Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  Frank with his Pal Joey co-stars Kim Novak and Rita Hayworth. Sinatra happily yielded his top billing for the picture. “It’s okay to make it Hayworth/Sinatra/Novak,” he said. “I don’t mind being in the middle of that sandwich.” (Credit 7.1)

  Frank’s previous close-to-real-life role, as the über-swinger Charlie Reader in 1955’s Tender Trap, was a hit with moviegoers because it was a kind of cartoon: Charlie was the untrammeled character a fearful and restricted America wanted and needed Sinatra to be. But The Tender Trap was pure artifice (and pure saccharine), an MGM product through and through. Two years on, Pal Joey, Frank’s second outing as a producer (after Johnny Concho), was a tougher, darker, sexier piece of work—a movie for grown-ups. And Sinatra is a grown-up in it. (The new lines around his eyes, the hints of hooding in the lids, are a harbinger of the fuller, older face to come.) Joey Evans almost entirely lacked a central element in most of Frank’s screen work to date: ingratiation. If Hollywood had made him play the self-effacing Nathan Detroit rather than the smooth Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls, he now had the wherewithal to confer the latter role on himself. More than that. In his eyes, on-screen and in life, there was a new look of command: he wasn’t high-paid help anymore; he was, as his friends and hangers-on called him, the Leader.

  —

  “Lauren Bacall, whom the whole town likes and respects for the way she made Bogie’s last days happier, is starting to get out in the less conspicuous places,” the Behind the Scenes in Hollywood column noted, anonymously, on April 2. “She was at the Peacock Lane with Adolph Green, Irving Lazar and Frank Sinatra to hear pianist Errol Garner.”

  It wouldn’t do, yet, for the two of them to go out alone; these things had to be handled delicately.

  —

  Sinatra and Riddle had reached a curious juncture in their great collaboration. After finishing the sublime Close to You, they’d closed out 1956 on an undistinguished note: in early December, Frank had recorded a heart-sinkingly pallid “Young at Heart” imitation called “Your Love for Me” (“It’s fabulous, it’s fantasy, it knocks me out tremendously/Your love for me”) and a charming if superficial bopper, “Can I Steal a Little Love?” Riddle arranged both, and not on one of his best days. He and Sinatra then hadn’t made it back to Capitol Studios until mid-March, and they didn’t do much better upon their return. The two tracks Frank laid down on the fourteenth were a bright trifle called “So Long, My Love” and the pleasant but unmemorable “Crazy Love.” Sammy Cahn had penned the lyrics for both; the composers, however, were neither Jule Styne nor Jimmy Van Heusen but Lew Spence (who was capable of better) and Phil Tuminello, the writer of “Can I Steal a Little Love?”

  All singer-arranger collaborations, even the great ones, have their highs and lows: it wasn’t that Sinatra-Riddle had gone stale but rather that Frank, in his restless search for hit singles—in which he was aided by Hank Sanicola, Voyle Gilmore, Jimmy Van Heusen, and others—had made some dicey choices along the way. The great Riddle had had to arrange some not-so-great tunes. But Frank’s eternal restlessness was of a piece with his great artistic imagination: even if his dazzling streak with Riddle had remained perfectly unbroken, it also makes perfect sense that he would begin looking for a new sound in the mid-1950s. And a new sound meant a new arranger.

  “Without intending any slight to Riddle, [Sinatra] had at least two good reasons for turning to Billy May and Gordon Jenkins,” Friedwald writes.

  First, he didn’t want to be “married” to any one particular arranger’s sound; he feared that ten years earlier he had relied too heavily on Stordahl and had been chained to one approach when his audiences tired of the Sinatra-Stordahl style. Like Nat King Cole, who wisely switched from a small combo to solo microphone when his trio was at the very height of its popularity, Sinatra knew that the time to switch to something new was before what he was currently doing had worn out its welcome. Second, as early as 1956, Sinatra had begun to think about not only controlling but also owning his recorded performances outright. Whether he could achieve that in conjunction with Capitol or if he needed to go elsewhere, he seems to have anticipated wanting a brand-new sound to distinguish the new venture.

  Sinatra might not have intended to slight Riddle, but that was the way Riddle took it. His teaming with Frank had rocketed the singer back to the summit of the popular-music world, and Frank paid back Riddle in kind. “Sinatra took good care of Nelson,” Alan Livingston said. “[He] would not work with anybody else. Riddle was his man. And Frank was very protective of him: he took Nelson on the road with him and did everything he could for him. And Nelson was delighted because he emerged far bigger than he had been before that…Sinatra took him with him, really.”

  Then—just for the moment—Frank let him go.

  “Frank used Nelson for many albums until one day he decided on Gordon Jenkins,” the music publisher and Sinatra friend Frank Military said. “I remember Nelson calling me and saying, ‘What did I do? What’s the matter?’ I said, ‘Frank just wants a different sound.’ But Nelson was really upset about it.”

  Frank had known both May and Jenkins since the big-band days; he turned to Jenkins first for very specific reasons. In addition to being an arranger, the quirky, multitalented midwesterner was a pianist, a record producer, a recording-company executive, and an extremely successful songwriter. Soon after leaving Dorsey and making his big move to California, Frank had performed Jenkins’s tune “San Fernando Valley” on the radio. It was a beautiful, upbeat song, and at twenty-seven Sinatra invested it with an irresistible optimism and sense of possibility:

  I’ll forget my sins

  I’ll be makin’ new friends

  Where the West begins,

  And the sunset ends.

  Direct emotion was key to Gordon Jenkins’s artistic sensibility: old-fashioned sentimentality was no sin to him. He was a left-handed (literally) American original, a man of many parts, by turns warm and reserved, effusive and misanthropic. Born in Missouri in 1910, he had bounced all over the music business. In his twenties, he played piano and wrote charts for the bandleader-composer Isham Jones, orchestrated in Broadway and Hollywood, and then, after World War II, went to work as a producer-arranger-conductor for Decca Records. Throughout, he was also a highly prolific composer, writing such hits as “Goodbye” and “Blue Prelude” (used, respectively, as theme songs by the bandleaders Benny Goodman and Woody Herman), “Homesick, That’s All,” and “P.S. I Love You.” In 1946, Decca released his suite Manhattan Tower, a groundbreaking composition—some have called it an early concept album—based on the life and loves of a fictional young man, a sort of twentieth-century young Werther, who comes to New York from the hinterlands seeking love and meaning. The highly expressive (and often excessive) work contained original songs, mood music, and spoken narration: it all seemed new and daring, and critics and record buyers alike loved it. Over the next decade, Jenkins rewrote and expanded the piece; when he moved from Decca to Capitol in 1956, his new label reissued it.

  As an arranger, Jenkins also hewed to old-fashioned values: he loved strings—lots of strings—and he disliked dissonance and modern chords. No Ravel and Debussy for him; he was a Tchaikovsky man all the way. As a musical mind, he was far closer to Axel Stordahl than to Nelson Riddle.

  And in truth, Jenkins the arranger had been on Frank Sinatra’s mind since 1946, when Frank heard some of the string-heavy orchestrations he had done for Judy Garland; more recently, he had admired the work the arranger had done with Nat King Cole, especially Cole’s recent number 1 album Love Is the Thing.

  Sinatra had, as music aficionados say, big ears. His tastes in classical music ranged from the impressionist textures of Debussy and Ravel to the complex harmonies of Ralph Vaughan Williams to the Slavonic lyricism of Reinhold Glière to, even, the dissonances of Stravinsky. But he also felt a strong attachment to—and an ethnic identification with—the rich emotionality of Puccini, and he felt this same vibration in Gordon Jenkins’s arranging. Fr
ank loved Nelson Riddle’s genius, but he also loved straightforward sentiment and simple chords and heavy layers of strings every bit as much as Jenkins did, and in the early spring of 1957—for at least one major reason, if not more—he needed musical swaddling. The writer Bruce Jenkins, Gordon Jenkins’s son, contends that it was more than artistic restlessness that moved Frank to seek a new and more overtly emotional collaborator. “Why not have time in your life to really dwell on [sadness] in a dark and quiet room?” he writes in his book about his father. “There should be no fear of crying, no harm in appreciating a brand of despair so vividly captured in words and music. That’s what happened when Sinatra and my father got together. That’s the sole reason Frank ever sought him out.”

  What was the source of the despair? Sinatra was in strange emotional territory in early 1957: having gained the world, he was feeling its weight. He was also more worried about the faculty at the center of his existence than he let on to lovers, close friends, or collaborators. “He felt,” Jonathan Schwartz says, “he was beginning to lose his voice, not trusting his own instrument.”

  Sinatra with the arranger Gordon Jenkins. Deprecated by some, Jenkins wrote openly emotional arrangements that appealed to the sentimentalist in Frank. (Credit 7.2)

  Frank Military described to Schwartz a crucial April 1957 session on the album that Sinatra and Jenkins had just begun making together, Where Are You? One of the songs Frank was to record that night was a tune that meant a great deal to him: “Lonely Town,” by Leonard Bernstein, with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. In 1949, when he was singing and dancing in a sailor suit—and not feeling very good about himself—in the MGM musical On the Town, Sinatra had eagerly looked forward to performing Bernstein’s complex hymn to urban solitude. But the studio had yanked the song (along with much of the rest of Bernstein’s score) at the last minute, feeling it wasn’t commercial enough. Frank had been furious.

  This April night, then, was a chance at redemption—if not revenge. Unknown to everyone but Frank, it was also a vocal test. In some deep part of himself, he wasn’t sure if his voice was what it had been. After he recorded the song, Schwartz says, “The room emptied, and he asked the booth to play it back. He stood by one of the walls, [leaning] on one of the railings, and just held on to the railing and listened, and he heard the truth. He was even better. He was so grateful to Jenkins.”

  —

  Frank had huge admiration for Nelson Riddle, but Riddle, with his dour and professorial mien, was difficult to warm up to. He was like a great research chemist, going into his lab and coming back with complex formulas that worked brilliantly. Jenkins, on the other hand, gave Sinatra something visceral. “Frank sure loved Gordon,” the drummer Nick Fatool said. Why? The pianist Bill Miller, himself the possessor of a highly subtle musical mind, once hazarded an educated guess. “There’s a certain squareness about Frank; I say that affectionately,” he said. “He has an old-fashioned side, and Gordon Jenkins represents that. As a singer he doesn’t hear the harmonies the way we would. He hears those high singing strings—that was Gordon’s gimmick.”

  To listen to Where Are You? is to hear those singing strings in abundance—and also to hear a new side to Sinatra’s voice that at first had some of his deeper listeners concerned. “When I first heard it,” Jonathan Schwartz recalled, “I said, ‘What’s the matter? Is there something wrong?’ It just seemed there was something different. Not the guy we knew on Wee Small Hours, Swing Easy, Songs for Swingin’ Lovers, Swingin’ Affair and so on. This was a different sound. And it was even more adult.”

  The difference is palpable. Compare the superbly assured vocals on a couple of tracks from A Swingin’ Affair! or Close to You with any song from Where Are You?—say the melancholy title number by Harold Adamson and Jimmy McHugh—and you can hear it in a second. Jenkins’s strings are singing, all right; they’re right up front (the fact that Where Are You? was the first Sinatra album in stereo might have emphasized the strings’ frontality). The effect is a sheltering of Frank’s voice, which has a roughness and a slight quaver that has never been present before. A new boundary has been crossed.

  On “Lonely Town,” the tune he was so concerned about, an ensemble of horns, rather than strings, leads in rather triumphantly, with echoes of Bernstein, Comden, and Green’s “New York, New York” (not the Kander and Ebb “Theme from New York, New York,” popularized by Sinatra in the 1980s), before Frank’s vocal turns melancholy:

  A town’s a lonely town when you pass through,

  And there is no one waiting there for you.

  It’s a brilliant vocal, and he had every right to be pleased with it. But this truly isn’t any longer the Sinatra of 1955 and 1956. If Nelson Riddle had been glad to hear “the rather angular person” replace the romantic Voice of the 1940s, this was a more angular person than ever. Where Are You?’s cover painting shows a sweatered, pensive-looking Frank, his mouth and chin leaning on (and obscured by) his left hand, which holds a cigarette emitting a meditative-looking trail of smoke. It was one of many thousands he’d smoked to date: his voice had every reason to sound rougher.

  That slight quaver was another matter. Surely it was intentional—perhaps, like the catch he’d once put in his voice to drive the bobby-soxers wild, a dramatic device, in this case to convey the album’s sense of sadness? Or did it somehow reflect the vocal and emotional uncertainty that now and then overwhelmed him that spring?

  —

  Early in 1957, Charlie Morrison, the colorful, white-haired owner of the colorful Sunset Strip nightclub Mocambo, died. Mocambo, with its decor of exotic birds in glass cages and its dance floor full of movie stars eyeing each other until all hours, had been the site of Sinatra’s Los Angeles solo debut in 1943. In late April, to benefit Morrison’s widow and to try to help keep the place open (Vegas was killing the L.A. clubs), Frank did a ten-night stand there gratis. It was a generous gesture, but it was also a smart public-relations move in the wake of the Wrong-Door hearings. “Not only did it turn the tide of publicity in Frank’s favor, it also afforded the movie colony a closeup look at the Sinatra magic,” reported a non-bylined piece on April 23.

  As someone pointed out, the guy comes out on the night club floor and defies you not to like him. While his voice is past its prime, his style is better than it ever was. He sings each song as if he had just grasped the meaning of the words. His ballads are great and now he can handle faster tunes with rare skill, something he lacked in his earlier days.

  The piece might have lacked a byline for a reason: fear. After all, there amid the praise was that “past its prime” comment, probably a reflection on Sinatra’s recent bouts of real or contrived laryngitis. Before the start of the charity run, Frank had consulted his publicists on which journalists planned to attend, and he crossed off several names: “Four long-time viewers of the Movietown scene, three with national news syndicates and one with Variety, were blacked out for the opening by Frankie because, I’m told, of old feuds,” wrote the columnist Erskine Johnson, who himself had been barred for having had the nerve, in 1946, to criticize Sinatra’s temperamental behavior on the set of It Happened in Brooklyn.

  Then he had been an MGM contract player and a singer with a fading reputation. Now all he had to do was check off names on a list.

  Only Sinatra could so seamlessly have compounded charity with vendetta.

  Power might have conferred coolness, but as Jimmy Van Heusen noted in a new Look magazine profile of Frank, “His boiling point is close to the surface.” The first part of Bill Davidson’s three-part piece appeared in the May 14 issue: Frank took one look at it and boiled. The piece was extensively reported, psychologically probing, and deeply personal, and—as would be the case with Gay Talese’s great Esquire profile of Frank in 1966—the writer never met with the subject.

  Not that actually sitting down and talking with Sinatra would have netted Davidson any deep insights. As long as an approved journalist—an Earl Wilson, say, or a Walter
Winchell or a Bob Thomas—made happy talk about approved subjects (singing and movie acting), everything was fine. If not, not. And the approved list seemed to be shrinking all the time.

  Davidson tried hard to meet with Frank, but there was a twist: in 1955, Sinatra had contracted with Look to collaborate with his friend the sportswriter Jimmy Cannon on his life story and had taken a sizable advance for the project. The story never came to fruition after Cannon sent Frank a list of questions in advance, and Frank, seeing that some of the questions were personal—as might be expected with a life story—changed his mind.

  He hadn’t returned Look’s money, though, and so in early 1957 Davidson drew the unenviable assignment of approaching Sinatra with the aim of reviving the project. “My mission was to try to persuade him to commit a few words to paper, with my help, if necessary,” Davidson recalled. “This offended Sinatra’s dignity and he issued an ukase to his subjects to the effect that I was to be treated as if I did not exist. I had incurred The Leader’s disfavor and I was now a nonperson.”

  The writer finally tracked Frank down in the cocktail lounge of the Sands, surrounded by a bevy of beautiful women. At first, Sinatra refused even to look at Davidson, but eventually his curiosity got the better of him, and he sent over Jack Entratter, the hotel-casino’s president and entertainment manager, to see what Davidson wanted. Entratter reported Davidson’s answer to Frank, then relayed Frank’s reply to Davidson, and so on. This process continued for almost an hour until Sinatra lost patience with it. But he could honestly say afterward that he had never spoken a word to Look’s writer.