, who still lives in the old neighborhood.
"She really had her heart set on my becoming a singer," Averona said. ''When I was 12, she had me enrolled in this vocal school on Chestnut Street, Elsie Miller's Studio. Well, I was a 12-year-old kid, so instead of taking that singing lesson every Tuesday, I'd go to the local pool hall. And those lessons cost $5, which was a lot of money back then.
"Everything was fine until my mother found out that the school was having a recital for the students. I ran all the way up to Chestnut Street and begged Miss Elsie to let me sing, which she finally agreed to. I sang 'Symphony of Love' and 'Sentimental Me.' My mother was so proud, but then Miss Elsie told her that I hadn't been to a single lesson. I got the beating of my life, but I never did forget those two songs."
When Averona was 15, he went to work as a mechanic at Crisconi Oldsmobile in South Philadelphia. A couple of years later, he took a similar job with Universal Motors. Eventually, he went into the auto-wrecking business.
"All of those guys I knew - Jimmy, Freddie, Fabian, all of them - left and
went to California," Averona said. "I remember the day Freddie Bell bought this new Oldsmobile. That was in '54. I adjusted the carburetor and asked Freddie were he was going. 'California,' he said. He drove off, and I was standing there on Broad Street with a greasy rag in my hand.
"A funny thing happened, though. I played the Tropicana in Vegas this summer for a month, and guess who was on the bill with me? Right, Freddie Bell - after all those years. Isn't that something?"
Cloning The Crooner Sonny Averona Sang "My Way" Sinatra's Way. He's Gone, But His Son, Michael, Knows The Way, Too.
around Atlantic City they said that Sonny Averona looked and sounded so much like Frank Sinatra that if you had a few drinks, you wouldn't know the difference.
Sonny, a junkyard dealer who became the Shore resort's most popular lounge act, died in July at 55. More than 1,000 people attended his funeral. An admirer sang "My Way" from the church balcony.
Now Sonny's son, Michael Averona, who followed his father into the junk business, hopes to follow his dad once again. Tomorrow night, in the Bay Cabaret at Harrah's Casino/Hotel, Michael makes his official debut as a second-generation Sinatra soundalike.
"The legend lives on!" Michael, 31, declared the other day at Sonny's Auto, the Southwest Philadelphia junkyard where he rehearses every day. ''People said my father sounded just like Sinatra. I sound just like my father. They tell me I have everything of Sinatra's but his eyes."
Michael sat on a stool in his small office and popped a tape into a cassette player. Music filled the room. Sinatra music.
Michael - muscular, with a movie-star chin, coal-black eyes and hair, a black-leather jacket and, in his left ear, a silver earring - began to snap his fingers and bob his head, his eyes closed as if he had fled his workaday office and withdrawn deep inside himself. He was oblivious to the posters of Chuck Norris in Hitman and Marlon Brando in The Godfather, to the life-size cutout from Mobsters, to the picture of a go-go dancer with bowling-ball-size breasts that's pinned to a bulletin board.
He didn't even hear the intercom squawk as one of the 51 other junkyard dealers around Passyunk Avenue asked, "Anyone got an early GM bumper jack?"
He took a deep breath and suddenly let go - as loud and clear as his father ever did, maybe even as sonorous as Sinatra himself. Hellooooooo Dolly, well, helloooooo Dolly, it's so nice to have you back where you belong. . . .
Sonny Averona always adored Sinatra - his music and his moxie. "Sinatra's songs," said Michael, "put happiness in my father's heart. Sinatra was playing all the time - at home, in the car. I was forced to listen."
An entire generation loved Sinatra's music, but Sonny felt a closer connection. Both were Italian; both were self-made men.
"My dad had the same name as Frank Sinatra," said Michael. "He was Robert Francis and Sinatra was Francis Albert. They were both an only child."
Perhaps it was meant to be. In the late 1970s, Sonny started singing at meetings of the junkyard dealers association. Always Sinatra songs. About 10 years ago, at 45, Sonny was performing one night at Palumbo's restaurant in South Philadelphia. Several executives from what was then Atlantic City's Playboy casino were having dinner. They loved him and offered him a lounge gig at the casino (now the Trump Regency Hotel) on a Monday night - the slowest night of the week.
Sonny packed the place. And he never looked back.
"He probably holds the record as the only entertainer - big or small - who has worked every casino in Atlantic City," said Sonny's longtime agent, Debbi Fitzpatrick. "You can't say that about anybody else, not even Frank Sinatra."
Sonny traveled the world. He even met Frank a few times. When Sonny appeared in Helsinki, a Finnish paper called him "the poor man's Frankie- boy." In the last year or two of his life, Sonny also sang Dean Martin and Tony Bennett and Vic Damone and his own compositions. But the people would shout, "My Way" or "New York, New York" or "The Lady Is a Tramp."
"Sonny looked like Sinatra, sounded like Sinatra," said Michael. "People wanted him to be Sinatra."
Michael never imagined himself an entertainer. "My place was here," he said, referring to the junkyard at 61st Street and Passyunk Avenue. He started working there at age 8. At 21, he ran the place. The closest he ever came to performing was doing "Dr. Ruth" imitations over the intercom.
But in February, Michael and his father were riding down Passyunk Avenue in Sonny's Lincoln Continental. Sonny was singing a Sinatra tune. Michael turned to his father.
"You know, Dad, I could do that - as good as you."
"Yeah, sure. You know how much work this is?"
"I'll prove it. I'll show you."
So that day Michael got on the phone with music stores all over South Philly. "I went out and spent three grand," he said. "Speakers, mixers, preamp, microphone, everything you need."
Then he mail-ordered some taped Sinatra arrangements - just the lush background music. The cassette arrived by Express Mail the next day.
"I went home that night - boom. I put my voice on his music. I sang 'The Summer Wind.' " Michael paused at this point and put the very tape into the cassette player on the junkyard counter. The summer wind, came blowing in, from across the sea. . . . It could have been Frank, or Sonny. But it was Michael.
"That was the first week I had my studio!" he boasted. "So I've been told I'm a natural. You know?"
The following Sunday, Michael went over to his parents' house in Cherry Hill for dinner. He played the tape for his father, who broke into a wide smile.
"It sounds good, son," Sonny told him. "Be down at the Shore Saturday night, and I'll call your name out of the audience. You'll sing 'The Summer Wind.'
The next Saturday, at the Trump Taj Mahal, Sonny called for Michael. "I wore a nice double-breasted Boyd's suit - black," said Michael. "I got up on that stage, and my knees are actually jumping. My hands are shaking. A couple hundred people are watching. I got through the song, and the people went crazy. And all the girls are screaming. It was a charge, man. And I said, 'I like this!' "
Michael sang a few more times with his father over the spring and early summer. Then, on the morning of July 4, a few hours after a show at Caesars Hotel-Casino, Sonny died of a heart attack.
Michael is still so ripped up that he can't listen to his father's music.
But he decided over the summer that he should devote himself to singing, to pick up where his father left off. Michael said he felt as if this was all ordained, that his decision to start singing was more than coincidence.
"My father worked so hard with his singing career," said Michael. "And he was cut short. There's so much for me to do. He left me so many people, so many doors. They loved my father, and they love me - especially with my ability."
Michael began taking singing lessons this fall. He assembled a trio, which includes his brother Bobby, 34, on drums, and it rehearses at night at keyboardist Gene Rizzo's house in Camden. And, of course, he sings every day at work, sitting behind that counter, in front of Chuck Norris, Marlon Brando and the go-go girl.
"I teach myself," says the unmarried Michael, a resident of Blackwood. ''I practice here."
Michael has the lyrics to nine Sinatra songs - the songs he'll sing at tomorrow's one-time, invitation-only show - written in longhand on old calendar pages. As Spike, his Rottweiler puppy, lay sprawled at his feet the other afternoon, Michael crooned,
Out of the tree of life, I just picked me a plum.
You came along and everything started to hum.
Still it's a real good bet the best is yet to come.
When he needed a break from rehearsing, he grabbed his .22-caliber rifle, wandered out back among the 200 old junkers and popped a few side-view mirrors.
Cloning The Crooner Sonny Averona Sang "My Way" Sinatra's Way. He's Gone, But His Son, Michael, Knows The Way, Too.
"Michael has so much more going for him than his dad," said Debbi Fitzpatrick, who is now Michael's agent. "His dad started at 45 years old, and it's unheard of to start at 45. He didn't look like Clark Gable. The boy is so much like Sonny, except he's better looking."
Michael's timing couldn't be better. The lush big-band sound is back in a big way, Fitzpatrick said. Harry Connick Jr. and Natalie Cole are playing to younger audiences. People are dancing again
The CBS series Street Stories will be taping at Harrah's tomorrow night, ending a segment on Sonny's career with the beginning of Michael's. Publicity after Sonny's death has also attracted several movie producers, who've had discussions with Michael and his mother, Roseann. She'd like Michael to play Sonny - but she'd settle for Robert De Niro.
As for Michael, he'd be happy just to make a little headway in his singing career.
"He has the looks, the presence, the potential," said Bruce Klauber, Sonny's old drummer. "All he needs is the experience. It's quite possible - if he does well, yeah, you could see lightning strike twice. You could see the Sonny Averona story all over again."