by James Kaplan
Dean Martin’s wife, Jeanne, recalled that Frank had had to ask her help to get a disoriented Monroe dressed before the cruise. And a man identified by Sinatra biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli only as “a former associate” of Sinatra’s said that Frank “couldn’t wait to get her off that boat. She was giving him a hard time, pressuring him to marry her, taking a lot of drugs and drinking. Frank told me, ‘I swear to Christ, I was ready to throw her right off that fucking boat.’ Instead, he called one of his assistants at the end of the trip, when they were ashore, and had her taken away.”
But that was at the end of the trip. At the moment the picture was taken, they looked very much like a couple.
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Later in the month, Frank, Dean, Sammy, and Peter—minus Joey, who stayed in Hollywood to start shooting his new sitcom—flew blithely off to a Europe that was seething with tension. Berlin was the hot spot. The still-unwalled city, with its American, British, and French zones and relatively porous checkpoints, had long been the point of least resistance for East Germans wanting to escape to the West, and thousands were still doing so, proving a constant embarrassment to the Communist bloc. At the Vienna Summit in June, Khrushchev had threatened to make a separate peace with East Germany, restricting Western access to Berlin and effectively sealing off the city; having failed to challenge the Soviet leader on this crucial point, President Kennedy wound up looking weak and inexperienced. In the weeks afterward, he compensated by announcing a military buildup, doubling the draft, and ordering the construction of fallout shelters, ratcheting up anxieties around the world.
During a summer when American tourists stayed at home and European hotels were empty, Frank and Dean landed in London in an anxiety-proof zone all their own. They were there to shoot a cameo (as a pair of goofy astronauts) in Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s latest film, The Road to Hong Kong. “In their scene,” UPI explained, “Crosby and Hope accidentally are rocketed to the moon. Instead of being the first humans on the moon, they find the clan—in the persons of Sinatra and Martin—singing a welcome.” An Associated Press news photo showed Sinatra and Martin in space costume, looking tanned and plastered and holding cocktails, flanked by Crosby and Hope, who were dressed as coolies. An AP dispatch beneath the photo, under the headline “CLANSMEN” DELAY PLANE, described the next leg in Frank and Dean’s excellent adventure:
Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin lingered in a London Airport bar and firmly refused to board their Paris-bound airliner until downing their drinks.
Red-faced air hostesses tried to hurry them into a waiting plane where 103 passengers were wondering what was holding up the flight.
“Have a drink,” Sinatra beamed at an embarrassed stewardess.
A third member of the “clan,” Peter Lawford, sat it out nearby.
Finally the girls won. Strolling casually through customs, Sinatra and Martin clambered aboard the plane 3 minutes before take-off time. The plane got airborne 10 minutes late.
A background detail with foreground significance: once again, as in the breakup of Eddie Fisher’s Cocoanut Grove show, Lawford was hanging back from the high jinks. Around the time of the inaugural gala, the Hearst columnist Suzy had predicted, “Peter Lawford is going to ease away from the Hollywood buddies as per request. No clean break, mind you, just an inch at a time.”
Frank and Marilyn, aboard Sinatra’s yacht, late summer of 1961. Her slovenliness and emotional chaos upset him, but the tenderness between them is evident here. (Credit 16.1)
Wending their liquid way across Europe, Frank and Dean planned to head to Germany to pay a visit to Dean’s son Craig, an army private stationed near Frankfurt. (A subsequent news photo showed the pair checking through German customs, looking like happy, snappy, sharkskin-suited visitors from the planet Vegas: if Dean was worried about world events, he disguised it well.) From there, they would head to the Riviera to drop in on Joseph Kennedy, who’d invited Sinatra, Martin, and the Lawfords to stay for ten days at his Cap d’Antibes villa. They would then spend a relaxing few weeks cruising the Mediterranean on a yacht chartered by the millionaire playboy Bob Neal.
Sammy was headed to Monte Carlo to star in Princess Grace’s annual Red Cross benefit. Needless to say, Joe Kennedy hadn’t invited him to stay at the villa.
But then, all at once, no one was invited. On August 3, under the headline JOE KENNEDY TELLS CLAN: NO BOARDERS, the New York Post ran a piece in which the Ambassador was quoted as saying, “I know they are coming to the Cote d’Azur. Certainly, they will come to visit me and I’ll be happy to see them. But they will have to go to a hotel because I just don’t have the room at my place to put them up.”
Something was strange. While Frank and Dean visited Craig, UPI reported,
the 170-foot steam yacht Hiniesta, chartered from Britain’s Sir John North, lay at anchor in Nice Harbor waiting to take part of the clan aboard.
August 1961: Frank and Dean do a cameo, as goofy astronauts, in the last (and worst) Bing Crosby–Bob Hope film comedy, The Road to Hong Kong. Fun was had by all. (Credit 16.2)
“We don’t know yet where we will cruise,” Texas oil man J. Robert Neal said. “We are waiting for ‘the leader.’ ”
But the leader would not come. Rather than proceeding from Germany to the Riviera, Frank and Dean flew back to London, where they crossed paths with Sammy—who on his arrival in Nice told the press that Sinatra and Martin had called off the cruise. “I saw them last night in London,” Davis said, “and they told me that they had to get back to the States right away. I don’t know why.”
He didn’t know, or he wouldn’t say. But UPI would, in an August 17 dispatch headlined SINATRA CRUISE REPORTED CANCELED FOR D.C. REACTION:
Texas oilman Robert Neal, who chartered the yacht for the Frank Sinatra “clan” cruise in the Mediterranean, was quoted as saying the jaunt was canceled because of “angry reaction in Washington groups.”
Neal, according to London columnist Paul Tanfield of the Daily Mail, said the reaction was stirred because [of] the timing of the cruise.
“It was being said that relatives and friends of the President were sunning themselves on the beaches of the Mediterranean while their fellow countrymen were being conscripted due to the crisis.”
An August 18 editorial in Louisiana’s Monroe News-Star expressed a widely felt outrage: “Certainly, it would have been better if Lawford, Sinatra, Martin and other members of the ‘clan’ hadn’t chosen to visit the senior Kennedys on the Riviera at this particular time. As for the accompanying publicity stunts—including the delaying of a commercial airliner in England—they were in poor taste this time or any other.”
But especially at this time. On the morning of August 13, thirty-two thousand combat and engineer troops of the East German army, with Soviet troops standing by to prevent interference, began building barbed-wire entanglements and fences around the twenty-seven-mile perimeter of Berlin’s three Western sectors: the Wall. The president ordered fifteen hundred U.S. troops in armored vehicles into Berlin. For forty-eight hours, it seemed as though war might break out.
Joe Kennedy might have called off Frank, Dean, and the others at a direct suggestion from the White House. Or, as one who’d once before been burned by being on the wrong side of history, he might simply have been canny enough to realize what bad PR such a visit would create at this moment. But there was another thing: the attorney general and his family had decided to stay at the Ambassador’s villa during the same week, and the attorney general and Frank Sinatra were not a mixture that worked well.
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At its mid-August meeting, the Nevada Gaming Control Board approved Frank’s application to buy a majority stake in the Cal-Neva Lodge. Earlier applicants for minority ownership had included Joe DiMaggio, Skinny D’Amato, and Dean Martin; all had now apparently dropped out. As of August 15, Nancy Sinatra writes, Park Lake Enterprises, Inc. (doing business as Cal-Neva Lodge), had an authorized capital of 1,000 no-par-value shares. Of these thousand shares, 54
0 were issued. Frank Sinatra owned 270; Hank Sanicola, 180; and Sanford Waterman, 90. The expectation, Nancy says, was that Frank would ultimately acquire all the shares and become the sole owner. Her father liked Cal-Neva, she writes, “because it was unpretentious yet glamorous, homey yet exciting.”
Skinny D’Amato might have dropped out of the ownership sweepstakes, but he would still be intimately involved in casino operations at Cal-Neva. And while the Gaming Control Board’s new Black Book now officially forbade Sam Giancana to set foot in any Nevada casino, he owned a substantial piece of the Lake Tahoe lodge, with Frank as his front. This was a matter of grave concern to Hank Sanicola, who stood to lose the $300,000 he’d invested in the place if Mooney showed up—which was a virtual certainty now that Sinatra was in charge.
While the world frets about the Berlin crisis, Sinatra and Martin return from Europe in an anxiety-proof zone all their own. (Credit 16.3)
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Because Frank was capable of pure philanthropy—often anonymous—we may look for a certain altruism in his hiring Axel Stordahl, the great arranger of his Columbia years, to orchestrate Sinatra’s final Capitol album: Stordahl, not yet fifty, was gravely ill with cancer. The guitarist Al Viola recalled the arranger’s wife, the former Pied Pipers*2 singer June Hutton, going to Capitol producer Dave Cavanaugh to lobby for her husband. “She knew that Frank was leaving Capitol,” Viola said, “and she also knew that Axel wanted to get in one last album with Frank because he might not be around much longer.”
But there was more to the hire than charity: Stordahl had supervised Frank’s first Capitol session in 1953, and even though the genius Riddle had quickly supplanted him, there was a nice symmetry to bringing Axel back for Sinatra’s swan song with the label, the album that would be—pungently—titled Point of No Return.
There was symmetry, but there was also extreme ambivalence on Sinatra’s part. Frank hated Capitol so vehemently by now that his initial impulse was to break his contract. “I’m sure his lawyers had to do a lot of talking to get him to do [the album],” said the trombonist Milt Bernhart. “I have a feeling he said, ‘Let them sue me.’ ”
Sinatra also had mixed feelings about Axel Stordahl, the quiet, gentle Norwegian-American who smoked his pipe upside down sailor-style and rarely spoke more than a few words. In 1953, just as they’d started working together at Capitol, and before Frank’s career slide had reversed course, Stordahl had taken a job as music director for Eddie Fisher’s TV show. Eddie Fucking Fisher. That had been that for the decade-long Sinatra-Stordahl partnership, and eight years later the wound was still fresh as far as Frank was concerned. When it came to Frank and grudges, eight years was the blink of an eye.
And yet he decided to work with Axel. Because he had cancer, okay. But also because he could still arrange.
That didn’t mean Frank had to be nice to him. Or to Capitol. There were two six-song sessions for Point of No Return, on the nights of September 11 and 12, and he showed up an hour and a half late for both of them, something he’d never done before.
The writer Robin Douglas-Home, young enough and British enough and affable enough that he had somehow persuaded Sinatra to give him an interview, was there to witness the scene. Just before Frank arrived, “the atmosphere was relaxed,” he wrote.
The bass-player was smoking a cigarette through a long white holder. A trombone-player was surreptitiously following a ball-game on a transistor radio earplug. Buzz of talk, smoke rings, violin squeaks, drum thuds, horn blasts, trumpet trills, flute whistles.
Suddenly the cacophony died to a whisper and all heads turned to the door. In sauntered Sinatra. He wore a well-cut dark grey suit; a dark grey felt hat crowned him jauntily; a red and yellow silk handkerchief peeked perkily from his breast-pocket; the black bows on his patent leather pumps winked from under the knife-edge creases. His face was alert, purposeful, a shade nervous—the ice-blue eyes moved here and there…but a twinkle was either in them or a split-second away.
Milt Bernhart, in the orchestra, didn’t see the twinkle. “When he did come in, Sinatra was all business,” the trombonist recalled.
The usual audience was there and he walked in with his entourage and went right up to the microphone, and said, “What’s up?” Didn’t really even address Stordahl. On most of the tunes, he did only one, maybe two takes, with no run-throughs. At one point, Dave Cavanaugh asked him for another take on a song, because something had gone wrong in the booth. Sinatra refused. The lead sheet was already on the floor. He said, “Nope. Next tune.” When Cavanaugh tried to cajole him into doing another take, Sinatra just glared at him, picked up the lead sheet, and tore it into about twenty pieces. “Didn’t you hear me?” he asked. “Next number!”
“That Sinatra still harbored a grudge against Stordahl was obvious from the tension in the studio on these sessions,” writes Charles Granata.
Listening to the album song by song, and understanding the stressful conditions under which it was recorded, one can easily distinguish between the “true” Sinatra and the lackadaisical, intractable singer that merely showed up because he had to. Albums are not usually sequenced in the order in which the songs were recorded, and the songs that Sinatra had invested real effort in are mixed with the ones he might as well [have] been phoning in.
The most egregious underachiever on the album, and one of the most notorious recordings in the Sinatra canon, is “These Foolish Things”—the great Harry Link–Holt Marvell–Jack Strachey ballad, which a young and ardent Frank had recorded to tremulous perfection (and a Stordahl arrangement) for Columbia in July 1945. Sixteen years later, pissy and distracted, he sleepwalks his way through the number, letting us know how much he doesn’t care by singing the second word of the song, “cigarette” (as in “A cigarette that bears a lipstick’s traces”) defiantly flat. For the rest of the tune, he mostly sounds hoarse and listless, like the victim of too many hangovers, and only occasionally—as if he’d suddenly remembered who he was—rises to Sinatra-esque heights.
Then comes the capper. On the final line,
Oh, how the ghost of you clings
These foolish things remind me of you,
there’s a painfully audible tape splice between “of” and “you,” clearly revealing that on the last word Frank hadn’t been able to hit the note and that another take’s “you” had been patched in. It’s the kind of gross error Sinatra would never have allowed onto an album he really cared about: with Capitol, of course, he’d just stopped caring.
Yet just as Frank could create movie magic with one take, he couldn’t help, despite everything, despite himself, sprinkling stardust on some of Point of No Return’s songs. The first two tunes on the album, “When the World Was Young” and “I’ll Remember April”—each the last number he recorded on the successive nights—are the ballad-singing genius at his best: quiet, tender, and incomparably expressive. Hearing him sing this way, you can forgive him anything; you forget that he is any man but this man. And Stordahl, as effulgent as a lightbulb that shines more brightly just before it goes out, has done some of his finest work here, showcasing his gift for lush and flowing string arrangements and showing a new flair for bright brass and pensive horns. Sinatra’s reading of “When the World Was Young,” a French song with an English lyric by Johnny Mercer, is a masterpiece: Frank brings all the weight and strength of his years to the lilting reminiscences of an aging boulevardier. It’s like “Lush Life” without the self-conscious ennui.
And “I’ll Remember April” is almost as great—a standard Sinatra makes his own. Stordahl’s beautiful orchestration, buoyed by tinkling percussion (Emil Richards’s jingling temple bells give the chart a Southeast Asian flavor), stands squarely in the now, without a hint of musty nostalgia.
Frank tenderly sings the coda of “April”:
I won’t forget, but I won’t be lonely,
I’ll remember April, and I’ll smile.
And then it’s all over—the song, the album, and his days in
Studio A. Robin Douglas-Home described those final moments:
At 11:45, the last playback came to the final chord. There was a moment of silence which, after the tremendous volume of noise, gave one the strange feeling of being left suspended in mid-air. Then the orchestra started clapping. Sinatra turned away pretending to be unaware of the applause, and occupied himself by busily buttoning his shirt and straightening his tie. He eventually raised an arm and said, “Thank you, fellers,” and walked toward the door. There was a disorderly shout of “Night, Frank,” then the scores were folded, the instruments packed away, and in no time at all the studio was empty and quiet.
He wouldn’t return to this room for more than thirty years.
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It was strange but true: Brother-in-Lawford had suddenly acquired some heat in Hollywood, based not on nepotism (“I don’t think anyone making a legitimate movie is going to put me in the cast just because of my brother-in-law,” he said; “I know and they know that it wouldn’t sell one extra ticket”) but on the strength of his performance in Exodus, whose director, Otto Preminger, had recently signed him to play a U.S. senator in his new film, the political thriller Advise and Consent. That September, the movie was shooting in Washington, D.C., and Lawford asked Frank, as a favor, to do a cameo in which the real Frank Sinatra is spotted by a starstruck young couple at a Capital soiree.
Sinatra’s high political profile over the past year and a half gave him a natural believability in a Washington story, lending real power to a fiction about power. And even if being the president’s brother-in-law wasn’t getting Peter Lawford any movie roles, another kind of nepotism was working in his favor: he would never have had the kind of visibility he was now enjoying if not for his association with Frank.