Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  —

  On Tuesday night, January 11, between sets at the Copa, Frank whisked Gloria down to the Statler Hotel to attend a celebration for Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, who twenty years or so earlier had gotten together to form the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra. The occasion was loaded with ambivalence: for one thing, the two brothers, who were famously hot-tempered and competitive, had split up to form separate bands almost immediately. For another, Frank Sinatra, who joined Tommy Dorsey’s band in 1939 and left in 1942 to go out on his own as a singer, had parted with the domineering bandleader on acrimonious terms, amid furious recriminations and lawsuits from Dorsey and, probably, a threat of gangland violence against Dorsey by Frank’s north Jersey godfather Willie Moretti.

  During Sinatra’s three years with the then-all-powerful Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, the spotlight had shifted from the charismatic bandleader to the even more charismatic singer. And in leaving Dorsey, Sinatra had, virtually single-handedly, ushered out the big-band era and ushered in the age of the vocalist as star. A dozen years on, he was the star of stars, and Dorsey was old news. Tommy, who with his prematurely white hair had once been nicknamed the Old Man by his musicians, really did look old, though he was not yet fifty. He would be dead within two years.

  Yet all the past battles appeared to be forgotten at the anniversary gala, which proceeded amid affectionate speeches and a general haze of nostalgia. Frank had reminisced fondly to Gloria about his old days traveling with Dorsey—indeed, he would continue for the rest of his life to recall those days to friends, as though they had been the best of his life. That night at the Statler, he sang two of the songs most identified with him during the Dorsey years, Ruth Lowe’s “I’ll Never Smile Again” and Joe Bushkin and John DeVries’s “Oh! Look at Me Now,” laughingly making a hash of the latter’s lyrics. After apologizing, he said, “Here’s a song Tommy just asked me to do that I had the—I don’t know whether you call it good fortune, whatever it was, I wrote the lyrics to this. Ha-ha-ha! Lyrics! Oh boy! I’m leavin’! I’m packin’!”

  He was being genuinely self-deprecating, and the effect was utterly charming. (The fact that Gloria was beaming at him from the audience would have inspired him.) Then he began singing the tune, which he wrote in 1941 with Sol Parker and Hank Sanicola:

  This love of mine goes on and on,

  Though life is empty since you have gone.

  Listening today, one is struck by the contrast between the Jersey boy who has just spoken and the nonpareil interpreter of the American popular song now singing with such beautiful tone and diction. (Gloria was probably still beaming, though listening carefully to the lyrics might have given her pause.) But to see the singer as somehow inauthentic to the speaker is to ignore the twenty years of very hard work the kid from Hoboken had put himself through. And at this moment, unbeknownst to all but a few people, he was working harder than ever.

  —

  In the second week of January, Gloria began rehearsals for The Time of Your Life. Frank came to watch and was impressed; at least that was what he told her. In a few months, he told her, his production company was going to make a movie called Johnny Concho, his first Western. There might be a role in it for her. She was thrilled. They had their farewell dinner at Le Pavillon, and then, after another apricot-and-aqua dawn, the gorgeous dream faded and he was off to Australia.

  —

  His last overseas tour, in Europe with Ava in the spring of 1953, had been up-and-down. He had begun recording with Riddle before he left, they were already making magic together, but the world didn’t know it yet. Frank barely knew it himself. His down period was then entering its nadir: Ava had one foot out the door; his confidence was wobbling. He played to packed houses in northern Italy and Rome, but in Naples, where the promoter had taken it upon himself to advertise that Gardner would be appearing along with him, the crowds and the press were far more interested in the resplendent Ava, whose movie career was surging, than in her small, pale consort. The audience chanted her name—“Ah-va! Ah-va! Ah-va!”—and threw seat cushions when she wouldn’t join him onstage. In Sweden, the small audiences barely applauded. One theater manager, alleging that Frank spent more time backstage checking his boat schedule than entertaining the public, refused to pay his fee. Claiming a nervous collapse, Sinatra ended the tour early.

  Things were very different in January 1955. Sinatra landed in Sydney, his fourteen-year-old daughter, Nancy, in tow, and joked easily with the press, giving long interviews to radio and newspaper reporters before his first concert. He was scheduled to give fifteen shows over ten nights in Australia; for this, he would be paid $80,000—roughly the equivalent of $700,000 today.

  He was worth every penny. The crowds were big and welcoming; they laughed at his jokes. And he sang magnificently, reveling in the incomparable vocal instrument that was—just then—at its peak: rich and feeling on the ballads, supple and athletic on the up-tempo numbers. In the closing song of his January 19 show at West Melbourne Stadium, “Ol’ Man River,” he flaunted his renowned breath control on the phrase “you get a little drunk and you lands in jail,” holding the low note on the word “jail” until it seemed no human could hold it any longer, then dropping the tone a fifth, then dropping again, then moving seamlessly into “I gets weary and sick of tryin’,” all on a single lungful of air, for an astonishing twenty seconds or more.

  For comfort and solidity, Frank had brought along a small combo of his regular musicians: Bud Shank on alto sax, the guitarist Nick Bonney, the drummer Max Albright, and, playing piano and conducting Dennis Collinson’s local orchestra, Bill Miller. In the three years he’d been working with Sinatra, Miller, a brilliant and inventive musician himself, had become, as Sinatra chronicler Richard Havers writes, “his musical confidant…Frank and Bill would work together on songs before going into the studio, teasing out the subtle nuances, working on the phrasing and slight shifts in the timing that gave Frank his unique approach to what were in many cases old songs, and in others already standards.” Their complete ease with each other was especially evident on the beautiful duet of Sinatra’s old 1940s chestnut “(I Got a Woman Crazy for Me) She’s Funny That Way” and would reach its artistic apogee, of course, on their solo-piano-backed version of the great Johnny Mercer–Harold Arlen saloon song “One for My Baby,” recorded in 1958 but not released until 1990.

  The troupe also included a young vocalist named Ann McCormack, about whom Nancy junior, who was keeping a diary of the trip, made a sorrowful discovery. Needing some hotel stationery on which to write home, she looked in the desk drawer of her father’s room and found, along with paper and envelopes, “some intimate ladies’ apparel.”

  Nancy knew her father had been seeing one of the girls in the show, she writes; what she didn’t know was that the girl had been with Frank next door. She was so upset that she stopped writing in her diary.

  The incident rhymes oddly with another discovery Nancy writes about in Frank Sinatra: My Father—a time when, playing dress-up in her mother’s dressing room as a little girl, she’d happened upon a stack of movie magazines hidden in the closet, fan magazines that contained photographs of the still-married Frank with girlfriends like Marilyn Maxwell and Lana Turner. “I was devastated,” she wrote. Whatever she was looking for in that hotel desk drawer, the thing she actually found might have upset more than surprised her.

  —

  Bill Miller, Sinatra’s musical right hand for forty years, a brilliant artist who chose to live in his boss’s shadow. In tribute to the pianist’s perpetual pallor, Frank called him Suntan Charlie. (Credit 3.2)

  Around 8:00 p.m. on Tuesday, February 8, Frank Sinatra walked into KHJ Radio Studios in Hollywood and greeted the small group already assembled there: the producer Voyle Gilmore and a handful of musicians—Bill Miller, the celesta player Paul Smith, the guitarist George Van Eps, the bassist Phil Stephens, the drummer Alvin Stoller. For the first four songs Frank would be recording for his new album—Rodgers and Hart’s “Dan
cing on the Ceiling” and “Glad to Be Unhappy,” Kay Swift’s “Can’t We Be Friends?,” and Alec Wilder’s “I’ll Be Around”—there would be no strings, no horns. Nelson Riddle had written the minimalist arrangements but was not present to conduct that night; instead, Miller would lead the session from the piano. Frank had been preparing his new album, his third for Capitol, for months, meticulously planning the song list and the sequencing of the tunes and, collaborating closely with Bill Miller and Riddle—often at night at Sinatra’s house—working out every note, phrase, and nuance.

  The album, as Will Friedwald writes, “inaugurated [Frank’s] tradition of using a title song to set the mood, something he continued doing off and on for the rest of his career.” The song in this case was Bob Hilliard and Dave Mann’s “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning.”

  Hilliard and Mann had dashed the song off in a postmidnight session just a few months earlier. As befitted the hour of the composition, both music and lyrics were of an exquisitely gentle sadness—an emotion that, in Frank’s post-Ava life, felt all too familiar. Yet it was a hallmark of Sinatra’s resurgence that he could now alchemize his sadness into gold. Bill Miller told Friedwald that “both singer and pianist instantly realized that ‘In the Wee Small Hours’ was going to be an important number for them.”

  No Sinatra album to date had set an emotional ambience so strongly as this one would. The first two albums of his Capitol period, Songs for Young Lovers and Swing Easy!, had each sustained a mood, but more simplistically: you could call them concept albums, if you wanted to cite concepts like Romantic or Upbeat. In the Wee Small Hours was a far more complex piece of work. The disc jockey and Sinatra specialist Jonathan Schwartz has compared it to both a novel and a two-act play, writing, “Sinatra, a man who lived his life in italics, was a piece of high drama in many acts. The record album—with its first-act curtain, ‘When Your Lover Has Gone,’ and intermission as the disc was turned over, and the second act’s opening number, ‘What Is This Thing Called Love?’—helped create the perfect format for the dramatic figure Sinatra had become.”

  Besides the title song, the carefully worked-out song list, and the exquisite orchestrations, technology itself benefited—and shaped—Wee Small. Sinatra had seen a lot of recording history in his twenty-year career. In his first two years at Columbia Records, a record album, like the photograph album from which it took its name, was a large, heavy, object-containing book—the objects in this case being ten-inch 78 rpm shellac phonograph records, with one song of about three minutes’ duration per side. Sinatra’s first album, Columbia’s 1946 release The Voice of Frank Sinatra, had contained four 78s, eight songs, and weighed a couple of pounds. When Columbia introduced the first 33 rpm long-playing album in 1948, it suddenly became possible to put eight songs on just one ten-inch vinyl disc: inside its cardboard sleeve, the album now weighed only a few ounces.

  In the Wee Small Hours was Sinatra’s first twelve-inch LP, a format that gave the singer the luxurious span of sixteen songs, more than forty-eight minutes of music, to weave his spell (to cover all bases commercially, Capitol also released the album in double-disc ten-inch and quadruple-disc 45 rpm extended-play formats). Wee Small is an amazingly integrated piece of work, both for its time and for all time, holding its mood of tender sadness throughout, amid the many somber colors of Nelson Riddle’s musical palette. Frank so often sings in a kind of hush that when he momentarily switches gears from gentle to rascally, as in the cynical verse to “Can’t We Be Friends?” (“I took each word she said as gospel truth/The way a silly little child would”), the effect is jarring. This is an album of capitulation, not retaliation—his “Ava album,” as Frank would later call it.

  Two of the songs that feel most naked in this regard are Hoagy Carmichael’s exquisitely ironic “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” with a lyric based on a poem by Jane Brown Thompson, and Cole Porter’s towering “What Is This Thing Called Love?” On the latter, with its lyric equal to any Roman ode, Sinatra is in spine-chillingly peak vocal form; as he makes plunging melodic improvisations that flirt with basso territory, he sounds like a cave of the winds. But then, with one of his patented lyrical improvisations, he comes close to ruining this great rendition of a great song. Porter’s superbly concise lines convey in absolutely minimal form all the soaring hope and crushing heartbreak of new love:

  I saw you there one wonderful day,

  You took my heart and threw it away.

  Yet Frank, for reasons best known to himself, takes it upon himself to augment the second line:

  But you took my heart and you threw my heart away.

  This was a very long way from the Frank Sinatra of twenty years earlier, who as a singing waiter at the Rustic Cabin in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, got so nervous at the sight of Cole Porter in the house one night that he forgot the words to “Night and Day”*2 and was reduced to singing the title phrase over and over again. This was an artist who now considered himself the equal, and the collaborator, of any of the great artists whose songs he was singing.

  —

  The story goes that Sinatra was so thrilled with Riddle’s arrangement of “What Is This Thing Called Love?” that after he had finally satisfied himself with a perfect vocal (on the twenty-first take! small wonder that he was fooling around with the words), he turned to the arranger and said, “Nelson, you’re a gas.”

  There was a pause while the serious, socially awkward Riddle came up with the best answer he could think of. “Likewise,” Nelson said.

  The musicians gave each other looks.

  —

  On the night of March 30, a year and five days after his Academy Award triumph, Frank stood once again on the stage of the Pantages Theater in Hollywood, once again in black tie—except that this time instead of accepting an award, he was presenting one: the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, to Eva Marie Saint for On the Waterfront. That movie, with twelve nominations and eight wins, was the big winner that night—the biggest since the year before, when From Here to Eternity had had thirteen nominations and won eight Oscars, including Sinatra’s for Best Supporting Actor. Best Actor this year went to Marlon Brando for his role as the Christlike longshoreman Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront: an upset victory over the favorite, Bing Crosby in The Country Girl.

  But the biggest upset in the Pantages Theater that night might have been in Frank Sinatra’s stomach. He had badly wanted the role of Terry Malloy, which had seemed so perfect for him: the film was even to be shot in Hoboken. (Though as a teenager Frank had actually worked—briefly—on the Hoboken docks, he had not discovered in himself much of a taste for manual labor.) On the Waterfront’s producer, Sam Spiegel, had pursued Sinatra relentlessly for the role, promising it to him, declaring that no one else on earth was as qualified to play it, assuring him that it would win him a Best Actor Oscar to bookend that other statuette. In the end, though, it was a matter of pure economics where Sam Spiegel was concerned: Marlon Brando, one of the biggest box-office draws in the world, would simply put more asses in movie theater seats.

  Where On the Waterfront’s director, Elia Kazan, was concerned, Brando—who had demonstrated astonishing craft and versatility in films like A Streetcar Named Desire, Julius Caesar, Viva Zapata!, and The Wild One—was the better artistic choice as well. “Frank Sinatra would have been wonderful, but Marlon was more vulnerable,” Kazan later said. “He had this great range of violent emotions to draw from. He had more schism, more pain, and so much shame—the actor who played Terry had to have a lot of shame.” As From Here to Eternity had shown, to the surprise of many, Frank could portray vulnerability wonderfully on-screen. Displaying shame, on-screen or off, was not his forte.

  When Brando got the role, Frank “half destroyed” his living room in a fit of rage. Now Brando had the Oscar Sam Spiegel had promised to Sinatra.

  And now history was about to repeat itself, this time as musical comedy.

  In early 1954, after picking up the movie rights to Frank
Loesser’s smash Broadway musical Guys and Dolls (based on Damon Runyon’s Times Square short stories) for $1 million, Samuel Goldwyn hired the renowned writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz to helm the film, then spent a very well-publicized half year trying to cast the four principals: the smooth-talking high roller Sky Masterson; the rough-hewn gambler Nathan Detroit; Nathan’s long-suffering fiancée, the chorine Miss Adelaide; and the pious but sexy missionary Sergeant Sarah Brown.

  As was (and still is) frequently the case in Hollywood, many casting permutations were bruited about, with stars as diverse as Gene Kelly, Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Clark Gable, Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas, and Burt Lancaster (and for one mad moment Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis) mentioned as possibilities for the male leads. Betty Grable, Jane Russell, Debbie Reynolds, Grace Kelly, and Marilyn Monroe were all in the running at one time or another for the part of Adelaide or Sarah. A Hedda Hopper column of early May had Goldwyn asking Frank Sinatra to play the “Guy Madison”*3 role (Goldwyn, who was born in Poland and immigrated to America in his teens, had a notoriously interesting relationship with the English language). But soon afterward, word got out that Goldwyn and Mankiewicz were in hot pursuit of Marlon Brando to play Sky Masterson.

  If it’s true that Goldwyn had first approached Sinatra to play Masterson, then his initial instincts were good. On Broadway, Sky had been played by Robert Alda (the father of Alan), a handsome leading man with a pleasant voice. Alda sang several of the show’s key songs, both solo and together with Isabel Bigley, who played Sarah Brown. Sam Levene, who was a wonderful actor but could barely carry a tune, played Nathan Detroit. To compensate for Levene’s limited vocal abilities, Frank Loesser wrote Nathan’s only solo, “Sue Me,” in a single octave. Levene croaked the song out very effectively.