Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  The to-do casts new light on the discarded May 5 recording session, which might have been scuttled not just by Nelson Riddle’s awkward writing for guitar but also by Frank’s insufficiently recuperated vocal cords. Sinatra really does seem to have spent much of May resting, even though resting never was his forte. Looked at from a distance, the month represents an interesting fermata in the ordinarily jam-packed score of Sinatra’s life. For one thing, his frenetic moviemaking schedule of the past two years had abated considerably. Though Frank had two films on his immediate slate (Some Came Running was scheduled to start shooting in August, A Hole in the Head in November; Ocean’s 11 was still in the talking stages), in remarkable contrast to 1956 and 1957, 1958 actually contained a six-month period when he was on neither a soundstage nor a location.

  Recording, too, was proceeding deliberately, while Frank rested and Riddle worked out the kinks in the arrangements for Only the Lonely. And The Frank Sinatra Show was officially kaput; the last musical installment, with the guests Natalie Wood and Pat Suzuki, aired on May 23, and the final dramatic episode (“The Seedling Doubt,” co-starring Phyllis Thaxter and Macdonald Carey) was shown on June 6. Sinatra had delivered thirty-one of the thirty-six episodes stipulated in his $3 million contract with ABC; he would fulfill his obligation by doing four musical specials for the network in 1959 and 1960.

  Even his love life seems to have slowed just a touch. No grand affairs were afoot. Whatever hopes Louella Parsons expressed in her column, Frank and Lauren Bacall had split definitively; the two wouldn’t even run into each other for six years. Peggy Connelly had long since moved along, having married the comedian Dick Martin in 1957. Frank’s always genteel relationship with Jill Corey appears to have become completely platonic. There was an actress named Sandra Giles; a model named Nan Whitney. (To the detriment of her column’s credibility, Dorothy Kilgallen remained steadfastly convinced that the latter was the same unfortunate woman in whose New York apartment the actor John Garfield had died, at age thirty-nine, in 1952; but the far less interesting story is that that was another Whitney.) Rumor had it that Frank and the forty-two-year-old actress/Westinghouse spokeswoman Betty Furness had been affectionate seatmates on a TWA flight to Rome; someone who claimed to be in the know even asserted that Furness—rather than Swifty Lazar or Frank himself—had been responsible for breaking up the Sinatra-Bacall relationship.

  —

  In the meantime, he briefly slipped under the radar. In early June, Sinatra landed in London en route to Monaco, angrily fending off a reporter’s shouted question about the status of his relationship with Bacall. Shortly afterward, he took the aforementioned TWA flight to Rome. On which it seems highly likely that Betty Furness was a chance encounter rather than Frank’s traveling companion, for he was headed to see Ava.

  She was about to start filming the last film in her MGM contract, The Naked Maja, a story of the painter Goya’s steamy romance with the Duchess of Alba, the Spanish noblewoman said to have posed for his most famous nude. The movie had begun as a passion project of the writer-director and Gardner obsessive Albert Lewin, who’d created Ava’s quirky 1951 vehicle Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. But an Italian production company took over The Naked Maja and bought Lewin out, rewriting the script, hiring the journeyman director Henry Koster, and turning the project into a piece of hackwork. Lewin alone might have been able to sweet-talk Ava into believing the movie was another great vehicle for her; instead, as she waited in Rome for filming to start, she was bored and alienated, and afraid.

  She was thirty-five, a dangerous age for a female movie star, and though the facial welt raised by her bullfighting accident had subsided over the past months, it had not disappeared. A star was what she was: she’d never considered herself much of an actress or especially enjoyed making movies. Her stardom had bought her the freedom to live exactly as she wished, and now her stardom was in grave peril. Her intermittent flame, the ruggedly handsome Italian actor Walter Chiari, was in Spain making a movie. Frank, who wrote and called her regularly, who could never forget her, was increasingly on her mind—she had rescued him once; perhaps he could now rescue her. And so when he told her he was traveling to Europe, Ava asked him to come and see her in Rome.

  Something went wrong. Gardner’s biographer Lee Server contends that between Ava’s invitation to Frank and his arrival in the Eternal City, she got wind of a new romance of his, with Lady Adelle Beatty, a divorced English socialite and former Oklahoma beauty queen. In Server’s dramatic account, Sinatra arrives in Rome and promptly contacts Ava, who suddenly won’t take his calls or return his messages. Unable to sleep one early morning, Ava takes her corgi, Rags, for a walk; she winds up at the Hotel Hassler, where Frank is staying, and has someone take her to his suite.

  In a scene that might have come from a movie, Rags leaps into Frank’s arms, but Ava doesn’t. Instead,

  she took the dog back and she reached out to Frank and put in his hand the wedding ring he had given her long ago.

  “Give that to your English lady,” she said and turned and went out the door…

  Sinatra, with the ring she had given him still gripped in his hand,…called for a car to take him to the airport; he was gone from Rome three hours later.

  Though Server is usually dependable, this episode feels implausible. Ava’s wedding ring from Frank had undergone quite an odyssey: the platinum band he slipped onto her finger in November 1951 had been lost and then replaced with a duplicate amid the couple’s marital woes in 1953; Gardner then took the ring off and definitively put it aside when she and Sinatra separated. Still, what was she doing with it in Rome, and why would she have taken it along on a walk that impulsively turned into a visit to his hotel?

  George Jacobs contends that the ring in question was a ten-karat “re-engagement” band Frank bought for Ava at Bulgari in Rome and that “when Ava found out about Lady Beatty, she left Sinatra’s ring with the concierge at the Hassler Hotel, where he was staying, with instructions to give the ring to Lady Beatty. By then, however, the lady had chosen [movie director Stanley] Donen over Mr. S.”

  The problem with Jacobs’s account being that the Beatty-Donen romance—quite certifiably—didn’t begin until the spring of 1959.

  Lady Beatty, née Adelle Dillingham, from the oil town of Ardmore, Oklahoma, would indeed swirl into Frank’s life but, from all accounts, not until the fall of 1958. Perhaps Ava had gotten wind of Betty Furness. In any case, as Hedda Hopper wrote later in June, “To set those nosey minds at ease who are dying to know if Frank Sinatra saw Ava Gardner in Rome, I can say definitely he did. He spent one evening with her. But I doubt if the old flame was rekindled.”

  No, but it burned on low and steady, like a pilot light.

  —

  Quincy Jones was twenty-five in the spring of 1958, living in Paris and enjoying life as an expatriate jazz musician to the hilt. Between gigs with various bands, he was studying composition and music theory with Nadia Boulanger and the composer Olivier Messiaen; he also had a day job as music director, arranger, and conductor for Barclay Disques, the French distributor for Mercury Records. One day a call came in to Barclay from the Sporting Club in Monte Carlo, requesting the services of the label’s fifty-five-member house band—which included such great musicians as the jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli, the drummer Kenny Clarke, and the saxophonists Don Byas and Lucky Thompson—at a benefit Prince Rainier and Princess Grace were holding on June 14. The band was to back Frank Sinatra, and Quincy Jones was to conduct.

  “Even though I was only twenty-five years old, by then I’d learned that every great singer is different; each has different nuances, and you have to know what makes them comfortable so they can let loose,” Jones writes in his memoir.

  In a way a conductor and arranger has to put an emotional X ray on the singer, and to explore their creative psyche. You have to understand their ranges and registers, the place where they break between natural voice and falsetto…That’s why Nelson Riddle
and Sinatra enjoyed such a long and successful collaboration: Nelson knew Sinatra’s soul. He gave him his space, never putting instruments in his register so that he felt crowded.

  Jones admitted in an interview that he was intimidated by the prospect of meeting the great man. “I didn’t know what to expect,” he recalled. And in his memoir he writes,

  I was curious to see how Frank liked his music cooked up. He was straight ahead about it. He walked into the rehearsal at the Monaco Sporting Club with his “Swinging Lovers” hat on, hit me with those steely blues, and said, “You’ve heard the records, you know what to do. You know where I’m coming from.”

  We rehearsed the show with that fifty-five-piece orchestra for four hours until it couldn’t get any tighter. When we were done he said, “Koo-koo,” shook my hand, and walked out. He didn’t say more than ten sentences to me the whole time. He was all business.

  Frank liked to create an air of drama and mystery about his entrances, often simply walking onstage unannounced, embodying the idea that he was one entertainer who needed no introduction. He made an exception for the European audience at the Sporting Club concert, allowing Noël Coward to introduce him (in English and French), but held on to his need for drama by failing to tell his conductor, who after all had to cue the music to Sinatra’s entrance, exactly when, and from where, he would appear.

  As the houselights dimmed and Coward made his introduction, “I was still mouthing the words ‘Where is he?’ to the stage manager, who kept looking around and shrugging,” Jones writes.

  When I heard the words “Frank Sinatra!” and heard the audience applauding, I cued the orchestra into “The Man with the Golden Arm” theme and conducted while keeping an eye on both sides of the stage so that I could lead them into “Come Fly with Me” as soon as Frank hit the stage…

  The applause grew louder. I still didn’t see him.

  Finally I glanced over my shoulder and said, “Oh, shit.”

  He was coming from the back of the room.

  “It’s a big oblong room in the Sporting Club,” Jones recalled, many years later. “He’s in the back of the room high-fivin’ with Yul Brynner and Noël Coward and Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, and partying and kissing and everything. And I’m stupid enough to think that the applause is going to run out. And he’s just hangin’, man, and drinking and stuff like that, and we’re playing the play-on for him, the beginning of the show. He kept stopping in the middle of the walk to the stage, and I was saying, ‘What is he doing now, man? Hurry up!’ ”

  “Then after a few more steps toward the stage, he stopped altogether, stood right in the middle of the floor, reached into his pocket, pulled out his gold cigarette case, opened it, took out a cigarette, tapped it on the case, and lit the cigarette,” Jones writes.

  I was dying. Three minutes of clapping and that’s long. Four minutes of clapping, five minutes…finally he reached the stage and they were still clapping. I steered the orchestra into “Come Fly with Me.” He turned, faced the audience, and hit them with that signature voice, and I knew then why the applause had held up so long.

  Some singers like to work in front of the beat. Some lag a little behind it. Frank did it all: in front, dead center, and slightly behind, as though it were inevitable. Just like Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong, whom he adored, Frank had grown up singing with the big bands and learning how to sound like a horn, so he knew exactly where the beat was at all times. He swung so hard, you could’ve turned him upside down and shaken every piece of change out of his pocket, and he would have never missed a beat. He grooved through the first sixteen bars of “Come Fly with Me,” then took a long drag on his cigarette just before the bridge. When he hit the bridge and sang, “When I get you up there, where the air is rare…,” he turned his head so that a pinspot of blue light onstage would catch his profile, and finally blew a stream of smoke out of his mouth. It was incredible. He had every delicate nuance down. He wasted nothing—not words, not emotions, not notes. He was about pure economy, power, style, and skill.

  Or, as Noël Coward later said, “Never once a breach of taste; never once a wrong note.”

  —

  He moved on a bubble of agitation, always with a pack, searching for the next amusement. Boredom was the enemy; and sleep, death’s counterfeit. And solitude. There had been an entourage since the beginning. In the 1940s and early 1950s, it was called the Varsity: Hank Sanicola and Toots Shor and Jackie Gleason, and Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn were part of it, and now and then Manie Sacks; the music publisher Ben Barton; the latest prizefighter. Anyone who was willing to accept Frank as the alpha dog, to drink and stay up late and laugh at his jokes. And at the rest of the world: the squares, the losers. The composition of the pack morphed, of necessity, over the years. Van Heusen and Sanicola, of course, were still around, and Toots, when Frank was in New York; but Manie had died, and Gleason, with his huge television success, now had an ego to match Frank’s and hangers-on of his own. Others stepped in eagerly to fill personnel gaps. Lawford. Art Buchwald, when Sinatra was in Europe. Winchell and Earl Wilson. Joe Fischetti and Sam Giancana—although when Momo was present, the question of who was the alpha dog grew more complex.

  More and more, as Frank’s fame and wealth and power increased, the pack became an activity in itself, rather than a mere diversion from his other activities.

  Those who trailed in his wake were delighted to be there; at the same time, they watched his moods anxiously for the next change. It would always come, more quickly than anyone expected.

  Like all clubs, his had its special codes and modes and passwords. There was a special language: it had started in the early 1950s, inspired by the inside talk of jazz musicians (the king of all of whom was Lester Young, who coined his own verbal world); now in the latter part of the decade, the journalists who infiltrated the outer edges of Sinatra’s pack began to catch on and feel fascinated by what they could understand but not quite penetrate.

  Art Buchwald devoted an entire column to the idiolect. “One of the reasons Frank Sinatra is misunderstood by so many people (i.e., Dorothy Kilgallen, Jack O’Brian, etc., etc., etc.) is that he speaks a language all his own,” Buchwald wrote.

  No one has been able to get this language down on paper, and it was only in Monaco last week that he agreed to discuss it with anyone.

  “I notice you use the words gas and gasser quite frequently,” we said. “Would you explain to our reading audience exactly what they mean?”

  “A gas is a good situation,” he said. “An evening can be a wonderful gas. Or you can have a gas of a weekend.”

  “I see. And a gasser?”

  “A gasser applies to a person. He’s a big-leaguer, the best, he can hit the ball right out of the park. The opposite of a gasser is a nowhere, a bunter, he can never get to first base.”

  That category, of course, applied to virtually everyone outside Sinatra’s in-group. As far as he was concerned, Frank explained to Buchwald, anyone he didn’t know could be referred to as Sam or Charley. “Even a girl turns around if you say, ‘Hey, Charley,’ ” Sinatra said. Real squares, on the other hand, were called Harvey, or Harv. And for those he really disliked, he favored the word “fink.” “A fink is a loser,” Frank told the columnist. “To me a fink is a guy who would kill his own friends.”

  There was also a kind of in-group infield chatter. “ ‘Hello’ is not a greeting but a word that alerts everyone at Mr. Sinatra’s table that a broad has come into the room,” Buchwald wrote. “If it’s a good-looking broad, ‘Hello’ will be followed by ‘Say now,’ or ‘Something is coming in on the starboard.’ ”

  And then there was the ineffable, all-purpose “clyde.” “If I want someone to pass the salt I say: ‘Pass the clyde,’ ” Frank explained. “ ‘I don’t like her clyde,’ might mean I don’t like her voice. ‘I have to go to the clyde’ could mean ‘I have to go to the party.’ ”

  But by the peculiar logic of Frank’s posse, a clyde could
also be a Harv. “A real clyde,” said Sinatra, “is someone who stands by the crap table and doesn’t play. He really doesn’t belong in the crowd. He’s a ‘poor soul’ who will stick both feet in the cement up to his neck.”

  Unlike Humphrey Bogart, who viewed the idea of leading a Rat Pack with supreme irony, Sinatra was an eager autocrat, and a real clyde was anyone who didn’t play along.

  —

  The European excitement spent, he headed back to Los Angeles for Nancy junior’s high-school graduation, with a quick stopover in New York, where he took in Ella Fitzgerald’s set at the Copa. Frank adored Ella, who was his near contemporary and had also come up singing with the big bands. At the same time, he was intimidated by her sheer genius as a singer: her three-octave range, her flawless diction, her high-wire virtuosity at scatting; the gorgeous girlish tone that made every American Songbook rendition sound definitive. In a 1959 interview, Sinatra admitted as much. “Ella Fitzgerald is the only performer with whom I’ve ever worked who made me nervous,” he said. “Because I try to work up to what she does. You know, try to pull myself up to that height, because I believe she is the greatest popular singer in the world. Barring none—male or female.”

  On one level, he had good reason to be intimidated. As a horn—which is what every singer who performs with instrumental accompaniment essentially is—Ella had no equal. Her ear (much like Mel Tormé’s) was staggering, as her spot-on scat singing showed. She was always in command musically: so much so that it was easy to lose sight of her Achilles’ heel, the emotional rendition of a song. She could do cool, she could do warm, every once in a while she could sing with abandon. But she never came close to living in the lyric the way Frank did—which, for many listeners, is even part of her appeal. Living Sinatra’s songs with Sinatra is totally engaging, and constant emotional engagement can be exhausting. The sheer entertainment value of Fitzgerald’s great musicianship can’t be underestimated.