Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  —

  Close to You was released the following Monday. Capitol ad copy—“A New High in Intimate Song Styling”—hopefully touted the album’s strongest suit. And the reviews largely agreed. Playboy wrote, “Sinatra is still the chairman of the board at the handling of material like ‘Everything Happens to Me,’ ‘With Every Breath I Take,’ ‘It Could Happen to You,’ ‘Blame It on My Youth,’ ‘The End of a Love Affair,’ and the other seven quiet standards in the collection.” But there were reservations. “The writing for the quartet is unobtrusive and caressing enough,” the review continued, “but with a singer who pulsates as surely as Sinatra, his background must have a rhythmic swing, too, even in ballads; especially in ballads. The Hollywood String Quartet doesn’t.”

  The album did not fly out of the record stores. It wound up charting respectably, rising as high as number 5 on Billboard’s album chart, but it didn’t have staying power. After the blockbuster success of Songs for Swingin’ Lovers!—whose sales would only be surpassed by Sinatra’s 1993 Duets—Close to You had to be counted a commercial disappointment. Intimacy didn’t seem to be what the record-buying public wanted from Frank.

  —

  Earl Wilson and Walter Winchell might have palled around with Sinatra, Hedda Hopper might have batted her eyelashes at him, but no columnist felt quite as possessive about Frank—and indeed the entire Sinatra family—as the redoubtable, relentlessly mother-hen-ish Louella Parsons. Parsons, who in the second decade of the twentieth century had become America’s first gossip columnist, then the nation’s first movie columnist, was preeminent in her field and enormously powerful, owing her international stature and her forty million readers to a rock-solid relationship with her boss, the politically and socially conservative William Randolph Hearst. However, unlike her archrival, Hopper, who was fiercely Republican and anti-Communist, Parsons wasn’t inclined to be publicly political. Also unlike Hedda, Louella lacked a certain vindictiveness. She could scold her subjects, she could fall out with them, but she was keenly aware of the theatrical value of forgiving and forgetting. This came in especially handy with Frank Sinatra.

  Parsons, more a social conservative than a political one, consistently pushed family values in her columns, despite or because of the fact that she was based in a company town that relentlessly undermined family values even as it touted them in public. Accordingly—and wisely, and humanely—she forged an early (and visible) bond with the wronged woman in the Sinatra-Gardner affair, Nancy Barbato Sinatra. Parsons was a regular visitor at the Carolwood house; she wrote regularly about Nancy’s social doings and played up her “dates” (the divorcée apparently had no romantic interests besides her ex); she performed the real and valuable service of buttressing Big Nancy’s dignity. And she doted on the three children in print, whether she was writing about little Tina’s shyness or Nancy Sandra’s teen romances or the more elusive charms of the remote and wistful little boy who had been given his father’s name* but little of his time or attention.

  But on February 1, Louella triumphantly told the world that she had at last found something of substance to say about Frank’s son:

  I don’t like to call a child a prodigy, but 13-year-old Frank Sinatra, Jr. comes close to qualifying in that class. He played the piano for us at a buffet dinner Nancy Sinatra gave in honor of Lorayne Brock Busse and Joseph Hall, who will be married Feb. 14.

  Young Frankie doesn’t care for Rock ’N’ Roll, and says he’s never seen Elvis Presley. But he feels that Elvis came up too suddenly and that he should work as hard as Frank, Sr., Bing Crosby and Perry Como did for their success.

  We played Frank Sr.’s new record [Close to You], and Frank, Jr. congratulated Jimmy McHugh on “I Didn’t Sleep a Wink Last Night,” included in the album. Believe me, coming from Frankie that was a compliment.

  Joseph Schenck, Dorothy Manners, the William Perlbergs, the George Seatons, the Harry Brands and the Ed Leshins gathered around the piano to hear this talented boy play.

  It was a strange occasion: the middle-aged to elderly group of Old Guard Hollywood types (Parsons herself was now seventy-five; Joe Schenck, at seventy-eight, was about to retire from 20th Century Fox, the studio he’d co-founded a quarter century earlier), standing around the piano while the slick-haired boy played standards. The assemblage listening reverently to the absent master’s Voice. The precociously opinionated but oddly unemotional thirteen-year-old holding forth about the weakness of the new music and the strength of the standards. In a way, everything Frank Sinatra Jr. was to become was contained in that evening.

  —

  February was a strange blur. In Honolulu on the sixth, Frank’s long-planned tour of Australia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Japan ended before it began over an absurd airport misunderstanding. Traveling with Sanicola, Van Heusen, and five musicians, Sinatra claimed to have reserved sleeping berths for Hank, Jimmy, and himself aboard the fifteen-hour flight to Sydney; Qantas had only two berths for them. Frank turned on his heel and took his whole party back to Los Angeles. He wound up paying $75,000 for lost bookings and compensating his musicians for the loss of earnings. Fans Down Under were understandably furious. “CRANKY FRANKIE” GIVES US THE BIG BRUSHOFF, read the headline in the Sydney Daily Mirror.

  Something was gnawing at him. Was he still worried about his voice—worried enough, perhaps, to have canceled the Far East tour on a pretext? He had always been an enthusiastic consumer of alcohol; suddenly his drinking seemed to have turned more serious. On Valentine’s Day, at a big Friars birthday benefit for Jack Benny at the Beverly Hilton, Frank sat on the dais and polished off most of a bottle of Scotch in front of eight hundred eyewitnesses, including, besides the saintly Benny, Bob Hope, George Burns, George Jessel, Dean Martin, Tony Martin, Deborah Kerr, and Ronald Reagan.

  In the early hours of February 16, he was asleep in his Palm Springs bedroom when he was awakened by what sounded like an inebriated woman outside. “Daddy, darling!” she was calling. “Lover boy! Frankie, Frankie!” Before Frank knew what was happening, he heard a key in the lock, and the woman, along with two men, had entered the house, walked into his bedroom, and shone a flashlight into his face. One of them shoved a piece of paper into his hand. The three were Los Angeles police detectives, there to serve Sinatra with a subpoena to testify before a California state senate committee about his role in the Wrong-Door Raid of November 1954.

  Until September 1955, when the Hollywood scandal sheet Confidential published an exposé about the raid (“The Real Reason for Marilyn Monroe’s Divorce”), the LAPD had treated the incident as a burglary. But the magazine had pointed out inconsistencies in Sinatra’s account of the evening—he claimed that he’d stayed in the car while a group of his buddies smashed down the door they thought Monroe was behind; eyewitnesses claimed otherwise—and now there was talk that while the state senate investigated the methods and ethics of private investigators and scandal magazines, Frank could come up on perjury charges.

  It was all a huge headache. After talking with his lawyer Mickey Rudin, Sinatra said he was contemplating filing a damage suit against the LAPD. He got a court order requiring the police detectives to attend a deposition and explain themselves. Though their methods had been unorthodox, to say the least, their story held up in court. After the policewoman’s love calls had failed to roust Frank from his bed, they had gained access to the house, they testified, with a set of keys provided by “an informant.” “It’s a good thing I was asleep, or you could have gotten a bullet in you,” Frank told them. (He had had a pistol permit since 1947.) “If I had had a gun, you might have gotten shot,” one of the officers volleyed back. The Los Angeles police chief, William Parker, gave Frank a fishy look. “It seems to me,” Parker said drily, “that somebody is attempting to take the spotlight away from the real issue in the matter.”

  The newspapers made comic hay of the hearing, reporting that Frank had called the lady cop “a loud-mouthed blonde.” “I am not now nor have I ever been a
blonde,” the policewoman, Gloria Dawson, retorted. But it was all a distraction; the subpoena stood. On February 28, Frank, “snappily clad in a charcoal gray suit with black knit tie and dapper black hat,” according to the Los Angeles Times, walked into the State Building in downtown L.A. to testify before a committee headed by the state senator Fred H. Kraft about his activities on the tragicomic night of November 5, 1954.

  The black hat might have been an unfortunate choice.

  On his way through “the forest of newsreel and TV cameras,” Sinatra was handed another summons, by a lieutenant from the LAPD’s bunko squad, to appear in March before the county grand jury’s separate probe into the Wrong-Door Raid. The whole mess would distract him until well into July.

  With Martin Gang, the sober-faced senior partner of his law firm, sitting behind him, Frank raised his right hand—pinkie ring prominently displayed—and the hearing began. The main point of contention was whether Sinatra had, as the Confidential article reported, joined Joe DiMaggio and the others in breaking into the apartment where they expected to catch Marilyn Monroe in flagrante but instead found (and flash photographed) the startled and terrified thirty-seven-year-old legal secretary Florence Kotz. Under oath, Frank insisted he’d stood by his car smoking a cigarette throughout the whole misadventure.

  “Throughout his questioning, Sinatra was alternately flippant and serious,” the Times reported.

  Asked at the outset which DiMaggio he had reference to, he retorted, “There’s only one that I know.”

  When it was pointed out that Joe DiMaggio has several well-known brothers, the crooner amended his reply to:

  “Well, Joe’s probably the hottest one.”

  Asked if he once made a picture called “The Tender Trap,” the singer-actor responded readily, “It was a smash. Of course I remember.”

  Also to testify before the Kraft Committee that day was Phil Irwin, the young operative who on the night in question had been assisting the private detective Barney Ruditsky. (Ruditsky, who was recuperating from a heart attack, did not appear at the hearing.) Frank denied knowing Irwin. He said someone he didn’t recognize had come to the MGM set of The Tender Trap and told him that Ruditsky had sold the story to Confidential. “I don’t know why he came to tell me that,” Sinatra said. “I assume he, for some reason, was trying to play hero with me. I don’t know why.”

  Taking the stand after Frank, the baby-faced twenty-four-year-old said, “Almost all of Mr. Sinatra’s statements were false.”

  Irwin told the committee that in fact he was on a first-name basis with Frank; he had even been to his Wilshire Boulevard apartment. After the Confidential story on the Wrong-Door Raid came out, containing details only an insider would have known, the young investigator immediately realized that Ruditsky (whose employ he had left) had sold the story to the scandal sheet, but was fearful of the consequences if Sinatra suspected Irwin of the betrayal. Irwin testified that he went to see Frank on the MGM set of The Tender Trap and swore he wasn’t to blame. Frank believed him, Irwin said, and agreed with his contention that Ruditsky was responsible. According to the young investigator, Sinatra then told him that if there were any further questions about the raid, Irwin should say that he, along with DiMaggio and everyone else involved, had all been at a party at Frank’s house.

  The state senator Edwin Regan, a member of the committee, looked back and forth between the two men and said, “There is perjury apparent here.”

  More than perjury was apparent. Young Irwin was terrified. After he’d reported his side of the story to the committee’s investigator, he’d been beaten up by six thugs on a Highland Park street corner. When the committee asked him if he thought Sinatra was connected with the beating, Irwin said he had no evidence to that effect.

  “Do you still fear him?” the committee’s counsel John Arden asked.

  “Still very much so.”

  “What do you fear?”

  “I’m afraid of being beaten up again.”

  “Aside from being beaten up, have you no other fears?” Arden asked.

  Irwin shrugged and thought for a moment. “Yes,” he said. “I have other fears.”

  —

  Around the time of the hearing, Louella spotted Frank sitting in a corner at Romanoff’s with Jack Entratter. “Frankie looked as if he had the weight of the world on his shoulders,” she wrote.

  The Wrong-Door Raid might have been the least of it.

  —

  He got off. Not quite scot-free, but he got off nevertheless, in part through the expert ministrations of Gang and Rudin, and perhaps those of Sidney Korshak, the all-powerful Chicago lawyer (his clients at various times included Al Capone, Sam Giancana, and Jimmy Hoffa) famed for being able to untie the knottiest situations with a single phone call. During Frank’s fifty-minute testimony before the grand jury in March, he displayed some of the same insouciance he had shown the state committee. When the district attorney asked how he could account for the stark discrepancies between his story and Phil Irwin’s, Sinatra answered, “Who are you going to believe, me or a guy who makes his living kicking down bedroom doors?”

  The DA elected not to pursue an indictment against Frank. “There is definitely a bald conflict in the testimony,” he said. “But the transcript falls short in its present form of showing the complete elements of a perjury.” The result was seen as an implied criticism of the LAPD for failing to act at the outset of the case.

  Yet even without an indictment, the whole episode was a very public black eye for Sinatra and the end of his friendship with DiMaggio, who ducked the state committee hearing (he managed to be in New York at the time) and felt ever afterward that in underwriting and encouraging the Wrong-Door Raid, Frank had made him look bad in order to get into Marilyn Monroe’s good graces, and her bed.

  —

  At the end of the 1955 Time cover story on Sinatra, Frank had been quoted as saying, “I’m going to do as I please. I don’t need anybody in the world. I did it all myself.”

  The problem was, Frank Sinatra had never said these words: some enterprising editor at Time had simply made them up, to round out the story nicely and put a point on its thesis. Accordingly, Frank did not have a warm spot in his heart for Time magazine or for its Hollywood correspondent Ezra Goodman, who had nominally written the piece. Thus, when Goodman showed up one day on the set of Pal Joey—to interview Kim Novak for a Time cover story—Frank spotted him and walked away from the camera. “He informed director George Sidney that either Sinatra or Goodman was leaving the set, which was simply not big enough for the two of us,” Goodman recalled.

  The fact that I was there to see Novak and not Sinatra was beside the point. Inevitably, I left the set.

  Studio boss Harry Cohn received me in his office. He was sympathetic. “But what can I do?” he said helplessly. “We’re doing a big musical number with all the stars and if Sinatra walks we’ll be out a day’s shooting.” So I saw Novak away from the set of Pal Joey. The next day I found out that, although I had left the set, Sinatra had walked out anyway, thereby fouling up production for the day and costing Columbia a small fortune.

  Everybody survived. Goodman got his story, and Cohn got his movie, Frank having returned to the set and completed what Tom Santopietro calls “the last great musical of his career.”

  Pal Joey really was something like great, or two-thirds great. In playing a cocky heel of a nightclub singer, Sinatra was edging very close to reality. With his lined face, his shameless eye for the main chance, and his unapologetically unleashed libido, Joey Evans looks an awful lot like the Frank Sinatra of 1957, minus the millions and the overweening power of course. The fact that Joey is down-and-out at the beginning of the story is a necessary contrivance, a quick nod at dramatic necessity. He may be down-and-out, but from the word go he sure can sing the hell out of (and Nelson Riddle can arrange the hell out of) those great Rodgers and Hart tunes. And—until about two-thirds of the way through the film—the fact that the chara
cters vocalize in show-business settings, rather than just breaking into song wherever and whenever, gives Pal Joey a smooth and powerful momentum. You believe what’s happening on-screen, and details like the tough byplay between Joey and Mike (Hank Henry), the hard-to-charm nightclub manager, lend the movie real grit. As does the studio’s wise decision to make extensive use of actual San Francisco exteriors (giving Pal Joey a big leg up, in this regard, over Guys and Dolls and The Man with the Golden Arm).

  As does the picture’s sheer sex. Frank’s famous sandwich comment about taking second billing between Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak might have been playfully crude, but to watch the three of them at work in Pal Joey is to understand exactly what he was talking about. The auburn-haired thirty-eight-year-old Hayworth and the blond twenty-four-year-old Novak are glorious opposites, and the forty-one-year-old Sinatra plays perfectly against them, and vice versa. When Joey remarks to Linda (Novak) that she’d look better out of those silk pajamas (though she looks pretty terrific in them), you get an idea where the movie is going. When he pressures the stuffy Vera (Hayworth) to reveal her stripteaser past at a charity auction, and when she reluctantly—but quite beautifully—does so in the musical number “Zip” (choreographed by the great Hermes Pan), you’re certain. In her immortal “Put the Blame on Mame” in 1946’s Gilda, Hayworth memorably took off nothing but her gloves, but forever set masculine pulses racing. In “Zip,” she takes off nothing at all, yet with a shrug of those exquisite shoulders and a flick of those hips she shows she’s still got It.

  The sex in Pal Joey is all suggestion, which of course is the sexiest kind. When Joey sings “The Lady Is a Tramp” to Vera, the acting is all in her eyes—she’s first outraged, then intrigued, then hot and bothered—and it’s perfect. When the two of them dance, and she takes his hand afterward and says, “Come now, beauty,” the thermometer has officially hit the boiling point. The same is true whenever the camera simply lingers on Novak’s killer cheekbones and abandoned gaze. The movie’s ludicrous ending—after a corny dream ballet, Vera blithely gives up Joey to Linda (who mouths “thank you”), and Joey and Linda literally stroll off into a Technicolor sunset—says more about marketing than it does about the great work of all concerned.