Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  Sinatra’s reaction could be abrupt. The bass trombonist George Roberts told Riddle’s biographer Peter Levinson of several occasions “when Frank would walk in and ask Nelson to have the orchestra run down the arrangements they were about to record that night. ‘I was on dates when Frank didn’t like the charts [Roberts recalled]…He would say, “The date’s over. You’ll get paid,” and he walked out the door and that was the end. He wouldn’t really say why he didn’t like the charts, but you’d know why he was leaving.’ ”

  Small wonder that Riddle felt intimidated by Sinatra, but then, on some basic level, he allowed himself to be intimidated. “I think he never really appreciated his own talents,” Alan Livingston said.

  —

  Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin had first met when Frank introduced Dean and his partner, Jerry Lewis, to the audience at Martin and Lewis’s Copacabana premiere in 1948. From 1946 to 1956, while Frank’s career crashed and then miraculously rose again, Dean and Jerry were the biggest thing in show business—on TV, in the movies, and in live performance. Yet nobody predicted a comeback for Dean Martin after the 1956 breakup of Martin and Lewis: the smart money bet that the multitalented Jerry would flourish and Dean, who was widely viewed as merely Lewis’s straight man, would more or less vanish.

  It came close to happening. His records sold pretty well—he had hit singles in 1954 with “That’s Amore” and “Sway” and in 1956 with “Memories Are Made of This”—but the thing that had made him world famous was no more. In February 1957, Martin’s first movie after the breakup with Lewis, a romantic comedy unenticingly titled Ten Thousand Bedrooms—he co-starred with Anna Maria Alberghetti—was dead on arrival. The reviews were pallid. Martin was “an affable leading man,” Variety said, with “an easy way with a song.” Ticket buyers stayed away. Yet the next month, he opened in the Copa Room at the Sands, to far better notices. “If audience reaction is any criterion, Martin will be around long and strong as a single café entertainer and headliner,” Variety opined.

  In other words, he could keep playing Vegas indefinitely, but the greater world would be closed to him.

  In the meantime, though, Frank Sinatra never stopped believing in him. The two men had hit it off from the beginning, for complex reasons. Though on the surface it would have seemed Sinatra and Martin had much in common—both were magnetic Italian-American singer/actors with swinging reputations—in fact, they were different in more ways than they were similar, and their differences interested each man.

  Sinatra, a molten cauldron of oversensitivity and insecurity, had been an adored and abused only child and remained a conflicted mama’s boy. The man born Dino Paul Crocetti was the younger of two sons, but from childhood he seems to have lived in a world of his own. He was detached and ironic, imbued with a quality known in Italian as menefreghismo—in translation, not giving a fuck. His biographer Nick Tosches also speaks of a certain cultural trait: “the taciturn harboring close to the heart of any thought or feeling that ran too deeply…that wall of lontananza [distance] between the self and the world.” It was an old-world quality, cultivated among the peasantry, and one that Dean took in naturally on the Italian-American streets of Steubenville, Ohio, in the 1920s and 1930s. He also learned it directly from his abruzzese parents. As Jerry Lewis, who knew Gaetano and Angela Crocetti, recalled, “Dean’s mother and his father told him the following: One, ‘You’re going out into the real world; there is no one there that will care for you.’ Two, ‘Be sure that the money you have in your hand goes in your pocket.’ Three, ‘You cry, you’re a fag. You show any kind of warmth, and they will get closer to you. If you show them that you have your own persona you’re happy with, they will stay away.’ He was brought up with these ground rules. From a mother and a father—nice people. But from Italy, and ‘This is the first order of business—distance.’ ”

  Though both Sinatra and Martin had dropped out of high school in the tenth grade, Frank possessed a restless, ravening intellectual curiosity; Dean loved watching Westerns on TV and reading comic books. While Sinatra was short, slight, and magnetic more than handsome, Martin was tall, strong, and devastatingly good-looking, with an athlete’s easy grace. He had huge hands (he had briefly boxed professionally and had worked as a card dealer) and was a six-handicap golfer.

  But perhaps most impressive of all Dean’s gifts—and most enviable to Frank—was a natural flair for comedy. (What the audiences at the Sands were reacting to, besides Martin’s affability and easy way with a song, was his new shtick, borrowed from Joe E. Lewis: carrying a glass of what looked like Scotch onstage—it was apple juice—and acting drunk. The drunk act also dovetailed nicely with Dean’s natural emotional distance—as Jerry Lewis said, “If you make believe you’ve had a few…usually people will stay away.”) And one of the things Frank Sinatra, who was almost incapable of ad-libbing a comic line onstage, desperately wanted to be was funny.

  Frank envied and admired almost every one of Martin’s innate qualities, almost to the point of idolatry. “Sinatra was enthralled by Dean,” Tosches writes. “In his eyes, he saw the man he himself wanted to be. The racket guys sucked up to Dean, not the other way around. To Sinatra, who always seemed to be crying or killing himself over one broad or another, who always seemed to be dispatching others to do his dirty work, whose mammismo relationship with his mother was that of a little boy—to Sinatra, Dean was la cosa vera, the real thing, with la stoffa giusta, the right stuff.”

  As for Dean’s feelings about Frank—well, who knew? He certainly admired him as a singer. Yet, Tosches contends, Martin felt Sinatra “took it all so fucking seriously. He thought he was a fucking artist, a fucking god.” And while Frank’s charisma, volatility, and huge success in the 1950s made him a natural leader, with a group of followers and hangers-on who jumped at his every wish—and often flinched when his temper flared—Dean Martin wasn’t one of his followers. Martin followed nobody. He built his life around golf, and he liked to hit the links early, which meant going to bed early—far too early to be on Sinatra’s clock. When he was in town, he also liked to have dinner with his family. He doted on his children—as Frank did with his daughters but on more of a drop-in basis. Though (at Frank’s initiation) the two men’s paths crossed with increasing frequency in the mid-1950s, and though they now and then drank or gambled together, their time together was more about work than play.

  That spring, to the surprise of everyone (including himself), Dean landed a serious role alongside Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift in the World War II movie The Young Lions. The movie would do great things for him when it was released the following year; throughout 1957, his star ascended. NBC wanted him to host a thirteen-show TV variety program starting in the fall (given his increasing commitments, he negotiated the network down to six shows). Then he went to Europe to shoot the movie.

  Martin got along well with both Brando and Clift, who discovered that he was a natural actor. Monty Clift coached Dean through their dramatic scenes together, much as he’d done with Frank on From Here to Eternity. And unlike Frank, Dean enjoyed spending off-set time with Brando: in July, the two were sitting together in the café of a Paris hotel when Brando accidentally spilled a cup of scalding tea in his lap, burning his genitals so badly that he had to be briefly hospitalized.

  The incident was commemorated at a surprise coming-home party Frank threw for Dean upon the latter’s return to Los Angeles in August. For the occasion, a boisterous gathering at Villa Capri, Sammy Cahn, a close friend to both Sinatra and Martin, had written a handful of parody songs to be sung by Frank, including one, “Tea in Gay Paree” (to the tune of “Tea for Two”), based on Brando’s mishap.

  Martin and Brando might have gotten along fine, but Sinatra’s dislike for “Mumbles” was well-known, and Sinatra was, after all, the Leader. Since someone had thought to bring a tape recorder to the party, we’re able to hear the raucous laughter that greeted almost every word Frank said, as well as his raffish rendition of the son
g itself, which began,

  When Marlon Brando said, “I’d like some tea,”

  He startled all of gay Paree,

  They hadn’t served a cup of tea in years,

  and continued,

  So finally they brought the tea,

  And poured it right above his knee—

  Frank paused. “Course ya gotta figure out what’s above your knee,” he said. “ ’Cause if you don’t figure this out, you’re in a lot of trouble—your birdie is there.”

  This got a big laugh. He concluded,

  Don’t ever ask for tea in gay Paree!

  Amid much similar hilarity, the festivities finally broke up at 4:00 a.m.

  —

  Lauren Bacall popped up regularly in Frank’s company that spring and summer. She was “an attentive member of the audience” when Sinatra’s tour hit Salt Lake City in mid-June, and she wouldn’t have traveled to Salt Lake City on her own. When the lowly local paper, the Deseret News, speculated about a romance between the two, Hollywood columnists huffily—territorially—denied it. Whether or not Bacall attended Dean’s Villa Capri party, she was spotted there frequently with Frank; “intimates” at his headquarters restaurant—no doubt meaning well—told reporters that the two were “very much in love.”

  On August 23, she was Sinatra’s date at the gala Las Vegas premiere of The Joker Is Wild. It was an eventful evening. As the newsreel cameras rolled, Frank, wearing a tuxedo and a jockey cap with the bill turned sideways, attempted to lead a horse ridden by Joe E. Lewis into the theater. The horse balked, then defecated. “Everybody’s a critic these days,” Lewis said.

  “After the screening, there was a big, public party at El Rancho Vegas, where Lewis was then appearing,” Arnold Shaw wrote.

  Lewis introduced Frank to thunderous applause. Then, instead of continuing with his own comedy routine, the comic invited Frank to do a song. The audience liked the idea. Frank remained seated. Lewis waited, and repeated the invitation. Then, in plain view of the large audience, Frank rose from his chair, helped his date (Lauren Bacall) from hers, and walked rapidly out of the room.

  It was a resounding rebuff to Lewis, even though, as became later apparent, Frank had reason to feel provoked. The audience could not have known that Frank had exacted a promise that Joe would not ask him to sing. Joe had agreed, knowing that it was Sinatra’s policy not to perform in any Las Vegas hotel other than the Sands.

  It wasn’t just Frank’s policy; it was part of his contract with the owners of the Sands—both the official owners and the actual ones, the latter being men whom it would have been unwise to cross. After leaving El Rancho, Frank took over the Sands cocktail lounge for an Italian breakfast that lasted until 6:15 a.m.; Betty sat at his right. The rumors about the two heated up.

  Still, as Earl Wilson wrote in his memoir, “it was a jolt to all of us”—“all of us” being the cognoscenti of the New York–Hollywood gossip axis—“when London Evening Standard columnist Thomas Wiseman reported September 14 that Sinatra and Miss Bacall would marry within six months, ‘barring an act of providence or Ava Gardner.’ ”

  Where had this overseas upstart gotten his information? In fact, he hadn’t: in the grand tradition of British journalism, he had simply made the whole thing up out of whole cloth, hoping to smoke out anything that might be developing between the couple. “I understand that Sinatra is anxious to keep his marriage plans secret,” Wiseman wrote, with maddening certainty, “and that he will probably deny that he has any intention of marrying Miss Bacall. You can take his denials with a pinch of salt.”

  He then added a fillip: Bacall, he opined, would find Sinatra “an even tougher assignment” than the late Bogart.

  He had that right.

  “There was a circusy atmosphere to the journalistic follow-up that made Frank uncomfortable,” Wilson recalled. “He was put on a spot.”

  Amazing that the relationship didn’t come apart then and there.

  Wire-service reporters contacting Frank in Palm Springs got only a brisk “no comment.” Meanwhile, at the center of it all, things were considerably more complicated than any column could convey: Bacall was having to contend with her own hectic emotions and the mercurial quantity that was Sinatra.

  She tried to put it into words at the time. “I’m not one of those emancipated women who likes to live alone,” Bacall told Hedda Hopper. “I hate it. I certainly want to marry again.”

  “You have some mighty nice beaux,” Hopper said.

  “ ‘Tell me,’ Bacall replied. ‘No. 1, Frank Sinatra; No. 2, Frank Sinatra; No. 3, Frank Sinatra.’ At which she threw back her head and laughed. ‘But who knows what Sinatra’s going to do six months from now?’ ”

  On September 23, the two of them attended a closed-circuit TV broadcast of the Sugar Ray Robinson–Carmen Basilio middleweight-title boxing match at a Hollywood theater. In a way, it was their official coming-out. “I had never thought much about celebrity after the insane exposure I’d had at the time of To Have and Have Not and my marriage to Bogie,” Bacall said years later. “I gave no thought to being noticed on such a quiet evening, even with Frank, but when we emerged from the theater, there were photographers waiting and the resulting pictures ended up in newspapers around the world.”

  One of the images showed the two of them shoulder to shoulder, Bacall laughing delightedly, a fedora’d Sinatra caught—quite remarkably—smiling as if all were right in the universe. Just for the moment, perhaps just for the instant that the shutter opened, they were utterly happy together.

  Reflecting back in her memoir, the actress was better able to understand that loaded period in her life, and Frank’s. “The house had been so quiet for so long, then so noisy for the week after Bogie’s death, then so quiet again,” she wrote.

  The nights especially. I had never known that kind of quiet before. Or that kind of aloneness. I felt as though a large chunk of me were missing. I felt physically mutilated.

  I wanted it all to come back. I wanted to wake up smiling again—I wanted something to look forward to—I hated feeling that my life was over at thirty-two.

  If I was included by friends at any small dinner, it was natural for Frank to pick me up if he was going. He was alone too. And he always made me feel better—I was even able to laugh. He was a good friend. We enjoyed being together. He was helping me, looking after me.

  Swifty Lazar was another attentive friend. “But Frank answered a more basic, unarticulated need,” Bacall wrote.

  When I was in New York and he called all the time to see how I was, I loved those calls. Even began to feel rather girlish—giddy. There was a man somewhere—a man who was alive—who cared about me as a woman. I came to expect those calls—to wait for them…

  The fact of my being alone was crucial. Up to that time there had been either my mother or Bogie to lean on. Now there was no one. If I’d stopped to verbalize that, I’m sure I couldn’t have functioned. Would have been paralyzed with fear. Now…I see how hopeless it was from the start. How there was no way for me to think straight, how there was no way to really feel anything positive—like loving; no way for there to be a solid, good future for me and Frank. I was silently asking more than anyone has a right to ask—burdening him with my terrors, my unspoken demands. Had he been sure of himself and his own life then, it might have worked. But he wasn’t.

  After Bogart’s death, Sinatra answered Bacall’s need to be cared about as a woman. In the end, though, he would disappoint her cruelly. (Credit 8.1)

  By blaming herself for the ultimate failure of their romance, Bacall, a dignified writer with a keen intelligence, was doing a noble thing and telling a partial truth. She had brought out what was best in Frank: his strong feelings for humans (and especially damsels) in distress, and that higher part of his nature that responded in kind to people of good upbringing and fine sensibility. And she had seen what was worst in him (alcohol usually played a part in it) and shrugged it off as par for the course. Yet so far he
had only shown his worst to others, and the course was to be far bumpier than she knew at the time.

  —

  Billy May was Frank’s kind of character. In any description of the trumpeter-arranger-conductor, the word “Falstaffian” inevitably appears: until he went on the wagon at age forty-seven in 1964 (he would live forty more years), May—somewhat like Jimmy Van Heusen, except for the sex addiction—was a true wild man, unapologetically potbellied, boisterous, and merrily alcoholic, given to holding his conductor’s baton in one hand and a fifth of Scotch in the other during recording sessions.

  There was something wild, too, about his musical gifts. He was a legendarily fast orchestrator, renowned for doing on a regular basis what Nelson Riddle had been forced to do with the arrangement for “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”: arriving at recording sessions still in process. “If the session was at eight,” Alan Livingston recalled, “a few minutes after eight, Billy would come in with copyist behind him, still copying, literally, at the session.” But, as Eleanor Slatkin noted, “Billy May was the most meticulous of arrangers. When you looked at his manuscripts, it was as if they were printed, they were so gorgeous. He might have acted sort of, well, carefree, but when it came to the music, he was a perfectionist.”

  It wasn’t Riddle’s brand of perfectionism. “Recording with Billy May is like having a cold shower, or a cold bucket of water thrown in your face,” Sinatra told the English journalist Robin Douglas-Home.

  Nelson will come to the session with all the arrangements carefully and neatly worked out beforehand. But with Billy, you sometimes don’t get the copies of the next number until you’ve finished the one before—he’ll have been scribbling away in some office in the studio right up until the start of the session! Billy works best under pressure. He also handles the band quite differently than Nelson or Gordon: with Billy, there he’ll be in his old pants and a sweatshirt, and he’ll stop them and he’ll say, “Hey cats, this bar sixteen. You gotta oompah-de-da-da-ch-Ow. OK? Let’s go then…” And the band will GO! Billy is driving.