Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  It makes sense, except that George Jacobs tells a rather different story. In the valet’s version, it was spaghetti marinara, not pomodoro, and the dinner guests were none other than Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Like Nancy Sinatra, Jacobs omits Brad Dexter entirely. According to the valet, Frank had, much to his surprise, conceived a powerful lust for the fifty-six-year-old actress after happening upon her in a formfitting tank suit as she took her dawn swim in the ocean. (As Tracy’s character said of Hepburn’s in Pat and Mike, “Not much meat on her, but what’s there is cherce.”)

  Yet Hepburn and Tracy were such a tight couple—for all kinds of complex reasons of their own—that Sinatra had no chance with the Great Kate. “It could be that Mr. S was feeling particularly horny and frustrated, because he was extra edgy” the night of the dinner, Jacobs writes. He served the spaghetti, which, he says, he had made “a million times” for his boss. Then, as in the Dexter story, Frank tasted the pasta, started raving that it wasn’t al dente, picked up the serving bowl, and threw the contents all over Jacobs and his white jacket. “This was the only time he had ever abused me, but once was enough,” the valet recalled. “Tracy and Hepburn were so appalled that they left immediately, while Sinatra cleared the table by smashing all the dishes.”

  Jacobs says he walked out too and bought $2,000 worth of new clothes in Honolulu, having the bill sent to Sinatra. When the valet returned the next day, Frank “tried to treat the incident as a big joke. ‘You’re not pissed at me, are you, Spook?’ he asked, trying to make me feel like a square for not playing his party game…Mr. S never apologized, but he never complained about the bill, either. Being Frank Sinatra meant never having to say you’re sorry, but it didn’t mean he was without remorse. You just had to know how to read his ‘Remorse Code.’ Whenever he tried to treat a slight as a big chuckle, you knew he was trying to apologize to you.”

  Though Jacobs’s version is plausible, Dexter’s is more believable. Frank’s fury about his impotence in the waves and his displaced terrors about aging and mortality (how could the world go on without him?) seem more likely triggers for a spaghetti-throwing tantrum than thwarted lust. Dexter said Sinatra admitted to having terrible nightmares about the near drowning yet, when asked about the episode by outsiders, would only say, “Oh, I just got a little water on my bird—that’s all.”

  Forced into a profoundly uncomfortable position of gratitude toward a man who had just been fetching him wine (“Frank would go get a cup of coffee for you,” Dick Bakalyan recalled. “You didn’t want to go get the cup of coffee for him, though; people would start to treat you like a gofer”), Sinatra went, for a couple of years, into a fury of payback. He granted Brad Dexter access to the inner circle. He cast him in his next movie; he even gave him a producer credit for a later picture. And then, once he felt the obligation was discharged, he cut him off without thinking twice.

  —

  Quincy Jones had last worked with Sinatra as a brilliant but intimidated twenty-five-year-old arranger-bandleader, conducting the stellar Barclay Disques house band at Princess Grace’s 1958 Monaco benefit. Jones was all but unknown to the outside world then, but Frank had found him the way he found all his important musical collaborators: he listened. His great ears told him all he needed to know. Though young, Jones had already written impressive charts for Count Basie, Dinah Washington, and others; he happened to be working at Barclay in Paris, and Sinatra happened to be doing the benefit in Monte Carlo: Frank picked up the phone, and a great collaboration began.

  By 1964, Jones was in New York, with a day job as musical director for Mercury Records and on the side a thriving arranging career. He’d written charts for a number of singles for Basie and, in 1963, for two albums: Li’l Ol’ Groovemaker…Basie! and This Time by Basie! Sinatra, who loved everything the Count did, listened. The latter LP contained a 1954 song by Bart Howard that had originally been titled “In Other Words.” Like the rest of the album, the track—now called “Fly Me to the Moon”—was an instrumental, but Frank, who’d known Howard since he’d played piano for Mabel Mercer, Eartha Kitt, and other cabaret singers at New York’s Blue Angel in the early 1950s, knew the lyric well. The song had been written as a waltz, and it had gained tremendous popularity as such: “Fly Me to the Moon” had been sung and recorded (over a hundred times), often by female vocalists, wistfully, dreamily. Frank had a different idea. And that May in Kauai, not long after the near drowning, he picked up the phone and called Quincy Jones again.

  Nearly fifty years later, Jones remembered the call vividly. “He said, ‘Hey, Q—this is Francis. I’m in Hawaii doing None but the Brave, and I just heard that record you did with Basie, and you did Bart Howard’s [“Fly Me to the Moon”] on there.’ It’s a waltz; we did it four-four with Basie, naturally. Frank said, ‘That’s the way I want to do it. Would you consider doing an album with me and Basie? Can you get over here next week?’ ”

  Jones hadn’t spoken with Sinatra since Monaco in 1958. “I nearly fell out of my chair,” he recalled. “Can I get over there next week? Shit, I was in Kauai two days later.”

  He arrived on the island, proceeded to Wailua Bay, and sat down with Frank in his office. “In the middle of our conversation, he says, ‘Excuse me a minute, Q,’ and he calls the Pentagon. He says, ‘Jim’—or whatever the hell the guy’s first name was—‘do you think you could get the Pacific Fleet over here tomorrow at eleven-thirty? I’m shooting a scene.’ The next morning, here comes destroyers, aircraft carriers—they were all there.”

  Location shooting for None but the Brave concluded while Jones was in Hawaii, and he and Sinatra headed back to Los Angeles together. On the way, they laid over in Honolulu, where Frank celebrated by organizing a bacchanal of epic proportions for Quincy and a few other pals. “It started out with seven of us, plus Francis, but after a call to some local ladies and starlets, within forty-five minutes there were nineteen,” Jones recalled. “Partied our brains out, man, for three days, man. I woke up one morning in a closet with Frank. I said, ‘How the hell did we get in here?’ We were all fucked-up!”

  Death had been exorcised, and power thoroughly reasserted.

  —

  And a new friendship forged. Frank quickly formed a closer bond with Quincy Jones than he’d had, or would have, with any of his other arrangers. When the two of them landed in Los Angeles, they went straight to the Warner Bros. lot, where Frank installed Jones in Dean Martin’s bungalow, next to his own offices. Quincy quickly got to work, against a tight deadline, on the Basie album.

  On the first night, Jones became so involved in writing that he lost track of time and got locked in Martin’s suite, where he fell asleep at 4:00 a.m. “At around 6:30 a.m. I heard a knock on the door,” he recalled.

  I opened it. Frank was standing there wearing fatigues, his costume for the war film he was directing. He looked me dead in the eye and said, “How do you like your eggs, Q?”

  I mumbled, “Scrambled.”

  He scrambled them up, we ate breakfast, and from that day on, we were tight.

  Tightness with Sinatra almost invariably came about at his initiative, on his terms, and as a result of his needs. In this case, the intimacy indisputably had to do not only with Jones’s formidable skills and genuine personality but with the color of his skin. Ever since Sinatra was an unknown young singer prowling the jazz clubs of Fifty-second Street, he had been crazy about the style and the genius of the great black musicians he’d seen and heard there: Basie. Billie. Art Tatum. Fats Waller. Lester Young. “He was a brother in disguise,” Jones wrote of Frank. “He was crazy about the big-band culture, his roots. One late night in Palm Springs, he told me about a crush he’d had on Billie Holiday when he was young, but you couldn’t follow it through because of the times. ‘Q, you couldn’t get away with that back in those days, no matter who you were,’ he said.”

  Now he was in the same league with his idols, but some part of Sinatra would always remain both an aspirant to blackness an
d an outsider. He was, after all, a man of the mid-twentieth century, a product of the insufficiently melted melting pot. The Amos ’n’ Andy jokes (“I’m not crazy about that sort of stuff,” Quincy Jones would admit late in his life; “I couldn’t get used to it”) reflected Frank’s mixed feelings: idolatry and otherness. For his part, Jones, who in his young life had already played with and arranged for many if not most of jazz’s greats, was thrilled to add Sinatra to his life list. “Frank was my style,” he recalled.

  He was hip, straight up and straight ahead, and, above all, a monster musician. I loved him, man, I admit it, I loved him as much as anyone else I ever worked with, because there was no gray to the man. It was either black or white: If he loved you, there was nothing in the world he wouldn’t do for you. If he didn’t like you, shame on your ass. I know he loved me too. In all the years of working together, we never once had a contract—just a handshake. The Sinatras always made me feel like part of their family, children, grandchildren, and all.

  All the arrangers who had loomed large in Frank’s career to date—Stordahl, Riddle, May, Jenkins—had purposely kept their distance from him (as he had from them). Sinatra was not only an overwhelming personality; he was the boss. Letting friendship into the equation could conceivably affect the work, and not for the better. Moreover, the time would inevitably come when an orchestrator would collaborate with other singers, and the incomparable intensity of working with Frank would pass. Best, most thought, to be able to move on easily, to keep things professional and clinical. (Riddle, who had little gift for friendship but took his professional relationship with Sinatra deeply personally, was a special case.) Because of Sinatra’s fascination with black culture and jazz, and because of Quincy Jones’s gift for agreeableness without sycophancy, the arranger was able to work with Frank on a nearly even footing and to be a friend as well: an unprecedented situation, and one never to be duplicated.

  On the night of June 9, Sinatra, Jones, and the Basie band began recording It Might as Well Be Swing. They started with a bang, laying down one of Frank’s masterpieces, “The Best Is Yet to Come,” by Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh, the composers of “Witchcraft.”

  Coleman and Leigh had originally written “Best” for Frank in 1959: it was a finger-snapping, deceptively simple vamp, with a tricky modulation from A-flat to C between the first and second choruses and a sexy, syncopated lyric. He liked the number but then—possibly because his disaffection with Capitol was coming to a head and Reprise wasn’t yet begun—sat on it for a year without recording it. The publishers then passed the tune along to Tony Bennett, who released it as a Columbia single in early 1961. “Frank was lazy,” Quincy Jones said. “He’d let Tony Bennett do it first, and then he’d do it. Tony always took pride in that; he kind of led Frank into the music, the songs.”

  Frank quickly formed a closer bond with Quincy Jones than he had with any of his other arrangers. But tightness with Sinatra, like almost everything else in his life, was on his terms. (Credit 21.4)

  Bennett had good reason to be proud. His version is so brilliant, so infectious, that it was an act of sheer hubris for Sinatra to follow him—but then, what was Frank if not the embodiment of hubris? The fact that he had failed with “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” seems never to have entered his mind. He loved Bennett’s singing, even if he didn’t always love Bennett (as recently as December, the two had been rumored not to be speaking), but he yielded to no one in his field. If the two men’s relationship was fraught, it had largely to do with the fact that Bennett had had to make his own way in Sinatra’s exceedingly large shadow.

  And he had made his way. He had his own big career, his own following, his own demons. Offstage, he was a recessive personality; onstage, he possessed the theatrical gift of coming alive when he opened his mouth to sing. Joy was his special gift, and joy was what he brought to “The Best Is Yet to Come”—he even laughed as he sang the outro. In Bennett’s hands, the great love song, with its tap-dance rhythm and message of soaring optimism—

  Out of the tree of life I just picked me a plum…

  Still, it’s a real good bet the best is yet to come

  —seemed to have found its truest interpreter.

  Once again, Sinatra had a new approach. As he’d often done before, he gave the number a sexual charge that no other male singer could come close to. He reveled in Jones’s swinging arrangement, heavy on the brass and brought to glorious life by Basie’s incomparable ensemble. Frank’s version evoked sheer mastery, not only of the music itself, but of the “you” of the song, the woman he was telling that if she thought what the two of them had together was great, she hadn’t seen nothin’ yet. His unapologetically macho rendition had a whiff of Mephistopheles about it: he was a sorcerer, and some of his tricks promised to be on the dirty side. But it also contained Sinatra’s signature quality: defiance. Even if fifty was rapidly approaching, even if death could lay its cold fingers on his shoulders—and even if the great love of his life was behind him—his power was such that he could surely make the world dance to his tune.

  “The Best Is Yet to Come” wasn’t his only challenge to Tony Bennett. The second number of the evening, “I Wanna Be Around,” had been a hit single for Bennett in 1963, and the tune had a singular origin: in 1957, a Youngstown, Ohio, grandmother named Sadie Vimmerstedt had written a letter to Johnny Mercer, on the sheets of an old desk-pad calendar, saying she’d come up with a song idea. She had been outraged, she explained, when Frank Sinatra left his first wife for Ava Gardner and delighted when Ava gave “Frankie boy” his just deserts by leaving him. She had a title in mind—“When Somebody Breaks Your Heart”—and one line of a lyric: “I want to be around to pick up the pieces when somebody breaks your heart.” Mrs. Vimmerstedt addressed the letter to “Johnny Mercer, Songwriter, New York, NY,” and dropped it in the mailbox. The Manhattan Post Office forwarded the envelope to ASCAP, which sent it on to Mercer.

  The songwriter, a depressive alcoholic, was then in a fallow period, but with the success of “Moon River” and “Days of Wine and Roses” in the early 1960s his confidence picked up, and he wrote the music and lyrics for “I Wanna Be Around,” which began, almost verbatim, with Sadie Vimmerstedt’s line. Mercer wrote back to her, saying he would give her co-composer credit and split the royalties with her but that he didn’t want the tune recorded until he found the right singer for it. A couple of years went by before Mercer told Mrs. Vimmerstedt that he finally had the perfect voice. “When he told me that Tony Bennett was going to record it,” she said, “I really got excited.” She was equally excited when she got a royalty check for $50,000 a few months after Bennett’s single charted.

  Here, though, Tony Bennett is the winner. His version, kiss-off though it may be, is ecstatic—his voice has the quality of a great jazz horn—while Sinatra’s competent interpretation of “I Wanna Be Around” is emotionally muted: almost as though he realized Ava had already received in excessive measure whatever comeuppance he might ever have wished on her.

  —

  There was nothing muted about the last song of the evening, “Fly Me to the Moon”—Sinatra nailed it in one take. Quincy Jones had taken the loping, flute-driven 4/4 of the Basie instrumental—which felt a lot like easy listening, albeit great easy listening—and turned it into a barn burner: still 4/4, but at a faster tempo and with propulsive brass. And Frank, driving the Rolls-Royce that Q and the Count had provided, kicked this modern standard into a new high gear. From here on, only revisionists would sing it in waltz time. Sinatra’s rendition was a superbly masculine invitation to levitation, one to stand alongside, even above, “Come Fly with Me.” Frank and Quincy and Bill Basie had taken a song that had been recorded a hundred times and made the definitive version.

  There were lesser pleasures to be found on the subsequent nights. At the second session, on June 10, Sinatra recorded yet another Bennett hit, “The Good Life.” The song had originally been a French tune called “La belle vie”—a perf
ectly Gallic title, conjuring images of bread, wine, and l’amour. And even though the English lyric (by Jack Reardon) contained darkness and ambiguity—

  Yes, the good life lets you hide all the sadness you feel

  —Bennett’s soaring rendition of the title phrase conveyed the pleasure of life. Sinatra’s version is upbeat but strangely superficial: as though on this one occasion, he couldn’t find the meaning in the lyric. The song also contains one line—“You won’t really fall in love ’cause you can’t take the chance”—that cut a little too close to the bone where Frank was concerned. He wasn’t majoring in torch anymore; his disengagement showed.

  This made three times on one album that Sinatra had gone up against Bennett: Frank scored one draw and two losses on points. Although he wasn’t purposefully setting out to record tunes that other male singers had made hits—he and Jones had come up with the song list together—it happened to work out that way in seven of the LP’s ten numbers: besides Bennett’s three, there were Ray Charles’s “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” Jack Jones’s “Wives and Lovers,” Steve Lawrence’s “More,” and—of all things—Louis Armstrong’s “Hello, Dolly!”

  In a way, Sinatra had sung this not very interesting song before: when his career was in decline in 1948, Mitch Miller had persuaded him to record a bouncy, pedal-steel-backed trifle called “Sunflower,” whose refrain would be echoed, almost note for note, in Jerry Herman’s razzle-dazzle 1964 show tune.*

  Armstrong’s version of the number had just come out in January and quickly became the biggest record of his career, reaching number 1 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 and ending the Beatles’ run of three number 1 hits in a row over fourteen consecutive weeks. Maybe Frank was grateful. He certainly had vast respect for Armstrong as a colossus of jazz and popular music, and so he did a brilliant thing: he couched his version of “Hello, Dolly!” as a straight-out tribute to Pops and, with Basie’s band kicking Vegas-style behind him, a rollicking, stomping hoot, complete with apostrophes to the Great Man—