Gaetano “Tommy” DeVito (The Four Seasons) was born on June 19, 1928, in Belleville, New Jersey, the youngest of nine children. When he was still too small to hold a guitar, he borrowed an older brother’s and tried playing it while it was lying on the floor. His brother discovered him, he told The Star-Ledger of Newark in 2005, and gave him first a beating and then a counterintuitive warning. “Now that I’ve seen you doing it,” he recalled his brother saying, “every time I come home and I don’t see you practicing, that’s a beating.” At eight years old, he taught himself to play his brother’s guitar by listening to country music on the radio. By the time he was 12, he was playing for tips in neighborhood taverns. He quit school after the eighth grade. (Belleville High made him an honorary graduate in 2007.) By 16, he had his own R&B band and was making $20 or $25 a night, getting into scrapes with the law from time to time.
The large DeVito family shared a flat with an uncle during the Depression, a difficult time. “You did anything to survive. You’d steal milk off of porches.”
Growing up in difficult circumstances in his native New Jersey, DeVito was, in his own words, “a hell-raiser” as a youth, but he found a purpose with music. He formed a band called the Variety Trio with one of his brothers and Nick Massi, who would become the fourth member of the Four Seasons when that group coalesced in about 1960. Massi died in 2000 at 73.
DeVito became a founding member, lead guitarist and vocalist with the Four Seasons, growing the close-harmony quartet that rocketed to fame with “Sherry”, Rag Doll” and many other hits that earned new generations of rock and roll fans. The key component with the Four Seasons though, was Frankie Valli, with his falsetto vocals. In a 2008 interview with the music publication Goldmine, DeVito recalled that in the late 1940s his trio performed regularly at a bar in Belleville, N.J., when Frankie, a teenager six years younger than him, would sneak in to watch them play. He and the other band members knew Valli from the neighborhood and knew that he had magnificent pipes.
“I’d call him up to the stage and let him sing,” DeVito recalled. “He’d get off right away, because he wasn’t really supposed to be in there; he was underage.” Before long Frankie Valli was part of the group, which went through name and lineup changes before becoming the Four Seasons. “Sherry,” the group’s breakout hit, topped the charts in 1962, and a stream of hits followed, (27 top 40 hits and number-one hits “Sherry” (1962), “Big Girls Don’t Cry” (1962), “Walk Like a Man” (1963), “Rag Doll” (1964).
DeVito didn’t entirely shed his hell-raiser past; he ran up debts, for one thing, and caused tensions within the group. In 1970 he was either forced out, as some accounts say, or left because the pressures of touring had disagreed with him, as he explained it.
He quickly burned through whatever money he had from the group’s heyday and took jobs working in casinos and cleaning houses to get by.
The actor Joe Pesci, a friend since childhood (whose character in Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” is named for Mr. DeVito), had lived with Mr. DeVito for a time before he was famous, and once Mr. Pesci broke through, he repaid the favor, helping Mr. DeVito out and getting him bit parts in movies, including “Casino” (1995), also directed by Mr. Scorsese. DeVito also had some success as a record producer and recorded an album of Italian folk songs.
Seeing a version of himself portrayed in “Jersey Boys” was startling, he said. But he was comfortable with the show, which he described as “about 85 percent true to life.”
“When you first see yourself being played, you look at the actor, who is Christian Hoff, and say: ‘Do I look like that? Did I talk like that? Was I really a bad guy?’” he told Goldmine. “And I was. I was pretty bad when I was a kid. There’s a lot of things I’d never do today that I did back then as a kid.”
“Jersey Boys” implies that he was somehow connected to organized crime, but that was an exaggeration, he said, done for the sake of the story.
“I was never part of the mob,” he said. “They might have asked me to play a private party or something, but they paid me for it. Mostly they asked me to do benefits.”
“Jersey Boys” opened on Broadway in November 2005 and ran until January 2017, one of the longest runs in Broadway history. (Clint Eastwood directed a film version in 2014.) The show won four Tony Awards, including best musical and best featured actor (Mr. Hoff).
If the musical massaged the truth a bit, Mr. DeVito generally complained about only one thing in the script: a crack about the cleanliness of his underwear. “I was the most cleanest guy in the whole group,” he said. “I’m clean. I’m very clean.”
Frankie Valli and Bob Gaudio, the two surviving original members of the group, announced Tommy DeVito’s death on Sept. 21, 2020. A spokeswoman for Valli said the cause was the Covid 19 coronavirus.
You must be logged in to post a comment.