by James Kaplan
Hello, Satch! This is Francis, Louis—
It’s so nice to see you back where you belong
—and even a growling, Satchmo-esque “Oh, yeahh!” at the coda.
Imitation was less than flattering in the ill-conceived Ray Charles knockoff “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” Frank’s version begins promisingly enough as he channels Charles’s hoarse shout on the title phrase, then quickly sinks like a stone with a faux-twangy, badly off-key melisma on “I’ve made up my mi-ind.” No one—not the sweet-tempered producer Sonny Burke in the sound booth, not Quincy Jones or Bill Miller—had the nerve to tell Frank he had hit a serious clam. No one had the nerve to tell him he was off his turf and out of his wheelhouse in attempting Charles’s unique blend of C&W and R&B, but such was Sinatra’s omnipotence, and his pride in his honorary blackness, that he felt he could do anything—even when he couldn’t. And as always, he was looking for hits. And he had the last laugh, as he so often did, when his “I Can’t Stop Loving You” became, along with “Fly Me to the Moon” and “The Best Is Yet to Come,” one of the most popular numbers from the album, clam and all.
He would keep looking for hits, but as popular music changed, swiftly, irrevocably, and beyond recognition, he would find them ever harder to come by.
—
On Saturday, June 13, the Rolling Stones, on the western leg of their first U.S. tour, appeared on ABC-TV’s weekly variety show The Hollywood Palace. Dean Martin was the guest host, and he took the opportunity to go after the Stones, and the nascent British Invasion, with a vengeance.
Ruggedly handsome in his tux, Dino clapped earnestly (“Beautiful. Beautiful”) as the old-style stand-up comic Joey Forman left the stage, then suddenly turned mock fearful. “Now!” he announced, to knowing laughter from the audience. “Something for the youngsters. Five singing boys from England who sold a lot of al-byumes. Albums. They’re called the Rolling Stones. I’ve been rolled while I was stoned myself, so I know what they’re singin’ about. But here they are at.”
The Stones did two numbers, both covers: Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away” and Willie Dixon’s “I Just Want to Make Love to You.” (Like the pre-1963 Beatles, the group had little original material at the beginning.) They performed well and charismatically; a couple of modest screams broke out, though a quick camera cutaway to the audience showed a lot of neckties and gray hair. If Mick Jagger seemed mildly cowed by the alien circumstances, he had a demonstrably greater command of the black musical idiom than Frank Sinatra.
Then Dino returned to the stage, clapping vigorously, though his broad deadpan told a different story. “Rolling Stones—aren’t they great?” he said, then rolled his eyes heavenward. “They’re going to leave right after the show for London. They’re challenging the Beatles to a hair-pulling contest. I could swear Jackie Coogan and Skippy were in that group,” he said, apparently making a fractured reference to Skippy, a 1931 film starring the nine-year-old Jackie Cooper. The Stones, in other words, were young.
Dean was on a roll. “Well, I’m going to let you in on something,” he said puckishly. “You know these singing groups today—you’re under the impression they have long hair. Not true at all. It’s an optical illusion—they just have low foreheads and high eyebrows.” It made no sense, it wasn’t very funny, but it got a laugh.
It was all relatively toothless—the old Dino treatment—until the next artist, Larry Griswold, a comedy trampolinist, finished his act. Martin perked up: “Larry Griswold—isn’t he wonderful? He’s the father of the Rolling Stones. And ever since he heard them sing, he’s been trying to kill himself.”
On the one hand, this was just ancient, roast-style comedy, but it was also a chink in the facade of fond condescension: in some inner recess of his cool and inaccessible soul, Dino was nervous. As was Frank. It was all well and good for him to insist to George Jacobs that the Beatles “were a stupid fad like hula hoops and Davy Crockett coonskin caps…He didn’t give them long.” But fourteen positions on the Hot 100—to Sinatra and Martin’s zero, in June—wasn’t quite a laughing matter. The barbarians were at the gates, and Dean and Frank and the rest of their ilk were seeing the gates rattle.
Stephen King, then sixteen, was watching the show in Durham, Maine. As Martin winked and rolled his eyes at the audience, he recalled, “I thought, ‘Fuck you, you old lounge lizard. You’re the past, I’ve just seen the future.’ ”
—
Frank made his own Ed Sullivan appearance on June 28, forgetting past feuds with the combative host in the interests of pushing Robin and the 7 Hoods, which had just premiered. He made nice with Sullivan and sang “My Kind of Town,” the best song from the movie—and the best part about the movie. The critics were united in their indifference to the picture. Calling it “an artless and obvious film,” the New York Times’s Bosley Crowther said, “The brightest thing about it is its color photography…[A]t least, one can say this for it: The usual Sinatra arrogance is subdued.”
The picture did a little better than 4 for Texas, which isn’t saying much. The elusive El Dorado of Ocean’s 11—the pot of gold that had inspired Jack Warner to open his checkbook, expecting more riches to rain down—remained elusive.
—
As did hit records, though Frank kept trying, even as the rock revolution threatened to overwhelm popular music. As the storm blew outside, Reprise’s “youth A&R man,” Jimmy Bowen, a good ol’ boy from Texas, assumed an ever-greater importance at the label. “Bowen drawled and shucked and jived and was your pal,” Stan Cornyn writes.
He wore clothes that were too tight, or else he’d overeaten inside of them. He wore aviator glasses with a beige tint and heard musical arrangements (not just tunes) in his head. He stayed up all night, drank Jack, and got hot girls. He never wore a pocket handkerchief. His drive: just make hit singles.
And his new chief mandate was to make hit singles for the boss. “Jimmy never cared about an album,” the engineer Lee Herschberg said. “He never would have an album concept. If you have enough hit singles together, you had an album. It didn’t have to have a continuity or a theme behind it or anything like that.” During their first meeting, Bowen recalled, Frank said, “ ‘Listen, if you’re going to produce some music for me, what would you do?’ I said, ‘Well, I wouldn’t bastardize you. I’d change the music around you but keep you who you are.’ ”
To that end, Bowen hired a new arranger, a former jazz and R&B pianist and organist named Ernie Freeman, who had gone into the profitable business of making white teen idols like Bobby Vee and Paul Anka sound like credible rock ’n’ rollers.
It was a new world, and on July 17, Frank’s first recording session with Freeman, Sinatra saw it up close. Gone were the studio musicians he was used to, the stalwarts and giants of classical and jazz, replaced by “Nashville rock-style players, such as drummer Hal Blaine and keyboardist Leon Russell, along with concertmaster Sid Sharp, who knew how to get fiddlers ‘who didn’t mind busting a string,’ ” Will Friedwald writes.
Oh, and a full choir, too.
When Frank walked into the studio that night, he “heard two flutists playing triplets (tweet-tweet-tweet),” Cornyn writes.
From the control booth, Bowen, sweaty-palmed, watched Sinatra, who stared down at the flute players, then turned to Jimmy.
“What’s that?” Sinatra asked.
“Them’s triplets,” Bowen answered.
“Oh.”
Frank made three recordings that night: “Softly, as I Leave You,” an Italian love song translated into English and, earlier in the year, a hit for “the British Sinatra,” Matt Monro; “Then Suddenly Love,” by Roy Alfred, the writer of “The Huckle-Buck,” Sinatra’s misguided 1949 attempt at R&B, and 1953’s similarly jazzy “Lean Baby”; and a Sammy Cahn, Ned Wynn, and L. B. Marks tune called “Available.” All at once Sinatra had a new sound, marked by insistent, metronomic rhythm and grandiose string and choral backgrounds. Sinatra sang wonderfully, but the music, more than slightl
y Muzak-y, called attention to itself, and not in a good way. It was as if the Voice were wearing a polyester suit and standing in front of a cheesy backdrop.
“When we finished cutting ‘Softly,’ we were listening to the playbacks and Frank said, ‘Well, James, what do you think?’ ” Bowen recalled.
And I said, “I think it’s [only] about a number thirty record, but it’ll get us back on radio.” He looked at me like that didn’t please him too much, and he left. And I think the record went to twenty-seven or twenty-eight. But with Sinatra that would be important because your word is very important to him, and that’s what I felt. We had a challenge to get Sinatra on top-forty radio when the Beatles were happening.
“Softly, as I Leave You,” with “Then Suddenly Love” on the B-side, would hit number 27 on September 5: mission accomplished. But at what cost?
—
This was the year Frank Sinatra got fat. Not fat fat, but thicker, more middle-aged. Until now, he’d always been defined as thin: in a thousand newspaper columns, in Bob Hope monologues, even in Warner Bros. cartoons. From the early 1940s to the late 1950s, the Homeric epithet “skinny crooner” could apply to no one else. The image had held fast until the thick hair thinned and the crooner became a swinger.
This was the middle period, say 1957 through 1963, when he was still slim but had lost the starved appearance that had defined him as a young man, the looks that had made women want to feed and protect him. Now, with his toup and his gaunt, scarred face, he was cigarette-smoker-skinny rather than endearingly thin. That look stayed with him through the Hawaii shoot of None but the Brave, where numerous on-set photographs showed him histrionically directing the actors, lean in his army suntans.
But sometime over the summer of 1964—maybe the near drowning triggered it, maybe the Honolulu saturnalia got the ball rolling, maybe it was just the onset of middle-age spread—Frank began to put on weight: five pounds, ten, fifteen. And with the weight, the sharp contours of his face, the physiognomy that had reminded the sculptor Jo Davidson (who did a bust of him in 1946) of Lincoln, disappeared forever. Sinatra’s head became more spherical and bull-necked and bald; the hairpieces perched ever more obviously.
This was the look he brought to his latest film, Von Ryan’s Express.
The picture was for 20th Century Fox (Frank’s movie deal with Warner Bros. was nonexclusive), where Sinatra hadn’t covered himself in glory: his misfires there included his walkout on Carousel; Pink Tights, his aborted musical with Marilyn Monroe; and Can-Can, a major flop. But Fox, having almost been brought down by the colossal fiasco of Cleopatra, was now in a new phase, back under the guidance of Darryl F. Zanuck, and Zanuck, like Jack Warner, wanted Sinatra.
Von Ryan’s Express was another World War II story, but a very different one from None but the Brave. Adapted from the successful novel of the same name, it fit squarely in the boy’s-adventure take on the war that flourished in the early 1960s: much like 1963’s smash hit The Great Escape, Von Ryan told the tale of a group of Allied prisoners who stage a daring mass escape, in this case by hijacking a freight train. Frank played the ringleader, Colonel Joseph Ryan. (The promotion from the chief pharmacist’s mate he played in None but the Brave reflected his fuller, prosperous-looking face.)
Sinatra had misgivings about the project from the beginning, primarily because it required several weeks of location shooting in Italy and Spain: he disliked leaving his home base, and he had bad associations with both countries. In the former, he was expected as an Italian-American to speak the language but did not, and audiences at the concerts he’d given there in 1953 and 1962 had been indifferent or rude.
Spain was not only the land of that memorable disaster The Pride and the Passion; more damningly, it was the land where Ava had declared her full independence, conducting two internationally publicized love affairs with bullfighters while the world reveled in Frank’s humiliation. And Rome was where his marriage to her had finally fallen apart.
Despite all the negative baggage, though, his intuition told him that Von Ryan’s Express could be a hit, and he hadn’t had a big movie since Ocean’s 11. Zanuck was dangling gross-profit participation, an almost unheard-of deal. When an old pal of Frank’s, the acerbic screenwriter Harry Kurnitz, told truth to power—the world had had it with those Rat Pack home movies—he listened.
It was also time for a shift of scenery. Los Angeles, like much of the rest of the country, was undergoing earthshaking change in the late summer of 1964. It was Freedom Summer in the South; it was the summer the Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater (“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice”) as their presidential candidate. There were race riots in Harlem; protests against the Vietnam War began to swell into a nationwide movement. Hollywood was no longer the Tinseltown Frank had ruled, on and off but mostly on, for two decades. The movie business was a mess (Cleopatra had been both a cause and a symptom). The grand old nightspots of the Sunset Strip, Mocambo and the Trocadero, were long shuttered—Ciro’s, under new management, had been repurposed as a rock club—and the elegant, red-banquette restaurants where Hollywood’s Old Guard gathered to hoist giant menus and look at each other were fewer and farther between. Discotheques like Whisky a Go Go and the Daisy were starting to sprout like toadstools after a rainstorm. Long hair began to appear on the Strip. The Beatles, and other alien sounds, were coming out of every radio, though in August Dino got his (and Frank’s) revenge on the Fab Four, the Stones, and all the rest of them when his Reprise single “Everybody Loves Somebody” (a 1947 number—Sinatra had sung it then—turbocharged by Jimmy Bowen) knocked “A Hard Day’s Night” off Billboard’s number 1 spot. It was a moral victory, but a temporary one. The young, emboldened by rebellion and the ecstasy of new possibilities, knew they were taking over. Sinatra didn’t like any of it a bit.
In early August, he packed up and headed for Rome, stopping in New York to pick up Jilly, who, Earl Wilson wrote, would “be in charge of ‘the Sinatra security,’ protecting Frank from the Italian photogs, the paparazzi…It could be a bloody war with Frank cherry-bombing the photogs.”
Frank took along the rest of his posse—Brad Dexter and Dick Bakalyan and Mike Romanoff all had roles in the movie—and a suitcase full of his favorite fireworks. He was in a fuck-all mood, ready to play whenever he felt like it and work on his terms. And he took an instant dislike to the director and producer of Von Ryan’s Express, the methodical, Canadian-born Mark Robson. “Priding himself on being a painstaking craftsman, Robson would probably have clashed with Sinatra on the easiest of shoots, the latter ever-eager to work through his scenes at top speed,” Daniel O’Brien writes. “Out on difficult, isolated locations, a clash was inevitable, the star failing to show Robson the kind of respect he’d afforded to Otto Preminger or John Frankenheimer. Deaf to all explanations of production logistics, Sinatra demanded that his scenes be filmed consecutively, with minimum waiting time between set-ups.”
Robson said this method of shooting was possible but would involve considerable extra effort and expense. Frank cut him off. “I know all that,” he said. “I didn’t tell you how to schedule the picture. I just told you what I wanted, and you told me, in front of witnesses, that you could do it. That was the deal. So now do it! You hear?”
The witnesses to the face-off were other members of the cast and crew, including Frank’s posse, who cheered on the Leader, openly flouting Robson. When the director failed to jump at Sinatra’s order, Frank walked off the set.
To try to appease the star, Fox made a yacht available for a cruise down the coast. Sinatra took his posse and basked in the sun at Portofino, Santa Margherita, and Rapallo while Robson stewed.
Sinatra in Von Ryan’s Express, 1965. This was the moment Frank’s face and body began to grow thicker: the sharp contours of his youthful physiognomy were gone forever. (Credit 21.5)
He had the director by the purse strings. Not only was the studio on the star’s side, but production costs were $25,000 a day (ro
ughly $200,000 in 2015), and Robson’s deal, unlike Frank’s, gave him a percentage of the movie’s net, not its gross. Sinatra could afford to delay indefinitely; Robson couldn’t.
Fox bowed to Frank’s every whim. When he refused to put up in Rome with the rest of the cast—screw Rome!—the studio rented him an eighteen-room villa outside the city, surrounded by a ten-foot wall and complete with indoor and outdoor swimming pools and a helipad. Each day a chartered helicopter whisked him to the location in Cortina d’Ampezzo, in the Dolomite Alps, while the rest of the cast and crew made the long drive by car. “Between takes,” George Jacobs writes, “he would listen to Puccini and old Neapolitan folk songs and throw cherry bombs at the elegant but pompous ski crowd of Cortina d’Ampezzo.” He also deployed the powerful firecrackers to destroy Dexter and Bakalyan’s hotel toilets.
He was in full midlife frenzy (midlife if he lived to a hundred, which he had every intention of doing), a second adolescence. Romantically speaking, he was footloose and fancy-free: he’d seen—as the expression goes—Angie Dickinson in L.A. earlier in the summer, but with his power at its height and his capacity for intimacy at its lowest ebb he was flying solo these days. He conceived a crush on a beautiful Italian production secretary, but she had recently married and had no interest in a fling, even with Sinatra.
According to Jacobs, his boss simply couldn’t fathom this. “One weekend,” the valet recalled, “when the husband came up to Cortina to visit, Sinatra ran into the couple in the lobby of the Miramonti Majestic Hotel. The secretary proudly introduced her husband to Mr. S,” who responded by taking a fountain pen and signing his autograph in big letters on the back of the white cashmere sweater she was wearing, a gift from her husband. The secretary broke down in tears. “The next Monday,” Jacobs writes, “when the stores opened, he had me go and buy three identical cashmere sweaters, in red, white, and blue, and deliver them, without any note of explanation or apology, to the secretary’s hotel.”