Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  “Sinatra has a revised act this trip,” Variety observed. “He’s discarded the theatrics of former entrances down middle aisle, hat shoved back, coat ‘carelessly’ slung over one shoulder.” Frank was also trying out a new approach, using the Red Norvo Quintet as accompaniment instead of a twenty-piece orchestra. The effect was both quieter and more electric: the audience hung on every note.

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  The vibraphonist Norvo, born in 1908, was a superb and multifarious musician who had led his own big band in the 1930s, with his wife, Mildred Bailey, doing vocals (he’d come within an inch of hiring Sinatra before Frank joined Harry James in June 1939), and had played with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in the mid-1940s. Sinatra admired Norvo extravagantly and in 1958 got the vibraphonist and his quintet a job playing in the lounge at the Sands. “While listening to Norvo’s group in Las Vegas,” Will Friedwald writes, “Sinatra hatched the idea of using the fivesome, with the addition of pianist Bill Miller (his regular accompanist since 1951) as both his permanent rhythm section and his opening act.” The lightly swinging sound of the de facto sextet not only complemented Frank’s voice beautifully but added an element of hipness that relaxed the singer, inspiring some of the most swinging vocals he’d done since working (all too briefly) with the Metronome All-Stars in 1946.

  A few days after Miami, he was wallowing in gloom.

  On the night of March 24, Sinatra joined Gordon Jenkins and a thirty-seven-piece orchestra in Capitol Studio A to begin recording the LP that would forever be known as the Suicide Album: No One Cares. That night he laid down four tracks: Victor Young, Ned Washington, and Bing Crosby’s “I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You”; Cy Coleman and Joe McCarthy’s “Why Try to Change Me Now?”; “None but the Lonely Heart,” from a voice-and-piano romance by Tchaikovsky, with a lyric translated from Goethe (!); and Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler’s “Stormy Weather.”

  To listen to these numbers, and the six recorded on the following two nights, is to taste mixed pleasures. Frank, despite having just completed two weeks of two shows a night at the Fontainebleau, displays no trace of the vocal problems that had sidelined him in January: he is in magnificent voice. The songs themselves verge on lugubriousness, and many would say they come closer than that. Listen to “I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance”: it begins with a sad and stately woodwind passage that for a few bars sounds like the national anthem of a particularly gloomy Eastern European republic. Then the strings, merely sweetly sad, arrive by way of relief. Sinatra begins to sing,

  I need your love so badly

  I love you, oh, so madly.

  The vocal is supremely tender, the tempo…like molasses. This is not material that would have thrilled ringside at the Sands or the Fontainebleau. But this is not the point—a fact that becomes all the clearer on Ira Gershwin and Vernon Duke’s great “I Can’t Get Started,” customarily performed in chorus only (see Bunny Berigan; Billie Holiday), as a light to rousing torch song, a complaint so witty that the singer seems bound to succeed somehow, in spite of everything.

  Here Sinatra and Jenkins are up to something entirely different. After a dignified French horn opening statement—the notes could practically be echoing across an Alpine valley—Frank begins with the tune’s seldom-heard verse:

  I’m a glum one, it’s explainable,…

  Gershwin’s breezy complaint about the unattainable love object is all but tossed off by most singers, but not in this version. Instead, Sinatra gives the lyric a soulful, earnest reading, with the strings and reeds rising heavenward behind him. Then, before the chorus can even begin, those Jenkins strings (in tight, foursquare harmony; no Riddle impressionism here) swirl through a couple of arabesques and then and only then Frank proceeds, at a tempo almost too slow for a fox-trot:

  I’ve flown around the world in a plane.

  It’s not a dirge, it’s not a blues, it’s a Sinatra-Jenkins. The form is unique to the team, and some can take it and some can leave it. In those days, a lot could take it: their first outing, 1957’s Where Are You?, had made it to number 3 on the Billboard album chart; No One Cares hit number 2.

  Since 1955, Sinatra’s album releases had followed a manic-depressive pattern, sad or contemplative LPs alternating with brisk and bouncy ones, as though Frank were trying to tell the world about itself, and himself. Thus that year’s In the Wee Small Hours was followed in 1956 by Songs for Swingin’ Lovers!, which segued into 1957’s Close to You, A Swingin’ Affair!, and the first Jenkins albums, Where Are You? and A Jolly Christmas from Frank Sinatra. Nineteen fifty-eight brought Sinatra’s initial collaboration with Billy May, the exuberant Come Fly with Me, followed by the melancholy Nelson Riddle LP Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely. Both went to number 1 on the Billboard chart.

  Soon after the September 1958 release of Only the Lonely, Frank recorded Come Dance with Me!, a high-spirited bookend to Come Fly with Me. Released in January 1959, Dance never broke number 2, but it stayed on the charts for 140 weeks, becoming Sinatra’s most successful LP. Besides the irresistible Cahn–Van Heusen title tune, the album was filled with upbeat delights, the likes of Johnny Mercer’s “Something’s Gotta Give”; Styne, Comden, and Green’s “Just in Time”; Rube Bloom and Johnny Mercer’s “Day In, Day Out”; Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek”; and a soaring version of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s “Song Is You.” Sinatra and May even managed to turn Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz’s pensive and foreboding “Dancing in the Dark” into an out-and-out romp: dancin’, rather than dancing, in the dark.

  But then, that was Frank; he could make you want to die, and he could make you want to live.

  It was in the latter spirit that he decided to go to Australia at the end of March: to help Ava. Since Walter Chiari’s departure, she had been especially lonely, and without alcohol and the adventures it stimulated to keep her occupied, she was feeling especially pent-up and bored. Gardner’s biographer Lee Server maintains that she spent many hours on crackling transoceanic phone calls with Frank, that “she had come to think of him as the one person in the world who understood her, who wanted nothing from her, who cared only for her friendship and her happiness.” During one of their conversations, the biographer says, Frank was telling Ava “about a concert he had just done, and she said to him that she wished she had seen it and then that she wished she could see him.”

  What about if he came down there and sang to her? he asked.

  She eagerly accepted.

  Frank contacted Lee Gordon, an American promoter living in Australia, and set up two concerts, one in Sydney, the other in Melbourne. The Red Norvo Quintet and Bill Miller would back him. He and the musicians, along with manager/bodyguard Hank Sanicola, landed in Sydney on March 31. Frank’s arrival in Australia was big news, in part because of the brouhaha that had followed his aborted trip Down Under in 1957 (that promoter had threatened to sue; Sinatra had settled for big bucks) but mostly, of course, because of Ava.

  It was easy enough to imagine the real reason behind Sinatra’s hastily arranged concert visit—they must be thinking about getting back together—and delightful to contemplate the sparks that would fly: between Frank and Ava, between Frank and Ava (together or separately) and the press. The tabloid frenzy that Ava had initially stirred up had died down; she’d simply failed to provide good copy. How nice it was of Frank to liven things up. And just in case he wasn’t in the mood to do so, the wild and woolly Australian press was ready to help. As the saxophonist Jerry Dodgion told Will Friedwald, two photographers followed Sinatra’s entourage everywhere, one continually provoking Frank to take a swing at him, the other with his camera at the ready. “After one particularly enervating evening, in which Sinatra vainly tried to escape by hopping from one restaurant to another,” Friedwald writes, “he finally instructed manager and companion Hank Sanicola to slash their tires.”

  As always in Frank’s life, less than sublime goings-on bracketed sublime music. On April 1, in West Melbourne Stadiu
m, he gave one of the greatest—and strangest—concerts of his life. Ava was sitting in the front row. Something about her presence, and the unconstrained Aussie crowd, uninhibited him. At one point, as he began “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” a woman in the audience screamed with delight, and Frank called out, “Get your hand off that broad!” And the minimal but swinging backing of Miller and the Norvo Quintet brought out, for the evening, his abilities as a great jazz musician.

  “I don’t think he ever sang any better in his life,” Red Norvo told Friedwald. “I loved the way he sang with the small band. It was very free, and he was right on top of everything we were doing. He just melted into it, I thought…And the band played great for him, they loved working with him. He gave us the feeling he was part of the group.”

  For all his life, Frank would nourish nostalgic memories of his big-band days with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, when he wasn’t yet a superstar burdened with the crippling demands of fame but merely one of the musicians, the boy singer. (It was easy to forget the overnight rides on unheated band buses in the dead of winter, the hunger and low pay, the feuds with Buddy Rich and Dorsey.) Working with a small combo helped him relive those feelings.

  He seemed to sing every number that night with a smile on his face. When one listens to the concert, and to Sinatra’s interplay with the audience and the musicians, it’s hard to keep from smiling oneself. The up-tempo tempi were fast, and the mood was up, even on bluesy numbers like “Willow Weep for Me” and “Angel Eyes.” On “The Lady Is a Tramp” and the Come Dance with Me!–style “Dancing in the Dark,” Frank was so loose that he even threw in a bit of quite credible scatting. His closer, “Night and Day,” was a tour de force jazz dialogue with Norvo, Sinatra singing gently but ardently, playing off the vibraphonist’s brilliant improv with his own, skipping around the melody, toying with the words, even violating his own cardinal rule about never breaking a lyric in order to give the vibes space to dance in.

  Frank was in the mood: it was intimate, ebullient singing. Seeing Ava’s face before him made it a perfect night.

  Then back to reality. “The scene afterward was chaos and invective,” Lee Server writes.

  Sinatra bodyguards played rough with the local rubberneckers. The singer’s imprecation to a photographer was widely reported: “Take another picture and I’ll ram that camera down your throat. You stink!”

  She went with him in the limousine to his hotel, a dangerous chase as a fleet of reporters’ cars followed them, everyone moving at high speed, and Sinatra screaming for his driver to run them off the road.

  And then, the twin aphrodisiacs of sweet music and hot chaos having done their magic, “they went up to Frank’s suite, and had some food sent up and drank champagne and talked and looked at each other and they went to bed.”

  They left Australia separately, within days of each other, not to see each other again for more than a year.

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  The first Grammy Awards were given on the night of May 4 at the Beverly Hilton hotel. Frank took as his date the young actress Sandra Giles, a busty bleached blonde who bore a more than passing resemblance to Joi Lansing, an actress who had worked on A Hole in the Head with Sinatra and whom he was also seeing. He was feeling upbeat and optimistic. He had been nominated six times in four categories—including Best Male Vocal for “Witchcraft” and “Come Fly with Me” and Best Album for Come Fly with Me and Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely—and fully expected to skip up to the podium and graciously accept a couple of awards.

  Instead, he won just one, not even for his singing, but for allegedly being the art director of the Best Album Cover award winner, the very late-1950s, harlequin-themed sleeve of Only the Lonely, featuring Nicholas Volpe’s bathetic painting of a sad-looking Sinatra in clown makeup and deep shadow. Bitterly disappointed, Frank started drinking as soon as the ceremony ended. Giles drank along with him but couldn’t keep up. Back at Sinatra’s Coldwater Canyon place, as she recalled many years later, she passed out and awoke to find herself naked in Frank’s bed, with a naked Frank. He claimed they had had sex; she was sure they hadn’t. She locked herself in the bathroom and told him she was going to call the police. He talked her out of it and had George Jacobs drive her home. She later found a $100 bill—roughly a week’s income for a U.S. family in 1959—stuffed in her purse. When a shaken Giles called Sinatra to ask about the money, she remembered, “He said, ‘Yeah, that’s something for your daughter for a Christmas present.’ It was his way of apologizing. He never actually said he was sorry.”

  That was Monday. On Friday, his sensitivity ascendant, he joined Riddle and a thirty-three-piece orchestra in Studio A to record two singles: the winsome theme from A Hole in the Head, Cahn and Van Heusen’s “High Hopes,” which Frank sang with a youthful choir billed as “A Bunch of Kids” (but not with his eleven-year-old co-star Eddie Hodges, whose ironclad contract with Decca prevented him from joining Frank on the date), and “Love Looks So Well on You,” another tender ballad by Alan Bergman, Marilyn Keith, and Lew Spence. The ballad never charted, but “High Hopes” became a huge hit, the rallying cry for a generation that would, after all too brief a moment, be disabused of its optimism.

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  The following Thursday night, Frank recorded two Riddle-arranged numbers, “This Was My Love” (as grandly sentimental as the title) and the bluesy-seductive “Talk to Me,” along with two songs orchestrated by Gordon Jenkins, the Cahn–Van Heusen “When No One Cares” and a reprise of Sinatra’s great Dorsey theme “I’ll Never Smile Again.”

  It was an odd night, and the last number was particularly strange. In May 1940, a twenty-four-year-old Frank, with the Pied Pipers’ exquisite harmonies and a tinkling celesta behind him, had turned Ruth Lowe’s musical elegy to her young husband into a thing of innocent beauty, an ode to youthful yearning in a world sinking into war. In May 1959, the forty-three-year-old Frank was singing the same song, but it sounded very different.

  For the past year and more, he had been growing steadily more impatient with Capitol Records, with which his contract would expire in November 1962. Sinatra had been agitating for many things—a greater share of the profits, a producer of his own, control of his master recordings—but it’s hard to escape the impression that what he wanted most of all was out. Power was central to his thinking in the late 1950s, and with power in mind he’d been hammering Capitol’s president, Glenn Wallichs, with a big idea: he wanted to start his own record label. It would be part of his movie-production company, Essex, and would have the same name; Frank and Capitol would each own half. Sinatra would hold title to the masters of his recordings and lease them to Capitol for processing and distribution. Capitol would pay all costs and expenses; Essex and Capitol would share profits fifty-fifty.

  Frank wouldn’t let go of the idea, and Wallichs wouldn’t budge. After all, the executive said, if he agreed to such an arrangement with Sinatra, Nat Cole, Peggy Lee, and others would expect the same, and where would Capitol be then?

  Frank told Wallichs that he, the straw that stirred the drink, would record no more for Capitol until Wallichs changed his tune.

  When one listens to the recordings Frank made on the night of May 14—and especially to his new “I’ll Never Smile Again”—it’s hard to escape the impression that, consciously or not, he already had one foot out the door. Singing over Jenkins’s sad strings, Sinatra sounds tender and vulnerable and middle-aged; there’s a slight quaver to his voice that’s not at all unattractive. Yet as he sings the first chorus—

  I’ll never smile again, until I smile at you

  I’ll never laugh again, what good would it do

  —something quite strange happens. His pitch is uncertain from the first syllable, and—after weirdly mispronouncing the word “laugh” as “luff”—he hits an unmistakable clam on the word “do.” A Sinatra wrong note—understandable enough in the heat of a nightclub performance, but on a recording session? Frank’s ear was exquisitely tuned: he was f
amous for bringing a take to a grinding halt if, say, the third violin was a half note off, fixing the offender with an ice-blue glare and saying, “Where you working next week?” He would do multiple takes of a song if anything about his vocal or the accompaniment displeased him: more than fifty years after attending a late-1958 session at Capitol, the former child actor Eddie Hodges vividly remembered Sinatra stopping a song mid-recording, furious at the string section. “He yelled, ‘What is with you guys? You sound like a bunch of girls!’ ” Hodges recalled. “Then he said, ‘Why don’t you play it with some balls?’ And they did another take, and he got exactly what he wanted. They sounded great.”

  Sinatra would sometimes listen to his playbacks in the recording studio; other times, he simply walked out when the session was done, secure that he’d nailed it. He was more keenly aware than anyone of his own strengths and weaknesses. Why did he not rerecord this “Smile”? Perhaps he had some important business to attend to on the night of the fourteenth; perhaps he just didn’t care. In any case, he wouldn’t set foot inside Capitol Studio A for almost another year.

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  George Jacobs maintains that his boss and Pat Lawford had eyes for each other from the moment they first met. Jacobs places that first meeting at a party at the Gary Coopers’, the one that most writers set in the summer of 1958, but as we have seen, Sinatra and the Lawfords had been socializing since at least June 1955—which is around the same time Frank and Jack Kennedy met at a Democratic fund-raiser.

  Nevertheless, Sinatra’s relationship with the Lawfords and his friendship with Pat Lawford’s politically ambitious older brother had accelerated in 1958. Frank was developing Ocean’s 11 with Peter Lawford and had a strong interest in the presidential prospects of Lawford’s brother-in-law. And Frank’s fascination with John Kennedy and his family was richly returned. “Let’s just say that the Kennedys are interested in the lively arts, and that Sinatra is the liveliest art of all,” Peter Lawford would tell a reporter in 1960. The man who would be called the first celebrity president had his own fascination with celebrities. For her part, Patricia Kennedy Lawford had long been enthralled by Hollywood, had had frustrated ambitions to be a movie producer (a career path not open to women at the time), and was well aware of her husband’s incessant womanizing. A relationship with Frank would have seemed to her like a kind of power play, not to mention a form of manifest destiny. And Frank would have felt much the same way.