Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  “We became very close friends and saw a lot of him between the recordings in those days, and spent many weekends with Frank at his home in Palm Springs,” Eleanor Slatkin recalled, when Sinatra was still alive.

  As you know, he has a tremendous collection of classical records, and every time we were at his house, he had classical music playing…and a lot of opera too. He is very knowledgeable, and of course, he knew many of the artists. He fell in love with the Quartet…and he said, “You know, I think it would be a terrific idea to do an album with a string quartet…” and so came Close to You. Everything you did with Frank was Frank’s idea.

  The potential problem, however, was that the quartet alone “might not be enough to support a pop singer—even one who exceeded many classical voices in artistry and execution,” Will Friedwald writes.

  And even if it could, the quartet alone might not sustain the attention of a pop audience. So…as [the HSQ second violinist] Paul Shure recalled, “Nelson decided to use a string quartet and [four rhythm], and each tune would have another instrument. He’d have string quartet and French horn…, string quartet and flute…, string quartet and trumpet…, string quartet and solo violin…It was all a core of string quartet writing with different instruments added.”

  The album was a brilliant meeting of minds between Sinatra and Riddle. It was also commercially problematic, to say the least. And coming on the heels of Tone Poems of Color, it gave pause to the men in the Capitol front office. “It was something that Capitol Records really didn’t want to do,” Leonard Slatkin said. “Using [the HSQ], putting their name on the cover. I think that was really the objection. Because it was before the time when we even used the word ‘crossover.’ They said, ‘How can we sell this? What’s our market? We have no idea.’ But Frank insisted. He said, ‘If you guys don’t do this, I’m leaving.’ Of course, this was a challenge that Nelson was so up to. I mean, those are just stunning arrangements all the way through. Like a lot of Frank’s work of that period, it almost needs to be about two in the morning when you listen to it.”

  The challenge for Riddle was writing for so few instruments. “It’s the most stunning thing that Nelson Riddle ever did,” Paul Shure said.

  Using the string sound as a basis rather than a pad or an enhancement really was a turnaround for Nelson. String quartet writing is the hardest thing to do, because everything is so open. With a larger orchestra, you have a big palette to work with, and there are all kinds of things going on. You can use the orchestra to overcome melodic deficiencies, by using riffs and doing things with the woodwinds or brass over a string pad and get away with it. When you’re writing for four, six, or eight instruments, it’s another story.

  On March 1, back at Capitol (where sound engineers had been laboring furiously to improve studio acoustics), Sinatra and Riddle, along with the Hollywood String Quartet and several other musicians, had a go at “Don’t Like Goodbyes,” a number from Harold Arlen and Truman Capote’s Caribbean musical House of Flowers. Frank was bothered by something, either the acoustics or the arrangement; if it was the latter, there might have been a reshuffling of instrumentalists for the next studio date, a week later. This time—using the quartet plus a clarinet, a French horn, a flute, a harp, and an additional violin, along with a rhythm section of guitar, bass, drums, and piano—Nelson came up with the goods, and “Goodbyes,” along with three other songs (“If It’s the Last Thing I Do,” “P.S. I Love You,” and “Love Locked Out”), was laid down for posterity.

  Close to You wasn’t just a work of brilliance; it was hard work. Its making would span eight months on and off, more time than Sinatra would devote to any album until 1980’s Trilogy.

  —

  For most of March, Frank played the Sands, commuting back and forth between the fleshpots of Vegas and the company town of Los Angeles. On the fifteenth, he conducted the last session for Tone Poems of Color. And on the night of the twenty-first, with Peggy Connelly on his arm, he was back at the Pantages Theater for the twenty-eighth annual Academy Awards, remembering keenly the heft of the eight-pound statuette he was all but certain he would hold again.

  It wasn’t to be. After presenting the Best Score award to Alfred Newman (for Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing), Frank had to sit and watch in disbelief as the Best Actor Oscar went to Ernest Borgnine for Marty. He was devastated. He had behaved for Otto Preminger on The Man with the Golden Arm as he had for Fred Zinnemann on From Here to Eternity: he had rehearsed, shown up at eight on the dot every morning, done every take that was asked of him. He had done the acting of his life. How could they begrudge him?

  “I had wanted to go on to the parties they held afterwards,” Connelly recalled, “but we walked out, got in the car, and went home. He went into his bedroom, didn’t turn the light on, just sat down on the bed. I finally decided to go in.

  “I kneeled down on the floor and put my arms around him. It’s embarrassing now to remember what I said to him: ‘It’s terrible. But Ernie Borgnine is fat and ugly—think what it’ll do for his career.’ Frank said, ‘Yeah, but think what it would’ve done for mine.’ ‘You don’t need it,’ I told him. ‘You’re Frank Sinatra.’ ”

  —

  In April, he did two more sessions for Close to You: on the fifth, he recorded, besides “The End of a Love Affair,” “It Could Happen to You,” and “With Every Breath I Take,” a Johnny Burke–Jimmy Van Heusen number called “There’s a Flaw in My Flue.”*2 The song, on which Frank’s vocal was as beautiful as any other on the album, contained lines such as

  Now I try to remember and smoke gets in my nose

  There are a couple of theories about why Sinatra laid down this parody, originally written by Burke and Van Heusen for a comedy segment on a wartime Bing Crosby broadcast. In Frank Sinatra: My Father, Nancy Sinatra claims that the tune was “a joke on the Capitol executives.” When the demo album went out to the big brass, she writes, they all proclaimed it “beautiful!,” and were ready to release it in its entirety—until Frank, shaking his head at the executives’ denseness, had the number removed.

  Nonsense, argues the Sinatra archivist Ed O’Brien, who claims that Frank “obviously viewed [the song] as a comedy piece…It was a throwaway meant to amuse his audience.” O’Brien, who interviewed the former Capitol vice president Alan Livingston at length before Livingston’s death, says that the label “never seriously considered” putting the song on the album.

  And yet. Bing Crosby, a far cooler character than Sinatra (and an effortlessly funny one to boot), would have brought off the comedy of “Flaw” without breaking a sweat. Frank had a strange and uncertain sense of humor, usually too close to the bubbling caldron of his anger for comfort: his jokes, onstage or off, tended to throw menacing shadows. When he opened his mouth to sing, it was serious business, even if the song was joyous. (Over the years, when he sang the parodies Sammy Cahn now and then penned for him, his often hesitant delivery had a way of too obviously signaling the joke.) Couldn’t his motives have been mixed where “Flaw” was concerned? Might he not have meant it both to amuse his pals and to nettle the suits? If it’s true that his beloved Close to You had been a hard sell to Capitol and that Sinatra had threatened to walk unless the album was made, “There’s a Flaw in My Flue” might have been the first volley in an incipient war between the singer and his record label.

  —

  On Monday night, April 9, Frank convened in Capitol Studio A with Riddle, a twenty-seven-piece orchestra, and a chorus to show his variety on a productive—if not great—non–Close to You session. Sans chorus, he recorded a good, straight-ahead blues called “No One Ever Tells You” and a pleasant enough John DeVries–Joe Bushkin ballad, “Something Wonderful Happens in Summer.” With the singers, he laid down two charming if extremely white-sounding R&B-flavored singles, “Five Hundred Guys” (to which he devoted a laborious fourteen takes) and the much catchier “Hey! Jealous Lover” (with lyrics by Sammy Cahn and music by Kay Twomey and Bee Walker), which would
go to number 6 on the Billboard chart in the fall.

  The following night, Tuesday the tenth, in Municipal Auditorium in Birmingham, Alabama, several members of a group that called itself the North Alabama Citizens’ Council (soon to change its name to the Original Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy) attacked the stage while Nat King Cole, a friend to both Frank Sinatra and Nelson Riddle (and Riddle’s frequent employer) was performing before an all-white audience. Three of the men stormed over the footlights while Cole was singing “Little Girl,” knocking him down and roughing him up before police rushed from the wings and subdued them. The attackers had apparently intended to kidnap Cole, who, after he had been attended to by a doctor, did a brief second performance—for an all-black audience.

  The moment Sinatra heard the news, he called Cole to console him as best he could, then phoned the singer’s wife to assure her that Nat would be gotten safely out of Birmingham and flown home to Chicago. It happened the next morning (Cole biographer Daniel Mark Epstein says a commercial flight was diverted), just as Frank had said it would.

  —

  Sinatra tended to spend money whether he had it or not—like a drunken admiral, one of his friends once said. But with real money coming in, Frank took stock and decided to make a big change. He’d been renting the garden apartment on Wilshire and Beverly Glen since his down-at-heels days; it was a nice place, but now he wanted a Los Angeles base of operations all his own, one befitting his elevated station, and he didn’t want anyone else’s house—he wanted to build the bachelor pad of bachelor pads, from scratch, to his own specifications. He’d found the perfect site, an aerie on Bowmont Drive, high atop the Hollywood Hills, just east of Coldwater Canyon and overlooking what looked like all of creation: the San Fernando Valley to the north, the City of Angels to the south, the Pacific to the west. And he’d found the perfect man to design his dream home: the superstar (and, unusual for the time, African-American) architect Paul Revere Williams, who’d created dozens of strikingly modern public buildings across Southern California, as well as numerous movie stars’ houses.

  Williams listened carefully to his new client’s wishes and soon came back with a set of drawings that Frank loved. The house would be small (two bedrooms) but elegantly simple in its contours, with clean lines, plenty of big picture windows all around, built-in appliances, and what was then called an Oriental interior motif, with expanses of rich wood and surfaces painted in his favorite color, orange.

  Ground had been broken at 2666 Bowmont early in the spring, and construction was proceeding apace, as things tended to proceed when Sinatra was involved. On Saturday, April 14, he awoke early, excited, and drove up to the site to watch the foundation being laid. The morning was cold and drizzly; the hopeful smell of freshly poured concrete hung in the misty air. Frank watched the workmen for a while, wide-eyed with pleasure. Afterward, he drove down to Columbia Pictures for a meeting with studio president Harry Cohn. Sinatra was slated to star in the musical Pal Joey in the spring of 1957, and there were several matters to discuss.

  The last movie Frank had made for Columbia had been From Here to Eternity, and things had been very different then. Down on his luck, his movie and recording careers stalled, Sinatra had gone to Harry Cohn with hat in hand and all but begged for the role of Angelo Maggio. This time, Frank was very far from down on his luck. His stride into Cohn’s office would have been easy and graceful, his handshake firm, his smile broad. He now possessed power to intimidate even Harry Cohn.

  Frank and his longtime valet George Jacobs at Sinatra’s bachelor-pad aerie overlooking Coldwater Canyon. “Oh, man, I had a life with that poor man,” Jacobs said. (Credit 5.3)

  The agents and lawyers had already worked out Sinatra’s deal for Pal Joey, at a rate very far from the reported $8,000 to $10,000 he had earned for ten weeks of work on From Here to Eternity. Columbia had never been one of the richest studios, but with Frank’s Essex Productions participating (and assuming part of the risk), the studio could afford to offer Sinatra a salary of $150,000 for Pal Joey, along with 25 percent of the net box-office receipts—the kinds of terms every star in Hollywood wanted but very few could demand. Frank walked into Harry Cohn’s office with this deal already in his pocket. What he was there to discuss with Cohn and his minions was not money but the marketing of the movie.

  Pal Joey was an adaptation of the 1940 Rodgers and Hart Broadway musical of the same name, which itself had been adapted from a series of New Yorker stories by John O’Hara. The main character was Joey Evans, a second-rate nightclub singer (he was a dancer in the original musical) who dreams of opening his own club; the action turns around Joey and the two women who come into his life: Vera, a bored socialite of a certain age with the power to bankroll his dream, and Linda, a naïve young secretary. For the two female leads, Columbia had signed Rita Hayworth, who was thirty-seven but still a knockout (and a box-office draw), and the twenty-three-year-old Kim Novak, with whom Frank was still involved, in his fashion.

  “We talked things out,” Sinatra recalled, “and then I saw an uneasy look coming into the faces of the Cohn braintrust and Harry himself. I don’t like frightened people, and I don’t like being frightened myself. So I asked, ‘What’s the trouble?’ All were afraid to talk up. ‘If it’s billing,’ I said, ‘it’s okay to make it Hayworth/Sinatra/Novak. I don’t mind being in the middle of that sandwich.’ Man, were they relieved!”

  That night, Frank had dinner at 320 North Carolwood with Big Nancy and the kids—Nancy Sandra, who was almost sixteen; twelve-year-old Frank junior; and seven-year-old Tina. Dinner with his ex-wife and children was an almost weekly ritual for Sinatra when he was in town, and “there was something ‘special event’ about these occasions, like papal visits,” George Jacobs writes, describing the first time he accompanied his boss to one of the dinners.

  Mr. S was very touchy and huggy with the kids. He truly loved them, and always arrived with either toys, gifts, or, as they got older, money. But at the same time the situation was awkward, especially the goodbye part. The kids never begged him to stay, but their longing expressions conveyed the powerful message, and it hurt. Driving back to the apartment, Mr. S looked down. I told him how much I liked his family, and all he could say was, “I know, I know.” He would call them every single day, wherever he might be, at six o’clock just before their dinner, and be the best telephone father there ever was.

  Though Big Nancy had thrown Frank out and changed the locks the first time he allowed himself to be seen in public with Ava Gardner (early 1950), his former house, a sprawling, Spanish Mission–style ranch set on two and a half Beverly Hills acres, still bore his strong imprint. The interior color scheme was predominantly bright orange and black, and most of the many family photographs proudly displayed the paterfamilias, just as though he had never left.

  In Frank’s apartment, on the other hand, there were lots of pictures of his children and none at all of their mother. There was a weird asymmetry to Sinatra’s relationship with Nancy Barbato Sinatra, the ex-wife who, George Jacobs writes, “didn’t seem ex at all.” There was something very Old World about it. She had even tutored Jacobs carefully about how to cook all of Frank’s favorite dishes. He was the padrone, who did what he liked and came and went as he pleased. Big Nancy, on the other hand, didn’t really even date, despite occasional excited reports in the gossip columns, and she would never marry again. “I married one man for life, and with my luck it had to be your father,” she would later tell her younger daughter. Her steadiest companions in the mid-1950s were Barbara Stanwyck, whose ex-husband Robert Taylor had also left her for Ava Gardner, and the handsome Latin actor Cesar Romero, a closeted homosexual. It was as if she had entered a cloister when Frank left (complete with devotional images of him on all the walls).

  Except.

  Tina Sinatra, who as a little girl always hoped her father would come home for good, would discover years later that he “actually was coming home” to Nancy. “Sporadically, but very romantica
lly. He’d encourage Mom just often enough to make waiting for him seem almost reasonable.”

  Il padrone.

  —

  After his home-cooked dinner that night, Frank popped over to Hedda Hopper’s house for a last-minute interview: he was due to leave for Spain in three days to shoot The Pride and the Passion. They talked about the construction of his new house, his meeting at Columbia. He even gave the columnist his sandwich line about Hayworth and Novak. The two of them had a laugh over that. Then Hopper jumped right in with the unavoidable question: Would he see Ava in Spain?

  “If I do meet Ava,” Sinatra told her with a blue-eyed stare, “it will be in some public place. It will be a casual matter—hello, how are you, goodbye.”

  “No chance of a reconciliation?”

  “There would have to be a complete change…But complete. I don’t think that could happen.”

  —

  He had written to her, according to a friend, asking when, if ever, she intended to pick up her divorce decree. They could discuss it, Ava replied, when Frank came to Spain.

  * * *

  *1 Stordahl, who had incurred Sinatra’s ire by going to work as the conductor on Eddie Fisher’s TV show, might still have been on Frank’s shit list. There is also the possibility that at this point Nelson Riddle had made Sinatra’s first arranger look like old hat.

  *2 For whatever reason, “Flaw” was shelved at the eleventh hour. Also, because Close to You was running longer than the LP limit of forty-five-plus minutes, Capitol put aside two other songs, “Wait till You See Her” and “If It’s the Last Thing I Do.” All three numbers were included on the CD release Close to You and More in 1987.