Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  —DORIS DAY, RADIO INTERVIEW

  Doris Day’s words, dripping with ambivalence about her co-star in Warner Bros.’ 1954 musical melodrama Young at Heart, remind us that human beings are complicated creatures and that no human was more complicated than Frank Sinatra. In the comeback year of 1954, as Frank regathered the vast power he’d lost, he also achieved new heights of arrogance. There was Sinatra, and then there was everybody else. He knew it, and the world knew it.

  Doris Day had first gotten to know Sinatra when they worked together in 1947 on Your Hit Parade. In her autobiography, she recalled that when Frank’s fortunes had dipped and he was working the nightclubs, her husband, Martin Melcher, urged her to show her support by going to the Cocoanut Grove to hear him sing. “The Cocoanut Grove was a cavernous place,” Day recalled, “and when it was only a third filled, as it was that evening, it had a melancholy air. Frank’s voice had changed. He wasn’t singing the way he had sung before or the way he sings now. He seemed uncertain…

  “Frank came over to our table and sat with Marty and me for a while and had a drink. He knew he wasn’t singing the way he wanted to. Of course, we didn’t talk about that, but he seemed a little embarrassed. About the small turnout, too.”

  Sinatra had bounced back, but American popular music was still hip-deep in schlock in 1954, with hits like “Sh-Boom” by the Crew-Cuts, Archie Bleyer’s “Hernando’s Hideaway,” the Four Aces’ “Three Coins in the Fountain,” and Eddie Fisher’s “Oh! My Papa” blaring from the nation’s radios and jukeboxes. And Mitch Miller was still going strong at Columbia, still forcing great singers into recording mediocre material that, in the coercively conservative climate of the times, turned into popular hits. The bouncy, negligible R&B number “Make Love to Me,” foisted by Miller on the sublime balladeer Jo Stafford, hit number 1 that year, as did “This Ole House,” the hoedown-style monstrosity that he inflicted on Rosemary Clooney.

  No one was telling Frank what to record at Capitol. Among the thirty-seven singles, soundtrack tunes, and album numbers he laid down in 1954, there were some interesting missteps, but they were his missteps. And Sinatra and Riddle were mostly making genius together. Especially on the albums. Continuing the prescient model he had initiated at Columbia with 1946’s Voice of Frank Sinatra, Frank organized each of his Capitol compilations around a specific mood or mode: downbeat or upbeat, ballads or swingers. The term “concept album” wouldn’t be coined until much later, but Sinatra invented the idea, and Riddle helped him perfect it. More than ever, he was far more than just a singer: he was an artist shaping his medium.

  At the same time, there was always the dark undertow—the inner voices that told him that underneath it all he was nothing and nobody, a little street guinea from Hoboken. The furies that would frequently blind him when his vulnerabilities were touched. The terrible impatience—with the incompetence and stupidity that were so rife in the world, with things he needed to happen instantaneously, and so rarely did. The realization that he was like nobody else and therefore destined to be alone. His terrors: of aloneness itself; of sleep, the cousin to death. And always, always, the vast and ravening appetites.

  When all these things are taken together, is it any wonder that he often showed up on the Burbank soundstage for Young at Heart two or three or four hours later than anyone else?

  —

  The director was an amiable hack named Gordon Douglas, whose chief claim to fame was shooting the Our Gang comedies for Hal Roach in the 1930s.* The production was overseen by Martin Melcher—a man who, despite his kindness toward Sinatra just a couple of years earlier (or perhaps because of it), almost instantly incurred Frank’s wrath, apparently by trying to persuade him to sing inferior songs in the movie, songs to which Melcher controlled the publishing rights. Sinatra had him banned from the set. (The fatwa was enforced by Jack Warner himself.) Next to go was the Academy Award–winning cinematographer Charles Lang, a perfectionist who took forever with his lighting setups. “Of course Frank had no right to do what he did,” Day writes, “but when a picture is in production with all of its overhead in operation, there is no right or wrong; there is only that old devil, expediency.”

  Sinatra would never in a million years have pulled such stunts with From Here to Eternity’s director, Fred Zinnemann. Not only had he been hungry and powerless then; he’d had great respect for Zinnemann, as well as his co-star Montgomery Clift.

  But that had been a very different time. Frank knew that selling records was all well and good, but being a movie star would give him a worldwide presence second to none. (Not to mention a financial hedge against poor record sales.)

  Sinatra knew he had acting talent and screen presence but was also wise enough to know where his main gifts lay. He had never taken an acting lesson; he had come to the craft when he was close to thirty. He was insecure the moment he walked onto a movie set. Everything took too long—much too long—and there were far too many variables: lighting, direction, co-stars, and eventually editing. In a recording studio, he was boss. On a movie set he was just talent, and knowing that led to self-doubt, which was usually followed by an explosion.

  He could be set off in a recording studio, too, but between his fanatical preparation—which included everything from choosing the material to making sure he had the best arranger and musicians possible—and his control over the whole process, there were far fewer grounds for insecurity. He could be impatient in a recording studio but was also known to do twenty or thirty takes of a song (some of them, admittedly, partial takes) in order to get it just right.

  Making movies, he had long had a deserved reputation as One-Take Charlie. But as with so many things about Sinatra, this cut two ways. It wasn’t just his impatience and insecurity that made him work like this but the realization that his best and freshest acting would come in the first (or sometimes the second) take. “People think that because he would shoot only one or two takes he didn’t take it seriously, but that wasn’t the case at all,” Frank’s friend Robert Wagner wrote.

  Spencer Tracy didn’t like a lot of takes either, and nobody thought he was casual about the work. Frank was very conscious of his lack of training; he was never sure that he would be able to reproduce an effect more than once or twice because he had to rely on emotion more than craft. He was very serious about his work; he went over his wardrobe, the look of the film, the dramatic arc. He didn’t just pick up a script, look at it, and shoot it. He prepared.

  This would be less the case in the latter part of Sinatra’s movie career. But in the mid- and late 1950s, the years just after Eternity and a few years past, he was still serious about reestablishing himself at the top of show business, which meant appearing to best effect in the movies he made. In this light, his expulsions of Melcher and Lang make perfect sense: Frank could only do good work if the conditions felt ideal to him. Powerless to some extent, he exerted his power in the only way he could, and it wasn’t pretty. But the result was good work.

  His character in Young at Heart was Barney Sloan, a moody, self-pitying, indeterminately ethnic musical arranger (it turns out he’s an Italian-American who changed his name, as Frank in real life had once refused to) who finds himself plopped down amid a Waspy, musical Connecticut family with three blond daughters—played by Day, Dorothy Malone, and Elisabeth Fraser. Barney might be the glummest character Sinatra ever played, but he’s far from the least interesting. With his pitiful backstory (orphaned as a child, deprived in the Depression, wounded in the war), he’s all pouts and frowns, sitting at the piano with a cigarette hanging from that voluptuous lower lip while his unseen fingers form gorgeous, moody chords (Bill Miller did the actual playing); he never smiles, let alone utters a kind word, until the preternaturally cheery Laurie Tuttle (Day) starts to work her magic on him.

  And magic it is. At thirty-two, Doris Day was a huge star (she had top billing on the film) and for good reason. As a singer, she’d broken out in 1945 with her recording of “Sentimental Journey” f
or Les Brown and His Band of Renown; as a movie actress, she’d been in the Box Office Top 10 since 1951. The year before Young at Heart, she’d scored the full parlay, starring in Calamity Jane and notching a number 1 record with a song from the picture, “Secret Love.” And she wasn’t just a movie and recording star but a full-fledged sex goddess, whose long legs and curvaceous figure, freckles and turned-up nose and thousand-watt smile, had stirred the loins of a million men, including the troops in Korea, who voted her their Favorite Star of 1950, and the young John Updike, who would obsess over her in poetry and prose for the rest of his life. Day was the stealth counterpart to Marilyn Monroe: her all-American features, bobbed blond hair, and sunny forthrightness made her look like a farm girl but hinted at an excellent roll in the hay.

  She and Sinatra have a strange chemistry in Young at Heart, or rather lack thereof: they seem to be working on two separate planes. He sings, quite wonderfully, standards like the Gershwins’ “Someone to Watch over Me,” Cole Porter’s “Just One of Those Things,” and Mercer and Arlen’s “One for My Baby”; she wastes her wonderful voice on nonentities like “Ready, Willing, and Able,” “Hold Me in Your Arms,” and “There’s a Rising Moon.” (Songs to which, no doubt, Marty Melcher controlled the publishing rights.) Frank looks middle-aged; Doris looks fresh as a daisy. He mopes; she grins, showing that enchantingly angled front tooth. And the more Barney mopes, the more Laurie sets her jaw and takes him on as a project, until—you guessed it.

  In reality, Day’s life story was far more like Barney’s than Laurie’s: a car wreck as a teenager that almost left her crippled; two bad marriages behind her and one in process; abiding panic attacks, depressions, and hatred of much about the movie business. Young at Heart was her last movie on a seven-year contract with Warner Bros., and she was itching to escape what she called “peonage.” And in his own tortuous way, Frank seems to have felt a real affection and respect for her. Their characters in the picture might not have matched up, but he tried hard—one guesses for her sake as much as his own—to make his characterization work, and it did.

  He also showed the unique brand of courtliness he would always extend to women he considered ladies (those he suspected of being otherwise got very different treatment). During the shoot, Ethel Barrymore, the grande dame of the American theater who played Laurie Tuttle’s spinster aunt, celebrated her seventy-fifth birthday, and Frank threw her a surprise party on the set. “She was very touched,” Day recalled.

  Sinatra proposed a toast to her and she kissed him on the cheek. I knew that it was entirely possible that this might be her last birthday, and my emotions being what they are, my eyes filled with tears…

  “Hey!” somebody called out. “Doris needs a Kleenex!”

  From across the set, someone threw a box of Kleenex to me. I didn’t see it coming and the box struck me in the forehead. It stung a little and I gasped, more in surprise than pain. Frank sprang at the man who had flipped the box at me and grabbed the front of his shirt, pulling the fabric up tight under his chin.

  “Don’t you ever do that!” he shouted at the man. “You don’t throw things at a lady, you understand?”

  “It’s all right, Frank,” I said. “I’m not hurt—”

  “That’s beside the point! You bring the box, you creep, and you offer a Kleenex—you got that? You offer a Kleenex!”

  Frank let the man go and came over to me to be sure that I was all right. Often, over the years, whenever I pulled a Kleenex out of a box, I thought of Frank.

  In all probability, the grip or gaffer who tossed the Kleenex box could have broken the five-foot-seven, 130-something-pound Sinatra in two like a stick—had the man not felt in the wrong, and had he not been surrounded by people far above him in the moviemaking hierarchy, and had his assailant not been the star of the show, who was, after all, Frank Sinatra. Or, more accurately, was Frank Sinatra again. For a couple of years, Sinatra had barely been himself. Now he was getting even bigger than the larger-than-life he already was. That was more than one man’s shirtfront he was holding.

  —

  “I have never seen Frank in such form,” Louella Parsons had written in July of Sinatra’s June show at the Sands. “He sings and sings and sings, and jokes and jokes. Frank has gotten Ava completely out of his system, which now I’m sure of, after seeing how gay he is and apparently carefree.”

  The overbearing Hearst gossip columnist was fond of issuing chirpy, authoritative pronouncements about Sinatra, as a way of trying both to rein him in and to assert her own power, and now and then she was even right. But she’d written these words around the same time that Frank made the long, fruitless trek from Vegas to Lake Tahoe to try to woo his wife back. And for someone as resolutely assertive as Parsons, “apparently carefree” had a dangerously hedged look about it.

  Something in Frank was bubbling ominously that fall. Perhaps he was feeling anxious about the not-so-distant horizon of middle age or the growing certainty that Ava wasn’t coming back to him. Jule Styne, unable to abide his housemate’s middle-of-the-night obsessing over his lost love, moved out in September. And the gossip columns, as they loved to, piled on. “Nancy Sinatra insists there’s no chance of a reconciliation after Ava sheds the warbler in Nevada,” one reported in August.

  He was largely without Riddle that autumn, too. After a September 23 session in which Frank recorded a “Someone to Watch over Me” of aching tenderness and two other tunes of aching banality—the tootling, Pied Pipers–backed “Don’t Change Your Mind About Me” and Mack Gordon and Jimmy Van Heusen’s gloppy Young at Heart duet for Day and Sinatra, “You, My Love”—he and Nelson barely saw each other for the rest of the year.

  As always, Sinatra’s soul was divided. On the one hand, he must have realized how good—how great—Riddle was; at the same time, it was as though Frank couldn’t bear to settle into a committed relationship. And then there was his frantic schedule: throughout October and November, he was shooting another movie, a melodrama called Not as a Stranger, and in November and December he recorded the soundtrack songs for a planned (but never produced) animated feature of the Broadway hit Finian’s Rainbow. Lyn Murray, who’d arranged the vocals on Broadway, did all the conducting and most of the orchestrating, though Nelson dropped in to write the charts for two numbers, “Necessity” and “That Great Come-and-Get-It Day.”

  Finian, a fascinating failure, was a victim of the corrosive political climate. The Broadway production, lauded as a classic, had a great score by Yip Harburg and Burton Lane; it had run all through 1947 and most of 1948. Six years later, the prospect of an animated adaptation generated great excitement. The producers raised $300,000 and recruited a stunning array of musical talent, including, besides Sinatra, Ella Logan (who starred in the original show), Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and the Jazz All-Stars (Oscar Peterson, Red Norvo, Herb Ellis, and Ray Brown, among others). But after the entire soundtrack had been recorded, the whole project fell apart when Harburg, an avowed leftist, and the director and chief animator, John Hubley, both refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee and Chemical Bank withdrew the rest of the financing.

  The songs are a tantalizing hint of what might have been. Particularly fine are the delightful “If This Isn’t Love,” on which Sinatra duets with Ella Logan, backed by a children’s chorus; the great “Old Devil Moon,” with Frank, Logan, and the Jazz All-Stars; and “Necessity,” a gorgeous duet between Fitzgerald and Frank, backed by the Oscar Peterson Trio. (It must be said that “Ad-Lib Blues,” a scat duet between Sinatra and Armstrong, reminds us how great a scat singer Satchmo was and how great Frank was at…other things.)

  Sinatra’s patent joy at performing superb material with great musicians shows what a refuge music was for him. A movie set where he was marking time, on the other hand, was a different matter entirely.

  Not as a Stranger, Morton Thompson’s multipage novel about the turbulent lives and loves of young interns, was a huge best seller in 1954
and therefore a natural to be adapted for the movies. But unlike that other popular doorstop, From Here to Eternity, Thompson’s book lacked both literary quality and historical resonance; it was merely a sexy melodrama and an odd choice as the first directing assignment for the successful young producer Stanley Kramer, who had a strong social conscience and an eye for good material. Kramer, who’d produced The Men, Cyrano de Bergerac, Death of a Salesman, High Noon, The Wild One, and The Caine Mutiny, all before turning forty, was a sharply intelligent, unapologetically earnest filmmaker. Unfortunately, as Robert Mitchum’s biographer Lee Server writes, “Kramer had unwittingly loaded the picture with a number of Hollywood’s most ferocious drinkers”—among them Mitchum, Broderick Crawford, Lee Marvin, Lon Chaney Jr., Myron McCormick, and, still in the apprentice phase but transitioning into the master category, Frank Sinatra. “It wasn’t a cast so much as a brewery,” recalled Mitchum, who became a good friend and drinking buddy of Frank’s on the picture.

  And with Kramer at the helm, the stage was set for mayhem. Server writes,

  The tippling would begin early, and by late afternoon the sets at the California Studios would become a full-blown bacchanal. Fights, with fists and food, erupted at a moment’s notice…

  One day Broderick Crawford went berserk. The scrawny but fearless Frank Sinatra enjoyed needling the huge, powerful Crawford, likening the actor to the retarded character, Lenny, in Of Mice and Men…Crawford…took all the needling he could stand one day and attacked Sinatra, holding him down, tearing off his hairpiece, and…eating it.