FRANK CELEBRATED HIS SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY that year with little fanfare. When he had turned sixty-five, Barbara had thrown a party for more than two hundred guests. The year before that, he had celebrated his birthday and his fortieth anniversary in show business with a thousand guests at Caesars Palace. Two specially commissioned Sinatra portraits, measuring eighty by forty-five feet, had graced the hotel’s facade.
More of the landmark people in his life were gone now: Bing Crosby; Harry James; Skinny D’Amato, his patron in Atlantic City; Nelson Riddle, Yul Brynner, and Orson Welles had died within four days of one another two months before Frank’s seventieth birthday.
In 1977, after his mother’s death, Frank had said he was working on his autobiography. He embarked on the project, writing in longhand and talking into a tape recorder, but after a while let it drop. Then, in 1983, he said he might be “forced to write a book . . . to defend accusations. Everybody now is planning to write a book.”
Just one independent author, in fact, had such plans. Kitty Kelley, already known for unvarnished biographies of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Elizabeth Taylor, had been digging into Frank’s life for the past year. She had repeatedly written to him requesting an interview, but he had not replied—except to sue her before she had written a word. He sought $2 million in punitive damages for, Kelley recalled, “presuming to write without his authorization. He claimed that he alone, or someone he anointed, could write his life story. . . . He further claimed that I was misrepresenting myself as his official biographer to get ‘inside knowledge of the private aspects or events of his life.’ Asserting that I was misappropriating his name and likeness for commercial purposes, he asked the court to issue an injunction.”
The suit came to nothing. Frank’s months of legal jousting achieved little, except perhaps to deter some potential interviewees. Some, Kelley said, were “so terrified that they refused to talk to me for fear of physical reprisals.” More than eight hundred others did agree to talk. Kelley’s book His Way, published in the fall of 1986, went to the top of the New York Times bestseller list and broke sales records for biography in several countries. Frank’s attempts to stop the book had backfired and instead guaranteed the author and her publishers massive publicity. Though her book was overly negative, Kelley had done some pioneering work. She had opened doors Frank had long kept sealed.
“I never read it,” he insisted months after the book appeared. “I don’t even talk about it.” Two years later, on television, he railed about “pimps and prostitutes . . . parasites” who wrote “a lot of crap” for money. It was the closest he would come in public to discussing Kelley. It was taboo, he told his family, even to mention her name.
Daughter Nancy has said the Sinatras “nearly strangled on our pain and anger.” In 2004 she publicly reviled Kelley as “the big C-word.... I hate her. . . . If I ever met her, I don’t know what I’d do. She’s just scum.” Tina said the book made her father ill and, coincidence or not, the year His Way was published marked the beginning of a decline.
Frank’s throat had given him trouble in recent years. In the summer of 1986 polyps were removed from his colon—not necessarily a serious matter. He was said to have cut back on cigarettes and, though there were lapses, on his drinking. He resumed a hectic schedule within ten days of the polyp procedure, flying off to Atlantic City, Honolulu, Los Angeles, Chicago, Madrid, Milan, Dallas, Las Vegas, and Atlantic City again. Then severe pain forced him back into the hospital.
An abscess on the large intestine required major surgery and a temporary colostomy. “If I hadn’t come back from the trip I was on,” Frank said later, “I would have bought it. They would have had flowers and a big band behind the casket. . . . It was a seven-and-a-half-hour operation.” Yet he was back on the road, astonishingly, within two weeks—to Las Vegas, Carnegie Hall, Los Angeles, Las Vegas again, Honolulu, Chicago, Genoa—sixty-eight concerts all told in 1987.
A week or so before Christmas that year, dressed in tuxedos at a morning press conference, Frank, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis announced that they were soon to embark on a twenty-nine-city “Together Again” tour. “As if replaying a lounge act,” Dennis McDougal noted in the Los Angeles Times, the three of them “grounded their ad libs and answers in death-defying talk about cigarettes, alcohol and carousing until the wee hours.”
For Martin, in his seventy-first year, the drinking that had once been an act was now his refuge. He mixed alcohol with prescription painkillers and suffered from ulcers and kidney trouble. He had been shattered, earlier that year, by the death in a flying accident of one of his sons, Dean-Paul, a pilot in the Air National Guard. Davis, now sixty-two, had abused alcohol and drugs for years. He had liver trouble and was soon to undergo a hip operation.
They began the tour in March 1988, playing to 14,500 people at the Coliseum Arena in Oakland, California. Frank’s “I’ve Got the World on a String” brought the crowd to its feet. Davis overcame his hip pain to dance to “The Girl from Ipanema” and do a Michael Jackson impersonation. “Every time you drink it rains bourbon from heaven,” Martin sang. He forgot the words to familiar songs, though, and had lost his edge.
Frank had had to cajole Martin into doing the tour in the first place, and now they were bickering. Martin had fallen down on stage at Oakland, had flicked a lighted cigarette into the crowd, and Frank had berated him. Frank wanted to party into the night, but his colleagues did not. “They weren’t in shape for it,” said Hank Cattaneo, Frank’s concert production manager. “After a half-hour Dean would say, ‘I gotta go to bed,’ and then Sammy would say, ‘Please, let me go too.’ But the old man loved to hang, to talk and tell stories.”
After the fourth show, in Chicago, angry shouts were heard from the dressing room. Two nights later, after Frank had again harassed Martin over not wanting to party into the night, Martin chartered a plane and flew to California. He had his manager tell the press he was sick, and even checked into a hospital—a charade, according to his son Ricci. “He loved Frank and he wasn’t vengeful,” Ricci said. “He just couldn’t endure Frank’s routine anymore.”
Martin was replaced by Liza Minnelli, and the tour continued. That year and the next, Davis performed with Frank frequently. A “scratchy throat” during the “Together Again” tour, however, had been an early sign of cancer. Davis died in May 1990, having refused surgery that might have saved his life but risked destroying his voice. Coming as it did on the heels of the death earlier in the year of Jimmy Van Heusen, Tina said, Davis’s death left Frank “in little pieces.” He had visited Davis repeatedly in his last months, had sobbed as he left afterward. Davis was laid to rest, as he had instructed, wearing on his wrist the gold watch Sinatra had given him after their last tour together.
IN 1986, nearing the end of her own cigarette and alcohol marathon, Ava Gardner had suffered a stroke while in the hospital with pneumonia. It left her with some facial paralysis, difficulty walking, and an arm that was all but useless. She retreated to her London apartment, went on smoking and drinking, and worked with the writer Peter Evans on an autobiography. She told Evans much about Frank that was fond. Asked whether he had been the love of her life, though, she said, “I can’t say really, no. No.” She said she had loved all three of her husbands equally. In a conversation with her actress friend Arlene Dahl, however, she said she had loved Frank more than any other man.
Every year since they had split up, Frank had sent Ava a huge bouquet on her birthday. And for the twelve months until the next bouquet arrived, her sister remembered, the long-dead flowers remained on Ava’s dresser. About the time of her stroke, Frank had sent her a photograph of their wedding that he had kept in his wallet for thirty-five years.
As Ava’s condition worsened, Frank sent a plane to bring her to California for treatment. Each day during Ava’s stay, he had a limousine take her to the hospital for physiotherapy.
On January 25, 1990, a month after her sixty-seventh birthday, Ava was found dead in bed at he
r London apartment. Frank broke down when he heard the news. Ava had been sick again recently, and he reproached himself for not having flown to London to be with her. When she was brought home to North Carolina for burial, however, he was not among the three thousand mourners who filed by the coffin. Instead he sent a wreath. The card with it read, “With my love, Francis.”
The following day, a crowd of eighteen thousand saw Frank perform at the Knickerbocker Arena in Albany, New York. He walked around the stage with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in his hand, and appeared to drink more than half of it.
“Sinatra seemed confused, distraught, at times,” an onlooker remembered. “As he was walking around the stage and started doing ‘One for My Baby,’ the ghost of Ava Gardner was there on the stage with him.”
Make it one for my baby, and one more, for the road.
35
To the End of the Road
IN 1991, AT SEVENTY-FIVE, Frank embarked on a world tour. There would be eighty concerts that year, eighty-seven the next, ninety-seven the next, and sixty in 1994.
The future movie Heist would include the following exchange:
GENE HACKMAN (IN THE ROLE OF A ROBBER): “Nobody lives forever.”
REBECCA PIDGEON (PLAYING HIS WIFE): “Frank Sinatra gave it a shot.”
The television special to mark Frank’s seventy-fifth birthday was entitled The Best Is Yet to Come, and the New York Times marked the occasion by publishing a story both warm and melancholy. “Physically,” it said, “Mr. Sinatra is no Dorian Gray. In concert nowadays he often wears the puffy look of a veteran barroom pugilist who has staggered to his feet for one more round.
“Even when he reads his lyrics from television TelePrompTers at the front of the stage, there is no guarantee that he will deliver a complete set of words. Increasingly—inevitably—the voice cracks, and notes that are strained after are never reached.”
In 1984, in London, a critic had said Frank’s sixty-eight-year-old voice was “cracked . . . jerks about like a wayward needle on one of his LP’s.” Four years later, a critic in Los Angeles thought the voice “shook and fuzzed.” By 1991, when Frank appeared in Milan, “La Voce” was said to sound “opaque and toneless.” The Sinatra sound, a London Times critic said, was now “in a state of grand deterioration.”
So, increasingly, was the body. Frank’s hearing and eyesight were failing. He was struggling with a hearing aid and—though not at every performance—was indeed reading from TelePrompTers. “He was using one or two monitors as early as 1984,” said the trumpeter Frank Fighera, who played for Frank in the final years. “By the 1990s there would be five or six. Each succeeding year the print got larger and larger, and even then he loused up.” A cataract operation helped but did not solve the problem.
There was a greater worry. A reviewer had noted as early as 1978 that Frank “forgot lyrics to some songs.” It had happened again in 1980, in front of that audience of 175,000 people in Brazil. As Frank himself recalled: “I was in the midst of singing a song I know as well as my hand when I lost the lyric. Just blew it. Nothing. I had been singing ‘Strangers in the Night’ and when I stopped and couldn’t remember how it went, the whole stadium started to sing it for me—in English. I was touched.”
There had been a similar incident a year later, in Boston. “We were doing ‘These Foolish Things,’ ” guitarist Tony Mottola said, “and when I played the chord to go into the release of the song, he drew a blank. He turned to me and said, ‘What’s the next word?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know, but the next chord is C sharp minor 7.’ Then someone in the audience gave him the next word, and he continued on.”
In 1984, at a concert in Canada, Frank’s memory failed him so badly that he walked off the stage. By the late 1980s the press was reporting that he had been “incoherently rambling” on stage, saying words in the wrong order. Most assumed he had been drinking, and he did not disabuse them. “What the hell is this?” he exclaimed on one occasion when he got muddled up. “I should never have had Coca-Cola before dinner.”
“The sickness could come overnight,” Fighera said. “In New York State once, when he’d finished the show, he told two jokes, introduced the band, introduced his wife, and then sang. When he had sung, he said, ‘Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, and went on to do the same two jokes, introduce the band and his wife, and do the same song, all over again.
“Sometime after that, when we did a gig, I would look at him and he looked like a robot. His eyes were glazed. He would fumble to find the microphone, and they’d say, ‘It’s his medication.’ ”
Daughter Nancy, on a visit to Palm Springs, found a smorgasbord of pill bottles on her father’s breakfast table. They included diuretics, sleeping pills, a barbiturate for migraine, and an antidepressant called Elavil. Told that the drug could have upsetting side effects, including disorientation, she and her sister voiced concern. Barbara Sinatra, however, insisted that the Elavil was working wonders for Frank’s mood swings, making him calmer.
Tina had always admired her father’s keen intellect and remarkable memory. By the late 1980s, however, he was very much changed. At Bally’s, in Reno, she thought Frank sounded “unsure . . . tentative in demeanor, unsteady of voice” on stage. Later, when he asked her to come up to his suite, she found him “pale and hyperventilating,” and was told he had inadvertently taken twice the prescribed dose of Elavil.
The arranger Buddy Bregman, who had known Frank for years, recalled a disquieting encounter at Hillcrest Country Club. When Bregman asked “How are you?” Frank gave him a blank look and said, “Where’s the fuckin’ bar?” Bregman tried again, but Frank just hurried off. Once Frank failed to recognize Liza Minnelli, whom he knew well and who had recently performed with him.
Darrien Iacocca, wife of the Chrysler boss, recalled sitting beside Frank at the White House during the first Bush presidency. “He was either drunk or just not coherent. He chatted on and on about nothing, except the pasta sauce he used to make. He seemed out of it. In the ladies’ room, Barbara told me, ‘I never leave his side, not for a moment.’ ” Darrien may have been seeing the side effects of medication, or of drink and medication combined. She wondered, though, as did others at that time, whether she was seeing the onset of Alzheimer’s. Frank’s Los Angeles physician, Rex Kennamer, said his patient “definitely had some degree of dementia.”
“If I were a pitcher,” Frank said in the late 1980s, “they’d have taken me out after six and a third innings.” When he decided to stay in for the full nine, Jonathan Schwartz wrote at the time, he could “no longer sustain a line of lyric; he must chop it up and while doing so throw in, by repetition of a word or a phrase, or a fallback to his own legendary slang, bits and pieces of deflective magic.” And yet: “People will look away from the rubble with their ears to enjoy the sideshow.”
Frank was still a riveting performer, Stephen Holden wrote in The New Yorker in 1990, because of “the spontaneity of phrasing and intonation he brings to almost everything he sings, no matter how many hundreds of times he has sung the songs. Even while reading lyrics from a prompter at the front of the stage, Mr. Sinatra still seemed compelled to experiment, trying out little tricks of phrasing, indulging in impromptu scoops and dives and interpolations that worked.”
“My guess,” Daniel Okrent predicted in Esquire, “is that when his voice can finally no longer traverse an octave, he will passionately perform songs that require less than an octave.” Like Mabel Mercer, Okrent thought, Frank would go on until he was simply speaking the lyrics to a musical accompaniment.
The producer Tony Oppedisano gained an inkling of the mind-set that drove Frank to go on. Though a much younger man—Oppedisano was then in his late thirties—he had known Frank for years and, Rizzo aside, had become his closest male companion. He attended functions with Frank, often traveled with him, and spent time with him in private. Sometimes Oppedisano was close by at night when Frank settled down in bed, closed his eyes, and offered up a prayer. Frank prayed
aloud, and a typical prayer was, “God, give me my health. Let me provide for Barbara and Nancy and Frankie and Tina, and for A.J. and Amanda. . . . But God, I don’t want to make a ton of money. Just make me a dollar more than I need.”
A.J.—Angela Jennifer—and Amanda, Frank’s daughter Nancy’s children, were in their teens by the early 1990s. Tina had been twice married and divorced. Frank Jr., though unmarried, had a son, Michael; he had been named Sinatra because of Frank’s desire for a grandson to carry on the family name.
Frank’s anxiety about being able to provide for his family may not have been as outlandish as it seems. Over the years, his lavish expenditure had stretched even his fabulous income. Before the sale of Reprise to Warner Brothers in 1963, executives at the record company said, he had been forced to borrow on his life insurance. In the early 1970s, after a period of relative stability, he had vastly overspent—at one point to the tune of some $500,000 a month after taxes. He had emerged from his brief retirement in the early 1970s at least in part at the urging of his financial advisers.
There were acrimonious family exchanges about money, according to Tina, during the period of her father’s decline. Frank’s prenuptial agreement with Barbara had been superseded in late 1987 by an “Agreement to Rescind Pre-Marital Agreement.” It stipulated, Tina wrote, that Barbara, whom she cast as the wicked stepmother, was to receive 50 percent of everything Frank had earned during the marriage, and of any future income. Again according to Tina, a new will Frank signed in 1991 ensured that his wife would receive more money on his death than had a previous version signed only days earlier. As Tina saw it, Barbara had married her father for his money.
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