Sinatra

by Anthony Summers

  Tina claimed, too, that Barbara would “ridicule Dad, even call him a has-been,” that—though caring toward her husband when visitors were present—she was “openly dismissive” toward him when only family were present. Tina’s sister Nancy has characterized Barbara as “cruel” and said the marriage had been a “huge mistake.” Once, according to Tina, Frank phoned her mother to say he wished he had never left her.

  The book Tina wrote after her father’s death is the only published account of Sinatra’s final years, and for that alone deserves serious attention. Because the book is in large part a chronicle of bitter strife with Barbara, however, it should be treated with caution. More detached observers have depicted Barbara as the loving mainstay of Frank’s old age. Sonny King thought her “the greatest thing that happened to him in his later years.” Armand Deutsch said she was “the best thing in his life.” Dr. Kennamer described her as “wonderful.”

  Frank’s home life now revolved around reading the papers, with growing difficulty, listening to classical music, and watching television. He also retained a boyish enthusiasm for his collection of model trains. The Palm Springs compound housed five of them, capable of running on independent loops on three levels, based around a realistic model of a train station. Frank liked to have children in to see, as he put it, “all the trains going 90 mph around the rail . . . lots of crashes and collisions.” Barbara said her husband had “an engineer’s hat and a whistle and everything.”

  In the summer of 1991, the violist Ann Barak dined at a Los Angeles restaurant with Frank, Barbara, and Frank Jr., who now conducted at almost all of his father’s concerts. After dinner, Barak remembered, “He asked for a cigarette, and when I said I had some he marched me out of the restaurant and into the street. We stood there on the corner at night smoking like two naughty children. Then he said, ‘Have you got any spare that I can take home for my stash?’ I gave him a bunch, and he stuffed them in his pockets. I said I hoped he wouldn’t get caught, and he said, ‘Nah, don’t worry. I know what to do.’ He put his arms around me and hugged me and said, ‘Thank you! I’ve had a ball.’ . . . The next time I saw him was the following week, when we played the next concert. Back on the road.”

  Frank surely sang on not just because of any money worries he may have had but because he craved what Paul Anka has called “the strongest drug in the world, the needle in the arm called show business.” Frank had said it himself years earlier—“It gives me a high.” Frank Jr. thought his father would become “a dribbling madman” were he to retire. Tina believed singing was “his life force.”

  When it was reported that George Michael, a singer some fifty years his junior, was quitting to “reduce the strain of celebrity,” Frank wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Times. The young star should be grateful for his fame, he wrote, “until the day that no one shows up and you’re singing to the cleaning lady in some empty joint.”

  FRANK WORKED ON even when weighed down by personal loss. He sank to his knees in despair, Oppedisano said, on hearing in the spring of 1992 that Jilly Rizzo had been killed in a car accident. Soon after, he was off on a concert tour that took him to England, Spain, Portugal, and Greece. At London’s Albert Hall, with the British prime minister in the audience, he had to be helped out onto the stage.

  In the fall, Frank performed in nine American cities on a tour that included eight nights at Radio City Music Hall in New York. Shirley MacLaine, the sole surviving Rat Pack member still performing, toured with him. It would be “a ring ding time,” he had promised, except that he might forget his lyrics. He did have trouble with them, and once forgot MacLaine’s name when introducing her. MacLaine groped for a way to make the show work. “When he began to sing ‘You Make Me Feel So Young,’ ” she recalled, “I stared at him. When he sang ‘And even when I’m old and gray,’ I said ‘You are old and gray.’ ” Frank laughed, and so did the audience.

  Late at night, in city after city, Frank took MacLaine along to meals in Italian restaurants hosted by aging local mob bosses. She sat mesmerized, watching “the subtle power plays that ebbed and flowed between him and the gangsters.” As dinner began, Frank would seem “deferential.” Then, emboldened by a second martini, he would behave as though he, not the mafiosi, were in control.

  MacLaine marveled at Frank’s capacity to outlast his companions. He would still be there at the hotel bar, spinning yarns to strangers, long after weary colleagues had retreated to bed. “They would sit with him because of who he was,” she thought. “They knew he was lonely.” In California, in November 1992, Frank and Oppedisano sat up late to see Bill Clinton elected. “He and I completely devoured a bottle of Jack Daniel’s,” Oppedisano recalled, “and I don’t remember seeing him stagger.”

  Frank staggered, in every sense, through the winter and into the spring of 1993—Nevada, Florida, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Scandinavia, Germany, New York, Vegas. Meanwhile, something special was brewing.

  That year, the record producer Phil Ramone was urging Frank to return to the recording studio to perform “duets” with a galaxy of other big names—Barbra Streisand, Bono, Aretha Franklin, Carly Simon, Tony Bennett, Julio Iglesias, Luther Vandross, and others—without meeting them. Frank’s partners would do their recording only after he had done his, and their work would be transmitted from distant cities by a fiber optic system, over telephone lines, eventually to be mixed into the final discs.

  Frank thought it a bizarre concept, but Ramone lured him by pointing out that Laurence Olivier, who had done Shakespeare in his twenties, had had something different and splendid to offer in his seventies. Frank came around, then balked when asked to perform in a specially designed booth. “I’m singing out there with the band,” he insisted, and Ramone’s technicians found a way to accommodate him. Frank then recorded old favorite after old favorite for four solid hours. Later, when he heard how the synthetic “duets” sounded—the first one played back to him was “The Lady Is a Tramp” with the mixed-in voice of Vandross—the revelation of what technology could achieve reduced him to tears.

  When the Duets album was released in October 1993, there were those who did not approve. Bono performing with Sinatra on “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” one aficionado complained in a letter to GQ magazine, was “like Andy Warhol collaborating with Michelangelo on the Sistine Chapel.” The public had no such quibbles. Duets went to number two on the Billboard chart and sold two million copies within weeks, three million eventually. It became Frank’s largest selling album ever.

  On hearing that news, said daughter Nancy, Frank reacted “like a little kid.” There were some other wonderful moments. In New Jersey, couples half a century his junior danced in the aisles as Frank sang “Summer Wind.” The words were freighted now with a special poignancy:

  The autumn wind, and the winter wind, have come and gone, And still the days, those lonely days, go on and on. . . .

  More often than not, though, he had to confront harsh reality. He lost his way entirely while performing before the Queen of Sweden that year. At a concert in New York he shouted in desperation, “What the hell are the words?” Wherever Frank appeared, aides stood by with an oxygen tank.

  A show at Aurora, Illinois, misfired badly. “Frank Sinatra is old tonight,” Tom Junod wrote in GQ. “He’s supposed to be singing ‘Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry,’ and that’s what the orchestra keep playing as the Old Man stands out there alone. The lights are still on him, and the TelePrompTers are spelling out the lyrics . . . but the Old Man cries out with scary desperation, ‘I can’t see! I can’t hear!’ ”

  In Las Vegas, Frank shuffled off stage miserable about his memory loss, shouting that the audience should be given its money back. Murray Kempton, writing in Newsday, thought the slide went deeper than shattered synapses. The electronic tricks of Duets had not fooled Kempton.

  “He well remembers the bounce of these songs,” Kempton wrote sadly, “but he has forgotten how they feel. The voice still drives as of old,
but it can never again breathe the loneliness of the heart. Sinatra’s supreme gift was to make us glad to be unhappy. He can’t do that any longer . . . to see him now is just to be unhappy.”

  EARLY IN MARCH 1994, orange handkerchief in tuxedo buttonhole, wearing a steel-gray toupee like a cap, Frank stepped onto a New York stage not to sing but to receive a Grammy “Legend” Award. On hand to present it was a modern musical hero, U2’s Bono.

  Reading from a prepared script, Bono characterized Frank as “a man heavier than the Empire State, more connected than the Twin Towers, as recognizable as the Statue of Liberty.” Frank responded emotionally, blew kisses to Barbara in the audience, said he loved her, and complained genially that no arrangements had been made for him to sing. The ceremony was being broadcast live, but Frank suddenly vanished from the screen. He had been cut off, on the instructions of someone who feared he might babble on out of control.

  Five days later, while singing “My Way” at a concert in Richmond, Virginia, Frank collapsed. Oppedisano, who rushed to his side, found that he was drenched in sweat “right through to the outer shell of his jacket.” Frank came to, was lifted into a wheelchair, and waved feebly as he was taken from the stage. The audience applauded.

  Doctors at a local hospital concluded that Frank was dehydrated. He had been drinking heavily the night before, Oppedisano said. Ignoring advice that he should stay overnight for observation, Frank flew back to California. Days later, when Time magazine asked why he still lived so fast and hard, Frank replied by fax: “You write for a magazine. I tour. It’s what I do.” He appeared in Oklahoma less than three weeks after the collapse.

  A month later, at Radio City Music Hall, he became tearful. “This,” Frank said, “may be the last time we will be together.” It was indeed his last New York appearance. In the months that followed he gave his last shows in Las Vegas, Chicago, and Atlantic City, and ranged as far afield as the Philippines and Japan.

  The Tokyo performances survive on videotape. They show a frail old man, rheumy-eyed, puffy in the jowls, waddling rather than walking, making awkward hand movements as he croaked through his repertoire. Some of his musicians found it painful to watch, and thought it would have been better had Frank not appeared. Watching the tape today, though, every song has poignancy. Frank’s last rendition of “One for My Baby,” with final amendments to the original lyric, takes on special meaning:

  “We’re drinking, my friend, to the end of a brief episode . . . when I’m gloomy, please listen to me before it’s all passed away. . . . I hope you didn’t mind my bendin’ your ear . . . that long . . . that long . . . it’s a very long, long road.”

  Natalie Cole, who starred with Frank in Tokyo, flew home with him on his private jet. “Even before the wheels left the runway,” she remembered, “he was knocking back the Jack Daniel’s one after the other. . . . We had been in the air about an hour or so when Frank suddenly looked around at all of us in the cabin and bellowed, ‘Who the hell are all these people?’ ”

  He “stood and started going around, confronting everyone in turn, getting close up in each face and demanding to know, ‘Who the hell are you?’ . . . He started with his housekeeper, who’d been with him some fifty years. His personal valet was next. . . . I ducked out and slept until we landed in Honolulu to refuel. At that point Frank suddenly had a moment of clarity. He was lucid, but he had no idea why he was on the plane.”

  Frank appeared as a performer just once more, at a Palm Springs resort hotel, at the close of the annual golf tournament that was and still is named after him. According to Oppedisano, he performed bravely and well.

  Frank’s eightieth birthday, in December 1995, was marked by grand public gestures. The Empire State Building glowed blue, and gigantic billboards along Fifth Avenue served as a nation’s birthday cards. Frank appeared on television for the very last time, in a two-hour special. Many stars paid homage.

  Bruce Springsteen called him the “Patron Saint of New Jersey.” For the first time in public Bob Dylan sang “Restless Farewell”—a song with lyrics that somewhat echo “My Way.” The proceedings closed with “New York, New York,” and Frank sang along with his fellow stars, managing somehow to hold on to the last note longer than anyone else.

  For years now, Frank had been ending his shows with a toast to long life, his version of the old Italian “cent’anni!”—“to a hundred years!” “May you live to be a hundred,” he had told audiences all over the world, “and may the last voice you hear be mine.”

  36

  Exit

  YOU GOTTA LOVE LIVING,” Frank liked to say in those last years, “because dyin’s a pain in the ass.”

  His world was shrinking rapidly. At one of his last concerts, he had choked up as he embarked on “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry,” a Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne song he had been singing for years. Cahn had died the previous year, Styne just a week before the concert. Swifty Lazar was gone, too. Frank did not like to say friends had died. He preferred to say they had “gone to the mountains.”

  Dean Martin had gone to the mountains on Christmas Day 1995 at the age of seventy-eight, his lungs ruined by cigarettes, his liver and kidneys by alcohol. Frank had a statement put out describing Martin as his “brother.” The relationship had never been the same, though, since Martin abandoned the “Together Again” tour. “There was a wall between them,” Oppedisano said. Frank did not attend Martin’s funeral.

  The Sands, cradle of Frank’s Las Vegas career, was about to close forever. Its roulette and blackjack tables, its thousand slot machines, would be sold at auction. The glittering casino in which Frank had walked like a prince, the luxury suites in which he had partied, would be razed. “Frank took it as a personal affront,” Jerry Lewis recalled. “He asked ‘How could they do that?’ ”

  Frank had been uprooted, too, from the place he had called home for almost forty years, the compound near Palm Springs that bore his name. The house and its contents had long been more than the material proof of fabulous success. It was the haven to which Frank had always been able to retreat, a place of comfort imbued with memories. There was the art collection: ranging from Fabergé treasures from old Russia to paintings by modern American artists including Grandma Moses, Guy Wiggins, Andrew Wyeth, and William Merritt Chase. One of the works by Wiggins was an oil painting of Fifth Avenue in the snow, probably the one Frank had long ago bought for first wife Nancy. Here were the gifts from departed friends: a silver-and-gold cigarette case from Cahn and Styne; a gold dressing table box set with diamonds from Mike Romanoff; a watch from Sammy Davis inscribed: “To Charley Shoulders Thanks Smokey the ‘B.’ ” Here was Frank’s Bösendorfer grand piano—he could play a little—his two 1930s vintage radios, his mounted busts of John F. Kennedy. Here were Frank’s trains: the precisely tooled working models, an actual old caboose he had named Chicago and converted into a massage room, train sculptures in wood and copper, train collages, train photographs.

  Within a year of Frank’s final performance, most of these items and other possessions were auctioned off at Christie’s for $2 million. The house itself had been sold earlier for almost $5 million. It had been decided that the Sinatras should leave Palm Springs for Los Angeles. Frank had owned the house for forty years, had first built a home in the area half a century earlier. Yet Barbara thought it was time for a change because “everybody is in the L.A. area now.” Frank would be closer to his children, and to the widest possible range of medical care.

  He seemed at first to accept the prospect of moving, but he was devastated when the time came, “grieving as though someone had died,” according to Tina. The sympathetic new owner, a Canadian businessman, allowed the Sinatras to stay on for a few more weeks. When the dread day of departure came, the twenty-six members of Frank’s household staff lined up on each side of the driveway. Some were moved to tears when Frank emerged, clambered into a town car, and left.

  The Sinatras owned two fine houses in the Los Angeles area, one in Beve
rly Hills, another on the beach at Malibu. The Beverly Hills spread, hidden in an orange grove and sealed off behind high security gates, was a place of Gatsby-style opulence. The place at Malibu, on Broad Beach, was more modest but nonetheless fit for a star. Neighbors included Dinah Shore, Steven Spielberg, and Jack Lemmon. The Beverly Hills house seemed sterile to Frank, oversized; it reminded him of a hotel. “They must be doing lousy business in this joint,” he joked gloomily one day as he sat drinking in his own bar with Oppedisano. He liked the house at the beach better because, he said, just being by the ocean reminded him of growing up near the New Jersey shore.

  Frank sorely missed the desert. One night Oppedisano heard him ask Barbara, “When are we going home?” When she replied that they were home, he said, “This is your home. When are we going to my home?” At times he was utterly disoriented. On another night at Malibu, as he sat outside under the stars, he turned to others present in sudden alarm. “Where am I?” he wanted to know.

  In July 1996, to mark twenty years of marriage, Frank and Barbara went to Our Lady of Malibu church to renew their wedding vows. Daughters Nancy and Tina were invited but did not attend. Tension between them and their stepmother had not eased.

  In November, a month short of his eighty-first birthday, Frank was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Hospital for treatment of what his publicist described as “a pinched nerve.” In fact he had suffered a heart attack, complicated by pneumonia and cancer of the ureter. The cancer was not life-threatening. The heart and lung trouble was very serious. Brain scans had now firmly identified dementia.

  George Jacobs got to see Frank about this time. “He didn’t know who he was,” Jacobs remembered. “He said hello, and then ‘Sinatra will be here any minute now.’ I left crying.” The confusion remained intermittent, but Frank’s medical team now included a geriatric psychiatrist. A nurse was on hand at all times.