Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  May was also allergic to taking himself seriously: he was the only one of Sinatra’s arrangers who was able to defuse Frank’s famous intensity during recording sessions, with a joke, a wry look, a swig of Scotch on the podium. Musicians loved it. “I figured, ‘What the hell?’ ” May told Charles Granata. “If you’re going to go in and do it, what the hell is the use of doing anything unless you’re having fun with it?”

  Sinatra and May had first crossed paths in 1939, when May was playing trumpet and arranging (and Bill Miller was playing piano) for the wild and woolly Charlie Barnet big band. Subsequently, May moved over to Glenn Miller’s outfit, then to Les Brown’s, and then, in the post-swing era, bounced around much as Nelson Riddle and Gordon Jenkins did, working in radio, arranging children’s records (like the Bozo the Clown series) for Capitol, and then, in the early 1950s, becoming a bandleader with a signature sound marked by sexy smears and glissandos among the reeds and brass—known as “slurping saxophones.”

  The first song that Frank Sinatra recorded for Capitol Records, in April 1953, was a Billy May composition, an infectiously jivey blues about a skinny girlfriend called “Lean Baby.” And when Sinatra demanded his old Columbia arranger Axel Stordahl, and Alan Livingston felt Frank needed to move along artistically, Livingston pulled a fast shuffle by promising him Billy May—and then, when it turned out May was on the road with his band (as Livingston had known all along), substituting the new and untried Riddle in his stead.

  All of which is to say that in the fall of 1957, when Sinatra wanted once again to move along artistically—or at least branch out—Billy May was very much on his mind. Frank had a new idea for an album: a record based on something he knew a good deal about: travel. The songs would alternate between the wry and the romantic, between straight-out swingers and lush ballads. And the LP would come as a nice piece of counterpoint after the sentimentality of the two Jenkins albums. He called Billy May to write the arrangements, and he commissioned Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen to write a title song and a closer. The album and the opening number, Sinatra told the songwriters, were both to have the same name: Come Fly with Me.

  As if to underline the project’s distance from Riddle and Jenkins, the opening recording session, on October 1, was fiddle-free. The band, featuring brass (five trumpets, five trombones, and a tuba), reeds (five saxes), a rhythm section, and a harp, backed Frank on three numbers that night: “On the Road to Mandalay,” “Let’s Get Away from It All,” and “Isle of Capri.” (“Flying Down to Rio” was rehearsed but not recorded.)

  Nelson Riddle, who liked and respected Billy May, was nevertheless further offended by being—in his eyes—passed over once more by Sinatra. But it was a different sound that Frank wanted, and a different sound was what he got: you can hear it in the first notes on the first number laid down on that first session. “On the Road to Mandalay,” with lyrics taken from the Rudyard Kipling poem “Mandalay” and a tune composed in 1907 by the Ohio songwriter Oley Speaks, had been a popular parlor ballad in the early twentieth century, then a dance-band fox-trot in the 1920s. In Billy May and Frank Sinatra’s version, the number is jerked into a present that both swings like mad and is weird around the edges. Against the sounds of tam-tam cymbals, temple bells, wood blocks, a big gong, and all other manner of Eastern percussion (in the able hands of Frank Flynn), the tuba oompahs, the brass and reeds swing, and so does Sinatra. Sounding as though he hadn’t a care in the world, he imparts some ring-a-ding-ding to Kipling:

  The arranger Billy May. Falstaffian in appearance, he liked to play the wild man, but his swinging and brassy orchestrations were meticulously written. (Credit 8.2)

  By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ eastward to the sea,

  There’s a Burma broad a-settin’, and I know she thinks of me.

  What on earth is going on here? Will Friedwald maintains that Frank felt a certain connection to the great English chronicler of fading empire. “After the success of the film From Here to Eternity, with its Kipling-inspired title,” he writes, “Sinatra seems to have nurtured a spiritual kinship with Kipling’s recurring hero, the warrior with a conscience.” He goes on to cite Frank’s dreadful 1962 film Sergeants 3, with its title echo of the Kipling story collection Soldiers Three and its vaguely “Gunga Din” plot, as well as Sinatra’s truly bizarre 1966 spoken-word recording of the Kipling poem.

  Okay, but…What really seems to be going on with “Mandalay,” and much of the rest of Come Fly with Me, is that Frank and Billy May and the musicians are having fun, maybe the time of their lives. Listen to the glorious title song, the peak of Cahn and Van Heusen’s art, and a high point for Sinatra, too. Sammy Cahn originally wrote the more family-friendly

  If you could use some exotic views

  There’s a bar in far Bombay,

  which Frank recorded. Then, at the end of the session, Sammy told Frank he’d also written a Vegas version:

  If you could use some exotic booze.

  “Upon learning this,” Friedwald writes, “Sinatra immediately recoralled [sic] the musicians, who were then heading for some exotic booze of their own, and rerecorded the song with this somewhat more colorful line.”

  Thank God! (No; thank Frank.)

  This spirit of free-flowing fun and come-what-may adventure infuses all the album’s up-tempo numbers, from the title tune to “Mandalay,” to Matt Dennis and Tom Adair’s great “Let’s Get Away from It All,” to Cahn and Van Heusen’s bouncy lead-out, “It’s Nice to Go Trav’ling,” wherein the stay-at-home lyricist channels Chester Babcock’s wanderlust:

  The mam’selles and frauleins and the senoritas are sweet,

  he writes, but they can’t compete with the models on “Madison Ave.”

  And at the same time, the romantic numbers possess a lush fullness that is all Billy May’s own: no comparisons with other arrangers are necessary. He might have had a natural affinity for horns, but he could write for strings as well as anybody: “Moonlight in Vermont” and “London by Night” shimmer lunarly, and the twelve violins, five violas, and four cellos soar heartrendingly on the classic Vernon Duke bookends “Autumn in New York” and “April in Paris.” (The chart was May’s, yet he wouldn’t have had the benefit of a twenty-person string section with any other vocalist. “When you hired the band,” the arranger recalled, “all the record companies used to say, ‘Use as few men as possible,’ because they didn’t want you to spend too much money. But with Sinatra, you’d ask ‘How many strings shall we get, Frank?’ and he’d say, ‘Fill up the outfield!’ He knew, as we all knew, the more the better, especially with strings.”)

  —

  For the third and final Come Fly with Me session, on the night of the eighth, there were two English visitors in Studio A: the composer and conductor-arranger Ron Goodwin and a thirty-one-year-old record producer named George Martin. The two worked for Capitol’s parent company, the London-based European musical colossus EMI, which had bought 96 percent of the American label in 1955. In the years since, EMI’s executives had been continually frustrated by their inability to sell English singles to Capitol—specifically to the producer Dave Dexter Jr., who ran the company’s international department. Somewhere over the Atlantic, something was simply lost in translation, and the two Englishmen were on a tour of U.S. radio and television stations, not only to promote Goodwin’s new instrumental single, but to try to better understand what made American popular music tick.

  “Invited to look on, they were fascinated to watch The Voice at work and observe the equipment and technical processes,” writes the English biographer Mark Lewisohn.

  Sinatra liked to record at night, and he taped five tracks (including the album’s title song) with some ease, surrounded by the professionalism of Billy May’s orchestra…Feeling like “the country cousins from England,” George and Ron also witnessed the evening’s only sour note, when Sinatra kicked up a stink over the artwork designed for his album, which showed him in front of a TWA plane. Sinatra blew his top,
alleging that surely someone somewhere at Capitol was getting some kind of rake-off from TWA for the free publicity he’d be giving them.

  This aside, the session left the best of impressions on George Martin, and it was no coincidence that after returning home he immediately set about getting himself a British Frank Sinatra—and found one within twelve days. London-born singer and jazz pianist Jeremy Lubbock had a voice more like Sinatra than Sinatra; although other record companies said it was “uncommercial,” George signed him to Parlophone and started to sift songs and discuss arrangements with Ron Goodwin suitable for a dynamic debut to be recorded in January.

  The quest to find another Sinatra, like the search for the lost city of El Dorado, has gone on over the years; many are the Jeremy Lubbocks who have been discovered and then forgotten. (Lubbock himself went on to a successful career as an arranger of easy-listening albums.) George Martin would of course have far more success, seven years hence, with the discovery of four lads from Liverpool who sounded like nobody else.

  And Dave Dexter would—at first—turn down the Beatles, too.

  —

  On October 13, Frank guest starred along with Rosemary Clooney, Louis Armstrong, the Norman Luboff Choir, and the Four Preps (Bob Hope also did a surprise walk-on) on a Bing Crosby CBS TV special, The Edsel Show. The telecast (it replaced The Ed Sullivan Show for that one Sunday evening) introduced Ford’s racy and much-heralded new 1958 model, the car with which the auto company hoped to finally gain an edge on General Motors.

  Ford had thrown huge resources into developing the Edsel, which featured a distinctive (if, in convenient retrospect, quite hideous) vertical grille and such technical innovations as a “rolling dome” speedometer, a push-button automatic transmission, and optional seat belts. “A new vista of motoring pleasure, unlike any other car you’ve ever seen,” the ad copy read.

  Of course the car would become a commercial disaster of historic proportions, losing Ford millions. “The only Edsel I ever saw was the one they gave me to drive while I was rehearsing,” Rosemary Clooney recalled. When she first opened the car door, the handle came off.

  During rehearsal, she noted another bad sign: all too predictably, Sinatra hadn’t bothered to show up. Crosby was worried, Clooney wrote in her memoir: “ ‘Frank’s gonna blow it,’ Bing said to me. ‘He’s gonna blow it, and you and I are gonna have to bail him out…’ There was a difficult chord change in a medley we were doing, and we knew that if he didn’t rehearse with us, he wouldn’t get it.”

  The show was broadcast live (on the East Coast; it was also the first telecast to employ the new technology of videotape, for later airing in the West)—no retakes, no margin for error. The medley began: Bing and Frank and Rosie, with Clooney standing in the middle. “When Frank started in with ‘Blues in the Night’ a capella, it sounded fine for about a bar, until the band came in with a chord in a totally different key,” she recalled. “Bing had been right—Frank blew it. But it didn’t matter, because Frank shrugged and laughed at himself—‘The note’s somewhere in there’—and the audience loved it. Bing and I just looked at one another. The Voice could get away with anything.”

  Almost anything. It was one thing to slough off someone else’s broadcast (although The Edsel Show got great reviews and drew big ratings, unlike the Edsel). Frank’s ambivalence about television was about to come back, very quickly, to nip him where it hurt.

  —

  Sinatra’s first major excursion onto the small screen, the original Frank Sinatra Show, on CBS in 1950, had been catastrophic. Admittedly, it was in television’s early days, but then some people—notably Sid Caesar, whose smash Your Show of Shows on NBC Frank had been up against on Saturday nights—were already exploiting the new medium’s inventive possibilities. Sinatra, in the midst of an epic career meltdown in music and movies, treated TV like a poor second cousin, sometimes showing up hours late for rehearsal and sometimes refusing to rehearse at all. The series had trouble finding a sponsor, drew scathing reviews (“a drab mixture of radio, routine vaudeville and pallid pantomime,” the New York Times’s Jack Gould wrote), and lost CBS a mint.

  The plans for Sinatra’s new series were grand, befitting the sum ABC had paid for it. The network secured a couple of big sponsors (Bulova watches and Chesterfield cigarettes); Frank himself would executive produce. “If I fall on my face, I want to be the cause,” he told the New York World-Telegram. “All of the years when I was taking advice from others they told me wrong 50 percent of the time.” The new Frank Sinatra Show would have a splashy premiere, kicking off on Friday, October 18, with a live, hour-long musical-variety episode guest-starring Bob Hope, Peggy Lee, and Kim Novak. Subsequently, the program would air on tape for half an hour every Friday evening, mostly in the musical-variety format, but now and then in thirty-minute dramas that Frank would either star in or produce. (He had one in the can already: he played a taxi driver who adopted a couple of war orphans.)

  Sinatra, who had classy taste in collaborators, hired Kirk Browning, who’d helmed opera and dramatic series for NBC television, to direct the musical installments. Browning came up with a brilliant idea for the premiere’s opening segment. It would start with a tight shot of Frank’s hand, snapping out the tempo for “Lonesome Road,” a gospel-tinged number from A Swingin’ Affair! The camera would then pull back to reveal Sinatra standing at the top of a grand stairway; then the view would widen to show the staircase in the midst of a starry universe. Frank adored the idea.

  All went well in the early stages. “We put all the numbers together with Bob Hope; then Kim Novak and Peggy Lee came in, and we started rehearsing and everything was totally harmonious,” Browning recalled. “We got within about a week of the show and we’d go in to rehearse and change little things, but basically Frank would approve everything we were doing. He behaved wonderfully!”

  Then, a little less wonderfully. One day, during run-throughs, Sinatra came in and said, “I don’t like some things about this show.” The director told him, “Well, Frank, we can change some things.”

  “And that’s when he decided to change everything,” Browning remembered.

  He kept the opening, but other than that he changed the numbers, the set, the order and the attitude. I remember the last few days of rehearsals when everything was different every day. Bob Hope came over to me and said, “Kirk, what’s going on here? What’s Frank doing? Things were going perfectly well, and suddenly he’s changing everything!” When you can throw Bob Hope, you know that things are getting painful.

  Things settled down; camera rehearsals and the dress rehearsal went okay. Show night came: the broadcast was to air live at 9:00 p.m. Browning told his stage manager to keep track of Frank so he could be in place atop the big staircase in front of a crane camera that was ready for the opening shot.

  Then, at five of nine, when the director was ready for Sinatra to take his place, “the stage manager says, ‘Kirk, I can’t find Frank,’ ” Browning recalled.

  “What do you mean, you can’t find him?” Browning asked the stage manager.

  “Well, he said he was just going to go out for a second and I can’t see him anywhere,” the man replied.

  “There was a total frenzy in the studio, everybody getting more and more hysterical,” Browning remembered.

  There was no Sinatra anyplace. One minute to airtime, no Sinatra. 45 seconds, thirty seconds, no Sinatra. At 20 seconds before nine, a side door opens. Frank strolls in and slowly, slowly, slowly walks up those stairs. At 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 he hits the top stair, puts his hand in front of the camera and clicks his fingers.

  He wanted to have the tension, and he wanted to feel that he was the one person totally in control. Obviously we went on the air, and survived. He was very sweet at the end of the show, and gave us all a big party, and by then the memory of the opening had already begun to fade. I remember he turned to me and said, “Kirk, we’ve had a good time working on this show. You know, I have a couple scripts for films th
at I’m doing, and if you’d like, you could do either one of them.” Well, I took a long breath and said, “Frank, that’s so sweet of you, I think I’m just going to go back to TV.”

  “I’m a real stickler for perfection in my work, and in most other people’s work, too,” Sinatra had told Edward R. Murrow. “I find myself picking whatever I do apart. Which I do believe is quite healthy.”

  “Healthy” was an interesting form of self-applause. “Unavoidable” was more like it. Frank’s perfectionism served him splendidly in the recording studio, where he was more or less in complete control. “A Sinatra album is a Sinatra album,” Nelson Riddle once told Jonathan Schwartz. “The cover, the liner notes, the songs, the arrangements. Everything. There was no producer—Frank produced. It was Frank.”

  Riddle was exaggerating, of course, but not by much. The recording studio was Sinatra’s domain. Movie sets and television studios were not, but that didn’t mean he didn’t try to take over there, too. In films, the question, always, was, whom was he up against? In television, he was up against the medium itself. The critics took notice, and soon the public would too.

  The $3 million deal and the advance hype couldn’t have helped, but all might have been forgiven if, somehow, Frank had been able to guest star on his own show. Instead, he took control—or rather dictated a process he didn’t truly understand—and the result was a broadcast that lacked free flow (in between the singing, which everyone seemed to like) and brought out Sinatra’s flaws as a 1950s TV personality: his unruly ethnicity and his uneasy humor, that always imminent threat of anger. His heat in a cool medium.

  Some of the critics were kind. The New York Herald Tribune’s John Crosby wrote of the premiere, “Sinatra has bounced back to become the hottest thing in Show Business, and for very good reason. He is one hell of a performer and his first TV show was a triumph in almost all departments.” What that slightly hedged sentence hinted at, and what others wrote explicitly, was that Frank did exactly one thing well on television; once he tried for more, trouble crept in. “When he was singing the program held our attention and he did some excellent numbers,” Jack Gould of the New York Times wrote. “But an hour’s show cannot be sustained by one man alone and Mr. Sinatra’s writers let him down badly. His patter with Bob Hope was second rate, and their sketch with Kim Novak never came off.”