by James Kaplan
He worked hard, too, at distracting himself from Ava. Frank hadn’t been much more than a boy when he married Nancy Barbato in 1939, and though he might have acted like a bachelor throughout his twelve-year first marriage, he hadn’t been this free in a long time. In 1954, he would be linked romantically with, among others, the French actress Gaby Bruyère, the Swedish actress Anita Ekberg, and the American actresses Joan Tyler, Norma Eberhardt, Havis Davenport, and (perhaps) Marilyn Monroe. He also kept company with the singer Jill Corey and the heiress and would-be thespian Gloria Vanderbilt. There were probably numerous others. But more problematically, that spring he also seems to have begun a relationship with the not quite sixteen-year-old Natalie Wood.
Wood, whose early career was managed by her generalissimo-like stage mother, Maria Gurdin (Natalie called her Mud, short for Mudda; her alcoholic and feckless father was barely a presence in her life), had become a certifiable child movie star at age eight in 1947’s Miracle on 34th Street. Now, however, she was in an awkward period, wishing to transition into grown-up movie roles before she was a grown-up, trying to look older by wearing heavy makeup and falsies. At fifteen, she was birdlike—barely five feet tall and physically undeveloped—but despite her youth and small stature she was a formidable presence, with huge, emotional dark eyes and a quick, intuitive intelligence. With film parts for teenagers scarce, Natalie was marking time by working on an ABC sitcom called The Pride of the Family and hating every minute. In May, however, she was cast in Warner Bros.’ swords-and-sandals epic The Silver Chalice (in which Paul Newman, to his everlasting shame, made his movie debut in a brief toga). Wood had a small role, yet according to her biographer Suzanne Finstad, “Mud was scheming to upgrade that ranking.”
The two went to Warners off and on throughout May, fitting Natalie for her Grecian costumes…One day while they were at the commissary, Frank Sinatra walked in, preparing for his next picture, Young at Heart. Sinatra either approached Natalie, or her mother sent her over to introduce herself…Sinatra was taken with Natalie, and got “a kick” out of Maria, inviting them to a party at his house. Mud eagerly accepted, whispering to Natalie afterward that she would let her go alone, urging Natalie to get close to Sinatra “because it would be good for her career.”
Youth and beauty—male and female—have always been fungible commodities in Hollywood, which has a long history of stage mothers who, in essence, pimp out their underage daughters for career advancement and profit. And so, at her mother’s urging, Natalie went to the party, alone. There, Finstad writes, she “consumed quantities of wine…and in the course of the evening, told Sinatra about ‘Clyde,’ the code name for penis that Bobby [Hyatt, her teenage co-star on The Pride of the Family] had coined to fool Natalie’s mother. Sinatra was so amused, he and his friends…incorporated ‘Clyde’ into their hipster slang.”*3
God alone knows what went on at that party. But Frank seems to have been touched by the young actress, who had precocious powers of empathy. (Not to mention a clear need for a father figure.) Perhaps he told her his troubles. In any case, Wood frequented his apartment that May and June, and her close friends at the time felt sure they were having an affair. Yet for all the unseemliness of the liaison, Wood appears to have been something more than a conquest where Frank was concerned. He was a man on the cusp of middle age, almost certainly nostalgic for the days when he had made all those bobby-soxers swoon. Surely on some level, Natalie Wood reminded him of those girls and their idolatry.
He was also a man in pain, and the vivacity and uncritical presence of a magically lovely young girl must have been balm to his soul, even if the liaison was, consciously or unconsciously, poison to hers. A complex emotional bond formed between them, one that would continue as Frank and Natalie stayed friends, and now and then lovers, until she died at age forty-three in 1981.
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Still, the most important emotional connection in Frank Sinatra’s life in the spring of 1954 was the one between him and his new arranger at Capitol Records, the sublimely gifted Nelson Riddle. The two had first struck gold together the previous spring, after Capitol vice president and creative head Alan Livingston, who felt Sinatra needed the kind of new sound that his previous arranger Axel Stordahl was unable to provide, cleverly introduced Riddle, in the guise of a substitute conductor. Sinatra had had no idea who Riddle was before their first recording session, but the moment he heard the playback of the Riddle-arranged “I’ve Got the World on a String,” he knew his life had been altered as irrevocably as it had been the first time he laid eyes on Ava Gardner. This was the thunderbolt, musically speaking.
“I’ve Got the World on a String” was issued only as a single. Frank’s first album for Capitol, Songs for Young Lovers, released in January 1954, contained just one tune orchestrated by Riddle, “Like Someone in Love.” The second Capitol album, Swing Easy!, recorded in April, was a different ball game.
Swing Easy! was post-meridian Sinatra in every way: he had won the Oscar and crossed the shadow line; now he truly could swing easy. And Nelson Riddle was the genius who would take him where he wanted to go. Young Lovers had been beautiful, but in the sense that it had been almost entirely arranged by Frank’s old-reliable up-tempo man George Siravo, it was fundamentally conservative: the most striking thing about the album was the voice singing the songs.
In Riddle, Frank Sinatra had met his musical match. Though the arranger hadn’t had anything like Frank’s early success—he played trombone and did some orchestration for the Charlie Spivak Orchestra in the early 1940s, then played third trombone for Tommy Dorsey after Sinatra’s departure—the serious-minded New Jerseyan seems to have had, from the beginning, a head full of complex music and a deep ambition to hear it played and sung. In contrast to his bandmates, who spent most of their off-hours boozing and trying to get laid, Riddle devoted much of his spare time to listening to Ravel and Debussy and Jacques Ibert on his portable record player. The lushly romantic Ibert composition “Escales”—“Ports of Call,” in English—was one of his holy grails. As was “Stomp It Off,” arranged by the great Melvin “Sy” Oliver for the Jimmie Lunceford big band.
The common thread between the two compositions was sex—slow and sensual, in the case of the Ibert; rock ’n’ roll, with the Oliver. Riddle was a sensualist with the demeanor of a scientist. And not a happy scientist. “Dad had a sadness about him,” Riddle’s daughter Rosemary Riddle Acerra recalls. “It was interpreted sometimes as sadness, where it might not have been in all cases. It was just this somber, serious mood. He was always thinking.” Julie Andrews, who worked with Riddle on her TV variety series in the 1970s, called him Eeyore.
In the genius arranger Nelson Riddle, Frank Sinatra had met his musical match—and a kind of dark double. (Credit 1.1)
Two major subjects were inextricably intertwined in his mind. Once, during a marital spat, Riddle’s wife, Doreen, accused him of only thinking about music and sex. The arranger later remarked to his son, with the glimmer of a smile, “After all, what else is there?” Riddle wrote of his work with Sinatra, “Most of our best numbers were in what I call the tempo of the heartbeat…Music to me is sex—it’s all tied up somehow, and the rhythm of sex is the heartbeat.”
He went on, “In working out arrangements for Frank, I suppose I stuck to two main rules. First, find the peak of the song and build the whole arrangement to that peak, pacing it as he paces himself vocally. Second, when he’s moving, get the hell out of the way…After all, what arranger in the world would try to fight against Sinatra’s voice? Give the singer room to breathe. When the singer rests, then there’s a chance to write a fill that might be heard.”
He had learned this lesson painfully, on an aborted early session with Frank: partway into a take of “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams,” Sinatra stopped the band and called Riddle into the recording booth, explaining heatedly to his ambitious young arranger (Nelson was five and a half years Frank’s junior) that he was crowding the singer out, having simply writt
en too many notes, beautiful as the notes might have been. Riddle never made the mistake again.
It was a critical moment. Sinatra, who was capable of firing associates at the drop of a Cavanagh fedora, could easily have axed Riddle then and there and returned to the comfort of Stordahl. But Frank was musically acute enough to realize that comfort was not what he needed at this point in his career. Nelson Riddle was taking him in new and daring directions: he just needed a little guidance in the art of arranging for Sinatra.
“I loved how Nelson used Ravel’s approach to polytonality,” Quincy Jones told Will Friedwald. “Nelson was smart because he put the electricity up above Frank…and gave Frank the room downstairs for his voice to shine, rather than building big lush parts that were in the same register as his voice.”
“Dad evolved, with Frank’s help, and some of his own,” Rosemary Riddle Acerra says. “I think Frank was very astute and generous.” At the same time, she says, her father was very clear about why he was there: not, like so many around Sinatra, as a mere employee, a hanger-on, or a supplicant, but as a musical collaborator of the first order. “Dad wanted to work with Frank because he saw something very special,” Acerra says.
Swing Easy! had artistic energy in abundance, much of it brought along by the scholarly-looking arranger, who knew which players could give him the sound he wanted: not, as Friedwald writes, “the conservatory-trained studio staff musicians of the ’30s and ’40s but guys who had cut their teeth as teenagers in the touring swing bands.” Guys like the reed players Arthur “Skeets” Herfurt and Mahlon Clark; the trombonists Milt Bernhart, George Roberts, and Juan Tizol; and, for the first time on Swing Easy!, the great minimalist trumpeter Harry “Sweets” Edison. The album was sheer grace; Riddle’s spare and gleaming up-tempo arrangements brought out Sinatra at the very peak of his art and emotional complexity. It was to be a long peak. His voice had ripened from the boyish tenor of his Columbia days to a baritone with a faint husk—from violin to cello, in a famous formulation attributed to both Nelson Riddle and Sammy Cahn—and the voice had become rich with knowledge.
The album’s first song, Cole Porter’s great “Just One of Those Things,” sums it up. It is a three-minute-fifteen-second symphony modulating from tenderness to bold defiance, with Ava in every breath. Sinatra’s reading of a song that many singers give a breezy interpretation is quietly devastating. Witness the contrast between the first chorus’s “So goodbye, dear, and amen,” all soft ardor and delicate sadness, and the second’s, a stammered mini-psychodrama of leave-taking: “So goodbye, goodbye, bye, bye, goodbye, baby, and amen…”
She taught him the hard way.
Even as Frank was recollecting emotion in the tranquillity of Hollywood’s KHJ Radio Studios, he was synthesizing it in new and fascinating ways for the movie cameras. That April and May, in the dusty railroad-stop town of Newhall, forty miles north of Los Angeles, he shot a new film—not one of the glitzy studio projects that the gossip columns were talking about, but a black-and-white noir piece called Suddenly, in which Frank Sinatra played, of all things, a man out to assassinate the president of the United States with a telescope-equipped rifle.
He had been interested in Richard Sale’s pulpy yet propulsive script from the moment he saw it, but since his grand new career plan—now that he could afford the luxury of having a career plan—called for him to alternate dramatic pictures with musicals, Frank had initially wanted to do Pink Tights at 20th Century Fox first. That idea went out the window when Marilyn Monroe, who’d finally become a big star the previous year in Niagara, decided (egged on by Joe DiMaggio, who knew a thing or two about negotiating contracts) that she was sick of dumb-blonde roles and refused to show up. Fox suspended her, and then, as big stars could, she simply went her merry way, marrying DiMaggio in January, then (to the Yankee Clipper’s chagrin) flying off to entertain the troops in Korea in February. Fox tested a newcomer named Sheree North for the dumb-blonde role, and Frank decided to make Suddenly his first picture after From Here to Eternity.
The assassin, Johnny Baron, is the one out-and-out villain Sinatra ever portrayed on-screen, and it is at once a mesmerizingly effective performance and a very strange one. Frank comes on-screen twenty minutes into the picture, taking a family captive and cold-bloodedly killing a Secret Service agent, and he’s the center of attention the rest of the way. As was the case with his first full-length role, in 1943’s Higher and Higher, you can’t stop looking at him—except that a decade later, his face has changed dramatically.
At thirty-eight, Sinatra was still a striking physical presence. He might have been approaching middle age, but he didn’t seem to have gained an ounce since his teen-idol days: on-screen, his waist, in high-topped pleated pants, is almost alarmingly narrow; his butt is nonexistent. Suddenly’s cinematographer, Charles G. Clarke, often shot Frank in tight, unnerving close-ups and amazingly frequently on his bad side—the left side of his face, the side deformed around the ear and neck by a forceps delivery at birth and a childhood mastoid operation.
Creepily effective as a presidential assassin in 1954’s Suddenly. At thirty-eight, Sinatra was still a striking physical presence, his features cleanly sculpted, his eyes avid and riveting. (Credit 1.2)
But his features are cleanly sculpted, his eyes avid and riveting: this is now a mature face, one in which liquor and cigarettes and heartbreak have made deep inroads. And fame. It’s impossible not to notice that this would-be presidential assassin looks fresh from poolside in Palm Springs: he has a deep tan and a sleek, self-pleased aspect that a contract killer’s backstory doesn’t quite account for.
The sleekness—Frank’s bad side notwithstanding—infuses his performance. Unlike, say, Richard Widmark in his noir roles or Humphrey Bogart in The Desperate Hours, Sinatra’s psycho killer doesn’t quite have the look of a man who can’t help himself. He widens his eyes arrestingly when he threatens to slit the little boy’s throat, then slaps him down; he introspects convincingly when he reflects on how his wartime combat experience made him a murderer (a theme that will be revisited, hauntingly, in The Manchurian Candidate). It’s a solid, unsettling turn. Nevertheless, it feels controlled, tightly wound. There’s never the sense that this guy might really go off the rails—the way the real-life Frank was wont to from time to time.
Burt Lancaster, Sinatra’s co-star in From Here to Eternity, recalled that Frank’s performance in that film displayed a fervor, an anger, and a bitterness that had as much to do with Frank’s personal and professional travails in the preceding years as with the character of Maggio. “You knew this was a raging little man who was, at the same time, a good human being,” Lancaster said.
You also sensed that these real-life factors heavily influenced the members of the academy to give him the Best Supporting Actor Oscar.
With Suddenly, Frank was suddenly in new territory. As Tom Santopietro writes in Sinatra in Hollywood, the movie “marked the start of Sinatra’s dramatic career on film as a leading man; there was no Lancaster or Montgomery Clift in sight now. This was the Frank Sinatra show, pure and simple, a feature film that turned into a one-man showcase the second he appeared onscreen.”
Now he had power, and power meant control. He didn’t have to kiss up to anyone anymore. His role in From Here to Eternity had been the first and last in which Frank let himself be so emotionally naked. From Suddenly on, he would be an actor, acting—sometimes compellingly (how compellingly was almost always a function of how much he respected the director) and sometimes just going through the motions. With this movie, Sinatra had a point to prove, and he proved it: he was now a movie star as well as a recording star.
* * *
*1 All the more fascinating for the mystery of exactly whom the letter was sent to. Kitty Kelley asserts (His Way, p. 526) that the note read “Dear Leland” and was addressed to the producer Leland Hayward. She claims that the letter “is on file in the correspondence collection at the Performing Arts Research Center at the New York Public
Library.” A search of Hayward’s correspondence at the NYPL yielded no such artifact. A scanned copy of the note provided by a Sinatra archivist appears authentic and clearly reads “Dear Lew.” But which Lew? Perhaps the movie director Lewis Allen, with whom Sinatra would work shortly, or the director Lewis Milestone, who would nominally helm Ocean’s 11 several years thence, but almost certainly not MCA head Lew Wasserman, whose agency had unceremoniously dropped the down-on-his-luck Frank as a client in 1951 and whom the singer would not forgive for decades.
*2 A couple of months earlier, after a horseback-riding accident, the boss had been pushed into work in a wheelchair, a cast on his leg. While Sinatra sat with some pals at lunch in the MGM commissary, someone said, “Hey, did you hear about L. B.’s accident?” And Frank responded instantly, “Yeah, he fell off of Ginny Simms.”
*3 If true, this is a puzzling sidelight, since “clyde,” in Rat Pack argot, came to be a kind of grab-bag code word with a multitude of meanings according to the context, as in “I don’t like her clyde [voice]”—whereas “bird” meant just one thing: penis.
2
Then we have Frank Sinatra. And Frank, who was in Young at Heart, he and I always got along beautifully. He was very protective, you know, and really dear to me. But he was late. Every day…Everyone was ready at 9:00 and we would maybe shoot at 11:00, and the studio was not too happy about that. Nobody knew what the problem was, but he was always late, which was not very professional…I’m a great admirer of his talents, but he does do things like that…He’s like a bad kid. He seems to enjoy keeping people waiting and things, which is not very attractive and annoys an awful lot of people. It’s the bad boy. It was a little bit of a macho image that I think he was putting across. But other than that, I really liked him very much, and still do, of course.