by James Kaplan
He was a man ahead of his time.
On the subject of marriage he was equally specific:
“I don’t say that marriage is impossible,” he says. “But if I did marry, it would have to be somebody out of show business, or somebody who will get out of the business. I feel I’m a fairly good provider. All I ask is that my wife looks after me, and I’ll see that she is looked after.
“I don’t feel that I’ve ever been a demanding man, but in some respects I’m a hard man to live with. I live my life certain ways that I could never change for a woman. I am a symmetrical man, almost to a fault. I demand everything in its place. My clothing must hang just so. There are some things I can’t stand in women. Strong colognes, for example, drive me out of the room. First of all I’ve got an allergy to them. I begin to sneeze, which is not very romantic—and this certainly might annoy a woman.”
What mainly seemed to concern him, however, was how a woman might annoy him.
—
In an eerie way, his remarks looked ahead, not to his next marriage but to the one after that, his fourth and final one, to Barbara Blakeley Marx: If I did marry, it would have to be somebody out of show business, or somebody who will get out of the business. I feel I’m a fairly good provider. All I ask is that my wife looks after me, and I’ll see that she is looked after.
As for Mia Farrow, though, his comments boded ill.
—
Frank’s own part of the package, the long essay titled “Me and My Music,” is an extraordinary work. Whoever did the actual writing crafted it expertly: the piece sounds very much like Sinatra and—as was not the case with his Mike Shore–crafted Playboy interview—feels precisely like him, the voice conversational and never overarticulate, yet expert, reflecting technical knowledge and musical opinions that could only come from the greatest popular singer of all time.
He speaks from the chair of authority, a place he had richly earned. He had battled a hundred other boy singers during the big-band years and outlasted them all, the Jack Leonards and the Bob Eberlys and the Dick Haymeses. He had gone out on his own when to do so was highly unusual and professionally perilous and succeeded beyond all expectations. He had narrowly skirted career extinction, overcoming his own self-destructiveness and America’s vindictiveness, to mount the greatest second act in show-business history. He had made dozens of records that would last as long as music itself. He was an immortal, and he knew it.
The essay is masterly. Sinatra is trenchant and at times prophetic (“The era of cool jazz is gone”). He tells only one outright lie: “I never had a vocal lesson—a real one—except to work with a coach a few times on vocal calisthenics.” (In fact, in the 1930s and 1940s, a former Metropolitan Opera tenor named John Quinlan had worked extensively with Frank to take the Hoboken out of his diction and put more power into his voice, which was thin and high at the time.) But his occasional arrogance never feels undeserved, and his revelations about the art and science of singing, if sometimes a little too technical, are sensationally enlightening for all who cared to pay attention.
He begins by describing how his early idolatry of the inimitable but all too widely imitated Bing Crosby evolved into a determination to be different. “What I finally hit on,” he wrote, “was more the bel canto Italian school of singing, without making a point of it.” He doesn’t make a point of it, because it’s a hard point to make: the bel canto style first evolved in the eighteenth-century operas and oratorios of Handel, reached its full flower in the early-nineteenth-century operas of Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, and had a broad range of hallmarks, some of them, but not all, strictly applicable to Frank Sinatra. But some of the style’s chief characteristics—a flawless legato, perfect diction, and graceful phrasing based on a total mastery of breath control—fit him like a glove, and he went on to describe how he had arrived at them.
He had said these things before but never at such length and so clearly. “How in the hell did he do it?” he wrote of Tommy Dorsey.
I used to sit behind him on the bandstand and watch, trying to see him sneak a breath. But I never saw the bellows move in his back. His jacket didn’t even move. I used to edge my chair to the side a little, and peek around to watch him. Finally, after a while, I discovered that he had a “sneak” pinhole in the corner of his mouth—not an actual pinhole, but a tiny place where he was breathing.
Dorsey was able to hide the opening at the corner of his lips with the trombone’s mouthpiece; Sinatra, by contrast, was out in the middle of the stage with just a smile and a shoe shine. How the hell could he do it? In the piece, he told the familiar stories about how he’d built up his lung capacity—swimming laps underwater at public pools, running laps around the track at Hoboken’s Stevens Institute—but, strikingly, avoided giving away his own trade secret. Whereas Dorsey sneaked breaths through the hidden pinhole, Sinatra did it by widening his mouth at key moments in a song—it looked as though he were smiling—and taking in air through both corners of his lips. Watch him singing on film or video: you can see him doing it, and he makes it look (and sound) good.*1
He was more forthcoming about his unparalleled microphone technique. The mike is a singer’s instrument, he wrote—a lesson, he scolded, that many vocalists never learn. He described how to use the device subtly—“like a geisha girl uses her fan,” he wrote: when to move close, when to lean back, how to avoid popping p’s and taking audible breaths.
“When I’m using a microphone I usually try to have a black one so that it will melt into my dinner jacket and the audience isn’t aware of it,” he continued. “Many years ago I found that I could take the mike off the stand and move around with it. That’s a boon, and so many singers don’t take advantage of it. Ella Fitzgerald, poor girl, still doesn’t. They set up a mike for her and she never touches it. You can’t even see her face.”
Poor girl. (Fitzgerald was all of sixteen months younger than Sinatra.) It was the first dig at another singer in the piece, and more were to follow. The comments weren’t gratuitous: in each case, Frank had a point. Fitzgerald, for all her greatness, was an odd, uncomfortable personality, uncertain about her looks and sometimes apt to be recessive onstage or on record. She was capable of retreating, even disappearing, behind her blistering proficiency: her genius didn’t sit easily with her. Her greatest performances happened when she forgot herself and let fly. But her brilliance also didn’t sit easily with Sinatra: as he’d confessed in a 1959 interview, it intimidated him. Maybe, now that he had the power and the forum, he was taking a certain measure of revenge.
The one colleague he praised without reservation was Tony Bennett, whom he called “the best singer in the business, the best exponent of a song…He’s the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more. There’s a feeling in back of it.”
With others there were reservations. Vic Damone (“has better pipes than anybody, but…lacks the know-how or whatever you want to call it”) and Lena Horne (“a beautiful lady but really a mechanical singer. She gimmicks up a song, makes it too pat”) came in for particularly stinging lashes. Was he settling scores? In the case of Horne, certainly.*2 But why did he take out after (his former lover) Judy Garland and, once again, Ella? “Technically two of the worst singers in the business,” he wrote, castigating both for perpetuating his bugbear, the taking of an audible breath in the middle of a phrase. Yet Garland was a nonpareil interpreter of song, an emotional force of nature: when she took the stage, her technique (she also had the proverbial vibrato you could drive a truck through) was the last thing audiences cared about. And Fitzgerald’s voice was such a powerhouse that sometimes the notes took precedence over the sense: both her strength and her weakness. (Frank also took a slap at poor Ella for recording uncommercial material like Cole Porter’s “Down in the Depths on the 90th Floor”—which was really a slap at his old enemy, her producer Norman Granz.)
After faulting Sarah Vaughan for taking so long to arrive at a musical identity,
he favored her with a strange encomium: “Sassy is so good now that when I listen to her I want to cut my wrists with a dull razor.” Surprisingly, he gave a passing compliment to Barbra Streisand (“an artist”), though George Jacobs claimed he despised her. Peggy Lee, though—or because—a former lover, received condescending praise (“pretty good with the lyrics. She sustains a little more than the other girls do”); he complimented Jo Stafford for technique only and vouchsafed Rosemary Clooney just two words: “sings well.”
He liked Jack Jones best of the male newcomers. “He has a distinction, an all-around quality that puts him potentially about three lengths in front of the other guys,” Frank wrote. “He sings jazz pretty good, too. But he’s got to be handled very carefully from here on out. The next year is going to tell. One thing—he should stop singing those gasoline commercials that they play on the Dodger baseball broadcasts.”
Tough words, but as it turned out, Sinatra was right on the money: Jack Jones, a wonderful singer, suffered from a mismanaged career (by himself as well as others) and never reached his true commercial potential. Frank knew all too well what he was talking about.
—
And he was almost as tough on himself, even if his narcissism was impenetrable. “I smoke too much and drink too much,” he admitted, yet couldn’t help adding, “But I’ve learned that the vocal cords aren’t bothered too much by that—they’re in a protected part of the body.” He failed to mention his lungs, which apparently were in a part of his body protected by good luck, as had not been the case with Nat King Cole, another lifetime smoker, who’d died in February, at age forty-five, of lung cancer.
As for the future, he sensed a certain narrowing. “At this stage of my career,” he wrote, “I don’t have any mountains left to climb.” He had never done a Broadway show and had absolutely no desire to start now, he said. The repetition would bore him to death, and besides the money was lousy. About poor Sammy Davis, then lighting up the Great White Way in Golden Boy, Frank said, “I don’t think he’s going to come out financially too well, and he’s tied up for two years.” Another piercingly accurate forecast.
He then delivered a self-prophecy that would become perfectly self-fulfilling. “One thing I would like to do,” he said, foretelling the years from the 1970s into the mid-1990s, when he would thrive as a concert artist, “is a long series of one-nighters…all over the country. I’d take an orchestra, like Basie or some big band, and a few other performers, comics, what have you, and hire a train. I’d like to go into a town and just sing for an hour or so, concert-style…I’d also like to do a few weeks in New York if I can find the time. I haven’t worked the big town in many years.”
But what about age and decline, those annoying conditions that affected the rest of humanity? Here he whistled in the dark. “Since I’m almost 50 years old, I’ve given a lot of thought to how long can the voice hold out,” he wrote.
I don’t think age has as much to do with it as does physical condition. In other words, as long as I stay in shape, I should be able to keep singing. My voice is as good now as it ever was. But I’ll be the first to know when it starts to go—when the vibrato starts to widen and the breath starts to give out. When that happens, I’ll say goodbye. I wouldn’t want to make a recording and have to listen to it 20 years from now with those symptoms turning up. I can’t kid myself into thinking my voice will be as strong or my enthusiasm as buoyant a few years from now.
I don’t believe in self-indulgence, anyway. In all my years as a performer, I’ve believed in taking only the nucleus of an act, that part which is so good, then getting off quick. I don’t do a long time on stage. That goes for my life, too.
He was good at getting off quick. Saying good-bye, though, would be far more difficult than even he could predict.
—
There was another thing. Now, while his voice was still strong but popular music was changing so rapidly—even more quickly than it had changed after the war, when his public had turned from him—what would he sing? In the November Variety interview, Frank had complained that the old warhorses Harold Arlen and Harry Warren and Hoagy Carmichael weren’t turning out product anymore; Cahn and Van Heusen, and Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh, he said, were the only proven songwriting teams still producing consistently.
But even they were bucking the rising tide, and Sinatra admitted he was at sea. “Even though I’ve been singing for a quarter of a century, and I’m the president of a major record company, I still don’t have a good idea as to what the public will buy and what they won’t,” he wrote.
Music is so fragile—from day to day—that you never know.
I get about 500 new songs a year sent to me, and chances are 497 of them will be lousy. But I look at them all, anyway. There’s always the chance one good one will come in over the transom…
I don’t read a note of music. I learn songs by having them played for me a couple of times while I read the lyrics. I can pick up the melody very quickly. I learn the lyrics by writing them out in longhand.
When I get a new song, I look for continuity of melody that in itself will tell a musical story. It must go somewhere. I don’t like it to ramble. And then, by the same token, I like almost the same thing—more, as a matter of fact—in the lyrics. They must tell you a complete story, from “once upon a time” to “the end”…
When a song doesn’t follow in continuity, it doesn’t continue to hold the interest of an artist. And the only time that songs hold the interest of the public is when an artist…understands the song and sings it properly. Throughout my career, if I have done anything, I have paid attention to every note and every word I sing—if I respect the song. If I cannot project this to a listener, I fail.
Yet the question lingered: What songs would he sing now?
—
May was the month Frank and Mia first came out as a couple, at the SHARE Boomtown charity show, which always received wide press coverage. She was shocked when he told her they’d be attending—at that point they were even staying away from restaurants. They put on Western garb, Mia got to meet Sammy Davis and Shirley MacLaine, and Dean Martin toasted her from the stage: “Hey, I got a bottle of scotch that’s older than you.”
Everybody laughed, the photographers snapped away, and the frenetic press scrum began. The world was puzzled, horrified, and endlessly titillated by the spectacle of the forty-nine-year-old professional swinger stepping out with the virginal, baby-faced nineteen-year-old—who played a shy, dreamy sixteen-year-old on one of America’s most popular television series. It was unseemly; it was delicious.
Proudly, defiantly, he began to take her out to parties and restaurants, to introduce her to more of his friends in L.A., Vegas, and New York. She discovered that Frank could finish off a fifth of Jack Daniel’s in a night, that the nights he liked best were filled with loud jokes and stories and a perpetually whirling cast of characters: friends, hangers-on, stayers-over. Her hours alone with him, she soon found, were growing rarer all the time.
—
In June, Frank, Dean, and Sammy did a benefit in St. Louis’s Kiel Opera House for Dismas House, a halfway facility for ex-cons and a favorite charity of Sinatra’s friends in the Teamsters. The show, broadcast via closed-circuit TV to movie theaters in New York and Los Angeles, was emceed by Johnny Carson, who had taken over The Tonight Show from Jack Paar in 1962 and become a star in his own right. He was young (thirty-nine) and cheeky, at once provocative and inoffensive: his button-eyed, pointy-nosed midwestern face was flawlessly all-American, yet his wit was lightning fast, and he carried a subliminal hint of anger. Physically, he looked bland alongside the show’s other three stars, but his ego was such that he didn’t wilt in their presence: instead, he got into the spirit of the proceedings and roasted them. When it came time to introduce Sinatra, who (of course) followed Dean and Sammy, Carson stared at the camera and intoned solemnly, “Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of Dismas House, I present our hoodlum singer.”*3
&
nbsp; Frank loved it. He came out beaming; he and Carson bowed to each other. Then, after some obligatory offstage heckling by Dean, he sang eight numbers, topped off by a “Happy Birthday” for the now seventeen-year-old Tina Sinatra, who came out onstage to give him a kiss.
Her father’s cheeks and neck were growing beefy; his hair, even with a piece, looked thinner than ever. But his smile was real and incandescent, and with the Count Basie Orchestra behind him (Quincy Jones conducting) he sang with incomparable style and power. Basie simply charged him up; in the opinion of longtime Sinatra observer Rob Fentress, who attended many recording sessions and shows at the Sands, Frank’s time with the Count had made him a much more dynamic performer. Onstage at the Kiel, Dean, as usual, mostly made fun of his own singing (though he didn’t need to); Sammy sounded as only he could sound. But only Frank was Frank: he was alone at the summit, and he knew it, as did everyone else.
As for the Summit, whose final performance this was, it was clear that its moment had passed. The presence of Carson and television cameras flattened the act, made it presentational rather than unpredictable. The button-eyed host, with his smooth patter, was like a lion tamer working with three big cats, and he effectively tamed them. (Though in fact Dean, about to begin what would become an enormously successful variety series on NBC that fall, had done the job on himself, distilling his drunkie routine into camera-ready perfection.) Even though all three men ad-libbed delightfully at times, with Johnny now and then chiming in, the set pieces—Dean’s by now hoary stunt of carrying Sammy onstage, chirping, “I’d like to thank the N-double-A-C-P for this wonderful trophy”—and obligatory ethnic humor, most of it directed at Davis and uncomfortable in this era of intense civil rights turmoil, were feeling shopworn. The fact that the benefit was broadcast in black-and-white seemed all too symbolic.