by James Kaplan
And part of the illusion was that Frank and Bing were pals. In fact, Sinatra was intimidated by his onetime idol, who was so cool and aloof offstage that even Crosby’s longtime comedy partner Bob Hope would say after his death, “You know, I never liked Bing. He was a son of a bitch.”
Yet Frank really had been waiting his whole life to do this duet: the boy who had dreamed of being Bing Crosby was now meeting him on—professionally, at least—level ground.
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During the filming of High Society, the crew nicknamed Crosby “Nembutal” and Sinatra “Dexedrine.” In 1956, as in the previous year, Frank continued to live as though the devil himself were prodding him with a pitchfork. “So long as I keep busy, I feel great,” he told a reporter. The problems occurred when he wasn’t busy enough: sleep, solitude, and leisure did not sit well with him. He was like a whole-body case of restless leg syndrome. Though he would shoot only three movies in 1956, as compared with the five he made in 1955, he would travel to Spain to shoot The Pride and the Passion; play three three-week stands at the Sands while commuting back to L.A. to make records and attend to motion-picture business; sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the Democratic National Convention; return to the Paramount Theater in Times Square to do a week with the Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra; and sign a $3 million television contract with ABC. For starters. But mainly, that year (if there could be such a thing as mainly with Sinatra), he would make records.
He went into the recording studio twenty-one times in 1956, the most sessions he had done since 1947. He was effervescing with musical ideas, and beginning in February he had a new laboratory in which to explore them. In 1955, Capitol Records, cash rich after its recent purchase by the British music publishing and recording colossus EMI, had broken ground for a monumental new headquarters at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street in downtown Hollywood; in February 1956, the new building opened: a cylindrical tower designed by the architect Welton Becket to replicate a stack of records. Atop the Capitol Records Tower, as the structure came to be called, stood a sixty-foot spire containing a blinking red light that spelled out “Hollywood” in Morse code.
Sinatra and Bing Crosby play perfectly together in their duet in High Society. In reality, Frank was intimidated by his onetime idol, who was cool and aloof offstage. (Credit 5.1)
The building’s ground floor contained three recording studios. Studios A and B were built to accommodate full orchestras; the more intimate Studio C was designed for jingles, voice-overs, and smaller sessions. Naturally, everything in the facility was state-of-the-art, mid-1950s style, from the shock-mounted concrete echo chambers built deep below street level to the tube condenser microphones, speakers, and tape-editing equipment in the rooms above.
It was all pristine and beautiful, a kind of cathedral of sound, and Sinatra’s first project there was appropriately high-minded and daringly ambitious: commercial considerations notwithstanding, Frank wanted to lead an orchestra once again.
He’d done so once before, back in the Columbia (and 78 rpm) days, with Frank Sinatra Conducts the Music of Alec Wilder. The 1946 album contained six of Wilder’s meditative compositions, pieces with titles like “Air for English Horn,” “Slow Dance,” and “Theme and Variations,” and while the enterprise was only possible because of the bushels of money Sinatra’s popular records were bringing in to Columbia at the time, it proved to Frank and some small part of the world (including the orchestra players he conducted) that he was more than just a Voice.
Ten years on, Sinatra had the same kind of commercial power, and then some. In 1956, he was making real money for Capitol and from Capitol: “Young at Heart” was a million seller, and In the Wee Small Hours went gold, reaching number 2 on Billboard’s 1955 album chart. He now had the leverage to renegotiate his original contract with the label, a four-year, lowball deal he’d signed (in 1953) with Capitol’s vice president Alan Livingston when his career had been at a low ebb. His clout was increased considerably by interest from outside. “When we took him on two and a half years ago, Frank couldn’t get a record,” Livingston told Down Beat. “Now, every company in the business is after him, and it would be silly to deny that he has had generous offers from every quarter.” RCA Victor, in particular, wooed him seriously when the negotiations stalled.
When Sinatra and Capitol finally came to terms, the label’s premier artist scored an impressive seven-year contract, with an annual guarantee of $200,000 and virtual carte blanche to record whatever he pleased. The suits were happy enough with their star to grant him an indulgence or two, and the first was Frank Sinatra Conducts Tone Poems of Color.
The idea for the album originated with a series of twelve poems about colors by the radio writer Norman Sickel, who had worked on the To Be Perfectly Frank series. (“Orange is the gay deceiver,” one began, “and I do deceive/but nicely./I am the daughter/of the yellow laughter/and the violent Red!”) Sinatra, who would take up painting in his fifties, liked the verses so much that he commissioned a dozen original orchestral works based on them, from a brilliant group that included Nelson Riddle, Alec Wilder, the bandleader and arranger Billy May, and the movie orchestrators Jeff Alexander, Elmer Bernstein, and André Previn. Conspicuously absent was Axel Stordahl.*1 Sinatra assigned each writer a different tonal color and text and then assembled nearly sixty musicians in Capitol’s new Studio A.
One of the first things Sinatra and the musicians discovered about the spanking-new facility was that despite Capitol’s exhaustive efforts to duplicate the rich acoustics of KHJ Radio Studios, the sound in Studio A was miserable. A photograph taken during a break in recording shows Sinatra perched on a stool, looking over at the redoubtable cellist Eleanor Slatkin, who’s leaning on her 1689 Andreas Guarnerius and grimacing as she apparently says something to him. She later remembered just what it was: “Frank asked me what I thought of the playback, and I said, ‘I think it sounds like shit!’ As the word came out, I heard the click of the camera as the photographer snapped the picture. I could get away with it—he just laughed!”
Frank adored the Slatkins, both Felix and Eleanor, as well as their two young sons, Leonard and Fred. The couple were brilliant, tough musicians who weren’t afraid to call a spade a spade, and Sinatra revered them as kindred spirits. They had begun playing on Frank’s Hollywood recording sessions for Columbia in the mid-1940s, but it was during the Capitol period, as Sinatra became increasingly fascinated with the Hollywood String Quartet, which Felix and Eleanor Slatkin had founded before World War II, that their friendship blossomed. “My dad and Frank became very, very close, and more reliance was placed on my father’s opinions,” Leonard Slatkin says. Felix Slatkin, Sinatra’s first violinist—his concertmaster—quickly established himself as the de facto orchestra leader on many of the recording dates for which Riddle is listed as both arranger and conductor. Like many arrangers, Nelson Riddle, for all his towering brilliance, was an indifferent conductor at best. (Sinatra biographer Arnold Shaw paints an unforgettable verbal picture of Riddle “conducting with the index finger of his right hand as if he were rhythmically pressing a bell-button.”)
Frank in a rare role, on the album Frank Sinatra Conducts Tone Poems of Color. The cellist Eleanor Slatkin has just commented pointedly—and scatologically—about a playback in Capitol’s sonically challenged Studio A. (Credit 5.2)
“Conducting is primarily about showing the passage of time,” Leonard Slatkin says. “All music, at least [Sinatra’s] kind, relies on some degree of steady rhythm as it progresses. It means that you have to, as a conductor, physically be able to keep steady time but at the same time be flexible enough to allow moments where a phrase might be stretched out a little longer or speed up just a little bit. This requires a degree of technical skill that goes beyond just intuitiveness.”
Nevertheless, in the special context of the Tone Poems sessions—and with a little bit of help—Sinatra, who couldn’t read music, got along surprisingly well. On a couple of the sess
ions, Eleanor Slatkin recalled, her husband “was damn near conducting [the strings] from his chair, but Frank was so gifted musically that he could bring it all off.”
What he brought off was a pleasant and respectable album that was probably too highbrow for most of his audience and too lowbrow for classical listeners. “Interesting” is the adjective that mainly comes to mind. Sales were predictably light.
Tone Poems was a Capitol release, but the slipcover of the LP was also imprinted with the name of Essex Productions, a company Sinatra had recently formed and for which he held grand ambitions. “He informed the trade press,” Friedwald writes, “that Essex was a ‘full-fledged independent record company’ and that he himself remained ‘only nominally a Capitol artist,’ claiming that all Sinatra product was merely distributed by Capitol.”
Alan Livingston begged to differ, pointing out that Essex was “purely a paper deal for tax purposes. We still owned every Sinatra record made at Capitol, and in perpetuity.”
From the mid-1950s on, Frank and his lawyer Milton “Mickey” Rudin, of the Los Angeles firm Gang, Kopp & Tyre, would form a number of corporations with British-y names—Essex, Bristol, Kent, Canterbury—ostensibly, and sometimes actually, for the purpose of co-producing Sinatra’s movies and records but also (and arguably mainly) in order to lessen his personal income tax exposure. Essex might have started out as a dream of Frank’s, but before long it would become a nightmare for Capitol.
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On February 19, Frank was nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award for his performance in The Man with the Golden Arm. He was competing against Ernest Borgnine, who’d played Angelo Maggio’s tormentor Sergeant Fatso Judson in From Here to Eternity and was now up for his performance as a lonely Brooklyn butcher in Marty; James Cagney (for Love Me or Leave Me); James Dean (East of Eden); and Spencer Tracy (Bad Day at Black Rock). Sinatra knew he’d given a great performance in The Man with the Golden Arm, the performance of his life. He didn’t just hope to win; he expected it.
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A week later, the first installment of “The Real Frank Sinatra Story,” a syndicated Sunday series by the columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, ran in Hearst newspapers across the nation. The politically conservative Hearst papers had been on Frank’s case since the early 1940s for his liberal stances, his infidelities, and his Mob ties, although it’s hard to think there wasn’t also an element of ethnic contempt, in that Waspocratic era, for an Italian-American who didn’t know his place. The first Hearst columnist to go after Sinatra was the Red-baiting, Jew-hating Westbrook Pegler; next came the Hemingway wannabe Robert Ruark, who had the journalistic good fortune to chance upon Frank fraternizing with Lucky Luciano in February 1947 at the Mafia summit in Havana.
The New York–based Kilgallen, who had started out in a dither about Frank—in 1944, she wrote a fan-magazine piece titled “The Stars I’d Like to Be Married to (If I Weren’t Already Mrs. Richard Kollmar)”; Sinatra led the list—soon began toeing the Hearst company line. Now and then her columns had positive things to say about Frank, but the few compliments she doled out sounded grudging.
The Sunday series began with a bang. “Success hasn’t changed Frank Sinatra,” Kilgallen wrote. “When he was unappreciated and obscure he was bad-tempered, egotistical, extravagant and moody.” He was, she said, “a Jekyll and Hyde dressed in sharpie clothes.” The pieces were factually accurate but acidulous, especially on the subject of his many romances. She named names: famous ones like Ava, Lana Turner, Anita Ekberg, Gloria Vanderbilt, Kim Novak, and Jill Corey; lesser-known ones like pop singer Jo Ann Tolley, fashion model Melissa Weston, and actress Lisa Ferraday. “A few of the women, like Ava and Lana, were public idols themselves and priceless examples of feminine beauty,” Kilgallen wrote.
Many more, of course, have been the fluffy little struggling dolls of show business, pretty and small-waisted and similar under the standard layer of peach-colored Pan-Cake makeup—starlets who never got past first base in Hollywood, assorted models and vocalists, and chorus girls now lost in the ghosts of floor shows past. Others belonged to the classification most gently described as tawdry.
On balance, the worst that can be said about Kilgallen’s characterization is that her feminist sympathies were somewhat muddled. Sure, Frank got around—a lot. His famous quotation of decades later—“If I had as many love affairs as you’ve given me credit for,” he told reporters, “I’d now be speaking to you from a jar in Harvard Medical School”—was, as I wrote in Frank: The Voice, not just an evasion but the Big Lie:
“Love affairs” was more than a euphemism, but less than the truth: Love was always what it was about, and never quite what it was really about. Love was the fleeting ideal, the thing to be sung about, to be dreamed of while he zipped his trousers on his way from one conquest to the next. In truth, there were probably even more affairs than the hundreds he’d been given credit for. For there always had to be someone. His loneliness was bottomless, but there was always someone to try to help him find the bottom.
And while this may be pitiable, is it reprehensible? Was he exploiting the many women he slept with? Though some of the girlfriends he wooed with lavish gifts and hearts-and-flowers declarations might have momentarily fantasized that they had his exclusive attention, the illusion couldn’t have lasted long. He was Frank Sinatra. He was, Peggy Connelly recalled, “always on his way somewhere else in his mind, even while he was looking you in the eye. Someone once said he had no ‘now.’ He was never satisfied to be where he was.”
And somewhere else was often someone else. In 2012, Jill Corey, finally beginning to process Frank’s mid-1950s relationship with Connelly and others, said, “I suppose I can understand he probably could have been carrying on a relationship with both of us at the same time, or maybe four others. I have no idea.”
Best for a woman’s mental health was either to reject him outright—we’ve seen it happen, and we’ll see it again; he wasn’t universally irresistible—or to understand (or squint at the fact) that any serious relationship with him was a membership in a kind of harem, a group of shifting size and constitution that would cling around the singer over the next decade and a half. Many women shared this understanding. There were no formal requirements for membership, but it seemed to help a good deal if a young woman was fresh-faced, innocent to a degree, intelligent, talented as an actress or singer or both, and not aggressive, over-perfumed, or over-inquisitive about the exact contours of Frank’s love life. In return, she could expect everything except intimacy: tenderness, respect, attentiveness, many Italian meals, travel, visits to historic recording sessions, lavish gifts, romance, good sex, the occasional proposal of marriage, and always that absolutely electrifying moment at a nightclub or recording session or in a casino showroom when he turned his startling blue eyes toward her and sang to her and her alone.
Not to mention stories to tell her grandchildren.
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A biographer once asked Peggy Connelly, whose relatively serious relationship with Sinatra continued for several years, if he had been the love of her life.
“I said, ‘Certainly not,’ ” she recalled. “Because there just finally wasn’t enough of a human being. Frank had a public persona that took him over; everywhere he went he was the focus of attention. He couldn’t switch gears very often. I think he was always on his guard.
“I mean, he did everything for me,” Connelly said. “He was generous. He complimented me to everybody. I heard all kinds of compliments that came back to me from other people. And I was very aware that I had become known as Sinatra’s steady, in a way—I don’t know what you’d call it. He took me everywhere, and we met everybody. Cary Grant used to say, when there was a party, ‘Oh, I hope Frank brings Peggy; he always behaves so much better.’ But he just didn’t have that cuddly, man-woman kind of need. You can only live without that for so long.”
As for the Tawdry Ones about whom 1950s newspaper etiquette forbade Dorothy Kilgallen to be more specific, t
he story could now and then be a good deal darker. Sinatra had a way of disrespecting those he considered disrespectable, as a way of punishing the disrespectability he felt imbrued with. But it’s unlikely Kilgallen’s reporting took her there. What she was really doing in her big piece on Frank was chastising him for promiscuity, the vice that Eisenhower America felt compelled to condemn and the same one America, secretly or not so secretly, loved Sinatra for. She was being a prude and a scold, and she was violating Frank’s intricate code for journalists, which allowed a reporter or columnist to now and then ask a personal question or two as long as Sinatra had met with him or her personally and assessed his or her bona fides and as long as he or she made sure to compliment Frank frequently and lavishly in print.
When Frank didn’t like a piece, he usually sent a nasty telegram. (Sometimes he also threatened legal action.) In Dorothy Kilgallen’s case, however, he decided to do something special: he sent her a tombstone with her name engraved on it.
To bring the perfectly ambivalent month of February to a terrible close, on leap day, the twenty-ninth, Humphrey Bogart was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. In those days, it was a death sentence. Frank was devastated.
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With Frank Sinatra, the sublime and the ridiculous, the exquisite and the coarse, alternated so quickly and frequently that it’s useless to try to reconcile them. He wasn’t one thing or the other; he was both, and then a moment later he was something else again. The man who went to significant expense and effort to send a Sicilian-style message in granite to Dorothy Kilgallen, the man who, when human relations palled, periodically had his valet dial him up some professional company, was the same man who envisioned a new album that would combine Nelson Riddle’s unparalleled arranging gifts and the rich and delicate sound of the classical string quartet Frank had come to revere.