Frank

by James Kaplan

  Parsons played the good cop—“I think Frank has done his best to be a good family man and still remain the glamorous figure he’s been in the public eye,” she wrote in her column—and Hedda Hopper, the bad. Hopper took Sinatra to task in print and in person, warning him when she encountered him at a reception “that he was public property, and that part of that public property was Nancy and his children.”

  Sinatra didn’t scare easily; normally, he would have shrugged off the admonition. But pressure was coming from all sides: after publicly (and somewhat contradictorily) musing, “You know, Frank has had a lot of career for one man, and he hasn’t had much time for home life. I think they’ll get it straightened out,” the relentless Evans even sent Manie out to L.A. to try to reason with him.

  And on October 23, Frank caved. The occasion was Phil Silvers’s opening at Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom’s nightclub on Beverly Boulevard, and this time Sinatra’s stooge act was in dead earnest.

  He attended the opening as a friend, and also to contribute to Silvers’s show in much the same way he had in New York. But this time the fix was in: Nancy was present, all dolled up and sitting at Jule Styne’s table. Midway through the show, Rosenbloom—a former prizefighter who had turned to playing tough guys in the movies—asked Sinatra for a song.

  Frank rose and asked the band to play “Going Home.”

  A very odd selection, given that the lugubrious spiritual was best known at the time for having been played at Franklin Roosevelt’s funeral. But it was the title, not the song, that was the point: when Sinatra was through, Silvers—who after all had written the words to the song about Nancy—grabbed Frank in a bear hug and steered him over to his wife’s table. Through tears, Frank asked Nancy (she was also crying) how the kids were. Fine, she told him. They missed their daddy. He had to clench his teeth to keep from bawling.

  You could’ve heard a pin drop in Slapsie Maxie’s. Then Frank asked his wife to dance, and the place went nuts.

  Frank and Nancy didn’t go home that night. She wanted to see his apartment, to feel its illicit thrill—and to make it her own. And so at the end of an evening of dancing at Slapsie Maxie’s, they got in a cab and rode to Sunset Tower and went up to his penthouse and made a baby.

  Despite the reconciliation, he continued to do exactly what he wanted. It Happened in Brooklyn was limping to a close amid further delays by the star; Sinatra and the director were barely speaking.

  One of the problems was the rate at which Frank kept on recording that fall. He was privately gratified to hear that Dick Haymes’s sales were beginning to drop. That was what happened, he thought, when you didn’t keep pushing in all directions. There was a radio show Sinatra badly wanted to do in early November, George Burns and Gracie Allen’s, and so he informed Whorf that he, Frank, needed to wrap up his work on the picture before then. Whorf refused. And so, as the MGM production memo for November 7 notes tersely, Sinatra “left at 2:30 to appear on Burns & Allen broadcast.”

  The camel’s back was stressed to full curvature. Mayer called a conference with his production executives, then fired off a telegram to the recalcitrant star:

  NO CONSENT WAS GIVEN BY US TO SUCH A RADIO APPEARANCE AND YOUR PARTICIPATION IN SUCH BROADCAST WAS IN VIOLATION OF YOUR OBLIGATION AND AGREEMENT UNDER YOUR CONTRACT WITH US … THESE INCIDENTS ARE THE CULMINATION OF A LONG SERIES OF VIOLATIONS OF YOUR CONTRACTUAL OBLIGATIONS TO US.

  The studio chief was sufficiently upset to have the story leaked to MGM’s unofficial mouthpiece Louella Parsons, who wrote in her column of November 14:

  I won’t be surprised if Frank Sinatra and MGM part company permanently. Frankie has been a very difficult boy on the lot, and I have a feeling MGM won’t put up with it. Louis B. Mayer, who has a faculty for getting along with MGM actors, talked with Frankie, I hear, but that hasn’t done very much good. The Voice’s chief pout was caused when he was refused the rights to a song he sang in It Happened in Brooklyn. I have always liked Frankie, but I think right now he needs a good talking to.

  The song—“Time After Time”—was just one of many issues. Sinatra didn’t call Evans; he didn’t call Keller. He called Western Union and fired off a wire to Parsons:

  SUGGEST YOU READ THIS TELEGRAM WITH YOUR ARTICLE IN YOUR OTHER HAND. I’LL BEGIN BY SAYING THAT IF YOU CARE TO MAKE A BET I’LL BE GLAD TO TAKE YOUR MONEY THAT M-G-M AND FRANK SINATRA DO NOT PART COMPANY, PERMANENTLY OR OTHERWISE.

  SECONDLY, FRANKIE HAS NOT BEEN A VERY DIFFICULT BOY ON THE LOT. FRANKIE HAS ONLY BEEN HEARD FROM WHEN IT CONCERNS THE IMPROVEMENT OF THE PICTURE WHICH YOU WILL FIND HAPPENS IN MOST PICTURES WHERE YOU USE HUMAN BEINGS …

  LAST, BUT NOT LEAST, IN THE FUTURE I’LL APPRECIATE YOUR NOT WASTING YOUR BREATH ON ANY LECTURES BECAUSE WHEN I FEEL I NEED ONE I’LL SEEK ADVICE FROM SOMEONE WHO EITHER WRITES OR TELLS THE TRUTH. YOU HAVE MY PERMISSION TO PRINT THIS IF YOU SO DESIRE AND CLEAR UP A GREAT INJUSTICE!

  When the Los Angeles Daily News columnist Erskine Johnson had the nerve to chide Sinatra for his temperamental behavior, he got a telegram, too:

  JUST CONTINUE TO PRINT LIES ABOUT ME, AND MY TEMPER—NOT MY TEMPERAMENT—WILL SEE THAT YOU GET A BELT IN YOUR VICIOUS AND STUPID MOUTH.

  On hearing that Johnson weighed two hundred pounds and was eager to mix it up with him, Sinatra decided not to press the issue any further.

  Only a year earlier, Frank had been the press’s hero, the humanitarian in chief, the noble and reasonable star of The House I Live In. Now, much to the chagrin of his handlers, the Hollywood Women’s Press Club voted him Least Cooperative Star, in a landslide vote. Suddenly he was a bad boy again. And seemingly eager to prove it at every opportunity.

  First, however, there was a certain amount of penance to do. He was a married man: it appeared he was going to have to pay some attention to that part of his life. Frank was returning to the Wedgwood Room at the Waldorf after Thanksgiving, and so he decided to take Nancy and the children with him. It was his idea.

  And that wasn’t all. He bought Nancy a glorious pearl necklace, three strands, at Tiffany, and presented it to her before they went out for a family dinner at the Stork Club. She opened the big light blue box—bigger than the box the diamond bracelet had been in—with glistening eyes; she put the necklace on immediately. Evans made certain a photographer was at the restaurant to record the occasion: pretty mommy and handsome daddy, all dressed up, in between their adorable little boy and girl with identical fat cheeks and floppy bows at their necks.

  Daddy was busy. He had rehearsals, business at Columbia and elsewhere, three packed shows a night at the Wedgwood (about which the joke was, If they could wedge any more paying customers in, they would). His schedule was so jammed that he barely got to see Nancy and the kids. Time was so tight that a recording session had to be scheduled for a Sunday, an unprecedented event.

  George Avakian remembers the day well: December 15, 1946. Avakian, twenty-seven at the time, was a junior producer at Columbia; his boss, Manie Sacks, had asked him to come in to supervise the second half of the session, which would consist of two numbers Sinatra wanted to record with the Page Cavanaugh Trio, a jazz combo. Sacks himself supervised the first half, as he did with all Sinatra’s important—that is, commercial—recording sessions. The first two songs were Irving Berlin’s “Always” and something called “I Want to Thank Your Folks,” a contemporary tune that Sacks felt had selling potential. Axel Stordahl arranged, and conducted the thirty-five-piece orchestra.

  “Always” is fine: Sinatra is in good voice, and it would be hard for him not to do a good job on the great standard. At the same time, there’s something slightly stilted and airless about his rendition: he’s articulating beautifully, yet doesn’t convey the song’s passion. The problem is compounded on “I Want to Thank Your Folks,” which, with its unexceptional tune and dreary lyrics (“I want to thank your folks for making you as sweet as you are/How else can I express how I feel, confess and reveal my love?”), against the sound of a sappily tinkling celeste, i
s the kind of schmaltz that gives 1940s music a bad name.

  The recording session changes dramatically once the classical musicians have packed up their instruments, put on their scarves and overcoats, and bustled out of Liederkranz Hall. Axel and Manie have also left the building. Now that Frank is alone with the jazz guys (the trio’s guitarist was the great Al Viola, who would continue playing for Sinatra for many years), the atmosphere shifts. With “Always” and “I Want to Thank Your Folks,” Avakian recalls, Frank “was relatively tense because they were ballads. The other two songs were just pleasant throwaways. He’s taking a drink and singing the song without worrying about it.”

  The results show. “That’s How Much I Love You” and “You Can Take My Word for It, Baby” are hardly classics, but Sinatra’s singing on the two jazz numbers is relaxed and good-humored and completely charming. He was especially relaxed at a one-off session he did two days later, a glorious recording of “Sweet Lorraine” with the Metronome All-Stars, including Johnny Hodges, Coleman Hawkins, Harry Carney, Charlie Shavers, Lawrence Brown, Nat “King” Cole, and, lo and behold, Buddy Rich. Many serious music commentators, George Avakian among them, have asserted that Sinatra never truly swings. They should redirect their attention to this “Sweet Lorraine.” Maybe it all depended on the context.2

  Avakian, who produced records for many musical giants, from Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington to Miles Davis, disliked Sinatra from the moment he first saw the singer get off the elevator at Columbia’s Seventh Avenue offices, flanked by four bodyguards.3 “He used to call me ‘kid’ because he didn’t know my name,” Avakian said. “He gave off the feeling that, ‘Listen, I’m a big man and you’re unimportant, and I’m putting up with your presence.’ ” On the first Sinatra recording sessions the producer witnessed, “everybody was sort of like, ‘Oh, Sinatra is very tough—you have to be careful. Don’t cross him; don’t argue with him.’ ”

  Yet to Avakian’s surprise, Sinatra was loose and easy on the two trio numbers the young producer supervised. “He did them very quickly, two takes of each one,” Avakian recalled. “I thought, ‘Gee, if only he could do this all the time, he’s somebody I could enjoy working with.’ ”

  Frank couldn’t do it all the time, of course. He was simply too important a personage to let his hair down (even while he still had it in abundance). He knew exactly how miraculous a singer he was, but he also knew how delicate his voice was—and how fickle public regard. He was protecting his position as America’s most important ballad singer, and the effort made him tense.

  Frank’s entire life seemed to be based on the building and the release of tension. When the release came in the form of singing, it was gorgeous; when it took the form of fury, it was terrible. But release was important and constantly needed. “Hard work and extended play, I mean after hours, never hurt Frank,” George Evans said, not entirely accurately. “But emotional tension absolutely destroyed him. You could always tell when he was troubled. He came down with a bad throat. Germs were never the cause unless there are guilt germs.”

  To some degree, this was wishful thinking on Evans’s part. Guilt, with Sinatra, was as transitory as his other emotions. His mercurial nature, as we have seen, was part of his finely tuned temperament. And as his fame allowed ever-greater self-indulgence, there were times he could simply shrug off guilt and go on to the next thing. He was often in beautiful voice that late autumn in Manhattan. He was working hard and spending as much time with his family as he could. He opened the Wedgwood gig with a smile, holding a cup of coffee and singing “The Coffee Song,” a cute Bob Hilliard and Dick Miles novelty number he’d recorded in July.4

  But then, unpredictably, the tension would return. He was less graceful with nightclub hecklers than he’d been before. “You must be glad the war is over—now you can get parts for your head!” he shouted at one. Another time he walked off the floor in the middle of a song. Something was eating him. In early December he issued an edict barring fans under twenty-one from his radio broadcasts. The public outcry was noisier than anything he’d had to endure in the studio. Frank quickly reversed his decision. He often seemed whipsawed at the end of that year. It wasn’t just the rising pressures of fame: he was also secretly making time in his busy schedule for Lana Turner, whose similarly busy schedule, as fate would have it, had brought her to New York City.

  Bugsy Siegel, the jaunty sociopath, was uncharacteristically nervous. He was millions of dollars in the hole for cost overruns (and skimming) on the still-unfinished Flamingo Hotel, and the men who had fronted him the money, Meyer Lansky among them, were not patient people. These men already suspected Siegel of stealing from them, but if the Flamingo’s opening, scheduled for the day after Christmas, was a success, promising rivers of revenue, all might be forgiven. The key to a big event, then as now, was stars. If major Hollywood talent came to the desert, the public would follow.

  Bugsy knew everyone in Hollywood, and the week before Christmas he flew to L.A. to call in some chits. He had extended friendship, protection, and business help to some very important people, and now he needed their help back. He called on the biggest names in his address book: Sinatra, Lana Turner, Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, and Jimmy Durante, among others. The response was not enthusiastic.

  Worse, December 26 was cold and rainy and the airports in Los Angeles and Vegas were socked in. The Flamingo opening was a gloomy, under-attended event: the stars, to put it mildly, did not turn out. Gable, Hepburn, Tracy, Cooper, and Dietrich all came up with excuses—a mother was very sick, an ankle had been sprained, a cold had been caught. Durante and George Raft, always friendly where the Boys were concerned, somehow made their way to the desert, as did Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Xavier Cugat, and George Jessel. It wasn’t enough. “There can rarely have been a more cheerless scene,” wrote Otto Friedrich in City of Nets, “than the newly opened casino at the half-empty and half-finished Flamingo, standing alone in the Nevada desert on the night after Christmas.” Cheerless, and snakebit: though Raft compliantly lost $75,000 at the crap tables, the Flamingo’s gaming coffers were $200,000 in the red after its first night of operation.

  Maybe Siegel stole that, too. It didn’t matter: his fate was sealed. The process had begun four days earlier, at the great conference of American mafiosi at the Hotel Nacional in Havana, organized by the plush hotel’s co-owner Meyer Lansky (his silent partner, the Cuban president Fulgencio Batista) and presided over by Salvatore Lucania, a.k.a. Charles “Lucky” Luciano.5 Luciano had been released from prison in return for protecting New York City’s docks during World War II, but had had to accept permanent deportation to Italy; now he was back in the Western Hemisphere, hoping to set up a permanent base of operations just ninety miles from Florida. Lucky Luciano had a mesmerizingly cold face, with pitted cheeks, a piercing gaze, and a strangely beautiful mouth—up-curved at the corners, and with a sensual lower lip—that was virtually the double of Sinatra’s. Every important gangster in the United States had convened in Havana to offer Luciano fealty and thick envelopes of cash—every important gangster except for Benny Siegel, who hadn’t even been told about the conference. The message was clear. Meyer Lansky, who perhaps felt remiss at having urged Vegas on Siegel in the first place, argued with uncharacteristic passion that Benny should live, that he might still turn the Flamingo around and be of value, but few at the conference listened.

  Sinatra was conspicuously absent from the Flamingo’s opening ceremonies. Whatever Frank may have told Benny, the real reasons for his failure to show were complicated. As for the other absentees, maybe, as is so often the case with stars, the herd instinct had kicked in. And maybe, as has been rumored, William Randolph Hearst, who was so close to Louis B. Mayer, had put the kibosh on the event for MGM stars because Hearst suspected his mistress Marion Davies had slept with the handsome gangster. As for Frank: maybe Charlie Fischetti’s warning about Ben Siegel still echoed in his head.

  It was
Frank’s New Year’s Eve party to welcome in 1947. There was a stirring in the big living room as a latecomer arrived: the twenty-three-year-old Peter Lawford, dashing in his well-tailored tux. Handsome as he was, though, it was his date who was drawing all the stares. Dark haired, with dazzlingly high cheekbones, a white fur stole on her wide shoulders, she walked with the easy grace of a tigress; Ava Gardner was on the prowl. Until recently a nobody in Hollywood, Ava entered the room with confidence born of success and buoyed by alcohol. The Killers had put her on the A-list; Mayer himself had told her the world was her oyster. She had just turned twenty-four the week before, and she was ready for adventure.

  She was more tired than ever of Howard Hughes. She still grudgingly accepted his gifts—the fur she was wearing; a Cadillac convertible. What was harder to take were the spies sent to monitor her comings and goings. It would have been annoying enough if she’d been his only girlfriend, but she happened to know that Hughes was also keeping tabs on Linda Darnell, Jean Peters, and Jane Russell. The man was insufferable. Lawford, on the other hand, was fun, and charmingly irreverent, and a girl couldn’t just sit at home on New Year’s Eve.

  It wasn’t just that she didn’t want to be alone, nor was it simply that this was the party that night. She had to admit that she was increasingly curious about the man she kept running into everywhere. She was intrigued by how persistently gentlemanly he was, unlike almost every other male she encountered—and unlike his reputation. And while she knew he was married, and the father of two small children, and she had a strict policy against seeing married men, she was intrigued. All the more so when Lawford took her over to introduce her (he thought) to Sinatra, and she and Frank exchanged an amused glance. Over his shoulder, a few yards away, stood the wife, mousy cute, smiling at another couple. Ava looked at her for a second, then back at Frank, who was still grinning at her. No contest. She felt like a thief inside a bank vault.