By Kristin Behr
Passing through the tinted glass foyer of the Carnegie Club is much like stepping out of Marty McFly’s DeLorean.
The room is dark, heavy and hazy with cigar smoke. The walls are a deep burgundy with rich wooden molding, decorative bookcases and stained-glass chandeliers. Elegant older women sit in plush leather chairs adorned with golden nail-head upholstery, sipping gin and tonics and daintily pulling drags from impossibly long cigarettes, their gaudy estate rings jutting out from wrinkled fingers. It feels like a dream.
He is standing at the corner of the bar, having a cocktail, adjusting his bow tie and laughing with old friends while the Stan Rubin Orchestra warms up. Even his speaking voice sounds like Sinatra’s.
Steven Maglio has come a long way from his Bronx boyhood to a career as the spitting image of Ole Blue Eyes.
He struts to the center of the room, commanding attention, an unlit cigar and a highball glass in hand.
“People always come up to me and say, ‘Steven, you gonna smoke that thing? You need a light?’” he said. “But the truth is, it’s more of a pacifier. I quit smoking years ago.”
It wasn’t until age 35 that Maglio got serious about his singing career. Before that, he worked from 1979 to 1991 as a waiter at The Palm Too Restaurant on 2nd Ave, part of the famous Palm Restaurant steakhouse chain. In August of 1985, he moved to Hazlet, N.J., settled down with his family, and in 1991 opened Squinge Awning Company, named after his boyhood nickname given to him by his grandfather.
“I knew I had to get started or regret it for therest of my life, Maglio said. “So I got started.”
He began taking lessons, had a procedure to fix a deviated septum and quit smoking, an unhealthy indulgence of his since age 11.
Cut to lounge act circa 1955.
“I don’t know why people say it’s so hard to stop,” Maglio said. “It’s easy – I’ve done it a dozen times.”
Ba-dump-bump.
Born on Christmas Day in East Harlem in 1958, Maglio moved with his family to the Bronx in September 1966.
“I didn’t know any of the kids in the neighborhood yet, and so I’d walk to school by myself,” Maglio said. “I heard a recording of Frank Sinatra singing ‘My Kind Of Town,’ and to pass the time on my new daily trek, I would sing the song to myself over and over.”
After a few days, Maglio had exhausted the tune and decided to listen to the only Sinatra record he had at the time, “A Man And His Music.”
Despite growing up in an era of rock, roll and disco, Maglio never strayed from his first love of singing Sinatra.
“I liked groups like The Beatles and The Four Seasons,” Maglio said, “but after the mid 80s, I lost all interest in new music completely. As far as singers are concerned, there are very few people who will disagree that Sinatra was the best singer of these type songs, so it made perfect sense for him to be the singer I wanted to emulate.”
“If I wanted to be a dancer, it would have been Fred Astaire. If I wanted to be a comic, it would have been Groucho Marx. I wanted to be a singer, so it had to be Sinatra.”
Maglio began his career by singing in karaoke bars all over New Jersey at night and working by day. Nobody knew, he said, but he’d take lessons on the weekends with vocal coach Cynthia Varrichio, and practiced during his lunch breaks at his aluminum awning business.
“At one point, he put an awning up on my house and he was singing Frank Sinatra the entire time, “ Varrichio said. “It truly is a part of him. He’s quite an artist, and he’s done very well for himself.”
Varrichio, who has been teaching voice lessons in Highland Park, N.J. for over 20 years, almost didn’t work with Maglio. “When he first came to me he loved Frank,” Varrichio said. “I didn’t want to work with him because he sang so out of tune. I told him if he stopped singing Sinatra, I’d take him on as a student.”
But after working with Maglio for just two years, it was she who ended up changing her tune.
“I think he’s one of the hardest workers I’ve ever worked with,” Varrichio said, “He persevered more than any of my other students. He was a father raising a family and doing this at the same time and that’s truly admirable.”
The lessons remained a secret for eight years, until one night in 2001, when he and his wife, Debi, went to the Champps Americana, a restaurant in Edison, N.J., that features karaoke.
“Debi and I were there for dinner, and they had karaoke going on, so I thought, why not?” Maglio said. “I remember getting off the stage and my hands were just shaking.”
He said he didn’t realize that the restaurant was holding a karaoke contest. Out of 200 contestants, Maglio came in first.
“That’s when I had to come clean to my wife,” Maglio joked.
From there, confident that the secret lessons had paid off, Maglio started to sing at karaoke bars every chance he could.
“I started to realize I was getting really good because it started to feel like a movie,” Maglio said. “I would come up to the microphone, and everyone would stop. The waiter would freeze — the chef would come out of the kitchen. That’s when I knew.”
Squinge operated until 2005, when Maglio decided to pursue a full-time music career. He teamed up with John Ruta, a friend of his since the late 70s and a saxophonist who had been playing with a 17-piece orchestra called Joe Battaglia & The New York Big Band that played in the outdoor garden at Tavern On The Green in Central Park during the summer months. Ruta invited Maglio to a rehearsal, and by the end of the set, was asked to return for more. After only a few weeks, he was the band’s official male singer.
“Joe walked up to me and says, ‘you got a tuxedo?’, I said ‘no,’ Maglio said. “He goes ‘well you better get one, because you’re playin’ on The Green with us this Wednesday.”
His mannerisms are like Frank’s – snapping fingers in between verses as he flirts with the microphone chord, twirling and swinging it to the side with great yet subtle intent. He jokes with the crowd between songs in a manner reminiscent of the Rat Pack comedy shows with Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. at The Sands in Las Vegas:
“You can’t buy happiness, but you can pour it.”
“A man never knows true happiness until he gets married…
…then it’s too late.”
“It’s not about recreating a sound,” Maglio said, “but about recapturing a feeling … of that smoke-filled Copa room.”
As much as he emulates The Voice, Maglio insists on reminding the crowd before every show that he is not an impersonator. The Sinatra influence is obvious, but Maglio puts his own twist on his performances, injects his own personality into every song.
Whatever it is he’s doing, it’s working. Maglio has sung alongside Dean Martin’s daughter, Deana Martin, and with Vincent Valcone, Sinatra’s piano player. He has met a myriad of celebrities along the way. But one story resonates most strongly for him.
A close friend of comedian Lisa Lampanelli, Maglio had been invited to her engagement party a few years back. It was scheduled for a Saturday, when Maglio does his Sinatra set at the Carnegie. So she came to him.
“Lisa and her husband were there early, smoking cigars,” Maglio said. “I was in the back getting ready, doing up my bowtie, and the fly on my pants broke.”
Starting to panic, Maglio thought fast. “I noticed the bus boy had the same kind of black pants as mine, so I told him ‘Gimme your pants!’” He paid no mind to the fact that the man was significantly shorter than he.
“I came out that night and opened with ‘They Can’t Take That Away From Me,’ which starts with the line ‘the way you wear your hat…’ Maglio said. “I started it with ‘the way you wear your pants…’”
Someone in the audience must have dropped a dime.
“That was the first and last time I made it into the New York Post,” said Maglio. “I gotta break my zipper just to make Page Six.”
When asked if things were better back in Sinatra’s era, Maglio hesitated, as if there were no definitive answer. “People used to have more respect for each other,” Maglio said, his stern face morphing into a grin. “But then again, they didn’t have air conditioning.”
“As far as new music is concerned, I haven’t gotten excited about a song since Natalie Cole sang with her father in the ’80s,” Maglio said. “There are no more real love songs. They’re either too sappy or have no romantic connection at all. These new artists confuse sex for romance.”
But it was Sinatra himself who said that when something is good, really good, it never goes out of style, and the number of people who come out every Saturday night to listen to Maglio sing is a testament to the enduring legacy.
Maglio now makes his living strictly as a singer. He performs two sets at The Carnegie Club every Saturday, and works restaurants, corporate events, family parties, country clubs, performing arts centers and nightclubs all over New York and New Jersey.
“I’m a starving singer, and I’m loving every minute of it.”
kristin behr 