by James Kaplan
They didn’t dare write.
Sinatra had had John the butler leave the Cadillac convertible at the airport, so he could drive himself home. He thought of the bracelet when he was a half mile from home. The robin’s egg blue box was under clothes in his suitcase, and Nancy always unpacked his bags. He couldn’t put it in his pocket; he was about to be hugged. He opened the car’s glove compartment and hid the box as best he could.
Nancy found it there a couple of days before Christmas. She’d driven over to her beauty parlor in Beverly Hills and, absurdly enough, wanted to comb her hair before she went in. She saw the robin’s egg blue box. Frank had been sweet, if a little distracted, since getting back home: He’d missed her, he said. And it was sweet; it reminded her of how it had been before the children.
She undid the ribbon and opened the box.
Sitting in the car on Cañon Drive, Nancy put her hand to her chest. The bracelet sparkled in the brazen California light, the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen—it must have cost a fortune. He spent it as he made it, she thought. The gold engraved Cartier lighters and cigarette cases for all his pals, even useful acquaintances, tens of thousands of dollars’ worth. Whatever else he was, he was hers.
On Christmas morning, with Little Nancy and the baby happy under the big tree with their dolls and toys, he handed her a Tiffany box. A small Tiffany box. She blinked in confusion as she opened it and saw the pearl earrings. Her smile as she hugged him was deeply confused.
The party that year was especially splendid: The war was over! And the show this year would be like no other. Harry Crane had written comedy sketches; Sammy and Jule had created a whole evening’s worth of songs; Dickie Whorf, a young director at Metro, had personally painted a Parisian street scene on the backdrop curtain and supervised the rehearsals.
The men wore black tie; the women, gowns. Sinatra stood at the front door and greeted the guests himself. The songs and the comedy were hilarious. Frank sang “Mammy” in blackface, complete with Jolson voice and head-shaking shtick; Phil Silvers’s dazzling new wife, Jo-Carroll, a former Miss America from Texas, sang a number called “I’m the Wife of the Life of the Party,” enumerating Phil’s many flaws, especially his habit of breaking into comedy routines whether they were asked for or not. A sketch in which Cahn, Crane, and Peter Lawford played three restaurant patrons served by Sinatra brought down the house: when Lawford, a notorious cheapskate, asked for the check, Frank dropped a whole trayful of dishes.
Nancy, struck by an attack of shyness, mostly hovered around the kitchen, seeing to it that the food was served properly. She felt comfortable around the servants. Now and then she stuck her head out to catch a song or a sketch. She watched the beautiful women watching Frank, watched their gleaming eyes and avid smiles, and felt sick with worry.
Then she shook her head in bewilderment at the sight of sweet-faced Marilyn Maxwell, sitting next to her handsome husband, John Conte, watching Frank sing with that look in her eyes. When Marilyn reached up to push aside a few strands of that perfect blond hair, the way women do when they’re attracted to a man, there it was, glittering unmistakably, like the palest chips of ice. Her bracelet. And at that moment, Nancy literally had to hold on to the doorway for support: the earth had spun off its axis.
Frank clowns at a CBS rehearsal, circa 1944. Joking aside, however, the man who couldn’t read music really could conduct. (photo credit 17.2)
Act Four
ICARUS
“Let me welcome you to the MGM family.”
“I’m proud to be in that family, sir.”
—Louis B. Mayer and Frank Sinatra, on the radio show
Old Gold Presents Songs by Sinatra
18
Frank and the two Nancys, 1945. “Daddy was … a voice on the radio most of the time,” Nancy junior wrote, years later. “A figure composed of a bow tie and two black patent leather shoes, who was always going away.” (photo credit 18.1)
She felt as if someone had smacked her in the face. Then she collected herself, straightening her shoulders, and walked across the room. She leaned over and took the woman’s wrist—the wrist with the bracelet—and looked Marilyn Maxwell in the eyes.
She would have to leave. At once.
Marilyn just stared at her, saying nothing, admitting everything.
It was all done quickly, quietly, efficiently, so the all-important party could come to its triumphant conclusion. For all anyone knew, there had been a minor family emergency of some sort. The couple simply got up and left. Frank, trouper that he was, continued the song even as he watched what was going on in front of him. He got a big hand.
Afterward, in the bedroom (he wouldn’t share it that night), he tried, as best he could, swearing she didn’t mean anything to him.
His wife looked at him coldly.
It was a long, slow climb back toward civility, beginning with a week of silent penance and followed by a full floral offensive, bouquet after gigantic bouquet, all of which she loftily ignored. Frank stayed uncharacteristically close to home in the beginning of 1946, not even venturing into the recording studio until early February, then bringing Nancy, as tribute, a test pressing of one of the day’s four cuts, a sappy something called “One Love” (“How sweet the way you play upon my heartstrings/How strange when you’re away, you give my heart wings”).
She ignored him, but she didn’t smash the record.
Maybe she should have. At this point in his career, Sinatra was doing what he would continue to do until the end of the line: look for hits. But this process was dicey, subject as the singer was to the whims of the marketplace and the tenor of the times. And in those days the times were tricky. The mid-1940s brought two paradoxical trends to American music: the rise of the singer at the expense of the big bands, and the decline of popular songwriting. Frank himself had much to do with the former,1 but was powerless to change the latter. Times change; tastes change: the war’s end had brought a kind of giddiness to the American zeitgeist, the result of post-traumatic stress and new fears. The longing wartime ballads that had made Sinatra’s reputation were suddenly uncongenial to the national ear. Cheesy novelty numbers began to pop up like toadstools after a rainstorm. Kern and Gershwin were dead. Berlin and Porter were writing almost exclusively for Broadway, and while musicals continued to be a rich vein of material, the days of Tin Pan Alley cranking out lovely tunes that went straight to sheet music, records, and radio were swiftly coming to a close.
Astonishing as it may be to think about today, the idea of the standard—the great and lasting popular song, from the hands of one of the above-mentioned geniuses, or others such as Harold Arlen, Harry Warren, and Hoagy Carmichael—didn’t really exist at the end of World War II. There was just a lot of music out there: great songs, good songs, fair songs, and poor songs, among which not even a great artist like Sinatra could always be depended on to navigate reliably.
He got an early leg up from a man who would become a romantic rival (and probably because of this, a Sinatra hater till the end of his life): Artie Shaw. Early in his career, the mercurial, intellectually arrogant clarinetist and bandleader hit on a simple but brilliant notion. “As Shaw put it,” Will Friedwald writes, “the idea was to take the best possible songs and orchestrate them in the best possible way.” With this guideline in mind, Shaw resurrected great (but incredibly enough, lightly dust-coated) tunes such as Porter’s “Begin the Beguine,” Kern’s “All the Things You Are,” and Gershwin’s “The Man I Love” and made huge hit records of them.
Sinatra had ears, and he heard.
Also starting in the early 1940s, Sammy Cahn began scouting for him. “I take great pride in the fact that I introduced Frank to a lot of the great, great songs,” he told Friedwald. He would continue to do so throughout their long professional relationship. But Frank was a lightning-fast learner, and the two geniuses behind his first album, which was issued in March 1946 and consisted almost entirely of what would come to be called standards, were S
inatra himself and the warm businessman Manie Sacks.
As previously noted, Frank recorded prodigiously in 1945. He committed to disc “Where or When” and “All the Things You Are” and “If I Loved You,” and he also recorded “Mighty Lak’ a Rose” and “Lily Belle” and “My Shawl,” as well as a couple of dozen other mostly forgotten tunes. Yet in two sessions—one on July 30 in Hollywood, one on December 7 in New York—he recorded eight numbers, six of which were masterpieces of songwriting, and these eight songs became the four discs of Columbia Set C-112, The Voice of Frank Sinatra. It was not only Frank’s first album but also the first thematic album of popular music available to the American public.2
It was a time when Frank Sinatra’s singing could be heard profusely, on the radio or in live performance or on shellac 78-rpm discs; yet it was also a time when the very notion of a Frank Sinatra album—indeed, of a phonograph album period—was new and exotic. An album was what you put stamps or family photos or butterflies in. Yet now you could buy a wide, flat, heavy box with four records inside, with Sinatra’s curly-haired, red-bow-tied, grinning image on the 1940s-Moderne cover (dancing white, yellow, and black ellipses on a field of teal; a hint of Miró and Calder), selling for the not inconsiderable retail price of $2.50, the equivalent of $30 today. And the people bought it. By the tens of thousands. Canny businessman that he was, Sacks had paid attention to Frank’s masterly (and unprecedented) notion of a musical self-portrait. He had put a new and irresistible product in a new and irresistible package, raising the price but also raising the game. In a very real way, Frank and Manie, together, had reinvented Sinatra.
The bobby-soxers could keep swooning over their fifty-cent discs of “One Love” or “I Dream of You”; but here was a box of music for grown-ups. The theme was adult love: J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie’s “You Go to My Head”; George and Ira Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch over Me”; Strachey, Link, and Marvell’s “These Foolish Things”; Cole Porter’s “Why Shouldn’t I?”; Woods, Campbell, and Connelly’s hymn to barefoot and pregnant, “Try a Little Tenderness”; Victor Young, Ned Washington, and Bing Crosby’s “(I Don’t Stand) A Ghost of a Chance.”
The nod to Crosby was intentional. Bing had made hit recordings of “Ghost of a Chance” and “Tenderness” in the 1930s, and had also been first with “Paradise.” He was still number 1 on the charts to Sinatra’s number 2. Frank was paying tribute, but he was also throwing down the gauntlet. He was Picasso to the older singer’s Matisse, coming on fast and strong.
And the market responded. Just over two weeks after The Voice’s release on March 4, it entered the Billboard Top 5 chart, and soon it hit number 1, a position it would hold for seven weeks. The album simply exploded onto the American consciousness, fixing Sinatra’s reputation as not merely a crooner but a singer. “I was working in a record store,” recalled the music publisher Frank Military, “and Dean Martin came in every day to see me. And one day The Voice album came in, and it sold like hotcakes. I didn’t know Frank, and Dean didn’t know Frank, but the two of us just sat there listening to all four 78s over and over.”
They were something to hear. Sinatra had purposely chosen the July 30 and December 7 sessions not just because they contained great songs but because of their beautifully spare settings: in each case, a nine-piece string, woodwind, and rhythm ensemble highlighted his voice perfectly. These small-group tracks sounded brand-new and special. Even the two lesser numbers, “I Don’t Know Why,” of fateful Paramount memory—music to get egged by—and “Paradise,” were quietly ravishing, in the former case because of George Van Eps’s restrained and lyrical guitar work, and in the latter because of Mitch Miller’s sublime oboe.
The singing was exquisitely tender and exact and assured and, most important, it was Sinatra. At thirty, he had cast off all influences and become, completely, himself. If he had ever sounded like Bing, he didn’t anymore. If he had ever wanted to be Bing, he didn’t anymore. And he wasn’t Frankie anymore, either. Now he was just Frank.
Three days after the release of The Voice, Sinatra, along with the producer Frank Ross and the co-producer and director Mervyn LeRoy, attended the Oscar ceremonies at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, where they received their special Academy Awards for The House I Live In. Nancy accompanied her husband. A photo taken of them afterward at Ciro’s shows them together like the cutest couple in Hollywood. Frank is in black tie; Nancy is wearing a strapless evening gown. Her hair is up; she wears a pearl choker; her creamy décolletage is lovely to behold. She is a beautiful young woman; he is a handsome young man. Their shoulders are touching.
And yet it is a strange picture: The two of them seem both intimate and distant. Frank is ardently admiring his Oscar; Nancy is smiling at someone across the table. A real couple sitting this close would be holding hands, or at least touching fingers. Yet he holds the statuette in his left hand, and rests his right, with its big pinkie ring, on the table, almost willfully distant from her. Nancy’s left hand, the one closest to Frank, also lies awkwardly on the table. And on her left wrist is what looks very much like a diamond bracelet.
What goes on behind any couple’s bedroom door is one of the great mysteries, but history can say with some certainty that he was outside that door for several weeks after New Year’s, and then, one night, he was back in again. There were conditions, there were strictures and continued reproaches, but he was back in again.
Did she believe him? Naturally she wanted to; at the same time, she wasn’t a fool. She knew that their life as a couple was anything but simple. Yet she needed his promises, not merely to hear the words, but for the sake of her dignity. She needed Frank to remember that he had made this commitment—that whatever he did elsewhere, he would be thinking about her.
As spring lit Hollywood in a blaze of jacarandas and azaleas, Sinatra was making movies again, once more commuting to Culver City. First there was a cameo in a Jerome Kern biopic, Till the Clouds Roll By. At Mr. Mayer’s behest, Frank sang “Ol’ Man River” in a white suit, white bow tie, and white shoes, surrounded by a forty-piece (white) orchestra similarly attired. (The critics would justifiably kill him for it, but it really wasn’t his fault. And the performance was magnificent.)
There was also a new picture, a musical called It Happened in Brooklyn. Frank was to play an Army vet (if the Duke could play soldier, so could he) named Danny Miller, returning from the war to find that the Brooklyn he’d lovingly obsessed about while overseas was not quite as he remembered. Jimmy Durante and Kathryn Grayson were to co-star, as well as—a nice surprise—his new pal Peter Lawford, portraying a sensitive young English composer named Jamie Shellgrove. (Of course he was a poofter. How could he not be a poofter with a name like Jamie Shellgrove?) Principal photography on the film began on the MGM back lot in March; in June, the company would travel to New York City for location work.
But in the meantime, there was the Metro lot, with its deeply shaded alleys between soundstages and sunstruck fake Main Streets and phony city blocks and its commissary and dressing rooms, and its many actresses—stars and supporting players and extras—every one of them beautiful, every one of them wanting him.
And he, of course, wanted them.
He saw her, Marvelous, on his first day back, walking across a knife-edge of shadow between buildings, her hair like the sun. They shook hands, just shook hands (passersby were watching them carefully, pretending not to). Frank suddenly remembered, just for a second, his promise that he would never speak to her again. But as his palm touched hers, her perfume, that perfume, made his brain turn over.
She smiled brightly and told him she was divorcing her husband. She would be free at last.
He smiled back. People were watching.
She didn’t give a damn who was watching. She was going to be free at last. Did he want her?
He took a deep breath, inhaling her perfume.
More than anything.
Not three minutes later, turning a corner on his way to his dressing ro
om, he came upon Lana, walking out of a soundstage in horn-rimmed sunglasses, dictating something to a secretary who followed her attentively. Lana saw him, and waved a dismissive hand to the secretary.
She looked at him and lowered her glasses, smiling.
And there were others, too, of course.
On March 7, 1946, United Press put a story on the wires about a forty-five-year-old New York construction-company executive, one Sven Ingildsen, who had filed a cross complaint in state supreme court to the separation action brought by his twenty-year-old wife, Josephine. “The day after our marriage, my wife told me she simply had to see Frank Sinatra, the singer, alone—both at the theater where he was appearing and in his apartment at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel,” Ingildsen’s petition stated. “I objected emphatically. She replied that she knew him and his wife and that it would only be for a short visit and she would return in no time.”
Frank Sinatra’s wife was, of course, in Los Angeles. And newlywed Josephine Ingildsen (the report said) didn’t return home to her husband until 5:00 a.m.
“If I had as many love affairs as you’ve given me credit for,” Frank would tell reporters many years later, “I’d now be speaking to you from a jar in Harvard Medical School.” It was a great quote, a true Sinatra quote, poetry down to the deliciously absurd image, the inner rhyme of “jar” and “Harvard”—except that it was an evasion. No, it was more than an evasion, it was the Big Lie. “Love affairs” was more than a euphemism, but less than the truth: Love was always what it was about, and never quite what it was really about. Love was the fleeting ideal, the thing to be sung about, to be dreamed of while he zipped his trousers on his way from one conquest to the next. In truth, there were probably even more affairs than the hundreds he’d been given credit for. For there always had to be someone. His loneliness was bottomless, but there was always someone to try to help him find the bottom.