by James Kaplan
Frank, who was agonizingly insecure about many things, “craved class like a junkie craves the needle,” in the words of his valet George Jacobs. And in Sinatra’s eyes, Humphrey Bogart, who had grown up rich in Manhattan and then spent the rest of his life living it down, was pure class. Sinatra idolized everything about the wry, disaffected Bogart, from the way he dressed (custom-made suits, shirts, shoes; sport jackets with pocket squares; fedoras from Knox and Cavanagh to cover his receding hairline) to the way he drank and smoked, to the cool irony that colored his worldview. Cool looked good to Frank Sinatra. Unattainable, but good.
Sinatra had begun hanging around the Bogarts’ house in the early 1950s, when he was down on his luck: Bogie and Bacall took him in; his disaffection with Hollywood matched theirs. As did his capacity for alcohol. Even after his miraculous comeback, Frank continued drinking: success held some demons at bay but also brought on new ones.
One late night when Bogart, Sinatra, and some of the other usual suspects were imbibing in the swank upstairs room at Romanoff’s, Bacall, much younger than the rest and sharp-tongued, looked around and said, “I see the rat pack is all here.”
Bogart liked that. In his usual spirit of irony, he proposed that those present form a semiofficial club under that name. “In order to qualify,” Lauren Bacall wrote in her memoir, “one had to be addicted to nonconformity, staying up late, drinking, laughing, and not caring what anyone thought or said about us.”
“The Holmby Hills Rat Pack held its first annual meeting last night at Romanoff’s restaurant in Beverly Hills and elected officers for the coming year,” the columnist Joe Hyams wrote in the December 15, 1955, New York Herald Tribune. “Named to executive positions were: Frank Sinatra, pack master; Judy Garland, first vice-president; Lauren Bacall, den mother; Humphrey Bogart, rat-in-charge-of public relations; Irving Lazar, recording secretary and treasurer.”
“Remember, it was all a joke,” Bogart later told Hyams. The club’s officers and its “platform of iconoclasm—they were against everything and everyone, including themselves”—were, according to Bacall, “Bogie’s way of thumbing his nose at Hollywood.”
That was Bogie. Sinatra, who had been odd man out for so long but now found himself so very in, was going to have to recalibrate his position from here on.
—
Frank had spent very little time in any one place in 1955, let alone the house at 320 North Carolwood Drive—in Holmby Hills, just across Sunset from Bogie and Betty’s place—occupied by his ex-wife and three children. But he did stop by for long enough to present his fifteen-year-old daughter, Nancy, with a gift-wrapped Chevrolet convertible for Christmas.
—
He threw a monster New Year’s Eve party in Palm Springs, a brawl that extended well into the following day. Noël Coward, arriving with his partner—in those days he would have been called a boyfriend—Graham Payn, on New Year’s Day, found the scene pleasant but chaotic. “It is enjoyable but not the acme of peace on account of people of all shapes and sizes swirling through this very small house like the relentless waves of the sea,” he wrote in his journal.
Their swirling is accompanied by a bongo drum band in the living-room…The Danny Kayes, the [Charles] Vidors, the Romanoffs, the Goldwyns, Lucille Ball, Mike Todd, etc., are all in and out and the noise is considerable. Bogey pushed Irving Lazar into the pool and Irving Lazar pushed Bogey into the pool and there is a great deal of “fucking” and “shitting” and other indications that the new year will be no less bawdy than the old one. The prevailing chaos is curiously dominated by Frankie, who contrives, apparently without effort, to be cheerful and unflagging and, at the same time, sees that everyone has drinks and is looked after. He is a remarkable personality—tough, vulnerable and somehow touching. He is also immeasurably kind.
In the same entry, Coward also wrote, “Frankie is enchanting as usual and, as usual, he has a ‘broad’ installed with whom he, as well as everyone else, is bored stiff. She is blonde, cute, and determined, but I fear her determination will avail her very little with Betty Bacall on the warpath.”
That Sinatra and Bacall had eyes for each other was an open secret in Hollywood, one that Humphrey Bogart apparently chose to ignore. It was complicated. Though he and his young wife were a famously devoted couple, Bogart had only recently ended a long affair with his makeup woman and wig maker Verita Peterson, a relationship he’d begun when his previous marriage was breaking up. Bacall had been deeply wounded by the liaison but had looked the other way to save face. And she had long been drawn to Frank, who was much closer to her in age than Bogie. Bogart had also been unwell for some time, suffering from coughing fits and having difficulty eating.
That New Year’s Day, “as dinner came to a close, Frank, looking sad, begged us to stay on,” Bacall wrote.
Not begging in the true sense, but begging in Frank’s sense—looking very forlorn and alone. I thought, “Oh, the poor guy, we should stay.” I looked at Bogie and he said, “Sorry, old pal, we’ve got to get back to town.” In the car going home, I said, “We should have stayed.” Bogie said, “No, we shouldn’t. You must always remember we have a life of our own that has nothing to do with Frank. He chose to live the way he’s living—alone. It’s too bad if he’s lonely, but that’s his choice. We have our own road to travel, never forget that—we can’t live his life.”
* * *
*1 Lawford’s manager Milt Ebbins had phoned Sinatra immediately after the incident to explain that drinks with Ava had been his, Ebbins’s, idea; Frank had exploded anyway.
*2 Sinatra and Riddle would improve on this version, which was never officially released, the following January in one of the Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! sessions.
*3 In 1958, Frank would attempt Billy Strayhorn’s masterpiece, the long and melodically tricky tone poem “Lush Life,” with the same result.
*4 Cf. Sammy Cahn’s recollection of watching Sinatra sing with Dorsey: “Frank can hold a tremendous phrase, until it takes him into a sort of paroxysm—he gasps, his whole person seems to explode, to release itself.” Cahn, I Should Care, p. 130.
*5 Preminger told Peter Bogdanovich that he wanted to shoot on location in Chicago but that budgetary considerations made it impossible.
*6 Vanderbilt maintains that Sinatra signed her at the same time to act in another film he planned to develop, a story Peter Lawford had recently brought him called Ocean’s 11. This argues for a much earlier reconciliation between Sinatra and Lawford than other writers have claimed.
5
I want a long crescendo.
—FRANK SINATRA TO NELSON RIDDLE, JANUARY 1956
Frank carried the sheer exuberance of the previous year with him into KHJ Radio Studios on Monday night, January 9, 1956, when he arrived to record four songs for the album that would become Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! The exclamation point was a fitting punctuation for his life at that moment. He was clicking on all cylinders—making great records, turning in memorable movie performances, earning serious money. Time’s cover story on him in August had estimated his income for that year at “something close to $1,000,000”—an astronomical number in the mid-1950s. The old days, the bad, poor days, were a blip in the rearview mirror; the limbo of his marriage to Ava was forgotten for the moment. “Swingin’ ” was the operative word.
He usually strolled into Studio A, upstairs at KHJ, at about 8:00 p.m. and always with an entourage: in this period, the group would have consisted of Jimmy Van Heusen (one of whose songs would be recorded on the night of January 9); Hank Sanicola; Don McGuire, who was directing Frank during the day in Johnny Concho; a prizefighter or two; sundry members of the Holmby Hills Rat Pack; and the blonde or brunette of the moment. The atmosphere crackled with excitement that night, as was usually the case at Sinatra recording sessions. “There was always a crowd at those Sinatra sessions on Melrose,” the trombonist Milt Bernhart recalled.
They should have charged admission! Because the studio had been a radio thea
ter, it had an auditorium. And the place was packed to the back. You weren’t just playing a record date, you were playing a performance. They took a great chance on the people applauding, because they could get caught up in the thing, and ruin a take…but believe me, they were sitting on the edge. And it was an “in” crowd: movie stars, disc jockeys. It was big, big…It was hard to get in, you had to be invited. But they’d fill the damn place!
For Nelson Riddle, the anticipation was less pleasurable. “At a Sinatra session the air was usually loaded with electricity,” he remembered. But
the thoughts that raced through my head were hardly ones to calm the nerves. On the contrary—questions such as: “Will he like the arrangement?” and “Is the tempo comfortable for him?” were soon answered. If he didn’t make any reference to the arrangement, chances are it was acceptable. And as far as the tempo was concerned, he often set that with a crisp snap of his fingers or a characteristic rhythmic hunching of his shoulders.
The tempo that night was upbeat, in keeping with the album’s preplanned scheme. (The one slower-paced number Frank recorded, Andy Razaf and Eubie Blake’s “Memories of You,” didn’t make it onto Swingin’ Lovers.) The other three songs on the roster were Sammy Fain, Irving Kahal, and Pierre Norman’s “You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me,” Johnny Mercer and Van Heusen’s “I Thought About You,” and Mack Gordon and Josef Myrow’s “You Make Me Feel So Young,” a song that had debuted, without much of a splash, in the 1946 musical film Three Little Girls in Blue. Riddle and Sinatra were about to turn it into an instant classic.
—
Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! was dance music of the hippest kind: swinging, infectious, supremely listenable. Rock ’n’ roll might have been on its way in—1956 was the year it would land like a falling grand piano—but its appeal at first was merely visceral and primitive. Sinatra and Riddle had visceral and sophisticated locked up in a way that would last.
The key lay in the hand-in-glove development of Sinatra as a singer and Riddle as an arranger. It wasn’t just that Frank’s voice had deepened; it had also toughened, through time, heartbreak, cigarettes, and liquor. “I didn’t care for his original voice,” Riddle once said. “I thought it was far too syrupy. I prefer to hear the rather angular person come through…To me his voice only became interesting during the time when I started to work with him…He became a fascinating interpreter of lyrics, and actually he could practically have talked the thing for me and it would have been all right.”
Interestingly, Sinatra had recently been quoted in Walter Winchell’s column as saying, “Everything I learned I owe to Mabel Mercer.” He was speaking of the trailblazing vocalist who began as an idiosyncratic chanteuse of the American popular song and eventually became a virtual diseuse, sitting in an armchair onstage and literally speaking the lyrics to piano accompaniment. Audiences hung on every syllable.
“I’ve always believed that the written word is first, always first,” Frank once said. “Not belittling the music behind me, it’s really only a curtain…you must look at the lyric, and understand it.”
But of course there was more to it than that. A singer sings in tempo, and something about Sinatra’s tempo had changed radically in just a couple of years. “During the Capitol period,” Charles L. Granata writes, Frank “began to take more noticeable liberties with the rhythm and timing of his vocal lines.”
The conductor Leonard Slatkin—both of whose parents played on the Swingin’ Lovers sessions—said, “Imagine that you’re delivering a sentence in a particular cadence, a particular rhythm, where the strong syllables come on strong beats and the weak syllables come on weak ones. When you listen to Sinatra’s songs, even ones that are highly rhythmically charged, you’ll find that often he’ll delay that strong syllable. It may not occur right on the downbeat. It will be just that fraction late, giving a little more punch to the word itself. I’m sure he thought about it. I’m sure that this was not just improvisatory on his part.”
It wasn’t. “Syncopation in music is important, of course, particularly if it’s a rhythm song,” Sinatra said. “It can’t be ‘one-two-three-four/one-two-three-four,’ because it becomes stodgy. So, syncopation enters the scene, and it’s ‘one-two,’ then maybe a little delay, and then ‘three,’ and then another longer delay, and then ‘four.’ It all has to do with delivery.”
And his delivery was now at its peak. Listen to Frank’s version of “You Make Me Feel So Young” on Songs for Swingin’ Lovers!, and you hear a great singer in joyous command of every component of his art—voice, tempo, lyrical understanding, expression. It is (imagine the seats in the radio theater, packed with rapt listeners) simply a magnificent performance. It is also a perfect union of singer, arrangement, and musicians. And the secret eminence behind it all was Tommy Dorsey.
Three powerful forces had come together in 1939 when the great bandleader hired the genius arranger Sy Oliver and then lured Frank Sinatra away from the Harry James orchestra. Oliver wrote charts that wedded strings to horns in a new and powerful way, and a Dorsey signature sound was born.
Sinatra mainly sang ballads when he was with Dorsey; still, he had ears—great ears—and he heard what Oliver could do with an up-tempo number. A couple of years after Frank went out on his own, Nelson Riddle joined the Dorsey band as third trombonist. Riddle was only a so-so horn player, but as a budding arranger he took careful note of Sy Oliver’s writing. When it came time to write up-tempo charts for Sinatra, Riddle brought along not only his deep grounding in the complex orchestral textures of the French impressionist composers (Debussy, Ravel, Jacques Ibert) but also his big-band chops.
“In planning Songs for Swingin’ Lovers [which Riddle called “perhaps the most successful album I did with Frank Sinatra”], Frank commented on ‘sustained strings’ as part of the background to be used,” the arranger wrote.
Perhaps unconsciously, my ear recalled some of the fine arrangements Sy Oliver had done for Tommy, using sustained strings but also employing rhythmic fills by brass and saxes to generate excitement. The strings, by observing crescendos in the right places, add to the pace and tension of such writing without getting in the way. It was a further embroidery on this basic idea to add the bass trombone (George Roberts) plus the unmistakably insinuating fills of Harry “Sweets” Edison on Harmon-muted trumpet. I wish that all effective formulas could be arrived at so simply.
“All the preparation in the world, however,” Peter Levinson wrote in his biography of Riddle, “couldn’t replace the reality of having a core group of first-rate musicians challenged by having first-rate arrangements and interacting with a singer they respected who had emerged from the same big band background.”
The musicians assembled on the stage in Studio A were truly a starry group, an amalgam of some of the finest classical string players and jazz instrumentalists around: Frank demanded no less. Besides the Slatkins, George Roberts, and Sweets Edison, the orchestra included trumpeter Zeke Zarchy, another Dorsey alumnus; the great Duke Ellington valve trombonist Juan Tizol (who was also the composer of “Caravan” and “Perdido”); alto saxophonist Harry Klee, who doubled on flute (he can be heard swinging beautifully on the outro of “Feel So Young”); and Sinatra’s musical right hand, pianist Bill Miller. And then there was the sad-eyed trombonist with a jutting lower lip, Milt Bernhart, who played a crucial role in the most famous song Frank Sinatra ever recorded.
As Frank Sinatra Jr. tells the story, his father had finished the second recording session of the week in the early hours of Wednesday, January 11, 1956, and planned to go to Palm Springs first thing on Thursday. The final Swingin’ Lovers session was set for Monday the sixteenth, and Frank wanted to rest up over the weekend.
Instead, though, producer Voyle Gilmore called him at 1:00 a.m. on Wednesday and said that because the album looked to be a big seller, Capitol’s vice president Alan Livingston had made an executive decision to put three more songs onto the twelve-inch LP. This would necessitate an extra rec
ording session on Thursday the twelfth. Frank was not pleased.
He phoned Riddle at home, waking him up, and told him that he had to arrange three more songs immediately. “Sinatra gave him three songs real fast. Either he had them already written down or he pulled them out of a hat,” Frank junior said.
Nelson got out of bed and started writing. By seven o’clock the next morning he got two songs to the copyist. He then had a few hours sleep and started writing again at about one o’clock in the afternoon. Nelson knew that “you-know-who” wasn’t going to be a very happy person that night because he did not want to be working…With [Riddle’s wife] Doreen at the wheel of their station wagon, Nelson was in the back seat finishing the arrangement while holding a flashlight.
Rosemary Riddle Acerra notes that her father used a leaf from the dining-room table as a laptop desk.
When the Riddles arrived at the studio, according to Frank junior, Vern Yocum, the copyist, had several of his associates there. Sinatra recorded the first two tunes with Nelson and the orchestra while the copyists were writing down the last arrangement.
The first two songs were Mabel Wayne and Billy Rose’s “It Happened in Monterey” and Isham Jones and Gus Kahn’s “Swingin’ down the Lane.” Frank then shifted gears and, with a chorus, recorded a single called “Flowers Mean Forgiveness.” Then he returned to the album, with Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”
Sinatra’s usual method with Riddle when planning out arrangements was to sketch out ideas verbally—“make it sound like Puccini”; “give me some Brahms in bar eight”—while Nelson took rapid notes. All this usually happened well in advance of recording. In this case, with one day’s notice, Frank told Riddle about “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”: “I want a long crescendo.”