A Local Author Spotlight by Michael Olohan
MONTVALE—Over five decades in show business, Montvale’s Anthony “Tony” Salerno Jr. has worked with hundreds of top entertainers, celebrities and VIPs — from Frank Sinatra, John Lennon and Lucille Ball to George W. Bush, Muhammad Ali and Bobby Darin — helping to produce scores of television programs, concerts, stadium spectaculars, special, political conventions, and corporate shows.
For the greater part of that half-century, Salerno writes, “it was the ride of a lifetime.”
Salerno’s “15 Minutes With Fame: 50 Years Among the Stars” (Fulton Books, 2022), with production notes, is a time capsule that begins on “The Dick Cavett Show” in 1967 and ends around 2019 after 16 years producing Advertising Week shows that featured performers such as Bruno Mars, Kanye West and Sting.
Recalling informal meet-ups and spontaneous moments with stars, Salerno takes readers on a trip through five decades handling production and behind-the-scenes coordination on “The Dick Cavett Show,” “The Tonight Show Starring Jack Paar,” and other programs and events, as well as work with notables such as David Frost and Jerry Lewis.
Salerno is also familiar to many locals as the host of Montvale’s community television programs “My Montvale” and “Montvale in Motion.” Montvale’s streaming archive includes a wide range of municipal content — from council meetings to work sessions and special events — as well as locally produced magazine-style programs dating back to 2018. The shows also air on FiOS Channel 35 and Optimum Channel 77; check channel schedules for times.
Other production gigs Salerno writes about include four Super Bowl halftime shows, network television specials, the 1996 Republican National Convention, the Special Olympics, three FIFA World Cups, and teaching stints at Montclair State University and Bergen Community College in Paramus.
He also did work for Walt Disney Productions and Radio City Music Hall, plus 25 years running his own independent production company, often working for the World Golf Hall of Fame and Advertising Week.
Salerno told me he wrote the book “over a couple of years, finishing it in ‘21 or ‘22. I started thinking about it when I retired in 2019, having finished 50 years in the entertainment business.”
Going “exclusively by memory,” he put to paper “a lot of stories” that he thought readers might find interesting. And he said, “I wanted to leave my children a record of what I had done.”
He said, “I wrote about the celebrities that had made a lasting impression on me, people I learned from or who had especially jazzed me in some way.”
Salerno noted in his foreword that “these are just my memories of events, colored by 50 years and my sometimes naive and romantic view of my career.”
If you want to scan for a specific celebrity or entertainment icon, the book makes that easy by featuring boldface for each famous (and some infamous) individual Salerno touches on.
The book reads like an intimate journal of Salerno’s career — moments, conversational snippets and names that anyone growing up in the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s will instantly recognize.
In the late ’60s and early ’70s, Salerno worked as a page and then production coordinator on The Dick Cavett Show, where he interacted sporadically with scores of celebrities.
One couple Salerno writes about meeting was John and Yoko Lennon, prior to their appearance on a September 1971 show.
Noting he was always one of the Beatles’ biggest fans, Salerno writes that during a brief meeting with John and Yoko at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City, Lennon played him a new song, which turned out to be “Imagine” before it had been released publicly.
Salerno writes, “Well, I loved it immediately. And in an effort to pay him a compliment, I said, ‘John, that’s a wonderful song. That’s as good as ‘Yesterday.’”
However, Salerno writes that he did not realize at that moment that ‘Yesterday’ was written by Paul McCartney, not John Lennon. “So here I am basically saying, ‘Your song is as good as that song written by your former partner, who you pretty much hate right now.’ What a backhanded compliment. Could I have said a more stupid thing, considering the feud they were then embroiled in?” Salerno writes.
He continues, “Luckily for me, John was nothing but gracious. He said thank you. He was very nice. He gave us T-shirts and a couple of albums and was just a wonderful guy.”
The book’s chronology follows Salerno’s career in broadcast and special-event production, with hundreds of anecdotes, interspersed production notes, and little asides about performers he met along the way.
Salerno also recalls his role helping to produce the U.S. Bicentennial fireworks show, July 4, 1976, on the Hudson River.
Salerno writes that his job was to program the show on paper, lay out all the music, and determine when each shell or group of shells needed to be fired so they would explode at the correct point in the music.
With a skeleton crew, Salerno writes that he “was literally digging the ditches and installing the mortars that would shoot the firework shells. I even loaded the mortars.”
Salerno adds, “It was the hardest manual labor I ever did, especially since I tried never to do manual labor.” He writes that the post-event schedule called for him and four co-workers from Disney to remove unexploded shells from their mortars.
Salerno refused to do that dangerous work, he writes, and persuaded Army and Navy personnel on site to remove the unexploded shells.
In 1976, he also helped produce a Bicentennial “Happy Birthday America” special for NBC-TV, featuring musical guests Paul Anka and KC & The Sunshine Band, along with motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel.
Salerno recounts other interactions with stars — mostly positive — and notes early in the book that if you’re looking for “celebrity dirt” or lots of negative stories about movie stars, these anecdotes are not going to be for you. “For the most part, I mostly seem to recall the good things only,” Salerno writes in a foreword.
Salerno was born and raised in New York City. He and his wife, Donna, have been married for 48 years, and have four children and 11 grandchildren. “15 Minutes With Fame” is Salerno’s first book. It’s available via Amazon.
I read the book by finding highlighted names I was interested in (and there were many) and reading those chapters first; I finished the whole thing in days, and learned a lot.
Salerno’s goal: “I just hoped readers would walk away with a smile. And perhaps realize that dreams really can come true.”