by James Kaplan
In March, the serious nineteen-year-old formally decided that was what he wanted to do, signing a contract with Sam Donahue, the saxophonist, trumpeter, and arranger who’d taken over the leadership of the Tommy Dorsey–less Tommy Dorsey Orchestra (a ghost band, in jazz-band parlance). “I don’t expect to create as much emotional excitement—with all the swooning—as my father did,” Frankie said earnestly. “But I certainly hope to be an asset to the band.”
Ten days later, the Beatles’ debut album, Please Please Me, was released in Great Britain.
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Mike Shore was a West Coast advertising genius whose signal achievement in the 1940s and 1950s was turning a Los Angeles used-car dealer named Earl Muntz into the sales sensation and media personality known as Madman Muntz. Shore’s ad campaigns for Muntz made him nationally famous, deploying all manner of gonzo strategies to sell automobiles—wild costumes, bizarre billboards, and off-the-wall stunts: on one TV commercial, Muntz threatened to destroy a car with a sledgehammer if it didn’t sell by the end of the day.
Shore first became involved with Reprise Records through his brother Merle, who had been Norman Granz’s art director at Verve. After Mo Ostin hired Merle Shore to art direct for Frank Sinatra’s new record label, Mike found himself spending time around the office; advertising and promotional ideas quickly followed. It was Mike Shore who had come up with the fledgling label’s name, partly inspired by the lyric to “April in Paris” (“April in Paris, this is a feeling/That no one can ever reprise”), as well as the famous Billboard ad (“A new, happier, emancipated Sinatra…untrammeled, unfettered, unconfined”) that so irked Capitol. “Mike was absolutely brilliant,” Ostin said. “One of the smartest guys.”
Mike Shore also wrote speeches for Frank now and then—little things the Chairman might have to say at sales meetings, for example—and in this capacity Shore, a thoughtful, intensely intuitive man, got to spend some time around his boss. The experience always unsettled him. “I used to go to have lunch with him,” he recalled, “and I was very nervous—you’re having lunch with a legend.”
But Shore was also fascinated by Sinatra, admiring much about him, including his liberal politics. In writing for the superstar, the adman came to empathize deeply with him. “There was a fellow who used to write little things for Bing Crosby, which he did on his Kraft Music Hall; somehow he was in Crosby’s head,” Shore said. “I felt that way about Sinatra, at least when I would meet with him. I really understood him. I knew him pretty well.”
In late 1962, Playboy decided to run a full-length Frank Sinatra interview, and the magazine’s editor, Hugh Hefner, assigned the celebrity journalist Joe Hyams to the job. Hefner had sent Hyams to interview Frank two years earlier, for the Show Business Illustrated piece about Sinatra’s diverse enterprises. The lengthy article had been highly positive, even starry-eyed—and, in places, somewhat imaginative—about Frank’s business acumen. But sometime since, for reasons unknown, Frank Sinatra had taken an intense dislike to Joe Hyams. He canceled the Playboy interview.
The photographer Billy Woodfield, who was close to both Hyams and Sinatra (and to Mike Shore), went to Frank to try to broker a peace. “Sinatra said, ‘I don’t want Hyams on it,’ ” Shore recalled. Frank then suggested that Woodfield write the entire interview himself. “This was on a Friday,” Shore said. “Sinatra said, ‘Let me see it on Monday. As long as you make it interesting.’ So Saturday morning, real early in the morning, Woodfield is sitting there, trying to do [the interview]. And he called me because he was stuck.”
Billy Woodfield was a photographer, not a writer. Mike Shore wasn’t just a writer; he was the writer who had created Madman Muntz. “I never dreamt it would ever be published,” Shore said. “But I sat there for about four hours and did the whole interview. The questions and the answers.”
Woodfield took the completed manuscript to Frank on Monday. “Billy called me on Monday afternoon,” Shore recalled. “He had just had lunch with Sinatra. He said, ‘Sinatra loved the interview!’ I said, ‘Oh, come on.’ ”
It was true. Frank loved the interview because somehow, in a singular Saturday-morning stroke of brilliance, Mike Shore had managed to create on the page a version of Sinatra that was both true to life and better than life, the embodiment of all that the intellectually striving and self-doubting star yearned to be. Hip, hyper-articulate, piercingly intelligent, but always self-effacing, Shore’s Frank held forth so believably—not only on what made him tick, but on great world topics like organized religion, nuclear disarmament, and Communist expansion—that the interview continues to be quoted to this day, the idea that these golden words issued from the lips of the Man himself not even up for debate.
And, great adman that he was, Shore made Frank’s remarks incessantly quotable, creating several formulations that have entered the culture:
PLAYBOY: Many explanations have been offered for your unique ability—apart from the subtleties of style and vocal equipment—to communicate the mood of a song to an audience. How would you define it?
SINATRA: I think it’s because I get an audience involved, personally involved in a song—because I’m involved myself. It’s not something I do deliberately; I can’t help myself. If the song is a lament at the loss of love, I get an ache in my gut, I feel the loss myself and I cry out the loneliness, the hurt and the pain that I feel.
PLAYBOY: Doesn’t any good vocalist “feel” a song? Is there such a difference…
SINATRA: I don’t know what other singers feel when they articulate lyrics, but being an 18-karat manic-depressive and having lived a life of violent emotional contradictions, I have an overacute capacity for sadness as well as elation. I know what the cat who wrote the song is trying to say. I’ve been there—and back. I guess the audience feels it along with me. They can’t help it. Sentimentality, after all, is an emotion common to all humanity.
(“As far as the 18-karat manic-depressive, I was really talking about myself as well,” Shore recalled.)
When Playboy asked if he believed in God, Sinatra waxed (if possible) even more eloquent. “First: I believe in you and me,” he said.
I’m like Albert Schweitzer and Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein in that I have a respect for life—in any form. I believe in nature, in the birds, the sea, the sky, in everything I can see or that there is real evidence for. If these things are what you mean by God, then I believe in God. But I don’t believe in a personal God to whom I look for comfort or for a natural on the next roll of the dice. I’m not unmindful of man’s seeming need for faith; I’m for anything that gets you through the night, be it prayer, tranquilizers or a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
In years to come, the songwriters Kris Kristofferson (“Help Me Make It Through the Night”) and John Lennon (“Whatever Gets You Through the Night”) would both take note of Shore/Sinatra’s deathless words.
Though Shore’s version of Frank often whiplashed between blatant Rat Pack–ese (“Look, pal, is this going to be an ocean cruise or a quick sail around the harbor?”) and what might gently be called excessive articulateness (“Our civilization, such as it is, was shaped by religion, and the men who aspire to public office anyplace in the free world must make obeisance to God or risk immediate opprobrium”), the Playboy interview was no mere tour de force; Shore really got Sinatra, as a man and as a great artist. As Frank’s interview avatar put it,
SINATRA: Most of what has been written about me is one big blur, but I do remember being described in one simple word that I agree with. It was in a piece that tore me apart for my personal behavior, but the writer said that when the music began and I started to sing, I was “honest.” That says it as I feel it. Whatever else has been said about me personally is unimportant. When I sing, I believe. I’m honest. If you want to get an audience with you, there’s only one way. You have to reach out to them with total honesty and humility. This isn’t a grandstand play on my part; I’ve discovered—and you can see it in other entertainers—when
they don’t reach out to the audience, nothing happens. You can be the most artistically perfect performer in the world, but an audience is like a broad—if you’re indifferent, endsville. That goes for any kind of human contact: a politician on television, an actor in the movies, or a guy and a gal. That’s as true in life as it is in art.
This was spookily effective ghostwriting: Frank on the money, and to the life.
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On the night of April 8, Frank hosted the thirty-fifth Academy Awards. In a show that began with technical difficulties (ABC’s cameras were out of focus, and the sound was fuzzy), Sinatra, too, hit some clams at the start. He looked handsome and elegant at the podium, his deep tan contrasting nicely with his white tie, but, either overawed or underawed by the occasion (perhaps a little of both), he failed at first to make contact with the industry crowd, many of whom had welcomed him back to stardom on Oscar night 1954.
He began unfortunately, giving “a little lecture in show biz slang on making better pictures in Hollywood, using the ‘Mona Lisa’ as an example,” the syndicated TV writer Cynthia Lowry wrote. “At one point, he referred to La Giaconda as ‘that chick,’ but the laughs never came.”
Yet the show soon found its feet, and so did Frank. Just before the presentation of the Best Picture award (it would go to Lawrence of Arabia), he looked evenly at the camera and spoke his mind. “Before we get on with the big one, I’d like to take this opportunity to level, you might say. To speak for just a second to us—we in the picture business. I, for one, am frankly a little tired of all of the talk about editorials, quote, ‘What’s wrong with Hollywood?,’ unquote. I’m sick about hearing of runaway productions and costs. And the star system, and how we need government subsidies. I know it and you know it—what we need are good pictures.” There was scattered applause. “And the way to get good pictures, as I rather obliquely hinted earlier in the evening, is to get back into the Mona Lisa business.” He raised an instructive forefinger. “Individual pictures, handmade with love and passion and care by individual picture makers. Not by banks or committees or accountants or lawyers or office boys or boards of directors who are really in the real-estate business, but by picture makers.”
It was a curious note to strike. On the one hand, Sinatra stood on firm ground, having just released The Manchurian Candidate. On the other hand, incredibly enough, he was about to replumb cinematic depths he had already explored in Sergeants 3.
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On the sixteenth, Hedda Hopper ran a curious item. “Frank Sinatra sold his eagle’s nest home to John W. Kluge, president of Metromedia, who bought KTTV from the L.A. Times and has latched onto another station here,” she wrote. “[Kluge] has a beautiful home in New York, wants this one for week-ends when he flies out on business. Kluge didn’t haggle over the price—Frankie got what he asked for.”
John Kluge didn’t have to haggle: he was a real-life tycoon, a media multimillionaire who bought and sold television stations. But why did Frank sell his eagle’s nest, the Japanese-themed ultimate bachelor pad with its breathtaking views of the Valley to the north and the city to the south? He loved the place.
Nevertheless, he moved into a new pied-à-terre, an apartment in a handsome white-brick 1950s-moderne mini-complex (five units) at 882 North Doheny Drive, just over the line that today separates Beverly Hills from West Hollywood. The apartment house still stands today in pristine condition.
It was built around a central courtyard that was hidden from the street and guarded by a metal gate with a life-size Chinese lion sculpture behind it. Around the corner on Cynthia Street, the building had a garage; tenants could pull in and enter the structure without having to use the front entrance. Even in an era before relentless, ubiquitous media surveillance of the famous and near famous, 882 North Doheny afforded privacy and understated luxury, serving as a discreet, low-key hideout for a number of interesting characters: Marilyn Monroe lived there twice, once in the early 1950s, around the time of the Wrong-Door Raid, and again toward the end, just before she moved to the Brentwood house in which she died.
Besides Monroe, the building housed, at various times, the playboy millionaire Bob Neal, who sometimes ran with Frank; the tragic Hollywood costume designer Irene (who later jumped to her death from the Roosevelt Hotel); Time’s Hollywood correspondent Ezra Goodman (who might have hoped to rustle up some scoops close to home); Sinatra’s secretary Gloria Lovell; and Frank himself.
It did not, however, house George Jacobs.
In Jacobs’s winsome and creative memoir, the valet and his co-writer assert that at the height of Frank’s romance with Marilyn Monroe in 1961, Sinatra had to decide whether or not to live with Marilyn and chose not to. Instead, Mr. S claims, Frank moved Jacobs into 882 North Doheny, both to watch over Monroe and as a kind of “consolation prize,” because Jacobs had just gone through an acrimonious divorce.
There are two problems with this assertion: first, Jacobs was divorced in the fall of 1963, over a year after Marilyn Monroe’s death. And second, Betsy Duncan Hammes, a consistently reliable witness who resided at 882 North Doheny from 1959 to 1967, firmly asserted that George Jacobs never lived there. His memoir gains a certain spiciness, and a narrative vantage, from placing him in the building, but loses something more important: veracity.
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Betsy Hammes encountered her new neighbor soon after he moved in in the spring of 1963 and under the homeliest of circumstances: Frank asked to borrow a cup of sugar. “I had some sugar cubes in a demitasse, and I put it by his door,” she recalled. “A little later, my doorbell rang, and I found a bunch of wadded-up dollar bills, like $15, in a cup by my door. He’d left the wrong cup.”
They soon became friends. “He was like any neighbor you’d have next door,” Hammes said. “Like, I’d come in, he’d carry the groceries in for me. One time I had a table I was bringing in, and he carried it in for me.”
Frank seemed a little lonely to her. He liked to cook late at night—“He was very good at pizzas and spaghettis and things like that,” she remembered; “he always had all the sauce and stuff all ready”—and he liked to talk into the wee hours. “He was interesting,” she said. “Complicated. He loved to learn, loved knowledge; he loved crossword puzzles. Sometimes he spoke about Ava Gardner. He said, ‘After I broke up with her, thank God I went into psychiatry.’ ”
As to the inevitable question—Hammes was an attractive young woman—she says, “We dated a few times, but our careers were separated. We really liked each other. That was it, basically. There was no romance. But we liked each other. And if we were there, we were there. It was convenient.”
Asked if she had any idea why Frank Sinatra, the most famous entertainer in the world, had suddenly decided to pull up stakes and move to humbler digs across town, Hammes said she had no clue. We cannot know much more. Reprise was heavily in the red; Cal-Neva was a money pit. And though movie money and record money and nightclub money were always coming in, along with profits from his various real estate and corporate investments, his overhead was considerable. He now owned three aircraft: the Christina; a new toy, a tiny (four-passenger) Morane-Saulnier jet; and a Hughes 269A helicopter (frequently piloted by his pal Van Heusen). Then there was the Palm Springs compound and its domestic staff; the Essex Productions office and its corporate staff; Reprise and its staff. He had also just bought a new aerie in Manhattan: a two-floor penthouse, with a rooftop “playpen” and a spectacular view of the East River, in a recently completed tower at the far end of Seventy-second Street. In the spring of 1963, he might very well have been feeling stretched thin.
But there was also this: in January 1962, Frank had applied for a permit to install a concrete helicopter pad on his half-acre Bowmont Drive property—much like the one he’d had built at the Palm Springs compound in anticipation of JFK’s visit. The rise in his power had magnified his impatience: when he wanted to be somewhere, he wanted to be there now. His L.A. neighbors, fearing they’d be subjected to loud and freque
nt landings and takeoffs, had objected to the proposed heliport. Vigorously. “Every time Frankie spits you can hear it down at our house,” one said. “The acoustics in the canyon are better than those of Hollywood Bowl,” said another. “This would be a definite noise problem.”
Forty nearby residents signed a petition against the helipad. The president of the Mulholland Property Owners Association said that if Sinatra were allowed to build his, others would surely follow: “If you approve one you will have to approve all.” There were a lot of rich folks in those hills.
At a planning-board hearing, Mickey Rudin argued (Frank was not present) that his client needed the heliport to beat rush-hour traffic to LAX when he made out-of-town trips. The lawyer said the use of the landing area would be infrequent: “not more than 35 or 40 times a year.” Which didn’t sound very convincing. In addition, Rudin said, Sinatra had pledged to make landing space available to any public or private agency in case of fire or flood disaster. “The noise would be no more than that caused by trucks or autos,” the lawyer asserted, not very credibly.
Frank’s application was rejected. And that was it for Bowmont Drive.
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The spring and summer found him often following in his own footsteps. At the end of April, Frank and Nelson made a new LP, Sinatra’s Sinatra, rerecording ten songs that had already been hits for him, mostly on Capitol (“In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” “Young at Heart,” “All the Way,” “Witchcraft,” “How Little We Know,” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”), but a couple of them—“Oh! What It Seemed to Be” and the Phil Silvers–Jimmy Van Heusen “Nancy (with the Laughing Face)”—from his Columbia days. He also redid his old radio sign-off “Put Your Dreams Away,” which had appeared on both of his former labels, and Cahn and Van Heusen’s “Second Time Around,” his first single for Reprise, in 1960.