by James Kaplan
“The Fontainebleau (where Frank Sinatra is the King of Miami Beach biz) turns away over 300 unhappy rich people at every show,” Walter Winchell wrote in his March 19 column. “The star appears to be more at home before this kind of an audience. Sports and their ladies, gamblers and gonniffs and glamorous guys and girls. ‘They are my kind of people,’ says Frank.”
In the meantime, Lauren Bacall was taking in Noël Coward’s play Nude with Violin at the Huntington Hartford Theatre on Vine Street in Hollywood. Swifty Lazar was her date. During intermission, Louella Parsons loomed up before the pair, all five feet three of her, and asked Bacall, point-blank, if she and Frank were to be married. “Why don’t you ask him?” Bacall said.
She went to the ladies’ room, and when she emerged, she claims, she saw Lazar and Parsons still conversing. By the time Bacall made her way over to Swifty, the columnist had vanished into the crowd. Betty thought no more of the encounter. She and Lazar saw the rest of the show, then went out to dinner.
On the way home, the pair stopped at a newsstand to buy the early edition of the morning paper. “I saw enormous black letters jumping out at me from the Examiner: SINATRA TO MARRY BACALL,” she writes.
I gasped—oh my God, what a disaster—how the hell did that happen? How could Louella have printed that? “My God, Swifty. You told her—are you crazy? Frank will be furious!” Swifty just laughed: “Of course I told her—I didn’t know she’d do this. I just said I happened to know that Frank had asked Betty to marry him. So what? He did! What’s wrong with saying it?”
She marched Lazar back to her house, she says, and had him call Frank: “I don’t want him to think I did it,” she said.
Swifty made the call but didn’t take responsibility. Instead, he treated the whole thing as a joke—“Ha ha, the cat’s out of the bag now, old boy.”
“I got on the phone briefly, saying I was ready to kill Swifty,” Bacall writes. “As I recall, Frank was not overjoyed, but at least he was prepared for the coming onslaught of the press, and he didn’t chastise me. I must have sounded contrite, though I had no reason to be. I was just frightened of making waves. Hopeless for any relationship, much less a marriage.”
Her friends began to phone; her mother called from New York. Bacall told them all that she didn’t know; there was no final decision.
From Miami, silence.
A few nights later, Frank phoned.
“Why did you do it?” he demanded.
“I didn’t do anything,” Bacall answered, her heart knocking.
“I haven’t been able to leave my room for days—the press are everywhere,” he told her. “We’ll have to lay low for a while, not see each other for a while.”
It was their last phone call.
—
A month later, Bill and Edie Goetz asked the two of them to a party. “We had one person between us at dinner,” Bacall writes, “but Frank didn’t acknowledge my existence. He did not speak one word to me—if he looked in my direction, he did not see me, he looked right past me, as though my chair were empty. I was so humiliated, so embarrassed. Nothing would bring my sense of humor back—it deserted me that night and for some time afterward. I would have preferred him to spit in my face, at least that would have been recognition.”
The same thing happened in Palm Springs a few months later. After a concert at which Sinatra had sung, Bacall found herself accidentally standing face-to-face with him: “He looked right at me again as though I were not there—not a flicker of recognition—called his group—got into his car. The blood ran to my face, then away. I felt sick. My humiliation was indescribable.”
What would possess a man to behave so savagely toward a former lover, a woman he had once treated with tenderness, courtesy, respect? He wielded humiliation like a weapon, as payment in kind. Her alleged sin having been not just to cut the corners on him but to do so in the most public way possible.
—
In his column of April 2, Walter Winchell, traveling with Frank, reported that he had a nude statue of Ava—it had been used as a prop in The Barefoot Contessa— on the lawn of his Coldwater Canyon house.
—
In early May, Sinatra and Riddle returned to Capitol Studios to begin the album that both of them would come to think of as Frank’s finest: Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely. Ironically, Sinatra initially planned the project as a collaboration with Gordon Jenkins, a follow-up to Where Are You?, but Jenkins was busy working in Las Vegas, so Riddle got the job. If he ever found out he was second choice, he kept it to himself.
Frank always prepared his albums carefully, thinking about not only the character of the record itself but also each LP’s place in the sequence of his work. Charles L. Granata considers Only the Lonely a kind of complement or bookend to the minimal classicism of Close to You. “While the orchestrations for Close to You express the intimacy of a chamber-music setting,” he writes,
for Only the Lonely the arranger chose to unfurl his musical canvas, painting aching portraits of loneliness on an expansive landscape sparingly dotted with musical colors and textures. Against a somber backdrop of understated strings speak judicious traces of instruments like French horn, oboe, flute, clarinet, bassoon, and trombone, and the barest wisp of a rhythm section. Semi-classical in feel, each four-minute tune is a short story of gloom and despair transformed into a cry for sympathy.
There were a lot of instruments: thirty-eight in all. “We had so many instruments,” the guitarist Al Viola recalled, “that when I got to the first date, I thought it was a union meeting!” As Riddle wrote the arrangements, he was delighted “to contemplate the luxury of a full woodwind section with all the misty, velvety sounds that issue from such a group if properly used.” To some degree, he was using these sounds to express a deep personal sadness: that spring, while still in mourning for his infant daughter, the arranger was also watching his mother succumb to terminal cancer.
The already gloomy Riddle might have found himself totally paralyzed had it not been for a peculiar remedy. “I’d be painting the house during the daytime,” he told Jonathan Schwartz in 1982. “I find it’s good therapy for any arranger to paint his house because arrangers work in small jerky motions to write notes, and painting a house requires long, sweeping motions. For me, it was therapy.”
Riddle had house painting to soothe his gloom, and arranging as catharsis. But what did Only the Lonely mean for Sinatra? Clearly the album, with its sequence of melancholy songs, beginning with the masterly Cahn–Van Heusen title tune and ending with Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s immortal “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road),” was meant as a statement, but a statement of what? “The Frank Sinatra that we know and have known (and hardly know),” Sammy Cahn wrote in the liner notes, “is an artist with as many forms and patterns as can be found in a child’s kaleidoscopticon. Come Fly with Me is one Sinatra. All the Way is another Sinatra. A Sinatra singing a hymn of loneliness could very well be the real Sinatra.”
He lived with loneliness: the solitude of the only child who grows up with inexpressible feelings of otherness, the self-inflicted isolation of the man who’d brutally pushed Lauren Bacall away, the aloneness of the great artist who mused on the sonorities of Ravel and Ralph Vaughan Williams while feeling compelled to pal around with hoodlums. The cover image of Only the Lonely, a painting of a pensive Sinatra, his face in clown makeup and half in shadow, fetishized his loneliness, made a fungible commodity of it. He was a kind of hunger artist, one who starved himself so the rest of us could feel better about our own hunger.
—
On the night of May 5, Frank, Nelson, and a thirty-eight-piece orchestra began the album by recording three numbers: Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne’s “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry”; a Ravel-colored version of the pop hit “Ebb Tide”; and, for the first time, a song that would become a kind of theme, Matt Dennis and Earl K. Brent’s great “Angel Eyes.”
It was a false start. Something about the session�
��in particular the guitar accompaniment for the verse of “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry”—struck Sinatra as off, and the recordings weren’t used. (It turned out that Riddle, who arranged beautifully for strings but had little understanding of the guitar, had written chords that were extremely difficult for the instrumentalist, George Van Eps, to play; Riddle rewrote the verse.)
On May 29, Frank and the musicians reconvened in Capitol Studio A, although Nelson, who was in London with Nat King Cole, was absent. The first violinist, Felix Slatkin, conducted in his stead. Having lost time with the discarded May 5 session, Frank recorded an amazing seven songs on the night of the twenty-ninth—or rather six songs and part of a seventh. Thereby hangs a tale.
Besides “Monique,” a tune written by Sammy Cahn and Elmer Bernstein for Kings Go Forth, Sinatra rerecorded the three numbers he’d done three weeks earlier and laid down three other tracks for Only the Lonely: the title number, Rodgers and Hart’s “Spring Is Here,” and Ann Ronell’s Gershwin-esque classic “Willow Weep for Me.” Before “Willow,” however, Frank attempted Billy Strayhorn’s majestic, fiercely difficult “Lush Life.”
Born the same year as Sinatra, Strayhorn wrote much of the great song-poem at the astonishing age of eighteen, and its precociously world-weary lyric—“I used to visit all the very gay places/those come what may places/where one relaxes on the axis of the wheel of life/to get the feel of life”—is filled with subtexts: not only was Duke Ellington’s future arranger and songwriting collaborator a genius; he was a homosexual, in an era and a culture when this was the love that dared not speak its name. The lyrics of “Lush Life” therefore have a coded quality, a slightly uneasy mélange of brilliance and pretentiousness, with a dash of awkwardness thrown in (“The girls I knew had sad and sullen gray faces/With distingué traces that used to be there”). And the number’s rangy chromatic melody—written as though warning the listener not to understand the composition or composer too easily—has the complexity of an art song by Schubert or Fauré.
It was wrong for Frank.
He certainly had the musical chops for it, but we’ll never know if he could have brought off “Lush Life” with his usual élan, because he never attempted it again. Granata contends that Sinatra might have left the song unfinished out of fatigue—it was the sixth song of the evening’s seven—and weariness might have factored into it. But more to the point is that Frank’s initial approach to a song was through the words: he studied a lyric like a literature professor analyzing an Elizabethan sonnet, bringing his formidable intelligence to bear on every nuance. By the time he sang a tune, he inhabited it, possessed it. And in some basic way, “Lush Life” didn’t speak to him.
Nat King Cole had thrown down a formidable challenge with his great 1949 version of the song, but Cole was a very different singer from Sinatra—no less great, but like Tony Bennett and Ella Fitzgerald less deep. Cole’s reading of “Lush Life” (based on Pete Rugolo’s arrangement) is rather sprightly and so assured as to be almost facile. It’s wonderful and highly listenable, but Frank meant to explore the canyons of solitude on Only the Lonely, and “Lush Life”—which in the end was an art song rather than a ballad—stopped him.
After two brief takes, he began a third, getting through the verse and beginning the chorus: “Life is lonely/again, and only last year/everything seemed…” And it’s strange: he’s beautifully in voice, but he’s also singing without assurance and not entirely on key.
“Hol’ it!” he suddenly barks, shifting abruptly from perfect song diction to Hobokenese. The musicians wind down as fast as they can. “It’s not only tough enough with the way it is,” Sinatra says, “but he’s got some clydes in there!” Referring, presumably, to the ranginess of the melody. To cover his embarrassment—and not being able to master a complex song in a studio full of brilliant musicians, with Slatkin at the podium, would have caused him embarrassment—Frank shifts into his Amos ’n’ Andy voice: “Ooohh, yeah! Well, ahhh…”
Slatkin suggests that he put the song aside for a minute.
“Put it aside for about a year!” Sinatra exclaims, and that is that.
Nelson Riddle wasn’t the only one absent from Studio A that evening. The mild-mannered Voyle Gilmore was also gone—permanently in his case—the victim of a Sinatra tantrum. On his way home from Miami in March, Frank had stopped in Chicago to catch the rematch between Sugar Ray Robinson and Carmen Basilio; while there, he made the rounds of the local disc jockeys. To his horror, he found that none of the DJs had received a copy of his latest single, a duet with Keely Smith, “How Are Ya’ Fixed for Love?”
Sinatra saw red, phoned Hank Sanicola, and ordered him to replace Gilmore. Sanicola told Frank that Gilmore wasn’t responsible for shipping. Frank called his lawyer Mickey Rudin and had Rudin call Glenn Wallichs, the president of Capitol (Frank’s rabbi Alan Livingston by now having left to become vice president of programming at NBC), to demand that the label assign Sinatra a new producer, one who would be answerable to Frank and no other artist. Wallichs refused but offered to substitute another producer, a former saxophonist named Dave Cavanaugh, for Gilmore. And so it was Cavanaugh who was sitting in the control booth on the eventful night of May 29.
When Wallichs told Gilmore he had been replaced, “I felt only relief,” the producer recalled.
No artist is easy to handle. But when they’re as complex as Frank…Which is not like saying he’s a bad guy.
With musicians he was a prince…But he’d never take a suggestion [from the producer] in the presence of a musician—or anybody else, for that matter. You’d have to come out of the booth and go into the studio. If you tried talking to him over the speaker system, as you frequently did with other artists, you were dead.
Once when he was really acting up, I went at him: “I’m trying pretty hard, Frank,” I complained, “and all I get is abuse.” He broke into a broad smile. “Don’t let any artist get your goat,” he said, “not even me.” He was so appealing at times he could charm butterflies—and then again, so miserable he could bother a snake.
But Sinatra’s replacement of his old producer was only a shot across Capitol’s bow. As Frank’s power grew—his last two albums, A Jolly Christmas and Come Fly with Me, had gone platinum and gold, respectively—so did his discontent with his record label. He wanted a bigger share of the profits he was generating, and, most important, he wanted a right no other major recording artist, anywhere, had: ownership of his own master recordings. Owning his masters would give Sinatra unprecedented control over his financial destiny, allowing him, once his contract with Capitol was up, to make a more favorable deal with any other record label.
Or even to start a record label of his own.
* * *
* Though Cohn gave Frank his big chance in From Here to Eternity, his tyrannical and ill-tempered style made him widely detested in Hollywood, and his well-attended funeral inspired a famous remark by Red Skelton: “It proves what Harry always said: give the public what they want and they’ll come out for it.”
10
If you’re his friend, that’s IT. If you need him, DADDY, HE…IS…THERE!
—SAMMY DAVIS JR. ON SINATRA
He was forty-two now, still a demon of energy, but every now and then showing ever so slight signs of wear. With the world premiere of Kings Go Forth set for mid-June in Monte Carlo, Frank had planned to travel to Europe via the Far East, accompanied by Peter and Pat Lawford. But in early May, tired out by two weeks of doing two standing-room-only shows a night at the Sands, Sinatra canceled the Asia jaunt and let it be known that he was going to take a long rest in Palm Springs.
The cancellation sparked all sorts of rumors: that his marriage plans with Lauren Bacall were alive again; that there had been a rift with the Lawfords; that he had had a severe throat hemorrhage. The first two weren’t true; the third might have been. While some stars grabbed publicity by insuring their legs or other body parts with Lloyd’s of London, Frank had taken the opposite ta
ck, holding all information about his golden pipes as closely as possible. His instrument could be a fluky one, and while he famously built it up by swimming laps underwater and doing vocal exercises, he did himself no favors by chain-smoking Camels, drinking to excess, and generally living a life of operatic emotionalism. None but the inner circle had known the full story of his vocal problems in 1956, nor of his terror, around the time of Close to You, that he was losing his voice altogether. Toward the end of his Fontainebleau run in March 1958, he’d had to cancel a couple of shows because of vocal difficulties, possibly a result of overuse, possibly also arising from general strain in the wake of the Bacall breakup. No one subbed for him; the customers got their money back.
But the Sands run in May might have triggered something more serious. An alarming June 1 wire-service report, which made the front pages in some papers, claimed that Frank had suffered a ruptured blood vessel in his throat and was seriously ill at home. A prominent New York specialist had been summoned, the item said.
Then, in a piece that ran two days later, Sinatra simultaneously shrugged off and confirmed what might have been a well-founded but erroneously time-stamped rumor. “He laughed when he heard about the report he was ill,” a representative from Frank’s agency told UPI. Jack Entratter, chiming in on Sinatra’s behalf, said that the singer had “made six records last Thursday” and that “the incident involving the badly-strained vocal chords [sic] occurred about a month ago”—around the time of the Sands engagement—“and that Sinatra had been at Palm Springs, Cal., much of the time since then.”