by James Kaplan
Next week, Frank Sinatra will be working in the picture, and I’m going to visit the set. We’re going to show Frankie boy the Match the Stars pictures, including the one of Ava as a child. We’ll just see if Frankie can recognize his own wife. If not there’ll be an awful lot of razzing.
Frank and the papers were virtually collaborators at this point: he was working hard to try to convince them (and by extension the public) that he was behaving himself and up to the task of playing Maggio, and the press seems to have been trying to persuade itself. “Crooner Frank Sinatra Tuesday joined the ranks of film greats who have switched from song and dance roles to straight drama,” proclaimed a wire-service report, mentioning Joan Crawford, Ginger Rogers, Dick Powell, and Jane Wyman.
Frankie flew 10,000 miles from Africa to Hollywood to try out for the role he coveted and finally won. His highest hope now is that his new impersonation will be well received by the public.
“I know how I feel about it, but how the public will feel is another thing,” he said.
It sounded rather plaintive. In a way Frank was raising expectations, putting huge pressure on himself; at the same time, though, he was asking for what the public had always been reluctant to extend him: tolerance. It was a brilliant job of public relations, one that he couldn’t possibly have brought off himself, and in fact he hadn’t: Eternity’s unit publicist, Walter Shenson (who would go on to produce A Hard Day’s Night and Help!), had taken over the latest Sinatra charm offensive and was stage-managing it in grand style. “I told him that I could do a lot for him if he’d just behave himself with the press,” Shenson recalled.
He was a pussycat. “Whatever you say, kid, whatever you say,” he said. So I started bringing around news people to interview him. A couple of times he said, “I won’t talk to that one. He was rude to Ava.” Then I’d remind him of his promise to cooperate, and he’d be a charmer.
One day I got a call from a press guy saying that the government had just released a statement that Frank owed $109,000 in back taxes. He wanted a comment from Sinatra, so I went to his trailer and told him. He looked at me very calmly and said, “You don’t think this is news, do you? If you owe $109,000, you know about it.” I explained that I was getting phone calls from the press wanting a statement. He said to tell them anything I wanted. If I do, I said, it will have to be a quote from you. “Go ahead,” he said. “Tell them whatever you want.”
“Surely your lawyers and accountants are working with the government, aren’t they?” I asked. Frank said they were, so I went back and called all the reporters. “Mr. Sinatra asked me to tell you the following: ‘My lawyers and my accountants are working with the government lawyers and accountants, and if it takes From Here to Eternity, I’m going to pay it all back.’ ” I later told Frank that I had to publicize the picture first and him second, but he thought that was brilliant.
Frank and Monty. The two men had enormous respect for each other. By example and through the advice Sinatra eagerly sought from him, Clift raised Frank’s acting to a new level. (photo credit 33.2)
Tax troubles and Ava troubles weren’t his only distractions that month. “Isn’t Frank Sinatra switching soon from Columbia records to RCA-Victor?” Earl Wilson wrote in early March. Not exactly, as it turned out.
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Nelson Riddle and Frank. The genius arranger and the genius singer had much in common: a New Jersey background, domineering mothers, solitary natures, restless sexual drives. (photo credit 34.1)
Of course, since Columbia had dropped him months earlier, Frank couldn’t “switch” to any record label. And he especially wasn’t switching to RCA Victor, where Manie Sacks, despite all his power and influence as head of A&R, had tried more than once, with no success, to sell the washed-up singer to his sales force.
William Morris, too, was trying to peddle Sinatra: What good was a singer who didn’t record? (And what good was a client earning a mere thousand a week?) Sam Weisbord, the president of the agency and the man who’d sewn up the From Here to Eternity deal for Frank, rang every record company’s phone off the hook until he finally reached Alan Livingston.
Livingston, Capitol’s vice president in charge of creative operations, had started at the fledgling label at the end of the war, fresh out of the Army and wet behind the ears. As low man on the totem pole, the boyish-looking ex-GI had been given the theoretically unenviable assignment of creating a children’s record library: he responded by inventing Bozo the Clown. Together with Livingston’s other brainstorm, the read-along record, Bozo sold millions of units and brought in huge merchandising revenues. Almost overnight, Alan Livingston achieved boy-wonder status. Seven years later, still just in his mid-thirties, he was hungry for a grown-up coup.
“Alan, we’ve just taken on representation of Sinatra,” Weisbord told him.
“Really?” Livingston said. The response was more than polite; the record man was actually intrigued by what sounded, at that point, like a contrarian notion.
“Yes,” the agent said. “Would you be interested in signing him?”
“Yes,” Livingston said at once.
“You would?” Weisbord said.
It had popped out involuntarily: not an attitude that laid the foundation for a strong bargaining position. But bargaining wasn’t the point at this stage of Sinatra’s career; getting him a foothold was.
Capitol was more of a natural for Frank than Weisbord had imagined. The label had recently signed Axel Stordahl, who’d been telling everybody who would listen, “Frank’s singing great again.” A house producer named Dave Dexter, formerly a critic for Down Beat, was similarly vocal about his enthusiasm for Sinatra.
Weisbord took Frank in to meet with Livingston. Livingston recalled:
He was meek, a pussycat, humble. He had been through terrible times. He was broke, he was in debt … I was told he had tried to kill himself on occasion. He was at the lowest ebb of his life … Everybody knew it.
Frank and I talked, and I signed him to a seven-year contract, one year with six options, which is as long as you can sign anybody. I gave him a standard royalty of five percent and gave him a scale advance. He was glad to have a place to make records. And that’s how I signed Sinatra.
Maybe Frank’s humility was genuine; maybe he was employing some of the acting skills he was learning from Monty Clift. He knew that Capitol was hot, that Livingston was largely responsible, that the label had recently made a superstar out of Nat “King” Cole. No matter that the deal Livingston was offering was the kind that new artists, not superstars, got (the advance was in the low three figures). No matter that for the first time in his life, Sinatra would have to cover his own recording costs. He was glad to have a place to make records.
If he was superstitious, he wasn’t thinking about it when he agreed to meet Livingston for lunch on Friday, March 13, 1953, at Lucey’s,1 a celebrity watering hole on Melrose, right across the street from the Paramount gate and Capitol’s recording studios. The food smelled delicious, and Frank was in great good spirits—he felt hungry again. As his witness, Livingston had brought along his girlfriend, the actress Betty Hutton, a square-jawed blonde who liked to laugh: there were plenty of laughs. Sinatra had brought Sanicola and Frank Military, a music-publishing pal who screened songs for him. Livingston waited till the drinks had arrived before unsnapping his briefcase and taking out the papers. He raised his glass to a great association.
The toast was seconded by all. Frank clinked his glass with the executive’s, then took a long pull of Jack Daniel’s. Livingston handed him a fountain pen; Frank regarded the papers on the table. He knew well what Capitol’s option clause specified: the label could drop him in a year if things didn’t work out. March 1954. Who knew where anybody would be in March 1954? But things would work out, if he had anything to do with it. He scratched his signature on the contract.
It was a long, pleasant lunch, yet the proceedings were of little note to the outside world. The next morning, a tiny wire-service
item on page two in many of the nation’s papers carried the news, buried beneath articles about a UFO sighting over New Mexico’s Kirtland Air Force Base and the illness of the president of Czechoslovakia. “Frank Sinatra was signed to a Capital [sic] recording contract today, terminating his long association with Columbia records,” it read, not quite accurately.
The next week, Alan Livingston flew to Capitol’s annual sales convention in Estes Park, Colorado. “We had every salesman in our distributing company there, every branch manager, every district manager, every promotion man,” he recalled. “There must have been a couple of hundred people. And I got up and talked about future artists and recordings, and I announced that we had just signed Frank Sinatra.”
Everyone in the room groaned.
Livingston raised his hands to quiet them. “Look,” he told his sales force, “I can only judge on talent. I can’t judge what people did in the past. I only know talent, and Frank is the best singer in the world. There’s nobody who can touch him.”
Still, that groan stayed with him. The past was exactly what Sinatra had to get away from.
“Hey, do me one favor and do yourself a favor,” Livingston told Frank when he got back to town. The executive said he had a great young arranger he wanted to team Frank with. But Sinatra shook his head practically before the executive had finished speaking.
“I’ve worked with Axel for practically my whole career,” he said. “I can’t leave Axel.”
Livingston asked Frank just to hear him out. The arranger was amazingly talented. His name was Nelson Riddle.
Frank shrugged—never heard of him. Practically nobody had. Riddle, a former trombonist and arranger with Tommy Dorsey in the post-Sinatra period, seemed to specialize in working anonymously. When Livingston told Sinatra about all the sides Riddle had arranged for Bing Crosby, Nat Cole, Mel Tormé, and Billy Eckstine, Sinatra shook his head again. Why hadn’t he heard of this guy?
They hit on an agreement: Frank would do a session with Stordahl, Capitol would put out the record, and they would see what ensued. If the cash registers rang, fine. If not, Frank would give what’s-his-name a shot.
“All hair restorers having failed,” Erskine Johnson confirmed on March 16, “Frank Sinatra has now taken to wearing hats.”
A week or so later, Sinatra had yet another on-set visitor at Columbia: the syndicated columnist Harold Heffernan, whose prose style was as clunky as his byline. “Salient factors that keep the pugnacious Frank Sinatra’s career from wallowing are a dogged tenacity and an enthusiasm about whatever he attempts,” Heffernan thesaurused, in his April 2 column.
No one could be more hopeful about a movie role than the bean-pole singer is over his non-warbling, unromantic part in Columbia’s “From Here to Eternity.”
“I play Montgomery Clift’s pal,” explained Frank on the set. “No girls for me. I just adore this fellow, and eventually give up my life, indirectly, for him. It’s a complete change from anything I have ever done.”
It would have occurred to nearly anyone who read Heffernan’s piece that Thursday that Sinatra hadn’t done much warbling in a while. This day was to be different. All morning and afternoon Frank worked hard on his scenes at the Columbia-Gower studios, then he showered and put on a dark suit and grabbed a quick bite with Monty at the Naples. At about 8:30 p.m., Sanicola picked him up, and they took the short drive over to Capitol’s recording facility, KHJ studios, a former radio station next to Paramount.
Excited, Frank walked into Studio C, where Stordahl, Livingston, and a putty-faced, high-pantsed producer named Voyle Gilmore were waiting for him. Record producers ran the gamut from control freaks like Mitch Miller to mere knob turners: the soft-spoken Gilmore fell somewhere in the middle. He knew how to get a good sound from a session, but also knew that Sinatra had a thorough understanding of what did and didn’t work for him. Gilmore was also aware that Alan Livingston had originally picked Dave Dexter to run the control room that night, and that Frank had vetoed him. In fact, at the mention of Dexter’s name, Frank had frozen, his phenomenal memory for slights and insults having instantly clicked onto a mildly critical review in Down Beat that Dexter had written years before.2
Gilmore was an amiable and gentle man, as quiet and thoughtful as Stordahl. Frank saw other friendly faces there: the reedman Skeets Herfurt and the trumpeter Zeke Zarchy, old pals from the Dorsey days; Bill Miller at the piano. In fact, he knew almost every musician in the room, since most of them had worked on Hollywood sessions for Columbia. Total pros, all of them. He was in good hands.
Frank sang happily that night, recording four songs: “Lean Baby,” an infectiously jivey Billy May blues about a skinny girlfriend; a sappy ballad called “I’m Walking Behind You” and an equally sappy waltz, “Don’t Make a Beggar of Me”; and one standard, Johnny Mercer and Rube Bloom’s great “Day In, Day Out.”
It was an odd session. Sinatra was in excellent voice, but the material didn’t quite rise to the occasion. True, “Lean Baby”—arranged not by Stordahl but by his (and the bandleader May’s) musical deputy Heinie Beau, in the bright and brassy Billy May style—was thoroughly charming. And “Day In, Day Out” was magnificent, if somewhat sedate—but Sinatra, for reasons of his own, would eventually decide not to release it. Of greatest concern were the middle two numbers, “Walking” and “Beggar,” both of them outright dogs.
But he was recording again, and he was pleased. After the session, Livingston took Sinatra across the street to Lucey’s for a celebratory drink. Sanicola lagged a few paces behind. The record executive noticed that Frank was walking taller, looking more alert, smiling. “It was late and we were sitting in the bar having a drink,” Livingston recalled.
Nobody else was in the place except for a man who was sitting across the bar. Frank and I were talking. I said, “Why don’t you take it easy? Get a better image.” He said, “Alan, I don’t do anything.” All of a sudden, the man says [to Livingston], “What are you doing, buying a drink for your leech friend?”
Frank said, “Knock it off.” The guy said, “Knock it off, knock it off …” And Frank didn’t do a thing, but his kind of a bodyguard went up and grabbed this guy—I thought he was going to kill him—and threw him out of the restaurant. Frank said, “See? That’s the trouble I get in. It’s not my fault.”
Sometimes, miraculously enough, it wasn’t. But the image of Sinatra as an aggrieved innocent to whom trouble came unbidden was no truer, then or later, than the image of him as a thug. He was more complicated than that, even if the world didn’t know it yet.
Astonishing to think that only a couple of months before, he’d been languishing in Africa, cooking spaghetti and sweating bullets. Now he was back in action—not quite clicking on all cylinders, but busy. Hedda Hopper spotted him dining with Judy Garland and Sid Luft. “Could they have been talking about getting Frank to play opposite Judy in the musical version of ‘A Star Is Born’?” the columnist wondered. (If indeed that’s what they were discussing, Frank might have found the role of the alcoholic fading movie star Norman Maine a little too close for comfort.) The television columnist Hal Humphrey noted that “Sinatra appears to be almost set to star in a TV series to be produced by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. The story would deal with the trials and tribulations of a musician and is called ‘Blue in the Night.’ ”
Also a little too close to the bone.
Frank was talking to all kinds of people. Amazingly, given the state of his finances, not to mention his situation with the IRS, it was reported in March that he was seeking a Nevada gambling license and a 2 percent share in the brand-new Sands Hotel & Casino, in Las Vegas, at a price of $54,000. Where did a man who barely had a pot to make pasta in intend to get $54,000? A lot of people, including the Nevada Tax Commission, were interested in that one. “The singer said in his application that the money would come from his own assets and that he has no liabilities,” reported the Associated Press. “But the tax commission said it wants to investigate, among ot
her subjects, Sinatra’s federal tax status.”
The seventh casino on the Strip, which had opened on Frank’s thirty-seventh birthday, December 12, 1952, was a natural foothold for Sinatra. With its ultramodern Googie-style architecture by the Desert Inn designer Wayne McAllister, its seventeen-story main tower looming in lonely splendor over Route 91, the Sands was a signpost of the new Vegas, a spaceship that would transport the town from its spurs-and-tumbleweed past into a neon-bright future. A big-time Houston gambler named Jakie Freedman had founded the place, but unlike the Flamingo’s Billy Wilkerson and the DI’s Wilbur Clark, who had run out of money while constructing their dream palaces and had to let the Mob muscle in, Freedman came to town loaded (after it got too hot for the quasi-legal casino he owned in his native Houston) and stayed loaded. Freedman was also connected. He had important friends in Vegas, and in New York and Miami, friends who were eager to tap into the cash cascades that were flowing from the Sands, but shy about seeing their names in cold type in the newspapers and on legal documents.
Sinatra and Freedman had friends—or, as the expression went, friends of friends—in common. Possibly some of the men who had looked kindly on Frank from the beginning were now extending him a favor, fronting him the money to buy into a dream? Or was he being asked to return a favor, by putting his name to a contract in their stead?
Suffice it to say that Frank had nothing like $54,000 lying around, that the money he wasn’t sending straight to Nancy’s lawyers he was paying to William Morris, and that Las Vegas—and the Sands in particular—had suddenly become a very friendly place. Jakie Freedman had even persuaded the guy who’d been running the Copacabana for its real owner to bring a little New York west and run the Sands for him. Jack Entratter was the guy’s name: a former bouncer—a big, heavyset fellow with dark slick hair and a ready grin on his tough moon face. In honor of Jack (and of Frank Costello, too), Jakie decided to name the main showroom at the Sands after the Copa. It was a room Sinatra would soon own a piece of, then more than a piece.