by James Kaplan
By June, Earl Wilson was reporting that Samuel Goldwyn wanted Frank Sinatra to play Nathan Detroit.
Thirty years later, in a talk at Yale Law School, Sinatra confessed to having been nonplussed by Goldwyn’s apparent change of mind. “[My] agent said to me, ‘Sam Goldwyn loves you, Frank, and I know you admire him and I love him.’ I said, ‘That’s true, but I don’t want to play Nathan because I don’t know how to play him.’ I meant it. I didn’t know how to play him. I said, ‘If it was the other way around, the role of Sky Masterson is a vocalist,’ and I said that’s what I thought should be the part I’d play. He said, ‘But it may be [Goldwyn’s] last film…You’d do a wonderful thing if you’d just play the role and make him happy.’ ”
Goldwyn’s biographer A. Scott Berg tells a rather different story. “In the midst of negotiations, Frank Sinatra’s agent got hold of the script,” he writes.
His client insisted on being in the picture. There would be no conflict in the fact that Goldwyn was about to sign Brando; Sinatra was desperate to play Nathan Detroit. Mankiewicz thought Sinatra was all wrong for the part; in fact, he still hoped to talk Goldwyn into signing Sam Levene…But he met the singer at the Beverly Hills Hotel and found that “Frank was just in love with it.” Even though Brando and Sinatra were better suited for each other’s roles, Goldwyn liked the ring of the stars’ names.
Sinatra, his career still on the post-slump upswing, received third billing, after Brando and Jean Simmons, who played Sergeant Sarah.
Marlon Brando might have been the world’s most brilliant movie actor, but there was this one small detail: he had never sung in a movie before. And another: Joseph L. Mankiewicz—who had directed Brando in Julius Caesar—had never written or directed a musical.
For the sake of getting on the picture, Frank had made no fuss about Goldwyn’s signing Brando for a role Frank felt should have been his. This didn’t mean he had reconciled himself to the situation.*4 In some ways, the slightly timid and awkward character of Nathan Detroit was a rehash of the timid and awkward Clarence Doolittle character Sinatra had played in Anchors Aweigh and more or less reprised in other roles of the 1940s. Goldwyn had given the Gene Kelly role to Brando.
Under the expert control of Mankiewicz, whom both Frank and Brando respected, the shoot of Guys and Dolls proceeded efficiently but with a certain amount of tension. “Brando’s desire to continually rehearse wore on ‘one-take Charlie’ Sinatra,” Tom Santopietro writes.
Frank, fueled by instinct, not intellectual analysis, never did grow comfortable with cerebral actors and was not particularly circumspect in his critique of Brando’s Method ways, referring to the estimable Brando as Mumbles. Or, as Sinatra pungently told director Mankiewicz, “Don’t put me in the game, Coach, until Mumbles is through rehearsing.” (Of course, Brando got his own back by proclaiming that when Sinatra dies, “The first thing he’ll do will be find God and yell at him for making him bald.”)
But if Frank was building up a head of steam about Brando, he might not have been eager to go up against a man who was eight years younger, muscular, and no shrinking violet himself when it came to physical confrontation. The production’s single chronicled detonation occurred between Frank Sinatra and Frank Loesser.
Goldwyn and Mankiewicz had cut five of the Broadway show’s key musical numbers, ordering Frank Loesser to write three new songs for the film—songs Loesser didn’t like very much—including one, “Adelaide,” specifically designed to beef up Sinatra’s on-screen singing time. The skids were greased for a face-off between the two hot-tempered Franks.
“Sinatra apparently felt that Nathan’s character should conform to his own well-established crooning style, whereas my father felt that Nathan should remain a brassy Broadway tough who sang with more grits than gravy,” Frank Loesser’s daughter wrote in a memoir.
I am told that my father conducted himself with uncharacteristic restraint for a time, watching Sinatra do his thing—until, finally, he could stand it no longer. After a rehearsal that left his blood boiling, he approached Sinatra with an offer to give him some help with “Sue Me,” some tips on what he’d had in mind when he wrote the song…
“Why don’t we meet in my bungalow and rehearse it?” he asked mildly through his clenched teeth.
“If you want to see me,” Sinatra said, “you can come to my dressing room.”
My father left the set to go outside and jump up and down and scream for a while. When he was calmer, he showed up at Sinatra’s dressing room only to find it crowded with hangers-on and noisy with radio music.
“How the hell can we rehearse in this atmosphere?” he said, his blood resuming its full boil.
“We’ll do it my way,” Sinatra said, “or you can fuck off.”
A contrapuntal duet of explosions swiftly followed, culminating in each man’s avowal never to work with the other again.
Or as Wilfrid Sheed put it in his meditation on the great writers of the American popular songbook, The House That George Built, “Frank Sinatra…never forgave Frank Loesser for telling him how to play Nathan Detroit. The nerve of some people.”
—
Early in April, the syndicated columnist Bob Thomas had the temerity to ask Sinatra about the status of his marriage to Ava Gardner. Frank responded with what sounded like resignation. “It’s a stalemate,” he told Thomas.
“She established residence in Nevada, but she never filed the papers for divorce. I don’t know what she’s going to do.”
He left no doubt that the marriage is over, but he’s not concerned about a divorce.
“I’m not going to get married,” he said. “If I feel the need for company, I call up for a date and go out somewhere. I have no plans for anything serious.”
Sinatra laughed, the columnist wrote, when asked if he had any plans to marry Gloria Vanderbilt.
Frank cracked, “Sure—and what’s the penalty for bigamy these days?” He pointed out that he was still legally wed to Ava and Miss Vanderbilt to Leo Stokowski.
“I found Gloria delightful company,” he said. “It was wonderful to hear a woman talk intelligently about music and books. Out here, the girls seem to limit their conversation to what’s happening in Hollywood and at the race track.”
Thomas reported that Frank had signed a five-year, five-picture deal with United Artists and was talking with other studios about various projects. “But the story he is most interested in is ‘Teahouse of the August Moon,’ ” the columnist wrote. “He would like to play the Okinawan interpreter.”
The role, of course, went to Marlon Brando.
—
One night in the spring of 1955, Peggy Lou Connelly, an attractive twenty-three-year-old singer from Fort Worth, accompanied a girlfriend to the Villa Capri in Hollywood, where the friend, a model married to a jazz pianist, hoped to meet Sinatra. “I did everything to discourage her, because I liked her husband a lot, but I didn’t think anything would come of it, so I let myself be dragged along,” Connelly remembered more than fifty years later.
As it happened, Sinatra was at the Villa Capri that night, sitting with his close friend the songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen. And, Connelly recalled, the two young women had barely ordered their food when Van Heusen loomed up out of the smoky darkness and asked if they would mind if Mr. Sinatra came over and had coffee with them after they’d finished their dinner.
For an innocent girl from Fort Worth, the sight of Van Heusen was alarming, to say the least. “He had rather bulbous eyes and rather unattractive teeth, and he was balding,” Connelly said. To her friend, though, it didn’t matter what the emissary looked like—Sinatra was Sinatra. Of course they would have coffee with him, she said.
Connelly, for her part, was terrified by the prospect of meeting Frank. She was a young girl from the provinces, living at the Hollywood Studio Club, a chaperoned residence for aspiring actresses. “I had been in Hollywood for such a short time that I was impressed by bit players,” Connelly recalled. “To meet one
of the biggest stars in the world, I was not prepared for it. So I did not speak, really. I smiled, and when Frank asked me ‘Where are you from?’ I smiled and said my name and said, ‘I’m from Texas, and I’m a singer.’ That’s really all I said.”
The dark-haired, freckle-faced Connelly sat shyly while her gorgeous friend did all the talking, flirting aggressively with Sinatra. “And after ten minutes he stood up and he said to me—not my friend—‘Miss Connelly, would you like to have dinner with me next Thursday?’ He liked to be formal. And I said yes, and Jimmy took my phone number. And so it began.”
What began that night for Peggy Connelly was a three-year relationship with Sinatra, one that would bring her into frequent contact with the man who would soon become the most important composer in Frank’s life and was already his procurer in chief, Jimmy Van Heusen. She never got over her first impression. “I used to feel sorry for him because I thought he was so ugly,” Connelly recalled. “I never saw him with a girl. I never even saw him get near the prostitutes that he used to bring around.”
Van Heusen, born Edward Chester Babcock in Syracuse, New York, in 1913 (he invented the sporty pseudonym as a teenage disc jockey), was a paradox: foulmouthed, obsessed with sex and alcohol, but a songwriter of deep and delicate gifts, verging on genius. He and Sinatra had first met in Manhattan in the lean 1930s, when Van Heusen was plugging songs for the music publisher Remick and trying to sell a few tunes of his own and Frank, who had yet to meet Harry James or Tommy Dorsey, was still singing at the Rustic Cabin. The skinny Hoboken kid with the sublime voice used to gather up his pal Nick Sevano and ferry across the Hudson to hit the nightspots with Van Heusen and Hank Sanicola, who at the time was also plugging songs in Tin Pan Alley. Another member of the posse was a fast-talking, wisecracking, breathtakingly talented little lyricist named Sammy Cahn, then working with a songwriter named Saul Chaplin.
From the beginning, Van Heusen’s songs had a melodic subtlety that made him highly sought after by singers: in a historic sequence of New York recording sessions by Sinatra and the Dorsey band between February and August 1940, the first number Frank recorded was a Van Heusen tune, co-written with the lyricist Eddie De Lange, called “Shake Down the Stars.” Another, “Polka Dots and Moonbeams,” written with Johnny Burke, was one of Sinatra’s loveliest early ballads.
It was Burke, Bing Crosby’s lyricist (Crosby called him “the Poet”), who lured Van Heusen to Hollywood, in the summer of 1940, to help him write songs for Bing’s movies. (Sammy Cahn would make a similar move not long afterward, to write motion-picture music with Jule Styne.) Jimmy, who’d used his first song royalties to take flying lessons and then bought his own plane, a two-seat Luscombe Silvaire, flew himself to Los Angeles. His last fuel stop before Van Nuys Airport was a dot on the map called Palm Springs. In the late summer of 1940, the airport there was nothing but a couple of adobe huts and a few fuel drums, and the incredible heat shimmered off the tarmac, yet the minute Van Heusen stepped out of his plane, he was happy. He had suffered all his life from sinus trouble; suddenly he could really breathe for the first time. He was in love with the desert. It was to be a lifelong affair and another of the passions he shared with Sinatra.
While Burke and Van Heusen turned out tunes for Crosby’s movies, Frank Sinatra soared into stardom with Dorsey, then left the band and, in 1943, moved to California and began making movies. With his 4-F draft status, Frank was able to build his singing and film careers throughout World War II; Van Heusen did double duty, writing movie music with Burke by night and risking his life as a test pilot for Lockheed during the day.
But after the war, Burke became progressively more debilitated by alcoholism. “When I wrote ‘But Beautiful’ [in 1947], he was so sick that he couldn’t pick up a cup of coffee off the table,” Van Heusen recalled. “He had to put his face down and sip it.”
Van Heusen’s partnerships with lyricists had always been, in modern parlance, monogamish, but as Burke’s health worsened, Jimmy was forced to branch out even more. There was also the fact that as Bing Crosby passed age fifty, he was contemplating retirement. Crosby had inspired a certain unsentimental edge in Burke and Van Heusen’s work for him, specifically enjoining Johnny not to write the phrase “I love you” in any of the lyrics. Without the lodestars of Burke and Crosby to guide him, Van Heusen engaged in some sheerly commercial work that had a whiff of cynicism about it. What else would explain the soupy “You, My Love,” the theme for Young at Heart, which Jimmy wrote with the frequent Harry Warren collaborator Mack Gordon; or the fittingly turgid theme song for Not as a Stranger (“I think of youuu, my love, not as a stranger”), composed with the lyricist Buddy Kaye?
Then Sinatra had an idea.
In the spring of 1955, he signed with MGM to co-star with Debbie Reynolds in a movie adaptation of a Broadway comedy called The Tender Trap, a very 1950s story about a confirmed bachelor and cynical ladies’ man who finally gets reeled in by a dewy young thing. Metro wanted a theme song for the picture, one that Frank could sing over the titles, and Frank had just the writers in mind: Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen.
It was perfect. Cahn too was in need of a new collaborator, his longtime partner Styne having decamped for Broadway. Like Van Heusen, Cahn had already done significant work for Sinatra, including (with Styne) the great songs “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry,” and “Time After Time.” His lyrics, though never pedestrian, tended to have a heartfelt, almost coercively emotional quality. But he also had another side: after immigrating to Hollywood and before succumbing to the charms of Goldwyn Girl Gloria Delson, whom he married in 1945, Sammy had been part of the poker-playing, skirt-chasing crew that frequented Sinatra’s Sunset Tower bachelor pad. Though he no longer alley-catted with Sinatra and Van Heusen, he had long delighted in writing witty, often bawdy special lyrics for parties and other occasions. He and Jimmy Van Heusen could each use a songwriting partner capable of delivering the other from schmaltz. They were a musical marriage waiting to happen, and Sinatra had made the match.
Sinatra brought the songwriters Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen together, giving each man a partner who could deliver him from schmaltz. They wrote some forty songs for Frank, including such enduring hits as “Come Fly with Me.” (Credit 3.3)
* * *
*1 The very show in which, that June, a twenty-year-old Shirley MacLaine had become an instant sensation when she stepped out of the chorus and into the lead role after the star Carol Haney broke her ankle. By the time Frank and Gloria got to the St. James Theater, MacLaine was already in Hollywood with a movie contract from producer Hal Wallis. Sinatra probably hadn’t heard of her yet but would soon.
*2 Porter’s biographer William McBrien says the song was “Let’s Do It,” although it seems unlikely that the twenty-year-old Sinatra would have hazarded that talky list song, with its “Lithuanians” and “Letts.” Cole Porter, p. 371.
*3 Guy Madison was a television actor best known for the Wild Bill Hickok series.
*4 In years to come, Sinatra would correct history by making “Luck Be a Lady”—a Sky Masterson song—one of his signature numbers.
4
Then all those hookers our boy met
He had the kind of fun that no one could hardly rap
He banged the way you do on a tymp
And lived just like a musical pimp.
—SAMMY CAHN, SPECIAL-OCCASION LYRICS COMPOSED FOR JIMMY VAN HEUSEN’S FIFTY-FOURTH BIRTHDAY
Something about Julius Epstein’s script for The Tender Trap clearly spoke to Frank—something beyond the chance to return to MGM, which had so unceremoniously dumped him five years earlier; something even beyond the prospect of being top billed for the first time in a film comedy. He would play Charlie Reader, a thirty-five-year-old Manhattan theatrical agent who leads the bachelor life of Riley, 1950s-style, traffic directing a steady stream of gorgeous and compliant young women who show up at the door of his gloriously panoramic Sutton Place ap
artment. Of course, because it is a story, Charlie has to change in the third act, and change for a perennial bachelor naturally means settling down. Will he choose Sylvia, the wry and sophisticated concert violinist with a few miles on her (played by the thirty-eight-year-old Celeste Holm), or Julie (portrayed by the twenty-three-year-old Debbie Reynolds), the theatrical ingenue so bent on marrying and making babies that even a starring role in a Broadway musical barely appeals to her?
Seen today, the 1955 movie is a load of Technicolor hooey, scarcely spiced up by the epic amount of smoking and drinking that goes on and the Feydeau-esque comings and goings of Charlie’s various luscious squeezes, their plenteousness and pulchritude helpfully underlined by the eye-popping double takes of Charlie’s best friend, the married but itchy Joe (David Wayne). Even the title of the picture and its theme song seems like a joke, and a semi-dirty one at that. “Every time Jack Benny sees me at a party,” Sammy Cahn wrote in his memoir, “before he even says hello, he will say, ‘How could anyone…write a song called “The Tender Trap” ?’ ” Can anyone actually have bought any of this malarkey?
Well, yes. For one thing, silly title or no, the theme, the first outing by the new team of Cahn and Van Heusen, was just terrific: in a beautiful opening sequence (the movie goes straight downhill from there), Sinatra sings “The Tender Trap” as he struts toward the camera, all alone under a bright blue CinemaScope sky.
And autres temps, autres mœurs, as the French say. What feels appallingly outdated today seemed racy and fun in 1955. Even the New York Times’s ordinarily fusty Bosley Crowther, who’d never hesitated to stick it to Frank when he appeared in inferior pictures—and there had been a lot of inferior pictures, from The Miracle of the Bells to The Kissing Bandit to Double Dynamite—melted with delight. “This comical dissertation on the fun a bright fellow can have merely by remaining single in the glutted marriage market of New York is a vastly beguiling entertainment, even for guys who already are hooked and for ladies of desperate disposition who have their traps out for any fair game,” he gushed.