Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  —

  Unlike the Kilgallen Sunday-supplement series on Frank, Davidson’s profile had no nasty edge; it lacked the stylistic excesses and high-handedness of the Time cover story. What it mostly had was exhaustive documentation of Sinatra’s power, success, and mercurial nature:

  There is Sinatra the devoted family man and Sinatra the libertine. There is the Sinatra who is a fine amateur painter and an expert on Puccini and Berlioz, and the Sinatra who likes to hang around with bums and gangsters. Even his friends are confused by his many faces. They [Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen, respectively] call him “The Man With the Golden Charm,” but they also call him “The Monster.” He is completely unpredictable, but his predominant moods seem to be those of anger and self-doubt.

  The profile interspersed descriptions of some of Frank’s more spectacular good works, such as his extensive financial and moral support of Lee J. Cobb when Cobb suffered a heart attack and a severe depression, with accounts of his bad behavior and colorful love life. It contained many facts and figures about Sinatra’s movie deals and record sales. It detailed his feuds with Jackie Gleason, Judy Garland, Phil Silvers, and Jule Styne. It quoted psychological experts on the sources of his emotional problems.

  What it left out was, exactly or approximately, what it was that happened when Frank Sinatra opened his mouth to sing.

  —

  Nevertheless, Frank saw the trees instead of the forest. The part of himself that insisted on distracting himself from his art rose to the current distraction. Against the advice of his lawyers, he brought a $2.3 million libel lawsuit against Bill Davidson and Look, claiming that the profile had portrayed him as a “neurotic, depressed, and tormented person with suicidal tendencies and a libertine.” He should have sued them, if such a thing were possible, for failing to portray him as a great artist.

  —

  Whatever dyspepsia Frank might have been feeling, though, the completion of Where Are You? and the release of A Swingin’ Affair! seem to have dispelled it. On May 20—having wooed back Nelson Riddle, bruised feelings and all—he lavished two and a half hours of a singles session (three other songs were recorded that night; it scarcely matters which) on a new number by Cy Coleman and lyricist Carolyn Leigh. The song was the great “Witchcraft,” and the time was well spent. From Riddle’s shimmering, downward-spiraling string intro (we’ve definitively left Gordon Jenkins territory) to the sensual, glance-over-the-shoulder flute outro, the tune is a finger-snapping dream of a sound, the perfect marriage of music, lyric, arrangement, and vocal—and quite simply one of the sexiest numbers ever recorded. Sinatra could sing the hell out of a torch song; no one else could make you feel love’s ache quite so piercingly. But “Witchcraft” was the perfect antidote to the melancholy of Where Are You? and to the tyranny of love songs in general.

  Proceed with what you’re leadin’ me to.

  It was pure abandon: rapturous, guiltless. It was everything the 1950s wanted but couldn’t have—all the fun that everyone knew Frank was having all the time.

  * * *

  * Little Frankie’s name was officially Franklin Wayne Emanuel Sinatra, but he was saddled at an early age with the easier to remember—but far harder to bear—moniker of Frank Sinatra Jr.

  8

  After some libation, the transformation

  From boy to beast.

  —SAMMY CAHN LYRIC ON THE OCCASION OF FRANK SINATRA’S FORTY-SECOND BIRTHDAY

  However miffed Nelson Riddle might have felt about Frank’s musical infidelity, that June the arranger accompanied Sinatra and twenty-six cream-of-the-crop studio musicians on a seven-city tour to El Paso, Albuquerque, Salt Lake City, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco. Frank, of course, had been feeling his own deep insecurity. The successful completion of Where Are You? might have temporarily allayed his vocal worries, but if the June 9 concert at Seattle’s old Civic Auditorium is any indication, he still had cause for concern.

  A recording made of the second show of that Sunday night reveals a Sinatra in fine spirits and enjoying a splendid rapport with a very appreciative audience; it also shows a singer who’s not only ambivalent about some of the material he’s performing but nervous enough about his vocal abilities to copy his pal Joe E. Lewis and have a slug of booze onstage. During the intro to “When Your Lover Has Gone,” Frank calls out for “Herman,” and then, a moment later, thanks him for something (a glass, no doubt). Then he sings the verse of the song—

  The dreams that you cherish so often may perish,

  And leave you with castles

  —and then suddenly breaks off. “I’m getting larger, aren’t I?” he asks the audience impishly. The crowd laughs delightedly. “Those are large glasses you got,” Sinatra says in a rascally voice. “I must be awful large at this point.”

  He then resumes singing, giving a smooth and feeling rendition of the song. Sinatra singing well is awful large. But “When Your Lover Has Gone” isn’t a particularly rangy number, and two tunes later, on “My Funny Valentine,” it becomes all too clear why Frank was trying to steady his nerves: he was feeling a breathtaking—literally—uncertainty about hitting the high notes. His doubts were justified. To hear Frank’s voice simply give out on the high D of “Stay, little Valentine, stay” is like watching a Wallenda fall off the wire: heartbreaking, unbelievable.

  Then again, this must be taken in context. The vast majority of us know Sinatra best from his studio recordings, which he polished to perfection. Those fortunate enough to have seen him perform onstage would know that Frank could hit clams like any musician—except that when he did it, there was no one to fix him with an ice-blue stare and say, “Where you workin’ next week?”

  Remarkably, though, he was in high spirits throughout that Seattle show, his good humor seeming to help his voice gain in strength. After the glitch on “Valentine,” he comes up with his familiar save—“I think I got a shot glass stuck in my throat”—and then, singing the verse of Rodgers and Hart’s “Glad to Be Unhappy”—“And look at yourself, do you still believe the rumor that romance is simply…”—he simply whistles the high note, instead of singing the word “grand,” then calmly tells the audience, “It’s safer that way.” He performs the rest of the song beautifully. In the second half of the line, “But for someone you adore, it’s a pleasure to be sad” (italics mine), his voice drops to a supremely tender whisper, telling us more, in six words, about who he really is than any three-part magazine profile could.

  But of course he was so many people, and in front of an audience he could be several of them. His stage patter ranges from the stilted to the vulgar to the awkwardly sincere, with stops in between. He sets up his great saloon song, Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s “One for My Baby,” with a stiff little monologue that tries—but thankfully fails—to undercut the tune’s deep emotion: “Now, you know that it’s pretty difficult when you got this kind of problems. Now, let’s face it—wars, you can win. But this is a different kind of thing. Oh, it’s moider, doc, I tell ya. Shake hands with the vice president of the club.”

  He gives his pianist, Bill Miller, a zinger for coming in too early on the intro to “Tender Trap”—“You’re pretty impatient, aren’t you? Charlie?”—then proceeds to forget the lyric, substituting a bunch of da-da-duh-dums for one of the verses.

  And, introducing his hit single “Hey! Jealous Lover,” he declares, “I absolutely and unequivocably detest this song.” He then detours into a weird Freudian ditty—“Trow your mudder off the train, but quick, but quick”—before complaining, “Oh, that pizza’s murder.”

  Of course he detested “Jealous Lover.” If his greatest strength as an artist was to plumb the truths of the great songs he sang, how could he not abhor a catchy but cheesy rhythm-and-blues knockoff with a lyric that included lines such as

  I was much too busy, baby, bein’ faithful to you.

  Had he ever been faithful to a single one of his lovers? Acting a role in a movie was one thing; pretending
to be somebody entirely different onstage was another matter. (It was the reason his corny, elaborate setup for “One for My Baby,” with the business about the “young fellow” supposedly complaining to the bartender, fell so flat: what makes the song great, every time, is that we know in our heart of hearts that it’s really Sinatra singing it.)

  But by the time he gets to his second-to-last number, the great Dorsey-era swinger “Oh! Look at Me Now,” he’s found his voice and with it his ease onstage. He introduces the 1941 song—“I think you’ll recognize this if you’re over twenty years old,” he says, then growls, “If you’re not, you should be”—and then, as the band strikes up Riddle’s thrilling arrangement, he blurts, in a moment of rare, gee-whiz honesty, “This thing brings back such wonderful memories for me.”

  Until the end of his life, Frank would wreathe his Dorsey days with a rosy nostalgia, whatever the realities. It wasn’t just his youth that Frank romanticized; it was the time before he’d had to stand, alone, astride the world.

  He gave an ecstatic, goose-bumps-raising performance that night in Seattle, and when he sang,

  I’m not the guy who cared about love,

  And I’m not the guy who cared about fortunes and such,

  he sang with a fond smile at the dream of that poor but happy guy he used to be.

  —

  In early June, Ava was in Mexico City, wrapping The Sun Also Rises, in which she played the manslayer Lady Brett Ashley, alongside Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power, and a very young Robert Evans, in his first major movie role, as the bullfighter Pedro Romero. Accompanying her on location was Walter Chiari.

  While she was in Mexico, she finally took the opportunity to file divorce papers against Frank, charging desertion and absence for more than six months. He did not contest the charges, and on July 5 the Mexican court issued a divorce decree. There was a strange air of anticlimax about the news, which failed to generate headlines in the American press.

  Ava would never marry again.

  —

  The day before, on the Fourth of July, Sinatra and a group of friends had set sail on a chartered 102-foot yacht, the Celeste, for a cruise down the Baja California coast. The event was carefully kept out of the press. Among those aboard was Lauren Bacall, whom Frank had been quietly squiring to dinner parties and his recording sessions for the past few months. It was during this cruise, Bacall later recalled, that their relationship became romantic, even though, at one of the ports along the coast, Sinatra “became drunk and abusive with a waiter, which, Bacall shrugged, was par for the course.”

  In any case, he was now officially a single man and would remain so for nearly a decade.

  In quieter moments out on the water, Frank, always on the lookout for potential movie properties, read the script of a comedy then running on Broadway. The play, A Hole in the Head, was about the financial and domestic difficulties of a widower raising a young son and trying to run a Miami hotel. As soon as Sinatra got back to Los Angeles, he had his agent at William Morris, Bert Allenberg, option the play for $200,000—big money that the $3 million from his recent ABC TV deal made a lot easier to spend.

  —

  In expansive spirits, Frank returned to Capitol Studio A in July to record a Christmas album. Feeling that Yuletide music required an old-fashioned, honestly sentimental touch, he once again tapped Gordon Jenkins to conduct and arrange. The results, with Sinatra backed by a twenty-two-piece orchestra and a twenty-five-member chorus (the Ralph Brewster Singers), were impeccable. As Friedwald points out, on “The Christmas Song,” “Mistletoe and Holly,” and “The First Noel,” among others, Frank “seems to be reaching back to the innocent sound he used on his first Christmas concept set, done a decade earlier with Axel Stordahl.” And on the sacred songs, such as “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing” and “Adeste Fidelis,” there was a new authority, even a majesty, to his voice.

  He had put his vocal difficulties behind him and created a holiday album for the ages, and when he wrapped up A Jolly Christmas from Frank Sinatra on July 17, he was in the mood to celebrate. “He threw a huge Christmas party for everyone,” Frank Military recalled. “It was incredible—catered food, drinks, everything. It was really something to see—Christmas in July!”

  It was also a rare occurrence. Despite Sinatra’s great esteem for the musicians who worked with him, “he rarely socialized with them outside of the studio setting,” as Charles Granata notes. “On the one hand, he respected and appreciated their talents and understood their importance to his career. On the other hand, there must have been some subconscious desire on his part to keep them at arm’s length, perhaps to insure that they would remain in awe of him.”

  The trombonist Milt Bernhart recalled, “Once in a while he did invite the musicians over to the Villa Capri restaurant after a record date. Even there he almost never made the rounds of the room, staying at his table in the back. We would approach him and say, ‘thanks,’ and he’d beam, and that was that.”

  On the other hand, Bernhart also remembered a mid-1950s party at Frank’s Coldwater Canyon house with about twenty musicians present, along with “three or four very important Hollywood people: Lauren Bacall, Adolph Green, Bill and Edie Goetz.” Sinatra spent hours with the instrumentalists, completely ignoring his other guests, who left one by one. “But this was his day with us, and I got the feeling that he enjoyed it—that it gave him a kick, making them wait. Only Sinatra would do that!” Bernhart said.

  Felix and Eleanor Slatkin, who’d become close friends with Frank in the mid-1940s, were a special case: Sinatra clearly saw them as equals—or possibly, because of their deep grounding in classical music, inhabitants of some higher cultural plateau. Their two young sons, Leonard and Fred, literally grew up around “Uncle Frank” in the Slatkin home and at Sinatra’s residences. Leonard Slatkin has clear memories, from the age of five or six, of Frank singing him and his brother to sleep.

  “We also were guests of his in Vegas quite often,” Slatkin says. “I remember my brother and I would be sitting out at the pool, and these announcements would come over a PA system—‘Such and such, please come to the office.’ And every so often, ‘Will Freddie and Lenny please come to see Mr. Sinatra?’ We were little. We didn’t know any different. It was all very sweet and very innocent. I think really that when you were a friend of his, you were a friend for life; if you were an enemy, you were an enemy for life.”

  Between Frank and his arrangers, on the other hand, there was purposeful distance. “During recording sessions with Sinatra, a magic takes place…between Frank and myself,” Gordon Jenkins recalled.

  It’s as close as you’re gonna get without being opposite sexes! I like to have him right in front of me, and I just never take my eyes off him, so it’s kind of a hard thing to describe. But there’s a definite mental connection between the two of you when it’s going down well…he lets loose—he’s all over the place when he’s going—he doesn’t hold anything back. It’s in his personal life that he holds back.

  Jenkins tried to stay away from Sinatra when they weren’t working together. “It’s a temptation to hang around him, ’cause he has so much to offer,” he said, “but I figure that we’ve gotten along fine by not being buddies, so when we get through at night, if he goes out the left door, I go out the right. I think it’s worked out fine.”

  With Nelson Riddle, it wasn’t even a matter of choice. Jenkins was capable of a certain midwestern bonhomie; he also possessed the confidence of a man of parts. He enjoyed a steady income from his songwriting royalties. Riddle, whose dry sense of humor was apparent to his friends but less so to outsiders, had no such luck. For all his brilliance, he was essentially an arranger for hire who now and then wrote a piece of music that sold (he had a couple of Top 40 hits in the mid-1950s with the lounge-y instrumentals “Lisbon Antigua” and “Port au Prince”) but mostly had to grind out charts at about $100 a pop—with no royalties. Until the end of his life, he would suffer a deep envy of the composer, conduct
or, and arranger Henry Mancini, who, although considered by some music aficionados a far lesser artist than Riddle, had a Midas-like ability to crank out award-winning movie and television scores (the themes to The Pink Panther and Peter Gunn) and mega-selling singles (“Moon River”). “Nelson said to me once,” Milt Bernhart recalled, “that he would have traded all those arrangements, for which he was paid a flat fee, for one song of Mancini’s. Just one song!”

  With his serious nature, a certain lack of self-assurance, and his fear of Sinatra, he projected a completely businesslike and self-protective demeanor in the recording studio that was a sharp contrast to Frank’s overweening self-confidence and nervous energy, his need to play to all present.

  “During their first several recording sessions Frank would make fun of Nelson without his realizing it, but the orchestra caught it,” the French horn player Vince DeRosa recalled. “He took advantage of his seriousness. Nelson was so serious that Sinatra would just kind of give him a jab. The musicians felt, ‘Jesus, this guy’s really nailing him.’ But Sinatra was that type, you know. However, obviously he had complete respect for him.”

  Riddle’s daughter Rosemary remembers attending some of her father’s recording sessions with Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Nat King Cole as a small girl in the mid-1950s. “Boy, would I see the entourage for Frank,” she says. “And it wasn’t like you were going to walk up to him. As generous as he was in many ways, this was serious business. Whereas if Ella saw me, it would be this warm, cozy feeling. And Dad and Nat were totally tight. Dad was more confident, I would imagine, at an Ella or a Nat date. He wasn’t waiting to hear [their reaction to an arrangement].”