Tony Danza’s Upper West Side home is filled with art and Sinatra songs

NEW YORK — Tony Danza does not have a housekeeper. He said he prefers to “deep clean” his two-bedroom Upper West Side apartment once every week while singing Frank Sinatra tunes.

“Drinking again, and thinking of when, when you loved me. I’m having a few and wishing that you were here. Making the rounds, accepting a round from strangers. Being a fool, just hoping that you’ll appear,” Danza crooned.

The song? “Drinking Again,” featured in Frank Sinatra’s 1967 Reprise album, “The World We Knew.”

As he sang, Danza, 73, stood beside his 1988 Yamaha Disklavier — a piano controlled by a computer, which propelled the instrument’s keys to depress according to instructions coded onto a floppy disk. It was midafternoon, but he had been belting out Sinatra’s lyrics throughout his 1,046-square-foot apartment that is filled with art, including signed prints by Joan Miró, since early morning in preparation for his new cabaret show “Tony Danza: Sinatra & Stories,” which kicked off the Cafe Carlyle’s fall season Sept. 10.

“I can’t play the piano, so I had my piano player come here and record all of these songs,” said Danza, whose television credits include “Taxi” and “Who’s the Boss?” and who had roles in Broadway’s “The Iceman Cometh,” “The Producers” and “Honeymoon in Vegas.” “I can start singing at 6 o’clock in the morning, and nobody hears me, and I don’t hear them. That’s one of the reasons I love this apartment.”

Above the piano is a framed replica poster by Swiss artist Celestino Piatti that was used to advertise the Harlem closed-circuit showing of the “Fight of the Century” between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier on March 8, 1971.

“I was watching a rerun of ‘Taxi,’ and I saw the poster hanging in Tony Banta’s [the character Danza portrayed on the television show] apartment. I was like, ‘What happened to that?’ That’s what’s wrong with me. I never worried about memorabilia. Anyway, I found a replica online. It’s better than nothing.”

Before he started his acting career in 1977, Danza was a professional boxer. He trained at Gleason’s Gym at 30th Street and 8th Avenue. “Ali trained at Gleason’s while I was there,” Danza said.

At the gym in the late ‘70s, a television producer saw Danza fight and later cast him on “Taxi,” which ran for five years. That was followed by the actor’s eight-year run starring as professional baseball player turned housekeeper Tony Micelli on “Who’s the Boss?”

Danza has fond memories of his boxing days. He has a framed photo of a Coney Island restaurant once owned by John Ciarcia, a boxing manager, restaurateur and actor who died in 2015. “It was a lot of fun and right next to it was the controversial Shoot the Freak stand where you could actually shoot someone, who was running back-and-forth, with a paint gun.”

Initially, the cozy two-bedroom, two-bath condo served as a pied-à-terre that Danza rented while he filmed the first season of “The Tony Danza Talk Show” in 2004. The following year, he purchased the apartment for $1.7 million and did a gut renovation. Danza often walked to work at ABC Studio 7 Lincoln with his neighbor and friend, Regis Philbin.

Danza had a recurring guest with a lot of star power on his show: Liza Minnelli. “Liza is my dear, dear friend. She appeared on my first show, the 100th show and the last show. She was a big booster of the show,” he said. “Here we are dancing to ‘I Can’t Give You Anything but Love’ on the 100th episode.”

“I was optimistic because the show got picked up for a second season. So, I bought this apartment, but it wasn’t supposed to be where I lived full time. I was going to go back to Los Angeles and live in my big house, and this was going to be my place while I was in New York. Unfortunately, the show didn’t work out. So, now I have an apartment with a great view of the job I used to have,” Danza said, laughing.

That view includes the Carlyle, whose Cafe he grew enamored with through the stories of Charles Messinger, a teacher he had in the 11th grade at his high school on Long Island. “He was that teacher that really had an effect on me. He used to go to the Cafe Carlyle and he would come back to class and tell us about cafe society and who was there and who wasn’t and how great the food was. So, now when I play there, I always bring him up. I wish Mr. Messinger could see me now.”

After his second divorce, the doorman building officially became Danza’s primary residence in 2011. Danza has three adult children. His now ex-wife chose the living room’s beige and brown decor before they split, but Danza has made the space his own by papering the walls with nostalgic prints, old photographs, paintings by his granddaughter and artwork from the Stars of Tomorrow. He co-founded the year-round theatrical outreach program for New York City youth with Brian Hills, who has worked with Danza for 12 years in the development through performance space.

On one living room wall is a photo taken by photographer Jessica Burstein of Elaine Kaufman, owner of the eponymous Elaine’s, the Upper East Side nightspot that attracted famous writers and celebrities for nearly a half-century. “She loved me,” said Danza, who started hanging out at Elaine’s in the early ‘80s. “If any woman tried to go near me in that place, she was in trouble with Elaine.”

In his pass-through kitchen, two air fryers sit atop a wood plank covering the stove.

“Someone in the building was renovating their apartment a few years ago and hired a guy who drilled through the building’s gas line,” said Danza. “The building contacted me and said 54 apartments do not have gas for months. So, I got myself air fryers and never used the stove again.”

During Season 5 of “Who’s the Boss?” Sinatra did a guest spot on the show.

Danza had been a lifelong fan. “My mom turned me on to Sinatra and exposed me to the finer points of his music. She would say, ‘Listen to how he sings this part,’” Danza said.

After meeting Sinatra on the set of “Cannonball Run II” in 1984, Danza was determined to get the icon to do a cameo. Five years later, he approached Tina Sinatra at Morton’s, a restaurant and showbiz institution in Los Angeles, and asked if her father would come on “Who’s the Boss?”

“The next day, I got a call saying Sinatra would do it,” Danza said. “I don’t know why he decided to do it, but I made everybody crazy on set when he came because I told them, ‘He only does one take. I will kill anybody who messes up the take.’”

The day of filming, the crew followed Danza’s directions: “So, everybody is stiff, and we do the take, and it was good, and then Frank goes, ‘Do you want another take?’ Everybody looked at me like, what a dope you are,” Danza recalled.

The day was also special because he granted his mother, Anna Camisa Iadanza, her fondest wish by arranging for her to meet Sinatra.

In “Sinatra & Stories,” Danza planned to recount other interactions with Sinatra, including a late-night talk in a restaurant booth in Santa Monica, Calif.

“He was drinking Jack Daniel’s neat and smoking Camels one after another, so I said to him, ‘Frank,’ and let me say that it was weird to say ‘Frank,’ but it was 2 in the morning, and we were drinking, so, I said, ‘Frank. The smoking and the drinking. Does it ever mess with your voice?’ He takes a sip of his drink, takes a drag and blows out the smoke, and goes, ‘I’ve never met a singer worth his shit who didn’t smoke two packs a day.’”