by James Kaplan
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The world premiere of Ocean’s 11 took place—where else?—in Las Vegas at midnight on August 3, 1960. The cocktail party, dinner party, and Summit reunion leading up to the opening made for a Vegas blowout to top all Vegas blowouts, attended by the dozens of stars who’d descended on the gambling mecca for the premiere, which was televised on Jack Paar’s Tonight Show. Frank, Peter, and Sammy joined Dean (who was already appearing at the Copa Room) and Joey (who’d flown in from a Chicago gig) for the show, which pulled out all the stops. “Their horsing around with race and religion has finally gotten out of hand,” complained Las Vegas Sun columnist Ralph Pearl. “Mix an abundance of blue material with that and you have an inflammable situation.”
The veteran Hollywood columnist Bob Thomas called the show “an experience difficult to describe,” though he did a pretty good job of it. “The performers appear onstage as a group or singly, though seldom is one allowed to finish a number,” he wrote.
Many jokes are made about Sammy Davis Jr.’s race (Negro) and religion (Jewish) and the derivation of Dean Martin and Sinatra (Italian).
Sad-faced Joey Bishop offers sardonic comments interlaced with references to Sinatra as “high lama,” “potentate” and “our leader.” Peter Lawford’s brother-in-law Sen. John F. Kennedy comes in for mention, with speculation of an ambassadorship to Israel for Davis.
A bar is wheeled out and Sinatra mixes Martin a drink in the ice bucket. Each sings solos in his husky baritone, highball in hand.
During one number, Lawford, Bishop and comic Buddy Lester walk across the stage chatting, fully clothed except for pants over arms. All lapse into occasional Amos ’n’ Andy “dialogue.” They join at the end in a ragtag version of “Birth of the Blues.”
And there you have it. You had to be there, and even for some who were there, it didn’t quite suffice.
The movie itself was sedate by comparison. Variety’s review was clear-eyed and tough. “‘Ocean’s Eleven’ figures to be a moneymaker in spite of itself,” wrote “Tube.”
Although basically a no-nonsense piece about the clan-destine efforts of 11 ex-war buddies to make off with a multi-million dollar loot from five Vegas hotels, it is frequently one resonant wisecrack away from turning into a musical comedy. Laboring under the handicaps of a contrived script, an uncertain approach and a cast weighted down with personalities in essence playing themselves, the Lewis Milestone production never quite makes its point, but romps along merrily unconcerned in the process.
To watch the picture today is a strange experience—especially in light of the George Clooney–Brad Pitt–Matt Damon remakes, two out of three of which are far more fun than the original. The 1960 film’s story moves along breezily and stylishly as its multiple-casino-robbing plot proceeds, but the picture can’t quite make up its mind whether it’s a comedy or a drama: What else can you say about a caper starring Frank Sinatra in which Sinatra neither smiles nor sings? (The only Rat Packer who truly seems to be enjoying himself is Sammy Davis Jr. as that singing, dancing garbageman.) The movie’s chief charms are visual: the opening credits by the great graphic designer Saul Bass are terrific (Bass had also created the opening sequences for The Man with the Golden Arm, as well as for two Sinatra movies in which the opening sequences were the best part: Johnny Concho and The Pride and the Passion). And the cinematographer William H. Daniels’s vivid, dynamic rendering of the casinos and their denizens make you realize just how compelling, how fun, a place the small-town, gangster-run, pre-corporate Vegas could be.
What’s far less compelling—to a present-day viewer, at any rate—is Ocean’s 11’s vision of manhood, 1960-style. Why were the wartime buddies robbing the casinos? Not just for the money, but, as Santopietro notes, to “inject some sorely needed excitement into their postwar lives, which had been disappointing in their blandness and rigidity.” The same might be said, Santopietro writes, for the audiences who flocked to see the Rat Pack in Vegas and the movie they made: “Onstage and onscreen, Frank Sinatra and friends were living out the fantasies of all middle-aged men who felt trapped in marriage, suburbia, and playing by the rules. They were men who wanted their freedom back.”
Fair enough—in fantasy anyway—but what about the women who were the other side of the equation? The females in the film are mostly just ornaments or adjuncts, easily ordered around and put in their place, as when Sinatra’s character Danny Ocean tells his estranged wife, played by Angie Dickinson, “Now just sit there and don’t interrupt me.” Or as when Danny walks into a room where Lawford’s character is being massaged by a blonde in short shorts and tells the blonde and her similarly blond friend, “OK, girls—time for your nap. Beat it.” Or, most startlingly, as when Dean Martin’s character announces he’s going to go into politics. His platform? “Repeal the Fourteenth [sic] and the Twentieth [sic] Amendment—take the vote away from the women, make slaves out of ’em.”
In real life, of course, none of the Rat Packers enjoyed such commanding or tidy relations with the opposite sex. Both Joey and Dean had been married since the 1940s and had spent much of their lives on the road; infer what you will. Lawford, who had been fitfully employed and frequently unfaithful since his 1954 marriage to Pat Kennedy, had fallen in his wife’s estimation as her family’s political fortunes rose. And while Frank, in the midst of his most prolonged period of bachelorhood, was flying high—artistically, financially, sexually—he still carried a torch for the love of his life and battled constantly against the demons that always threatened. He was the Leader of the Clan—but he was also the one who needed the group most of all. The fun of his epic bachelorhood was long and loud and real, but there was also a desperate, million-miles-an-hour quality to it—a lunar loneliness just beneath the surface.
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Writing about Ocean’s 11, Variety’s reviewer had accused Frank, Dean, Sammy, and Peter of “acting under the stigma of their own flashy, breezy identities…[They] never quite submerge themselves in their roles, nor do they seem to be trying very hard to do so.”
But why should they have submerged themselves in new roles when the flashy, breezy identities they had brought to the Copa Room seemed to be working just fine? The Summit’s act wasn’t demanding or sophisticated; it was just naughtiness, at a time (post-Havana) when Las Vegas was establishing itself as the nation’s Capital of Naughty, in an era when the national bar for naughtiness wasn’t very high (or low). It was a time when the lettuce was iceberg and the bread white, when there were three networks of television and one variety of sex (or you were in big trouble). When fellatio was a rumor rather than a commonplace; when Judy Campbell could be shocked, shocked, at Frank Sinatra and then Jack Kennedy for proposing she participate in a threesome.
This last was no coincidence. Frank and Jack were national pathfinders of sex, our proxy explorers, boldly going where few men had gone before. They recognized the inclination in each other at the start; they admired each other extravagantly for it. It was wise of the Kennedy campaign to seize those photographs and negatives of JFK with the Rat Pack in Vegas, the white-hot center, the national test lab, of naughtiness.
And yet there was a hollowness to all this misbehavior—and not just morally speaking. The Summit’s act at the Sands was infantile, the grown-up equivalent of fart jokes. It was a reaction to the profound national torpor of the 1950s: the Rat Pack “depended for its vitality on what Gore Vidal has called ‘the great national nap’ of the 1950s—at times Frank and ‘the Clan’ seemed the only people awake after 10:00 p.m.,” writes the professor and cultural critic T. H. Adamowski. The Summit was a declaration of superiority—except that the most superior one of all, the Leader, was himself a whirl of chaos, centerless. The emperor was not only naked but manic-depressive.
But he was still the emperor. No one could crack the whip at Frank in a TV studio, nor could Lewis Milestone rein him in on a movie set. No one was directing the Summit shows, and that was the trouble. The only place Sinatra could be controlled, coul
d be artistically exacting, was where he could be his own boss—the recording studio.
And he didn’t want to record in Capitol’s studio anymore.
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Or did he? Over four nights, three at the end of August and one on the first of September, Frank went into that big round tower, the one he’d recently threatened to tear down, and laid down the very odd album that would be titled Sinatra’s Swingin’ Session!!!
The LP’s core was a reprise of half a dozen standards that had appeared on Frank’s first long-playing album, Columbia’s Sing and Dance with Frank Sinatra. On the face of it, the idea of Nelson Riddle’s ringing changes on Axel Stordahl’s 1950 arrangements was unimpeachable: it had worked beautifully on Nice ’n’ Easy. But for the new, up-tempo album, Sinatra wanted much shorter tracks, as Riddle recalled to Ed O’Brien. “He told me that Frank instructed him to do just one run-through on most of the songs,” O’Brien said. “Frank didn’t want to repeat a lot of choruses.”
Fair enough. On a ballad, Sinatra might sing the song’s verse (introduction), then its first and second choruses, then the bridge, then repeat one of the choruses—and then, after an instrumental, sing one of the choruses again. On up-tempo tunes, he usually eliminated the verse and extra choruses. Yet when Sinatra arrived at the first Swingin’ Session recording date, he had a surprise for Riddle: he announced “that he wanted to do all the tunes at tempos twice as fast as he had previously planned,” Will Friedwald writes. “Riddle hadn’t given him any four- or five-minute epics to start with, so Sinatra’s decision left them with a whole bunch of tracks that were short enough to fit on an answering machine message and a twenty-five-minute album—not much longer than the original ten-inch Sing and Dance disc.”
Twenty-six minutes and nine seconds, to be exact, was the length of the album: this was an LP without the L. Every one of Swingin’ Session’s twelve tracks was under three minutes, and three of the songs clocked in at close to a minute and a half.
What was going on?
“The whole album lasts six minutes because Sinatra sped everything up to fuck Capitol,” Jonathan Schwartz says. In Nelson Riddle’s opinion, Swingin’ Session was “a disaster.”
The argument has merits. Even as Frank sang in Studio A, his mind was on the new record label that (as we’ll soon see) was already in the works. Listen to his update of the Walter Donaldson–George A. Whiting classic “My Blue Heaven,” and you may find yourself shaking your head in disbelief: it sounds as though Sinatra were trying to set a land-speed record. The number has the drive of rock ’n’ roll—Buddy Collette’s honking, bopping tenor-sax solo seems to come straight from a juke joint—but it lacks the joy of rock ’n’ roll. It’s hard to imagine anyone dancing to this. To make sure you get the point—we’re going fast here—Frank drops the first word of each phrase at the beginning of the lyric, so that
When whippoorwills call
And evening is nigh
I hurry to my blue heaven
becomes
Whippoorwills call
Evenin’ is nigh
Hurry to my blue heaven
It’s positively Hemingwayesque. Sinatra’s hurry—to finish up with Capitol, to move on to the next thing—is so blatant that there’s a kind of giddiness to it.
On its release early the next year, “the album reached Number Three on the Billboard chart and hung around for thirty-six weeks,” Ed O’Brien says. “Disk jockeys loved it. They could lead into the news at one fifty-eight before the hour with a complete Sinatra song. The album got a great deal of airplay.”
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Norman Granz, the founder (in 1956) of Verve Records, worked with, and befriended, virtually every great jazz musician of the mid-twentieth century—the label’s roster would grow to include Bill Evans, Stan Getz, Billie Holiday, Oscar Peterson, Ben Webster, and Lester Young, among many others—but Ella Fitzgerald was arguably the central figure in his career, as he was in hers, not only as the head of her record company, but as Fitzgerald’s manager and concert impresario. Her first album at Verve was 1956’s groundbreaking, Granz-produced Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Song Book, which became one of the best-selling jazz records of all time. Between 1956 and 1959, Ella and Granz followed that LP with four more songbook albums, devoted to the compositions of Rodgers and Hart, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, and George and Ira Gershwin. It was incomparable jazz singing, on what was quickly becoming the premier jazz label.
By the late 1950s, Norman Granz had begun to parlay his various jazz enterprises into great wealth. He was a connoisseur of fine food, wine, art, and automobiles and a lover of beautiful women. He was also handsome, athletic, magnetic, and blessed with an extremely good opinion of himself. And he was ferociously protective of his prime artist, Ella Fitzgerald. That stance, and his irrepressible personality, would soon put him on a collision course with Frank Sinatra.
Early on, Granz came to feel that Frank, who had enormous influence in Las Vegas, wasn’t doing enough to promote tolerance in that historically racist town. During the 1950s, when Ella Fitzgerald or Sammy Davis Jr. or Lena Horne or Pearl Bailey performed at casinos on the Strip, they couldn’t eat in the establishments’ restaurants or stay in their hotels. After their shows were over, black entertainers had to go back to rooming houses on the run-down west side of Vegas. For a long time, Sammy wasn’t permitted in the steam room at the Sands. Frank pushed for change, but Granz, a firebrand, felt he hadn’t pushed early enough or hard enough.
This was his private opinion. But he would soon clash publicly with Sinatra, when Fitzgerald guest starred on Frank’s ABC television show in May 1958 (or in another account, on the Timex show of December 1959). As Ella’s manager, Granz naturally accompanied her to the taping. But the combination of two strong-willed and egocentric men in one place quickly turned volatile. When Granz began suggesting numbers Ella and Frank could sing together, Frank had him thrown out of the TV studio.
“Frank and Norman didn’t see eye to eye,” recalled Fitzgerald’s pianist, Lou Levy. “Norman would always want to be on top, and no one is on top of Frank Sinatra. Oh yeah! That’s Caesar, you don’t mess with him!”
But Sinatra and Granz weren’t through with each other by any means.
By 1960, Norman Granz had had it with the record business. He had made his real money as an impresario, and though Verve was now profitable—its roster had expanded to include comedy recordings (Shelley Berman, Mort Sahl, Jonathan Winters) and even, by 1958, big-selling pop discs by the likes of Ricky Nelson—Granz’s true love was jazz, and trying to sell jazz records to a niche audience was a continual uphill battle. “The record business in jazz was very, very limited,” recalled Verve’s controller, Mo Ostin. “We sold twenty thousand albums, we sold fifty thousand singles; that was big numbers for us.”
Nevertheless, Verve had a big fan in Frank Sinatra. “He loved the Verve roster,” Ostin said. “He was a big jazz enthusiast, and we had the very, very best jazz artists at that time. Frank was in love with Billie Holiday, he loved Lester Young, Oscar, Ella—whoever it might have been. So he wanted to buy the company.”
One thing did not necessarily follow the other. Yet for a long time, Frank had been itching to have his own record label, and to a man who craved class, Verve was a shining object of desire.
“Sinatra may have gotten wind of Granz’s plan to sell Verve because they shared the same attorney, Mickey Rudin,” writes Granz’s biographer Tad Hershorn. A strange situation—and, as Granz admitted to Hershorn, a conflicted one: “Rudin represented me and Frank, which was one hundred percent against the law, or whatever they call it.”
Conflict of interest is what they call it. But then, Milton Rudin knew how to play the angles. He’d been working for Sinatra since the early 1950s; as Frank’s various enterprises prospered, Rudin, who had a keen eye for the main chance, became increasingly enmeshed in them—less an attorney for hire, more a consigliere. He was enmeshed in all kinds of ways. Oddly, or perhaps not so
oddly, he was married to the classical cellist Elizabeth Greenschpoon, who played on a number of Sinatra albums and was the sister of the psychoanalyst Ralph Greenson (né Romeo Greenschpoon). Greenson had briefly treated Sinatra and also taken on the massive project that was Marilyn Monroe.
Mickey Rudin was a character: “a man born to twist arms…out of the Harvard Law Review mixed with a Brooklyn upbringing,” as record executive Stan Cornyn recalled.
He also had a cruel streak. When a negotiation was going bad, Mickey would write devastating letters about the guy opposite him at the table, letters doing everything from questioning his math competence to suggesting he enter his ass in the Kentucky Derby. Then Mickey would send this letter to the guy’s boss, with a carbon copy to the guy himself. And just wait for the guy’s insecurity and pain to turn the deal Mickey’s way. Mickey once told me one of his power secrets: “I get a lot of questions about Frank’s Mafia connection.” Then he smiled the smile of a guy who knew how to turn fear into a business asset. “But, you know, whenever people asked me about it, I just would smile and look wise. It never hurt I wouldn’t deny it.” Even in the way Rudin confided in you, he made you realize there was a lot he knew that you didn’t.
“He was as strong a lawyer as I ever knew,” said Mo Ostin, who hired Rudin at Verve. “He had an incredible street sense. He could be very difficult. He was a wonderful negotiator. He could be a bully. He was very, very strong; he had that kind of strong personality which a guy like Frank would be attracted to.”