by James Kaplan
“I would rather write songs than do anything else—even fly,” Van Heusen once told an interviewer. And he loved flying. He loved fucking, too, but the sublime pleasure of songwriting trumped all other joys—and made them possible. He had written some good songs for Sinatra, and he hoped to write more. Staying as close as possible to Frank, Chester sensed, might just accelerate that process.
But Jimmy Van Heusen had another notable quality: he was a hypochondriac of the first order. He kept a Merck manual at his bedside, he injected himself with vitamins and painkillers, he had surgical procedures for ailments real and imagined. He was terrified of illness and death, and earlier that year, close to his fortieth birthday, he’d had what he’d felt might be a heart attack. The doctors weren’t sure, but he was. Terrifyingly, over these last taxing weeks with Sinatra, Jimmy had begun to feel chest pains again.
Accordingly, while Frank got dressed in the hospital room, shooting his cuffs to cover the bandages (the doctor had just walked out, shaking his head, after warning Sinatra that he was leaving Against Medical Advice), Van Heusen looked his friend in the eye and told him he had to have a word with him.
The songwriter had already gone over in his mind what he wanted to say. If it meant the end of the friendship, so be it. But he’d come to the end of his rope. The two men looked at each other in the mirror as Frank looped his tie. And Jimmy, his voice serious, told Frank that he had to see a headshrinker when he got back to Los Angeles. He couldn’t take this anymore.
Sinatra smiled a little. Why not?
Worried about their newly successful client’s fragility, William Morris assigned Sinatra a shadow, in the person of the New York agent George E. Wood, a dapper, slightly shifty-eyed fellow who prided himself on his wide acquaintanceship among organized criminals of the top rank—many of whom functioned as a kind of show-business directorate. Wood relished the assignment. “When Frank ate, I ate; when he slept, I slept,” the agent recalled. “When he felt like walking, I walked with him. When he took a haircut, I took a haircut. I loved the guy.”
Wood bribed a TWA gate agent at La Guardia to let him walk his charge through a hangar so Frank could get on his L.A.-bound flight unmolested by the pack of reporters. He rode cross-country with him, watching him as he slept a drugged sleep, now and then glancing at the bandage on his left wrist. And Wood did his best to fend off the reporters who met the plane at Los Angeles International the next morning. It wasn’t easy. The whole country was tuned in to what looked like the final act in the Frank-and-Ava saga.
RUMOR MILL IS MUM ON FRANKIE’S ROCKY ROMANCE, read a November 21 headline, punning lightly on the name of his radio show. “Whether skinny, harried Frank Sinatra would win back luscious Ava Gardner today prepared to be a matter known only to the principals,” began the wire-service story, datelined Hollywood.
Some of the couple’s friends believed the crooner’s estranged wife regarded their separation as “final.” Others thought Sinatra’s flying trip here from New York in defiance of his doctor’s advice might “weaken” her stand.
Several thought it was significant she did not meet him at the airport …
Newsmen followed him to the baggage stand and again he growled:
“Nothing. No comment.”
The crooner, down to 118 pounds from his normal 140, darted into a waiting limousine leaving still more questions unanswered.
Will he follow Ava to Europe?
Has she said she would talk to him?
“No comment.”
They’d made a plan to have dinner that night, at Bappie’s place—Ava’s big sister was now living with her husband, Charlie, in the Nichols Canyon cottage. Ava had insisted on a neutral location, with Bappie and Charlie present, so that Frank couldn’t misconstrue the occasion.
She met him at the door, kissing him on the cheek and immediately noticing his bandaged wrist.
He deflected her concern, instantly sensing that vulnerability wouldn’t play this time. It was nothing—a stupid accident. How was she?
Warm but cool at the same time, and nervous. He saw her hand shaking slightly as she held her cigarette. Frank was all charm, especially with Bappie, who’d once considered him an oily little dago (she didn’t have much patience for Negroes or Jews, either) but now felt considerable warmth toward her brother-in-law.
It was too late, all of it. Ava had written him off. Not, of course, just for the one infidelity he’d boasted about, but for the hundreds he would never mention. Years later she would say, “I was happier married to Frank than ever before in my entire life. He was the most charming man I’d ever met—nothing but charm. Maybe, if I’d been willing to share him with other women we could have been happy.”
She smiled at him now with a kind of relief: she’d worried before he came that she might not be able to resist him, that something would trigger her old susceptibilities. Nothing did. He looked like shit—that helped. Nor was she in the mood to mother him. She tapped her cigarette, she drank her drink, she looked at him and smiled, and all the while she was thinking of Rome, and Luis Miguel.
He saw it. He was endlessly intuitive—he could pick up a vibe from a room-service waiter or the second reporter from the left (though he didn’t like the world to know what he knew), and he was, if anything, over-attuned to the love of his life. Early he had learned to watch Dolly closely, closely, to try to figure out whether she was going to hug him or hit him; early he’d learned to watch Ava closely, to see whether she was going to love him or leave him.
She was leaving him.
Her bags might as well have been sitting by the front door.
“F. Sinatra will spend Thanksgiving with Nancy and their tots,” Winchell wrote the next morning.
Meanwhile, Ava came up with her own way to spend the holiday. “Ava Gardner on Thanksgiving morning boards the plane from Los Angeles to Rome, obviously in the hope of catching reporters and cameramen more interested in a turkey drumstick than in the Sinatras,” Dorothy Manners wrote in her column. “One thing came out of her ‘talks’ with Frank—or at least one talk—they haven’t seen each other since. She will not file for divorce (if she does at all) until she returns to this country in the spring.”
The photographers caught up with her at Idlewild as she was about to board her Rome-bound connecting flight. She was standing on the aluminum steps in her big sunglasses, grinning in the November sun, holding a manila envelope containing a Barefoot Contessa script (she hadn’t gotten around to reading it just yet) in her right hand and, with her left, waving to the cameras, showing the whole world that she was no longer wearing her wedding ring.
That night Frank was back at the El Capitan Theatre, once again guest starring on The Colgate Comedy Hour, along with Eddie Fisher, no less. The host, Eddie Cantor, brought Fisher out first, to croon a medley of his hits (including “I’m Walking Behind You,” the number that had aced out Frank’s version in the charts); Fisher then invited Cantor to appear on his TV show—the one with Axel Stordahl leading the band. A little later, as the great Harold Arlen himself suggestively tinkled the opening bars of “One for My Baby,” Old Banjo Eyes said, “You know, Harold, there’s one fella that sings your songs better than anyone else. Lately, he’s become a dramatic actor—pretty good, too.”
And out came Frank, to big From Here to Eternity applause, looking painfully thin in his tux. But if, as he walked onstage, he felt any hangover from the last ten terrible days, he lost it the instant he flared his nostrils and went into his own, all-Arlen medley: “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “I’ve Got the World on a String,” and Mercer and Arlen’s “That Old Black Magic.” This was, quite simply, a master class in American popular song, and Fisher, the perpetrator of “Oh, My Papa”—who was always deferential to Sinatra’s infinitely greater gift—stood openmouthed in the wings. Frank was in magnificent voice, and his passion (“ev’ry time your lips meet mine, darling, down and down I go; round and round I go”) was palpably, almost embarrassingly, real, blazing
out sun-like from the little black-and-white screen.
Watching the old, scratchy kinescope and taking note of the way he seemed to favor his left arm, holding it slightly awkwardly at times, one can’t help but wonder: Was he still wearing the bandages? Was that long tux-shirt cuff taped to prevent his accidentally revealing them?
SINATRA ADMITS HURTING WRIST BUT LAUGHS OFF SUICIDE RUMOR, ran the wire-service headline.
Crooner Frank Sinatra admitted Tuesday he had “bruised and scratched” his wrist, but laughed off as gossip the rumors he had attempted suicide.
The tempestuous singer, who recently reached a parting of ways with Ava Gardner, said he did not remember when or where the accident occurred.
Rumors that Sinatra slashed his wrist started when a photograph taken during a conversation with Eddie Cantor revealed a mark on the singer’s left wrist.
Hollywood gossips immediately connected it with his recent hospitalization in New York.
Still feverishly plotting how he might win her back, he went into the Capitol studios again on two late nights in early December. For the first session, on the eighth, he recorded three swingers, trying to pick up the mood from the meditative note he’d ended on in November—and perhaps pick up his own mood as well. Most of all, though, he was trying to notch his first big hit for the label. But while Riddle’s writing for the horns had all the wonderful lightness and sass of “World on a String,” the songs themselves (“Take a Chance,” “Ya Better Stop,” and “Why Should I Cry over You?”) were strictly grade-B stuff—a reminder to keepers of the pieties that Sinatra plus Riddle does not always equal magic.
The next night, though, singer and arranger returned to the studio with a string section and laid down three ballads, the second of which would turn into pure gold.
According to Nelson Riddle, Carolyn Leigh and Johnny Richards’s “Young at Heart” had been floating around various record companies for a while without attracting a vocalist. Nat Cole had passed on it. “I think it’s a good song,” Riddle told Sinatra, “but nobody wants to do it.”
“Let’s do it,” Frank said—according to legend (his), not even asking to hear it first. In fact, he had asked Jimmy Van Heusen for his opinion, and Chester had responded in his most clinical fashion that he thought “Young at Heart” could be a hit for Frank.
And so, on the night of December 9, Frank recorded it.
Sinatra, Riddle, and Gilmore convened at the KHJ studios at 8:30 p.m. They wrapped up at 1:00 in the morning—ninety minutes overtime, by the rules of Local 47 of the American Federation of Musicians. This meant that the costs for the studio time and the fees for the twenty-five players—costs that came out of Frank’s pocket—doubled from $1,072.50 to $2,145 (some $17,000 today).
Clearly, Sinatra felt it was worth his while.
A great vocal recording of a popular song is an inseparable weave of words and melody, of the singer’s work and the arranger’s, and—of course—the musicians’. But also to be taken into account is the meaning of the song, which is not always what the lyrics say. “Young at Heart” was a paean to rebirth, the ideal soundtrack to Frank Sinatra’s matchless comeback: “Fairy tales can come true; it could happen to you” was the perfect rejoinder to Swifty Lazar’s “Even Jesus couldn’t get resurrected in this town.”
And everything about this recording was perfect. New high-fidelity recording tape and microphones brilliantly brought out Sinatra’s diction, phrasing, and pitch-perfect tone, not to mention the gorgeousness of the musical background and Nelson Riddle’s arrangement. From the opening fillip—a string passage announcing the melody in a quizzical, slightly off-kilter way that draws the listener in irresistibly—it was clear that a genius was at work. Riddle had brought impressionist sonorities to the American popular song for the first time, as well as a complexity of sexual longing that would infuse the 1950s and provide an antidote to the conventional pieties of the Eisenhower years.
And most to the point, he had brought a new level of art to Frank Sinatra. Once the singer began, it was apparent that Riddle had completely understood Sinatra’s lecture about overbusy orchestrations: the flutes and strings shimmer over the gorgeous glide of Frank’s ever-deepening baritone; underneath lies the deep woof of the trumpetless brass section (featuring, for the first time, the bass trombonist George Roberts). It was vintage Riddle—only the vintage had just ripened.
All at once, Sinatra and Riddle were a team. Frank had never sung this way, and Nelson had never written this way. (The arrangements he’d done for Nat Cole, while superb, were colorless by comparison.) And what he and Frank were doing was inimitable: “Young at Heart” is a wonderful number, but it’s more a great moment than a great song per se—it’s difficult to imagine any other singer, no matter how skilled, ever bringing as much to it as Sinatra brought to it that night, three days from his thirty-eighth birthday.
As with Frank’s acting in From Here to Eternity, his singing on “Young at Heart” told the world that he truly had returned from the dead. But as would be the case with the movie, the real fruits of the recording would be delayed until the new year.
The last song of the night, recorded in the wee small hours of December 10, never became nearly as well-known as “Young at Heart,” but the Jimmy Van Heusen number, with lyrics by Carl Sigman, was ravishing all the same—and, as with all Sinatra’s great ballads, a little too close to home for comfort:
I could have told you she’d hurt you …
But you were in love, and didn’t want to know.
38
Spain, May 1950. Jimmy Van Heusen shows Ava how to use his camera while Frank and an expatriate couple named Frank and Doreen Grant look on. Ava would take shelter with the Grants over the hard Christmas of 1953, as Sinatra futilely tried to win her back. (photo credit 38.1)
The press was omnipresent in Sinatra’s life: a third party in his marriage, a constant kibitzer on every aspect of his career. He could never completely tune it out, because the reporters and columnists were always checking in. Besides, he needed them as much as they needed him.
Yet even if he’d turned a corner in his professional life, even if he was behaving a little better than he used to, there were still those journalists who felt honor-bound to attack him. Like Maggio, he was an uppity wop, proud even when he’d been beaten to a pulp. It didn’t sit well with much of America—especially Middle America. An early-November editorial in Michigan’s Holland Evening Sentinel read:
The breakup of the sultry love affair of Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner after only two years of what was euphemistically called marriage caused a critic to call the love affairs of the movie world “barnyard romance.” The only trouble with that description is that it is insulting to the respectable domestic animals of the barnyard.
On the other hand, Edith Gwynn, in her Hollywood column, apostrophized rather feelingly:
F. Sinatra is taking his usual beating from most of the press. He’s often merited it in the past. But we don’t dig how several reporters could chronicle as they did, when F.S. brushed ’em off at the airport here. Of him they front-paged, “he admitted he was upset”; “he said he is a sick man” (which he is!). They further itemed Frank was fresh out of a New York hospital, and then a few sentences later, beat his brains in because the guy wasn’t all smiles, affable and gabby!
Sinatra is on the verge of a whole new career—musically and dramatically. He is also on the verge of hysteria over “emotional problems.” The fact that Ava Gardner is taking off for Europe again (to do “The Barefoot Contessa”) won’t be much help! Strikes us, The Voice rates at least half the break in print others in the spotlight might get!
That was certainly the way Frank felt. Christmas was coming and he wanted to spend it with his wife, but there was little evidence that his wife wanted to spend it with him. When he had talked to her in Rome over the fucking transatlantic phone line, she’d been infuriatingly breezy, chattering on about the magic of the Eternal City, her wonderful new apar
tment, and her funny Italian maid …
The moment he told her he loved her, the connection was mysteriously severed.
The holiday blues descended on him early and heavily. And so, as Van Heusen had demanded, Frank began seeing a psychiatrist: Dr. Ralph Greenson, whose sister happened to be married to Sinatra’s new lawyer, Milton “Mickey” Rudin. Like so many pilgrims to the Golden State, Ralph Greenson was a reinvented character: born Romeo Greenschpoon in Brooklyn forty-two years before, he had gravitated to Los Angeles after serving as an Army doctor in the war and quickly built a practice composed of movie stars and Beverly Hills housewives. Appropriately to the territory and to his great benefit, the darkly handsome doctor looked the part: with his square jaw and ironic (though sympathetic) Jewish (but not too Jewish) features, his black mustache and closely cropped graying hair, Greenson could have played a psychiatrist in a movie. Funnily enough, he almost had: a close friend, the writer Leo Rosten, had based the title character in Captain Newman, M.D., his novel about an Army psychiatrist—eventually adapted for the screen, with Gregory Peck in the title role—directly on Greenson.
Ralph Greenson, who was to become Marilyn Monroe’s psychoanalyst, would later gain notoriety in the therapeutic community for violating doctor-patient boundaries: he treated Monroe in his home, where she became virtually a part of his family, and eventually more or less took control of her life. Sinatra was no Monroe, but there is evidence that Greenson may have overstepped the bounds with him in a similar way. Since Frank would certainly have attracted unwanted notice by going to Greenson’s Beverly Hills office, the psychiatrist offered to see him in his Spanish Mission–style house a stone’s throw from the Brentwood Country Club.