Frank

by James Kaplan

  Nelson Riddle heard, from the moment he lowered his baton, that something was different—that this was not the same Sinatra he’d recorded with the previous May. During that last session, Frank had sung beautifully but politely over the lushly orchestrated strings, muffling the promise of the great “I’ve Got the World on a String” he’d recorded just two days before. Now he fulfilled that promise. This time, with only half the number of musicians he’d had in May (and just four fiddlers rather than nine), his voice was more exposed. The band was hipper—Allan Reuss’s electric guitar imparted a 1950s-modern sound on some numbers—and the songs were better: two Gershwins (“A Foggy Day” and “They Can’t Take That Away from Me”), a Rodgers and Hart (“My Funny Valentine”), and Tom Adair and Matt Dennis’s lovely (and gorgeously titled) “Violets for Your Furs.”

  This time, coming out from the protective cover of the orchestral backing, Sinatra was astonishing. On the first song, “A Foggy Day,” he established dominance. The voice was as magnificent as ever, but now he showed a rhythmic ease, a sense of play, that he hadn’t shown since he’d recorded the jazz-trio throwaways “That’s How Much I Love You” and “You Can Take My Word for It, Baby,” and his great “Sweet Lorraine,” with the Metronome All-Stars, in 1946. His tossed-off, Hoboken-bratty lyrical improvisations (“I viewed the morning with much alarm/The British Museum—it lost its charm”) showed the world that while Ira Gershwin might be Ira Gershwin, Sinatra was Sinatra.

  He’d been loose in 1946 and he was loose now, but with a new component added: maturity. This year Frank had been through the crucible, emotionally and professionally. His “Foggy Day,” from pensive verse (“I was a stranger in the city …”) to joyous chorus, is an autobiography in miniature, a masterpiece of phrasing forged from Sinatra’s inseparably intertwined life and art.

  Frank had always been in impatient command in a recording studio—even with Mitch Miller. Nelson Riddle recalled: “If I wasn’t conducting the orchestra to his liking, he’d shove me out of the way and take over. If he asked for diminuendo from the orchestra and didn’t get it immediately, he’d take things into his own hands and you can believe that they damn well played softer for him than they did for me.”

  On “World on a String,” Frank had brought a new kind of authority to the music itself. On “Foggy Day,” he once more took charge, but with a chastened undertone. “Ava taught him how to sing a torch song,” Riddle would say later. In this “Foggy Day,” you can feel Frank and Ava’s actual agonies and ecstasies in the real London, just three months before. His voice has such a plaintive tremolo that you worry for his emotional well-being. On the song’s ultimate line, “and in foggy London town the sun was shining everywhere,” Frank sings the word “shining” not once, not twice, but five times in a row—sings it so passionately that you can feel the deep dark in back of the sunlight.

  The next night he recorded four more songs, and one of them, the first—a pretty Burke–Van Heusen tune called “Like Someone in Love”—had been arranged by Riddle. Siravo’s charts were lovely, but this orchestration, with its Debussy/Ravel-esque flute passages (the flute would soon become a Riddle signature), was something special: a gift from one lover of impressionism to another, and a promise of more complex beauty to come.

  Saturday night, November 7, wasn’t just the loneliest night of the week, as Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne’s great song had it, but the loneliest of Sinatra’s life: his second wedding anniversary, with his wife nowhere in sight. Accordingly, when Jimmy Van Heusen—Frank’s master of revels, and the champ at getting him to Forget—picked him up at Beverly Glen, he announced in his wry voice that they were going to get Frank laid. But good. He was as good as his word.

  The next night Chester accompanied Sinatra to the El Capitan Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, where Frank was to do a guest spot on The Colgate Comedy Hour, with his old pal Jimmy Durante. If Frank was suffering over Ava, he hid it well, clowning it up with the Schnozzola, who kept interrupting him whenever he tried to sing—especially when he tried to sing “From Here to Eternity.” The two did a musical quiz-show skit together; they sang a duet about how all comedians want to be singers and all singers want to be comedians. Frank even warbled the Halo Shampoo jingle, “Halo, Everybody, Halo.”

  Maybe he was able to feign good spirits so convincingly because he’d found a pleasant distraction: while he sang the jingle, a blond twenty-two-year-old beauty-pageant winner from North Dakota named Angeline Brown Dickinson smiled and showed off her silky tresses for the camera. Later, she and Frank—and then she and Frank and Jimmy—struck up a conversation backstage. Angie Dickinson was very young and, as she remembered vividly many years later, “bursting with awe” at being in Sinatra’s presence. She had a humorous, easygoing presence about her that he liked a lot. She was witty, but not caustic; she knew how to talk, but she knew how to listen, too. It turned out she was married in an informal sort of way, yet she was also an extremely practical girl, and her sights were set firmly on Hollywood. Chester asked her for her number—for Frank, of course—and of course she gave it to him.

  Ava was still wrangling with MGM over The Barefoot Contessa. The studio was demanding an exorbitant fee from Mankiewicz for her services—and proposing stingy terms for her end of the loan-out. She didn’t give a rat’s ass about the terms. She had just had it with Hollywood, a company town whose business she neither liked nor trusted, and she had had it with Frank. She wired Schenck himself:

  I AM DESPERATELY ANXIOUS TO DO THIS PICTURE … YOU MUST KNOW MY TERRIBLE DISAPPOINTMENT AT NOT BEING ABLE TO ACCUMULATE SOME MONEY AND SECURITY WHICH I HAD CONTEMPLATED WHEN I MADE MY NEW CONTRACT WITH METRO … AND I THINK THE LEAST THAT THE COMPANY CAN DO IS TO GIVE ME SOME MEASURE OF HAPPINESS IN DOING THE KIND OF PART I WANT TO DO AT THIS TIME AS I COULD LEAVE FOR EUROPE IMMEDIATELY.

  Metro, of course, didn’t give a good goddamn about its spoiled star’s happiness, except insofar as it affected business. The right deal was all Schenck cared about. The horse-trading continued.

  Frank knew how badly Ava wanted this role. What it really meant as far as he was concerned was that she wanted to return to Europe. Alone. And not just for a visit, but to stay, as long as she could. If she got the job—and she tended to get what she wanted—she would leave at the end of November for an indefinite period: three months of shooting in Rome, and then Spain, probably.

  If she didn’t get the job, she told the press, she might go to Spain anyway.

  Frank knew who was in Spain, and he felt a kind of rising panic—the end of November. Maybe the two of them really were through; maybe she could resist him after all. There were times, at five or six in the morning, when he had to pour another Jack Daniel’s and tell himself he must think of something to keep her here. He couldn’t. He was constantly on edge: when he found out she’d had a drink with Peter Lawford at the Luau on Rodeo Drive (a totally innocent thing—Lawford’s manager and Bappie were also present—but Hedda Hopper blared it as a date in her column the next day), Frank went nuts. He was not just a cuckold but a public cuckold, and in his own backyard. He phoned Lawford and told him he was a dead man—his exact phrase. He screamed into the phone that he was sending somebody to break the actor’s legs.

  Now it was Lawford’s turn to panic. He called his manager, Milt Ebbins—whose idea it had been in the first place to go have that drink with Ava—and begged him to call Sinatra and tell him that he was completely innocent.

  Ebbins was glad to call Frank and try to set things straight, but there was a small problem: Frank had left town, and nobody knew where he was.

  Hysterical with fear, Lawford begged his manager to find him.

  Ebbins found him, but it wasn’t easy. It turned out Van Heusen had flown Sinatra to New York on his plane, and Frank was holed up at Chester’s West Fifty-seventh Street apartment. Jimmy answered the phone, whispering hoarsely, his hand shielding the mouthpiece: “Yeah, he’s here! Jesus Christ, and he’s driving me crazy! Ava, Ava, Ava! A bill
ion fucking broads in the world, and he’s got to pick the one that can take him or leave him!”

  “Eventually they got Frank onto the phone,” Ebbins recalled.

  And he started threatening me … I said, “Frank, Frank, listen to me, it wasn’t Peter. I wanted to see Ava!” He said, “What?!” I said, “Listen, it was my idea to go to the Luau, I just wanted to meet Ava is all” … And it took some time to calm him down. I think he believed me. Well, he never said anything more. He never says that he’s sorry. And when he got a hate on, forget it. He didn’t talk to Peter for years.

  He’d come to New York to begin yet another radio show for NBC: To Be Perfectly Frank, a fifteen-minute, twice-a-week broadcast on which Sinatra played DJ, spinning the records of other vocalists and singing a number or two of his own, backed by a five-piece combo. The show was a strangely mixed bag, reflecting both Frank’s resurgent fortunes and the declining state of radio. At first a sponsor couldn’t even be found. “Ten years ago, even five,” wrote the critic Jack O’Brian, “such a show starring such a revivified ‘hot’ personality as ‘The Voice’ would have had 35 musicians, a ‘name’ conductor, a chorus of 16, several announcers and highly-paid guest stars. Now it’s just Frank, five musicians, and recordings.”

  He was taping the shows for later broadcast on NBC affiliates, and during the ten days he spent in New York that November, he was in a kind of fever, consuming coffee and pills and cigarettes instead of food, recording episode after episode over the course of long days in the Rockefeller Center studios, stockpiling shows against the trip he knew he had to make to win back his wife.

  In the meantime, he was a walking wreck, able at times to simulate his old charming self, but mostly obsessing about her, trying in vain to reach her on the phone (she and Bappie were lying low in another Palm Springs rental). Van Heusen took him out to Toots Shor’s and “21,” where Frank—still wearing his wedding ring, the gossips were interested to note—declined to sing when Chester sat down at the piano. Not in the mood, he said. A pretty blonde sitting nearby, “Melissa Weston Bigelow of New York and Southampton society,” according to Kilgallen, found his moodiness attractive. After a couple of days it wore thin. When she left, Chester brought in the usual paid company (after an early experience with a pro who bore a slight resemblance to Billie Holiday, Frank had discovered a special fondness for black women), sometimes in twos and threes.

  Jimmy Van Heusen indulged his friend as fully as his imagination and resources would allow, but even he, renowned for his heroic energy, was fraying out. He marshaled the usual reinforcements: Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn (though not together, just at the moment: they were having an idiotic feud), Manie Sacks, Ben Barton, Frank Military, Al Silvani.

  Not Tami Mauriello, though. The old pug had actually gone and gotten a part—a pretty fair-sized one—in Kazan’s fucking waterfront picture, which was just about to start shooting in Hoboken, where the populace was all agog at the arrival of the movie people with their trucks, lights, and cables. Not to mention the breathlessly awaited appearance of Marlon Brando.

  After a few days, Frank stopped going out. He stiffed NBC, failing to appear for the premiere of Perfectly Frank, which was to be broadcast live; the network had to do a fast shuffle and throw one of the tapes he’d already stockpiled onto the air. The suits were not pleased—there were grumbles about legal action. Sinatra couldn’t have cared less. He was walking around Jimmy’s apartment in his pajamas, a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, gazing into space or out the window or at the flickering gray and white images on TV: Lucy and Ricky jabbering about this or that, to uproarious laughter. Husband-and-wife situation comedies were all the rage that fall, and a number of them featured actual couples—the Arnazes, Ozzie and Harriet, Burns and Allen, the Stu Erwins, Anne Jeffreys and Robert Sterling on Topper. When MGM announced the Frank-and-Ava split, some Hollywood wit cracked, “Well, that washes them up. They’ll never get a TV situation comedy show now!”

  On Monday, November 16, Mankiewicz and Schenck signed: Ava was to play the lead in The Barefoot Contessa. Mankiewicz would pay MGM $200,000 for her services; of this amount, Metro would pay Ava $60,000 for three months’ work. It was well below her usual rate, but she didn’t give a damn. All the trade papers carried the news. They also carried the news that Elia Kazan had started shooting On the Waterfront in Hoboken. Marlon Brando, wearing blue jeans and a red-and-black-checked hunting jacket, had slipped into town, listened attentively as Kazan explained the setup, done a couple hours’ work, then slipped away in a black car. (He’d had it written into his contract that he could leave every afternoon to go see his psychiatrist in Manhattan.)

  Across the river in Chester’s place, Frank, still in his pajamas, sat and talked dully on the phone—to his agents, to Hank Sanicola. He had Sanicola read him the trades. Hank said he was sorry, about Ava, about Waterfront. Frank didn’t answer.

  He was due in St. Louis the next day, to rehearse for a week-before-Thanksgiving gig at the Chase Hotel. His bags still weren’t packed. Chester looked at him. Would he please eat something, for fuck’s sake? He looked like shit.

  Frank stared into space. He would try.

  Chester told him he had to go out. Could he get Frank anything? Blonde? Redhead? Brown sugar?

  Frank didn’t answer—not even a smile. Van Heusen left, exhaling with relief the second he walked out the door. He had had it, and so had the rest of Sinatra’s friends. Frank had committed the worst sin, one of which he’d previously been incapable: he had finally bored them all to tears.

  Chester went home at 2:00 a.m. after attending another party at “21.” It had been a gala occasion: he’d played the piano and sung, mostly his own songs, and he’d been a big hit. At forty, Jimmy Van Heusen wasn’t anything like a good-looking man—tall, powerful, gravel voiced, he had a bullish presence enhanced by a thick neck and shaved head (he’d begun the ahead-of-his-time practice when he started losing his hair in his late twenties). “You would not pick him over Clark Gable any day,” Angie Dickinson recalled. “But his magnetism was irresistible.” He played piano beautifully, wrote gorgeously poignant songs about romance, and, quite straightforwardly if rather unromantically, loved to fuck. Women knew it at once by the look in his eye, the way he ran his fingers down a girl’s arm—playing her like a piano!—and growled, in those W. C. Fields–ian tones, “Bee-yutiful.” He had a fat wallet; he flew his own plane; he never went home alone.

  Tonight, though, he did: he had a sick friend to tuck in. Van Heusen shook his head as he turned the key—and then stared at the spots of blood on the floor. He followed the red trail across the living room, his heart thudding. At the entrance to the kitchen, he saw Frank, his left pajama sleeve soaked deep scarlet, lying semiconscious on the linoleum.

  Frantic when their star attraction failed to appear, the bookers at the Chase Hotel phoned everyone: Sinatra’s agents, his lawyer, even Alan Livingston at Capitol Records. No one knew anything. Finally they called Morris Shenker. Shenker was a St. Louis defense attorney with a large and grateful clientele of men whose bona fides might not have stood up to scrutiny by the Kefauver Committee. An enormously powerful figure with ties to Vegas and the East Coast, the lawyer made it his business to know everyone and everything. And with one telephone call, he found out. Quickly and simply, he told the entertainment managers at the Chase Hotel that Sinatra had slit his wrists.

  In truth, it had only been one wrist—his left. Van Heusen had paid his doorman $50 to get a cab fast and keep his mouth shut, then paid the cabbie $20 to run every red light on the way up to Mount Sinai Hospital. More money passed hands, and with great haste Frank was attended to and checked into a suite under his own name. The cover story was to be that he was exhausted. This was true enough. His weight was down to 118 pounds from 132, and he hadn’t really slept for weeks. Though no official announcement had been made yet, the flowers and telegrams started arriving in great quantities the next morning.

  After a dr
ugged sleep, Sinatra awoke alert and agitated. He had to get out of there now, he kept repeating. Around his bed, his doctors, along with Van Heusen, Sacks, Styne, and Cahn (forgetting their feud), tried to reason with him. He was in no shape to move, let alone leave. Why not just put his feet up for a few days?

  He had to get to California. Had to see her.

  She was leaving him, he knew it. He’d tried to leave her, the only way he knew, but maybe he just didn’t have the guts. Now he was pinning everything on looking her in the eye, holding her hand, and begging her to stay. He finally reached her on the phone—she’d returned to L.A. to go to the opera and see friends.

  Oh Jesus, Francis.

  She sounded both solicitous and slightly exasperated, but her voice was balm to his soul. He imagined her standing at his bedside, imagined the dimpled chin and lush lips and green eyes looking down at him.

  His voice was weak. He was okay, but he had to see her right away.

  She told him to just stay put until he was healthy. She wasn’t going anywhere.

  But he knew her: she probably had her bags packed already.

  “Sinatra’s father says he went to Mt. Sinai hosp for a checkup,” wrote Winchell, the All-Powerful. “But the rumors had it he tried to End It All.”

  Whenever Frank Sinatra taxed his patience to the utmost, Jimmy Van Heusen had to remind himself that this, after all, was Sinatra. A man who put his pants on one leg at a time, picked his nose, and told stupid jokes, but … Sinatra. As a songwriter of brilliance but not genius, Van Heusen was in an ideal position to understand what genius really was, and he recognized that Frank surely possessed it. It didn’t excuse his excesses—only God could do that—but it began to explain them. Jimmy might bad-mouth Frank behind his back (and he meant it when he did), he might hate him at times and even fear him, yet he also loved him, as much as he could love anybody. And when the little bastard sang, Chester got more goose bumps than anyone else.