by James Kaplan
This was whom Frank was dealing with.
Humphreys finally, if reluctantly, went along with his fellow hoods. It was a crucial decision. The Camel was the brains of the Chicago Outfit, its chief fixer. Renowned for his diplomatic skills and a certain personal elegance—he never used profanity—he had enormous influence among political and labor leaders. Humphreys was instrumental in securing the massive loans from the Teamsters’ Western States Pension Fund that allowed the Mob to bankroll the hotel-casinos of Las Vegas, including the Sands.
Of course the Teamsters also had something to gain from the deal: they too wanted in on Vegas. But their leader, Jimmy Hoffa, was severely conflicted, worrying aloud to Humphreys at one point that “my members’ money is…going to get that son of a bitch elected.”
Hoffa notwithstanding, Humphreys leaned on labor-union officials all around the country to get out the vote for Kennedy, confident of the result and glad to stay behind the scenes. “He didn’t expect any accolades,” his widow recalled, “and was content to see Mooney bask in the glory and praise.”
All of it based on a promise from Joe Kennedy.
Frank spent Election Day, Tuesday, November 8, at his Essex Productions office at 9229 Sunset Boulevard, where his secretary, Gloria Lovell, had set up an open phone line to Chicago. On the other end was Jake Arvey, Democratic National Committee member and Giancana’s political fixer, who gave Sinatra updates every half hour on the Illinois returns.
It went well for Kennedy all day. Early returns from Chicago—as well as from Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Detroit—showed the Democratic candidate opening up a large lead over Nixon in the popular and electoral vote. But as day turned to evening, and returns came in from suburban and rural areas, from the Midwest, the Rocky Mountain states, and the West Coast, the momentum began to turn toward the Republican ticket.
Frank had gone to Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh’s Beverly Hills house, the site of the Key Women for Kennedy fiesta in September, and started to drink—first in celebration, then to blunt his mounting anxiety. He kept phoning Giancana for reassurance; Mooney told Frank he was doing his considerable best. “It’s gonna turn, it’s gonna turn,” Frank told all who would listen.
It turned. Slowly, agonizingly. Sometime after midnight, John Kennedy, watching the returns in Hyannis Port, phoned Chicago’s mayor, Daley, who, JFK told aides, assured him, “We’re going to make it with the help of a few close friends.”
At 3:10 a.m., Pacific time, Richard Nixon appeared before TV cameras at L.A.’s Ambassador Hotel and hinted that Kennedy might have won the election. Reporters on the scene were puzzled by the non-concession concession speech. Sinatra was furious. And by this time, as Janet Leigh recalled, drunk. “He yelled at the TV screen, ‘Concede, you son-of-a-bitch! Concede!’ ”
Then he took matters into his own hands. He phoned the Ambassador and commanded the operator to put him through to Nixon’s suite. The operator refused. Frank cranked up that big voice. “Do you know who this is?” he screamed. “This is Frank Sinatra, and I want to talk to Richard Nixon.”
When the operator still wouldn’t put him through, Frank yelled a message. Tell the son of a bitch to concede!
—
Around the same time, Richard Daley phoned Dave Powers in Hyannis Port. “We’re trying to hold back our returns,” the mayor said. “Every time we announce two hundred more votes for Kennedy in Chicago, they come up out of nowhere downstate with another three hundred votes for Nixon.”
—
By morning, though, Illinois had finally come through. Despite Kennedy’s 450,000-vote margin in Cook County, he captured the state by a razor-thin 8,858 votes. Nationwide, he captured the popular vote by a similarly slim majority: 112,881 votes out of 68,832,818 cast, about sixteen-hundredths of 1 percent of the whole. The electoral margin was more substantial: 303 for Kennedy to 219 for Nixon. But as Theodore H. White reminds us, “If only 4,500 voters in Illinois and 28,000 voters in Texas had changed their minds, the sum of their 32,500 votes would have moved both those states, with their combined fifty-one electoral votes, into the Nixon column”—and thus would have won the Republican the election.
Instead, Nixon finally conceded, and Kennedy claimed victory, on the afternoon of the ninth. It was a victory in which Frank could actually feel he had been instrumental. “‘Ye assholes of little faith’ was all that Sinatra could say, with a weary victory smile,” George Jacobs remembered.
—
Frank Sinatra and Norman Granz might have shaken hands, but they’d never liked each other and never would. Correspondingly—if not consequently—all was not well with the Verve sale. Strange things were going on: Will Friedwald cites a story that “someone in Sinatra’s office loused up the deal—perhaps deliberately. He continually postponed appointments to sign the papers and kept asking to examine and reexamine the company’s books.”
That someone was Frank’s lawyer Mickey Rudin.
Rudin, who as we’ve seen also worked for Norman Granz and Verve, had finally admitted he was fatally conflicted in this matter and recused himself. Verve hired another lawyer to handle the sale of the label.
But—recused or not recused—Rudin knew things. Was he urging caution on Sinatra’s part because of inside knowledge about Verve’s finances?
Or was it Frank’s finances his lawyer was concerned about?
Frank was earning big in 1960, but he always spent it as fast as it came in, if not faster. Rudin knew that a realistic offer for Verve had to be at least $2 million. Was he worried about a hit of this size to his star client’s bank account?
Then strange got even stranger. “Quite by accident,” Mo Ostin recalled, “Granz ran into Arnold Maxin, who was then the president of MGM, in an airport. Maxin asked him, ‘What’s going on with your company?’ And Granz said, ‘Well, I’m in the process of selling it.’ Maxin said, ‘Look, I’ll buy it from you.’ Granz said, ‘Well, I can’t; I’m already in the midst of making a deal.’ So Maxin said to him, ‘I want you to promise me if it falls through that you’ll come back to me and sell me the company.’ ”
Meanwhile—apparently without Sinatra’s knowledge—Rudin dithered.
And then Norman Granz, impatient to cash out and move to Europe, went back to Arnold Maxin and made a deal to sell Verve to MGM—not for $2 million, but for $3.1 million. (Multiply by eight to ten to understand present-day values.)
And Frank hit the ceiling.
Sinatra felt that Granz had simply reneged on a handshake deal to get more money. Frank (who might not have known exactly how much cash he was capable of putting into play) felt that Granz could have, should have, simply come back to him with the MGM offer and he would have matched it.
“Frank was absolutely incensed,” Ostin said. “I don’t think he ever got the facts straight. I don’t think he ever learned that in fact Granz went to Rudin first, to see if he could close the deal, and then, when he couldn’t close, he went back to MGM.”
With his fine Sicilian sense of vendetta, Sinatra made Norman Granz an enemy for life. And his powerful sense of loyalty clasped Mickey Rudin closer than ever. (With Frank, as we’ve seen, enmity tended to last longer than friendship.)
Did Rudin withhold critical information from Sinatra? “It’s certainly possible,” Ostin said. “And, I think to cool Frank out, Rudin then suggested to him that instead of spending all of this money on a record company, why don’t we start one from scratch. He said, ‘I have somebody who I think you can hire to run it,’ and that, of course, was me.”
Mo Ostin, who would go on to become the chief of Warner Music and a titan of the recording industry, has been cast, in his 1960 avatar, as a schnook—a mousy little bookkeeper manipulated by Mickey Rudin into running Frank Sinatra’s new label, where he would be a mere rubber stamp for Rudin’s schemes. Fredric Dannen’s record-business exposé Hit Men describes Ostin as “short and slight, bald and bespectacled. His features were somewhat rodentlike…He had ent
ered the music business as Frank Sinatra’s accountant.”
This is harsh, though not entirely off the mark. Ostin was small and unassuming, strictly a numbers guy, and at age thirty-three not imbued with self-confidence or a grand vision for his future. But as he recalled, Rudin saw potential in him. “I think he thought I was honest,” Ostin said. “He thought I had learned a great deal in terms of my experience with Granz about the business itself. I was dealing with financial administration, contracts administration, distributors, international licensees. I had people who had worked for me, so I had good relationships with my employees. And he saw something in me that I certainly didn’t see in myself. I didn’t have that confidence. But having an opportunity to work for a guy who was perhaps the biggest artist in the world was something that I could never turn down. So when Rudin asked me if I’d be interested, I jumped at it.”
First, though, Frank would have to approve him. And Ostin’s initial encounter with Sinatra was inauspicious.
The shoot for The Devil at 4 O’Clock had moved from location work in Hawaii to a Columbia soundstage in Hollywood. “I went onto the soundstage with Mickey, and as we got there, Frank was having this incredible argument with Mervyn LeRoy,” Ostin recalled. “I mean, he was enraged, in a tantrum—I mean, frightening. He was just screaming, and I’m about to go get his approval! This was the opportunity of a lifetime for me, and that’s what I face.
“So Mickey said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ We went to Frank’s dressing room. My heart was beating; it was a scary situation. I didn’t know what his temper would be or what I would be confronted with. We waited until Frank finished whatever was going on on the set. He came into the dressing room, and it was like a 180-degree turnaround. He could not have been more enthusiastic. He could not have been more energetic. He could not have been more positive. He loved the idea of starting a record company.”
It was the same old song with Sinatra and the movies: other people had control over him and the product, and it drove him crazy. The only way to get what he wanted was to throw a fit. But when it came to his new record label, the power was all his, and the slate was clean. He was excited, bursting with ideas. “He told me how important he felt it was to have a record company that reflected the artists’ as well as the businessmen’s point of view,” Ostin said. “He wanted to encourage other artists to join him in what he felt would be a freer, more creative atmosphere. He wanted to build a better economic mousetrap for artists having ownership in a record company so that they’d have not only idealistic but business motivations as well.”
It was all fresh and new and thrilling. Whether it could actually work was another question.
—
On Sunday, November 13, a safe five days after Kennedy was voted in, Frank stood as best man at Sammy Davis Jr.’s wedding to May Britt at Sammy’s house in Beverly Hills. Invitations had been sent out for October 16, but Davis had postponed the ceremony after a characteristically blunt phone call from Joe Kennedy to Sinatra: Jack’s chances could be hurt, the Ambassador said, if the wedding took place before Election Day. Frank put the directive to Sammy in the form of a request, and Sammy agreed—as “a huge favor” to Frank, according to George Jacobs, but according to Nancy Sinatra Jr., because Davis loved Jack Kennedy and “would do anything for him, no matter how hurt he was.”
He had no idea how far he would have to go.
Sammy had seen, the moment he announced his engagement to Britt, how dangerous he was to the Kennedy campaign. “I combed the papers every day,” he recalled. “The already stale news that Frank would be my best man continued making the front pages and too often by ‘coincidence’ right next to it were stories about Frank campaigning for Kennedy.”
There had been hate mail (“Dear Nigger Bastard, I see Frank Sinatra is going to be best man at your abortion”) and unsettling scenes of bigotry, along with the constant buzz that Sinatra’s connection to the campaign implied, by association, that JFK approved of interracial marriage. “Right or wrong, fair or not, my wedding was giving the Nixon people the opportunity to ridicule Kennedy and possibly hurt him at the polls,” Davis said later. “And every survey showed that [Kennedy] couldn’t afford to lose a single vote. I could imagine the pressure Frank must be under. He must have eighty guys telling him, ‘Don’t be a fool. You’ve worked hard for Kennedy, now do you want to louse him up?’ ”
Sammy felt for Frank in all kinds of ways. The way he saw it, just appearing at the wedding was a risk for his idol: the press mobbed the event; seeing the coverage, a fickle public might take Sinatra’s participation amiss and stop buying his records and tickets to his movies. Davis recalled that for Frank “to state, ‘This is my friend, and in your ear if you don’t like it,’ means putting in jeopardy everything he’d worked for, lost and regained, and must fight to hold on to. It was not a minor thing for Frank to be my best man.”
Nor was it a minor thing for Sammy to postpone his wedding: a good deed that would not go unpunished.
—
Among Frank’s visitors on the set of The Devil at 4 O’Clock was the young composer and arranger Johnny Mandel, whom Bill Miller brought in for a special audience: Sinatra wanted to ask Mandel to orchestrate the first album for his new label, Reprise.
“I [arranged] a lot of club acts, and one of them was Vic Damone,” Mandel recalled. “Vic used to come and play the Sands, and we had a real dynamite act at the time—I’d written a lot of hard swinging things. And Sinatra came in and heard it, and he came up to Vic and asked him, ‘Who did those?’ ”
Hard and swinging was exactly the sound Frank wanted for the new LP—on which neither Nelson Riddle nor Billy May was allowed to work, both being under contract to Capitol. That business detail was fortuitous. Sinatra (much to Nelson’s dismay) was always on the lookout for new sounds, and the thought of a fresh start filled him with excitement. He was bursting with ideas, “like a kid with a new toy,” Mandel remembered. For one thing, the new label would press its records onto colored vinyl: “They were all going to be different colors, he said. And everybody’s going to own their own masters, which was why he left Capitol…I remember just watching his eyes as he was talking about the company, you know, and they were sparkling. It was like he was very proud of this thing. He had the most striking kind of blue eyes. Man, they drilled right through you! When he was talking to you, he was talking to you and no one else. He meant what he said and said what he meant.”
Frank decided to symbolize his break with the past by crowning the new album with a title song and a concept that were all about the present. The result was Cahn and Van Heusen’s “Ring-a-Ding Ding.”
The number was nearly identical in theme and structure to the team’s 1955 composition “The Tender Trap.” Musically, both tunes rise—hopefully, energetically, erotically—until the melody plateaus and the title is announced. Lyrically, both tunes were written in the second person, telling the story of a confirmed Every-bachelor who finds an enchanting young thing and is lured into wedded bliss. As crafted by the married Sammy (whose wedlock was growing less blissful by the month) for the relentlessly promiscuous Frank, the songs’ stories expressed what was at once both a dream and a nightmare of Sinatra’s: of finding true love, and of being ensnared in it after the thrill wore off.
The new number was also an act of sheer ego and defiance: “ring-a-ding-ding” was the signature catchphrase of Frank’s own swinger’s argot, his identifying code as America’s bachelor in chief. It was an expression of exuberance born in the first flush of his early-1950s rise from the ashes, when after falling from the empyrean of 1940s superstardom, he’d once more found he could make the world dance to his tune. It was also, implicitly, an announcement that—at the moment he said it and felt it, at any rate—he was no longer in Ava’s thrall.
“Ring-a-ding-ding” proclaimed he was at the summit. Where, as Frank had also admitted, he was quite alone.
—
And ring-a-ding-ding was the mood Fra
nk was in on Monday night, December 19, 1960, at United Recording studios at 6050 Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood: the night he began recording the album of the same name.
He had just turned forty-five the week before, he had helped put his man in the White House, and he was starting his own record label, with a brand-new arranger, in a brand-new studio. He felt reborn.
Sinatra’s previous recording home, Capitol Studio A, had had acoustical problems from the word go, and though various tinkers and baffles had improved matters, a nontechnical funk soon settled over the premises, at first gradually and then precipitously, as Frank dueled for power with Glenn Wallichs and Alan Livingston.
United Recording was a new lease on life. The genius behind the facility was Bill Putnam, an inventor and independent recording engineer who’d founded Chicago’s Universal Recording studio, where he made historic discs with Duke Ellington and Count Basie in the 1930s and 1940s before moving west with the music business. Putnam had put all his considerable technical ingenuity into building United’s state-of-the-art Studios A and B; the larger Studio A, in which Sinatra would make most of his Reprise recordings, had concert-hall dimensions—it could accommodate seventy-five players—and sound of an unparalleled richness. Frank felt immediately at ease there.
“Unedited tapes reveal a remarkably jovial tone for these sessions,” Charles Granata writes.
In the studio, there is electricity in the air; the atmosphere is light and fun. The musicians are warming up, joking, and laughing…Happy sounds come from the piano, the horns, the percussion, as they find their pitches.
Shuffling lead sheets at his music stand, Sinatra, anticipating one hell of a swingin’ evening, addresses Mandel. “I’ll tell you what we do, Johnny…let’s do the title song, huh? That’s the name of the album, so let’s get in the mood!”
Frank, who of course couldn’t read music, was about to take in Mandel’s arrangement of “Ring-a-Ding Ding” for the first time, the only way he could: by hearing it played. And as the arranger recalled more than fifty years later, a remarkable thing happened. “We played the song down once,” Mandel said.