Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  And Kim Novak was the current leading lady of his harem, although he was equally attentive to all its members. Ever the gentleman, he sent a car to take Novak to Las Vegas—she refused to fly—even as he made plans for a thirty-second birthday party for Bacall on Sunday the sixteenth at the Sands. That same week, he phoned Peggy Connelly three times in New York and sent flowers in support of her opening at the Blue Angel. Less satisfyingly, Ava reported to Parsons that she would be spending Christmas with her family in North Carolina, then picking up her divorce papers from Frank in Reno.

  To hold the demons at bay, he maintained a jam-packed schedule. The rest of America might have been getting back in gear after Labor Day, but Sinatra, who’d been running at top speed straight through the summer, just kept going. Now he was going to get to tell the television-watching public about it.

  Edward R. Murrow had been trying for a couple of years to corral Frank for his big CBS interview show Person to Person, and he’d finally succeeded. The first show of the program’s fourth season would be broadcast live on September 14 from Sinatra’s recently completed Coldwater Canyon house, turning the place for fifteen minutes into the world’s most public bachelor pad. It would be an unprecedented opportunity for the country to see America’s swinger in chief in his natural habitat. “Hollywood people called [it] ‘the Teahouse,’ after the hit Broadway play The Teahouse of the August Moon,” Frank’s valet George Jacobs recalled, “and those who really knew what was going on called it the Whorehouse of the August Moon.”

  “When its owner is in a reflective mood,” TV reporter Hal Humphrey wrote of Frank’s home, “he has his choice of looking out over the blue Pacific, or the sun-drenched San Fernando Valley. On a clear day he can see Peggy Lee, who lives a piece down the hillside.”

  Peggy Lee, too, would soon beat a path to Frank’s door.

  Seen today, the black-and-white Person to Person (only NBC, which was affiliated with RCA and several other manufacturers of color televisions, was then broadcasting prime-time shows in color) is vintage 1950s. The effortlessly iconic Ed Murrow, sitting in a comfortable armchair in a New York studio, clutching one of the unfiltered Camels that would kill him at age fifty-seven between the second and the third knuckles of his left hand, intones his trademark opener: “Good evening, I’m Ed Murrow. The name of the program is ‘Person to Person.’ It’s all live—there’s no film.”

  In the days before celebrity interviews went viral, Person to Person was a national institution, and its host, who earned more than William S. Paley, the head of CBS, had unparalleled influence. Murrow was larger than life, a nonfiction, non-Jewish Rod Serling before Rod Serling, heavy eyebrowed, deep-voiced, almost absurdly authoritative. Every line he spoke sounded as though it were coming straight from the London Blitz (from which Murrow had reported as the bombs were falling) or his famous 1954 takedown of Senator Joseph McCarthy on the CBS news show See It Now.

  Of course Sinatra too was larger than life, but he seems strangely diminished on Murrow’s show. Television was not his medium. After the host’s orotund introduction (“Frank Sinatra is—well, Frank Sinatra. In twenty years, he’s traveled from Hoboken to Hollywood, with stops in between”), the remote camera (transmitting by microwave to New York) picks up Frank, jauntily knotting his tie in front of his bedroom mirror and tossing off a couple of bars of “The Tender Trap,” like some average Joe preparing for a date. He’s playing a role here, and his demeanor is eager and lightweight. “How are ya, Ed? Nice to see you,” he pipes up.

  “Good,” Murrow says in his funereal baritone. “Good luck in your new home, by the way.”

  “Thank you very much, and welcome.” Frank finishes tying his tie and leans on the bureau, facing the camera expectantly.

  “Tell me—have you been home long enough to make sure there’s a place for everything, and everything in its place?” Murrow asks, all folksy bonhomie.

  Frank smiles and channels Nathan Detroit: “I have just been home long enough to change clothes and say hello to you and your wonderful audience, and get in the car and drive to the airport and go right back up to the Sands in Vegas,” he says.

  And so the house tour begins. The camera moves with Sinatra from his bedroom to the living room, where a large autographed portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt hangs prominently. (Murrow: “You must prize that very highly.” Frank: “I really do, Ed.”) Nearby hang three framed photographs of his children; the camera closes in on each in succession. After Murrow asks Frank about the two Oscars sitting side by side on a bookshelf (one is for From Here to Eternity; the other is a special award for Sinatra’s 1945 short on tolerance, The House I Live In), he says, “Well, Frank, I gather the night you won the Oscar for Eternity was the high spot in your professional career, wasn’t it?”

  It’s an interesting moment. The Person to Person shows, all set in celebrities’ homes with Murrow looking in from his New York studio, were carefully choreographed ahead of time, from the cameras and lighting to the topics to be covered, but even if the programs were scripted—there has been some controversy on the subject—Frank seems to have been caught off guard here. Plainly uncomfortable, he tries to settle himself on the edge of a sofa and blinks several times. He’s flustered and, beneath his carefully composed face, probably annoyed. He might have smacked anyone else for bringing this up. For as great as winning his Best Supporting Actor Oscar was, the wound from being passed over for The Man with the Golden Arm is still fresh.

  “Well, it’s one of the high spots,” he says. “Uh, Ed, there’ve been several others, too. For instance, Golden Arm—when I did The Man with the Golden Arm, I think was one of the true high spots.” He blinks rapidly again, trying to gather himself. “And, uh, one of the—it was one of the difficult things to do, by the way, the From Here to Eternity role, because it was the first time I had ever done anything like that. And the other difficult thing I’d ever do was to sing the National Anthem in the Polo Grounds…”

  Momentarily unhorsed, he’s lost the thread, then steers the conversation back into safe territory with a lighthearted anecdote. Murrow plays along for a moment, then lowers those thick brows and drills in with almost sadistic pleasure: “Well, so, from Golden Arm, you had a great deal of satisfaction but not the big award, is that right?”

  And Frank parries! “That’s quite true,” he says, smiling. “No, we didn’t get the award for that, but you just reminded me—I got something to show you, speaking of awards.”

  He leads the way into the foyer, where a big beribboned gift box sits on a table. The box is a prop, as it turns out; Frank lifts it to reveal a huge, hideous trophy, two feet high if it’s an inch, all bronze terraces decked with figurines. It’s an award from the Al Jolson Chapter of the Los Angeles B’nai B’rith, and Frank is to receive it the next night in a ceremony at the Cocoanut Grove in Hollywood. Mysteriously, though, the thing has found its way to 2666 Bowmont Drive so that he can display it on national TV. Murrow asks him to read the inscription.

  Frank is all self-deprecation as he picks the monstrous trophy up. “Well, it says—let’s see if I can lift this thing—it says, ‘The first Al Jolson Memorial Award, the Entertainer of the Era, Frank Sinatra, who by his deeds and talents most exemplifies the tradition of the great Al Jolson.’ I really shouldn’t have read that,” he says quietly. “Somebody else should be doing that.”

  Yet he has thus had the chance to give himself a testimonial before millions, as balm for the wound of the lost Oscar.

  —

  That Sunday, Frank threw Betty Bacall her birthday party at the Sands. Not only were Kim Novak, the Durochers, the Riddles, the Goetzes, and Van Heusen present, but so were Cole Porter, the Nivens, the Romanoffs, Swifty Lazar, and many others. A photograph taken at the time shows some of the above at ringside in the Copa Room (the casino’s main showroom, named after the New York nightclub), along with Mr. and Mrs. Jack Benny, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Louella Parsons, and a certain youngish, sunglasses-wearing gentlema
n—not Sam Giancana, not Joe Fischetti, but, judging from his proximity to the stage and his clear wish, unlike the stars surrounding him, to conceal rather than display his identity, of their ilk. Unlike virtually everybody else in the room, the man is not looking at Sinatra but staring straight at the photographer, with what might be construed as an interested expression.

  Sinatra had had a two-tiered cake made for Bacall, inscribed “Happy Birthday Den Mother.” He gave her a large stuffed horse for her and her children, introduced her, and sang “Happy Birthday” from the stage.

  Humphrey Bogart, however, was not present. He had, in Bacall’s loaded phrase, “decided to withdraw,” opting instead to spend the weekend aboard his beloved sailboat the Santana with his seven-year-old son, Stephen. According to Bacall and one of Bogart’s biographers, the actor had rallied somewhat and felt well enough to go to the party; at the same time, he must have realized how distracting his presence would be. He had lost thirty pounds from an already slight frame: “His neck,” a waiter at Romanoff’s recalled, “had gotten so thin that the skin was just hanging over the bones.” Instead, he phoned his wife at the Sands to wish her happy birthday. “I hadn’t expected it and screamed with excitement and pleasure,” she wrote. “Should I have gone with him? I kept wondering. I was escaping from reality until that call—I must have needed the noise, the extravagance and general insanity of Las Vegas, the feeling of no responsibility, the feeling that life was being lived.”

  She returned home to find her husband “a bit edgy and resentful,” as she carefully put it—understandably furious seems more likely. “Finally he calmed down enough to hear who’d been there and what we’d all done. He was somewhat jealous of Frank,” she recalled, treading delicately.

  Partly because he knew I loved being with him, partly because he thought Frank was in love with me, and partly because our physical life together, which had always ranked high, had less than flourished with his illness. Yet he was also crazy about Frank—loved having him feel that our home was his home. Knowing Bogie, I suspected he was beginning not to feel quite so well as he had been.

  Bogart, who had had few illusions about anything, might have sensed how little time he had left. He also knew well that no matter how crazy he and Frank were about each other, his wife was thirty-two years old, in the prime of her life, and Frank Sinatra lived by his own set of rules.

  “Frank loved Bogart,” Peggy Connelly said, “but his woman was…just something else.”

  The playwright and screenwriter Ketti Frings, a close friend of the Bogarts’, put a finer point on it. “Everybody knew about Betty and Frank,” she said. “We just hoped Bogie wouldn’t find out. That would have been more killing than the cancer.”

  Lauren Bacall’s thirty-second birthday, at the Sands. She and her husband, Humphrey Bogart, had been the center of the original Rat Pack, and Bacall had given the group its name. (Credit 6.1)

  —

  Back from the Sands in early October, Frank pulled down a cool $40,000 for doing The Dinah Shore Chevy Show on NBC. Though he had barely rehearsed, he gave good value, performing a dozen songs, half of them duets with the charming and easygoing host, the first woman to have her own TV variety show (theme song: “See the U.S.A. in Your Chevrolet”). Critics praised Frank and Dinah’s unforced rapport, which certainly had something to do with the fact that Shore, though married to the actor George Montgomery, had long been an on-again, off-again paramour of Sinatra’s.

  Ten days later, he went to work on The Joker Is Wild. Joe E. Lewis, a longtime drinking buddy of Sinatra’s, had been a popular comic and singer in Chicago in the 1920s when he ran afoul of a lieutenant of Al Capone’s, Machine Gun Jack McGurn (born Vincenzo Antonio Gibaldi). McGurn had ordered Lewis killed, but though the entertainer’s attackers fractured his skull and slit his throat, Lewis survived and, with damaged vocal cords, became a singing comedian rather than a singer who told jokes. He was a lifelong boozer and inveterate horseplayer whose shtick was carrying a highball onstage and toasting audiences with his catchphrase, “It is now post time!” The drunk act—if it was an act—inspired the likes of Dean Martin, Phil Harris, and Foster Brooks.

  With Sinatra’s new power in Hollywood—all his recent films except Johnny Concho had been box-office hits—he was able to strike a sweet deal for The Joker Is Wild: he optioned the Lewis biography while it was still in galleys, hired a director (Charles Vidor), and sold the package, with himself in the starring role, to Paramount for $400,000. Frank’s end of the deal was $125,000, plus 25 percent of the film’s profits. (He also had the power to give the studio’s publicity chief a list of banned reporters. “I don’t want any of these crumbs on the set when I’m around,” Frank said.)

  Vidor was a smart choice on Sinatra’s part. The director had recently helmed Love Me or Leave Me, another musical biopic set in 1920s Chicago, starring Doris Day as the singer Ruth Etting and James Cagney as the gangster who loved her. The picture had won an Oscar (for Best Motion Picture Story) and had been nominated for five others; Vidor knew what he was doing.

  He and Sinatra click perfectly in the black-and-white movie’s superbly assured first half. Frank is effortlessly convincing as a lovable, cheeky nightclub singer, and his singing is terrific, as are Nelson Riddle’s 1920s-style arrangements of “At Sundown,” “I Cried for You,” and “If I Could Be with You.” The film’s theme is a great new Cahn–Van Heusen number, their best (and least ambivalent) love song: “All the Way.”

  Sinatra’s performance is equally fine after Lewis is horribly wounded and sinks to working as a mute burlesque clown and hitting the bottle. The problems crop up in the second hour, when Lewis finds a new career as a stand-up comic, loves and loses a society dame (Jeanne Crain), then marries and loses a chorus girl, played by Mitzi Gaynor. Both relationships fail for the same reason—Joe drinks too much and can’t connect—and neither relationship is very interesting.

  Nor, unfortunately, is Sinatra very interesting as Lewis the comedian. For one thing, as a stand-up comic he isn’t just not funny; he’s deadly. Over the years, Frank tried to do jokes in his nightclub acts, and they fell flat because they were just that: jokes. Humor, as anyone who’s ever watched a nervous young comedian debut on a late-night talk show will know, is based not just on material but on timing, which is an innate gift, and, every bit as important, the quick establishment of a character that the audience likes and wants to laugh to. Sinatra lacked the natural comic timing that his friend Dean Martin possessed in such abundance (and that Frank so envied); as for character, audiences felt they already knew him well: he was a hot-tempered singing genius, with barely a laid-back bone in his body. The jokes he made on a nightclub stage usually carried an undertone (or an overtone) of anger.

  This is somewhat true of the material he does as Joe E. Lewis in The Joker Is Wild, but the main problem with the portrayal is one of reverence. It’s not an interpretation so much as a bad imitation. Frank loved the older man—for his earthy, self-deprecating humor, for his deep flaws, for his wounds themselves. Talking to the Hollywood reporter Bob Thomas just before production on the film began, Sinatra said excitedly, “I’ll do some of Joe’s parody songs, and I’ll have a gravelly effect on the high notes, the way Joe does when he can’t reach them. I’ll also do some standup comedy routines, and I’ve done a pile of research on those. I watched Joe work several times at the Copacabana when I was in New York and picked up some routines from his writers that are real gassers. And I’ve been studying a film that was made of his act at the El Rancho Vegas.”

  Lewis was a homely man and a drunk, and his persona onstage was that of a poor schnook who just couldn’t help himself. (The persona was very close to reality: a compulsive and reckless gambler, he was deeply in debt to the owners of El Rancho, and his employment arrangement at the casino was a kind of indentured servitude.) Lewis had a rascally twinkle in his eye; you rooted for him even when the jokes fell flat. Frank could play drunk pretty well, but he couldn’t or w
ouldn’t efface his considerable sexual charge: watching him try to be Lewis, you feel all too strongly that he just isn’t. He’s far more convincing (and funny) at the beginning of the movie when he’s playing a nicer version of himself.

  —

  On the first of November, Sinatra returned to Capitol, at long last, to finish his album with the Hollywood String Quartet, Close to You.

  The title track was the last tune recorded that night. The 1943 number by Jerry Livingston, Carl Lampl, and Al Hoffman was particularly dear to Frank: it was the first song he’d ever recorded for Columbia Records (backed up by the Bobby Tucker Singers instead of instrumentalists, because of the American Federation of Musicians strike of 1942 to 1944). The 1943 “Close to You” had been vintage wartime Sinatra, soft and youthful and ardent, music to send bobby-soxers into moist ecstasies—and to remind troops far from home of all they were missing.

  The 1956 “Close to You” was no less ardent, but of course, with the almost forty-one-year-old Frank singing it, it took on different colors and depths. Against the sparse instrumental background, with its hints of Debussy and Ravel and led by Felix Slatkin’s ravishing violin, the song sounded simple but wasn’t. Rather than the young and yearning Sinatra, this was the middle-aged man, with his middle-aged voice, reaching out, not to the girl on the other side of the phonograph speaker, but to the magical lover—perhaps Ava, perhaps not—he seemed to keep trying to find:

  You’ll always be near, as though you were here by my side.

  Unlike In the Wee Small Hours, the album of fresh heartbreak, Close to You was gentle, even hopeful. It was astonishingly intimate singing, created in the one place where Frank Sinatra was capable of creating intimacy.