Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  He was only half-kidding. In fact, his breathlessness during the tea break was probably about more than nerves: he’d been touring for a month and a half, singing night after night, meeting and greeting and patting kids on the head day after day, and that incomparable voice—always a delicate instrument—was showing the strain. Reviewing Frank’s June 3 concert at West London’s Hammersmith Odeon theater (his fourth in three days), Ray Coleman of Melody Maker commended him for showing “the height of professionalism” but added, “At times he sounded coarse, even nasal, and he certainly found it tough to sustain the note on certain occasions—notably on ‘My Funny Valentine.’ ”

  And the tour still had two weeks to go. In Paris on the fifth and seventh, he did two shows (his first ever in the City of Light, though he’d been singing Vernon Duke’s and Cole Porter’s odes to it for years): the first was at the Lido, a nightclub-theater on the Champs-Élysées, the second at the Olympia, a grand old music hall in the 9th arrondissement. The Olympia concert was the only performance on the world tour to be professionally recorded, with an eye toward an eventual release as a Reprise LP. Eventual almost became never: the record wouldn’t come out for more than thirty years, and the 1994 CD—only Sinatra’s third commercially released live album—is a curious document. For one thing, it’s mislabeled as having been recorded on June 5 at the Lido. But more important, and central to its long delay, is that despite the grandeur of the venue, the warmth of the audience, and the largesse of Charles Aznavour’s introduction—“Frank Sinatra, Paris vous appartient!” (Frank Sinatra, Paris belongs to you!)—by the evening of the Olympia concert, Frank’s voice was running on fumes.

  At first it seems that, vocally, not much is there. There are some truly bad moments: at the beginning of the very first number, “Goody Goody,” he jumps in (“So you met someone who set you back on your heels—goody, goody!”) carelessly, almost defiantly flat. And on the fifth tune, “Moonlight in Vermont,” he struggles, pitiably; his not-even-close-to-on-key “ski trails down a mountainside” is the sonic equivalent of a bloodied prizefighter staggering through the late rounds. Hunting for the pitch, barking instead of belting on some of the loud passages, he gives a strange foreshadowing of the performer he would become in old age.

  At the same time, though—Sinatra is Sinatra—he rallies. He may not be 100 percent, but his pride and his love of singing are at stake, and he’s got that terrific sextet to back him (and to prove something to). He finds his breath and his pitch and his confidence, and he gives the crowd a show. He delivers real performances on swingers and ballads: “Day In, Day Out,” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “In the Still of the Night,” and, importantly, “April in Paris.”

  Two of the best numbers in the show are duos, just Frank and an instrumentalist. Both are signature tunes. He does a beautiful “Night and Day” with guitarist Viola, and he gives “Ol’ Man River,” with Bill Miller on piano behind him, the majesty it deserves. He’d had long practice with both songs: he’d first performed “Night and Day,” of course, as a singing waiter at the Rustic Cabin in 1939.

  “Ol’ Man River,” too, was an essential part of his repertoire, as he had told his friend Alec Wilder. Amazingly, Sinatra had been singing the Jerome Kern–Oscar Hammerstein classic (written in 1927 for the musical Show Boat) for almost twenty years—since the age of twenty-seven, in 1943—and somehow, over those two decades, a skinny white Italian-American had managed to make a work song made famous by a great black baritone, Paul Robeson, authoritatively his own. “Sinatra needed ‘Ol’ Man River’ to make a point about himself as a singer—a point no dreamy love song or, in later decades, swinging tune could drive home to listeners,” the music historian Todd Decker writes. “With ‘Ol’ Man River,’ Sinatra…declared in no uncertain terms that he could deliver a challenging melody and a serious lyric that dealt with life’s biggest questions.”

  He gives the song a powerful performance and on the rousing finale (“He just keeps rollin’ a-long!”) finds the big volume, and a vocal flourish, that had eluded him at the concert’s beginning. The crowd loves it. But Frank’s deepest feelings are too tightly tied to his intense vulnerability: he can never stay serious for long. Once the applause dies down and the saucy intro to “The Lady Is a Tramp” begins, he cracks a smile. “That was a song about Sammy Davis’s people,” he announces. “And this is a song about mah people.”

  Well, the Rodgers and Hart song isn’t about Italian-Americans, so one assumes he means female people. Lots and lots of them. Further driving home the point he made earlier in the show, when, on the number he’d been implicitly dedicating to Ava throughout the tour, he changed one key word: “Some like the perfume in Spain—yecchh!”

  * * *

  *1 Mostly Jule Styne, in Cahn’s case; mostly Johnny Burke, in Van Heusen’s.

  *2 Martin, a veteran arranger-conductor, “occasionally pinch-hit for Sinatra around this time,” according to Friedwald. Sinatra!, p. 384.

  *3 Until 1993 and 1994, when Capitol would release Sinatra’s Duets and Duets II.

  *4 June 23, 1961, in Friedrich-Ebert-Halle, Hamburg: John Lennon on lead vocal and rhythm guitar, Paul McCartney on bass, George Harrison on lead guitar, and Pete Best on drums. The Polydor single wouldn’t be released until May 1964, after the Beatles, with a different drummer, had changed the world.

  *5 There is a minor mystery here. George Jacobs claims the El Dago was a DC-6, a four-engine prop with a range of approximately three thousand miles, but photographs clearly show a two-engine Martin 4-0-4, which had a range of only about a thousand miles. How, then, was the plane transported from Los Angeles to Rome? Most crucially, how did it get across the Atlantic (if not by boat)? The trip might just have been possible with hops from Gander, Newfoundland, to Nuuk, Greenland, to Reykjavík, Iceland, to Shannon, Ireland—a lot of work, but then, people were used to jumping through hoops for Frank.

  18

  I thought Italians were supposed to be liberals.

  —SAMMY DAVIS JR. TO FRANK, ON THE STAGE OF THE 500 CLUB ON AUGUST 25, 1962

  The world tour limped to a close, just one concert to go: Princess Grace’s annual Red Cross gala, on June 17 in Monte Carlo. Frank’s voice had been in rough shape before the Paris concerts, but afterward, as Friedwald says, “he had next to nothing that he could sing with.” The only problem was—sloth being the one cardinal sin Sinatra could never be accused of—he now planned to make an album.

  After sampling richly of Paris’s many pleasures (“We had our most fun in Paris,” George Jacobs wrote with a wink, adding that he even managed to find the boss some Campbell’s franks and beans at Fauchon, a luxury grocery store), Frank returned to London to complete a long-awaited project, an album of British songs with the Canadian-born arranger-conductor Robert Farnon. Like Billy May, the forty-four-year-old Farnon was lantern-jawed and ebullient; like May and Don Costa, he was also a gifted musician—the Englishman’s instrument being the jazz trumpet, which he played so well that Dizzy Gillespie reportedly expressed relief that Farnon had turned from performing to composing, conducting, and orchestrating. At the latter, he had few peers. Quincy Jones cited him as a major influence, and André Previn called him “the greatest writer for strings in the world.” It was Costa who’d commended him to Sinatra as the best arranger for the English album.

  The LP—Frank’s first, and ultimately only, album to be recorded overseas—had been in the making for years. The English music journal Melody Maker had reported in 1959 that Sinatra had “big disc plans” to record in London; he began putting together the repertory in December 1961. A producer for Reprise’s British affiliate, Pye Records (whose head of A&R had recently turned down a certain Liverpool rock ’n’ roll group seeking its first recording contract), compiled a list of almost seventy homegrown English tunes, which Frank then winnowed down to eleven. Farnon wrote the charts with carte blanche from Sinatra. They double-checked the keys and tempos on June 1, the day of the Royal Festival Hall concer
t, and “on the evening of June 12, Sinatra arrived at the C.T.S. Studio in Bayswater in a Rolls-Royce lent to him by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and said to Farnon, ‘Let’s see how it fits, huh?’ ” Friedwald writes.

  Four trumpeters, four trombonists, eight saxophonists and woodwind players, five rhythm men (including both Bill Miller and a local pianist, as per union rules), twenty assorted strings, and an uncountable horde of well-wishers, several dozen in the control room alone, had already arrived. “There were so many people there who had nothing to do with the recording,” said Farnon. “There were people all around us, sitting on my podium, under the piano, on the piano…The studio was absolutely crammed with people, and Frank loved it. He didn’t mind at all.”

  And he didn’t mind for a while, even though, in the outtake tapes, it’s difficult to listen to him: his voice is a gorgeous ruin, deep and resonant, but hoarse and cracking periodically. His ability to sustain notes is severely compromised, the fabled breath control a distant memory. A remark he made during the tea break at Royal Festival Hall comes to mind. “This tea I drink during the performance is not a joke at all,” he said. “It’s not a prop; it’s a necessity. It’s very good for the throat, the tea and a little bit of honey mixed into it—I’ve been doing it for years. And then the cigarette ruins the whole thing after that.”

  He smoked. Immoderately, as he did so many other things: up to three packs of unfiltered Camels a day. How could he inhale this much tobacco smoke and still sing? How could he have any breath control at all? He was Sinatra. But the cumulative effects of the tour, and the smoking and the drinking and the late-night fun, had caught up with him.

  Still, his good humor stayed with him over the rocky three-hour course of the first recording session. Toward the end of the evening, he prefaces a take of his pal Noël Coward’s “I’ll Follow My Secret Heart” with a minor coughing fit, which is then echoed by others in the studio. “Damn, we gotta sleep indoors,” Frank says. And then, a little shamefacedly, he rolls out an ancient gag: “If I could find my key, I’d use it.” As it turns out, the joke isn’t so funny: that first take is not pretty to listen to.

  But song by song over the course of three nights, with plenty of takes and great patience all around, Sinatra Sings Great Songs from Great Britain got recorded. Everybody involved, especially Frank, knew all too well that he wasn’t really himself: at the end of the first night, after all the joking around, he disappeared without saying good-bye, a sure sign that he felt humiliated. “He was finding it difficult to sing,” Farnon recalled. “His voice was tired, and it was breaking a lot. He was very angry with himself.”

  On the third and final evening, an unexpected guest dropped by. Nelson Riddle was in London to score Lolita for Stanley Kubrick, who had admired his artistry on In the Wee Small Hours and Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely. (While the arranger was in town, he was also working in a liaison with Rosemary Clooney.) Riddle had been part of Sinatra’s rapturous audience at Royal Festival Hall: Frank’s gravity was hard to resist anytime, and the fact that Nelson was prohibited from working with him then would have made the singer’s tight work with that splendid sextet, and his power over a starry crowd, feel all the more poignant. To then see Sinatra working with another gifted arranger, and to hear him struggling vocally, would have stacked layers of envy, schadenfreude, and regret in Riddle’s dark and complex spirit.

  —

  Sinatra Sings Great Songs from Great Britain is a curiosity, an asterisk, an honorable failure. Farnon’s scoring for that big lovely orchestra is gorgeous, but both Frank and the players are heavily echoed to mask the vocal imperfections. Often the imperfections peek through anyway. He quavers, he cracks, and if you listen hard (and you don’t really want to), you can hear him running out of breath. We don’t expect Sinatra to run out of breath.

  But the problem is ultimately with the material. Once the two great ballads—Jimmy Campbell, Reg Connelly, and Ted Shapiro’s “If I Had You” and Ray Noble’s “The Very Thought of You”—are out of the way, we have only the winsome but not immortal Noël Coward number, followed by a whole lot of flowers (“A Garden in the Rain,” “Roses of Picardy,” “We’ll Gather Lilacs in the Spring”), some stiff upper lip (“We’ll Meet Again”), and that poignant piece of wartime nostalgia, “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.” The rest is pleasant but negligible. Even putting Frank’s voice problems aside, it’s a polite album, and politeness never was his strong suit.

  —

  After putting in at Monte Carlo, where he gave the final benefit concert, Sinatra returned home, elated: by the new vistas he’d seen, the good he’d done, and something else. When Earl Wilson checked in with his old friend at New York’s Savoy Hilton, he found Frank and Mike Romanoff ensconced in the Presidential Suite, enjoying a welcome-home dinner (“salami, clam soup, veal, and VINO”) sent over from Patsy’s on West Fifty-sixth Street. “Frank was in a good mood,” the columnist wrote. “He suddenly found himself popular in the world press.”

  It was true. Suddenly accounts of Sinatra’s largesse—and a new note, his humility—were everywhere: he estimated that the tour had raised $1.2 million for children’s charities but said, “I wish it was five million.” The trip had changed him, he said. “I found out a lot of things I didn’t know before,” he told a reporter. “It was a revelation.” One story that gained wide play concerned Frank’s encounter with a blind six-year-old girl: “It was windy, and I brushed the hair out of her eyes and told her that the wind had been blowing up her hair. She stopped me cold when she said, ‘What color is the wind?’ ”

  He wafted back to Los Angeles, only to find his troubles right where he’d left them. Problem number one was Reprise Records. The label had gone into business in 1960 with high ideals and a capitalization of $300,000—borrowed from the ever-friendly City National Bank, which was run by Frank’s pal (and world-tour travel companion) Al Hart. In its first year of operations, Reprise had turned a profit of $100,000, but in 1961 the company lost $400,000, bringing its cash balance down to zero. By the first quarter of 1962, the label was a further $250,000 in the red.

  Reprise’s problems were both external and self-inflicted. For one thing, it had a serious enemy in Capitol’s president Alan Livingston. It wasn’t enough for him that Capitol had won the suit over the title of the Swing Along with Me/Sinatra Swings album: now he decided to scorch earth. Frank’s old label, record-industry veteran Stan Cornyn writes,

  offered its entire Sinatra catalogue to its distributors on a twofer plan, two albums for the price of one: an unprecedented 50 percent discount plan. Customers could snatch up complete Sinatra libraries at $1.99 per album. At $4.98—and able to offer only a one-fer—Reprise’s newer product languished in bins. Soon Sinatra had thirteen albums on the charts. The bad news: twelve of the thirteen were on Capitol. Reprise’s new album sold a humiliating 156,400 copies.

  It was paradoxical: as a recording artist, Sinatra was doing better than ever; as a businessman, he was being blown out of the water by the competition. His bank account was thriving, but his pride was hurting badly. And his pride, which meant a great deal to him, had been getting shelled lately.

  Things would have been bad enough if Frank had been the only artist on Reprise’s roster. This was far from the case. He had started out by wooing Dean Martin away from Capitol—further angering Livingston—and built his stable from there, promising “that Reprise artists would have a latitude previously unknown in the business of record-contract rules,” Cornyn writes.

  Reprise artists would keep the ownership of their masters. (Few did.) His artists would own shares in the company. (Never happened.) Reprise artists would have complete control over their record sessions. (Happened.) Reprise artists could record for other labels when they wanted to. (Hardly.) “He divined that the thrust of this company should be its artists,” [Mo] Ostin recalled. “It all seems logical today, but back then it was truly revolutionary.”

  Soon Reprise had signed
the likes of Jo Stafford, Rosemary Clooney, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Dennis Day, the Four Lads, the Hi-Lo’s, Danny Kaye, the McGuire Sisters, Ethel Merman, Debbie Reynolds, Dinah Shore, Joey Bishop, Peter Lawford. (The same Earl Wilson column that welcomed Frank back from his world tour noted, as if it were a news flash, that Eddie Fisher had just been signed to Reprise.) “Cronies aside, the list read like Sinatra’s master’s thesis on Good Music,” Cornyn continues.

  In 1961, the year Columbia signed twenty-year-old Bob Dylan, Reprise’s roster might have been drawn from the phone book of Palm Springs, a place that had become home to the Dinah Shore Set. Reprise’s were singers who, on weekdays, spent little time in recording studios and lots more lunching at the Racquet Club.

  “The only thing that was meaningful at Reprise was the kind of music Sinatra had been involved in all his life,” Ostin said. Frank loved jazz, and Mo Ostin had worked at Verve, so he signed jazz acts: Ben Webster, Mavis Rivers, Jimmy Witherspoon, Calvin Jackson, Eddie Cano, Barney Kessel, Chico Hamilton, Dizzy Gillespie, Shorty Rogers, Marv Jenkins, a reissue of Django Reinhardt. Sales were almost nonexistent.