Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  Sinatra called Ostin to describe plainly about how he’d broken his back to make the record and wanted it out. Now. Eight hundred dollars in twenties set aside for spiffs (“gratuities” to make sure things got done). Runners heading down to LAX, setting up “need a favor” courier duties with stewardesses heading off across America. For a twenty, they’d take a package with the Sinatra acetate in it to, say, O’Hare, where they’d be met with Reprise’s Chicago promotion man. Another twenty and thanks and a cab to Chicago’s Top Forty program director and hand over the package with “For you. From Frank.” Jack Jones got leveled, flatter than the Death Valley Freeway.

  It was good to be king, even better to know how to work the angles.

  —

  He could make almost anything work, especially when he was in great voice. As the strings swooped and swirled and the rhythm guitar (Glen Campbell played on the session) chink-a-chink-a-chinked insistently behind him, Sinatra sang the goopy lyric with the conviction of a man who wanted a big hit with his whole heart, and somehow—by now, after thirty years onstage, he had mastered the sorcery—he made the dumb thing work.

  After the insult of the final couplet—

  It turned out so right

  For strangers in the night

  —he finally began to have a little fun with it, scatting,

  Dooby dooby doo

  Doo doo doo-bee ya

  Da da da da da ya ya ya.

  Sinatra would hate “Strangers in the Night” ever after. “He thought it was about two fags in a bar!” said Warner-Reprise’s Joe Smith. (Singing it for audiences, he sometimes changed the lyric “Love was just a glance away/a warm embracing dance away” to “a lonesome pair of pants away.”) In 1975, in a concert in Jerusalem, Frank would introduce it thus: “Here’s a song that I cannot stand. I just cannot stand this song. But what the hell.”

  What the hell indeed. The song hit the Billboard charts on May 7, joining fellow new entries “I Am a Rock” by Simon & Garfunkel, “Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?” by the Lovin’ Spoonful, and “Come Running Back” by Dean Martin. Two months later, it reached number 1, overthrowing the Beatles’ “Paperback Writer,” which had unseated the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black.” In the U.K., it sat atop the singles charts for three weeks that summer.

  He had shown Dean and Nancy who was boss. Dooby dooby doo was the new ring-a-ding-ding.

  —

  Meanwhile, Mia continued to have a merry time without him. “Just as predicted, director Mike Nichols and Mia Farrow got together as soon as he returned from Europe,” columnist Jack O’Brian wrote in early May. “They were at the Cocoanut Grove with the Tony Newleys and the Rex Harrisons…and naturally, they showed up later at the Daisy Club.”

  Frank, always an assiduous reader of the gossip columns, paid attention. “That’s not so good,” he told a friend at Jilly’s. “I think I’m gonna have to be the one to straighten this out with Mia. Can you believe that? Sinatra on his knees?”

  She was playing Ava’s game, enjoying herself publicly, flaunting other lovers in his face. He couldn’t dominate her, and it excited him unspeakably.

  The night she came back to Los Angeles, a phone call from Frank in Las Vegas woke her from a sound sleep, Farrow recalled. As she slowly gained consciousness, she found herself agreeing to get on his plane and fly to him the next night. They began to plan a future together, against formidable obstacles. Both of them were needy and complicated people, she writes; neither of them was especially self-aware. What they did know about themselves, they had trouble saying: “Blindly we sought completion in each other.”

  Hardly a recipe for a lasting union. But for the moment, she had his complete attention.

  —

  Another union, a far more important one, was coming to an end, though neither Sinatra nor Riddle knew it at the time. In May, they recorded what was to be their last full album together, a project originally slated for a later date but now rushed into production to capitalize on the huge success of the new single. Naturally, the album would be called Strangers in the Night.

  Nelson hadn’t arranged the title song, but the rest of the material, with the exception of Frank’s ill-conceived and halfhearted cover of the Petula Clark hit “Downtown,” would be as sublime as “Strangers” was ridiculous.

  The LP was subtitled Frank Sinatra Sings for Moderns, and even though only half the songs were of 1960s vintage, the feeling throughout was light, upbeat, free—Riddle in a new key, as symbolized by his use of a hip, Basie-esque organ (the Count often doubled on the instrument) on several numbers, most notably the sublime “Summer Wind” and an equally gorgeous remake of Sinatra’s first big hit, 1939’s “All or Nothing at All.”

  “Summer Wind” was a 1965 German pop song by Heinz Meier, translated into pure poetry by Johnny Mercer:

  Like painted kites, those days and nights

  Went flying by

  The androgynous-voiced Wayne Newton had had a breezy minor hit with the tune, but in Frank and Nelson’s hands it became something altogether different, and magnificent. With Riddle’s shimmering strings and Artie Kane’s Hammond organ portraying a warm, lazy wind, and Frank’s deep, wise baritone hanging as far behind the beat as a leisurely walk along the beach, the song distilled the pure, fleeting essence of summer romance.

  As for the updated “All or Nothing at All”: a quarter century earlier, it had been pure prewar opera; in the 1966 version, a quick lope with devil-may-care muted horns and raffish organ fills, a wised-up Sinatra gave bittersweet testimony about love’s mutability.

  The album was a knockout.

  It would hit number 1 and stay on the charts for seventy-three weeks, Frank’s biggest LP success since Only the Lonely in 1958. Yet when it was all said and done, Sinatra decided the Riddle era, as great as it had been, was history.

  “There is no particular story, and if there is one, I don’t know it,” Riddle told the NPR interviewer Robert Windeler not long before the arranger’s death in 1985.

  [Sinatra] is not inhibited by any particular loyalty…He had to think of Frank. I was hurt by it, I felt bad, but I think I was dimly aware that nothing is forever. A different wave of music had come in, and I was closely associated with him in a certain [other] type of music…So he moved into other areas. It’s almost like one changes one’s clothes. I saw him do it with Axel Stordahl, my favorite; I should have realized that it would be my turn. He just moved on.

  His restlessness—in his art, in his personal relations, in everything—was his genius and his illness, and a permanent condition.

  —

  No more Mike Nichols. By the beginning of June, Frank and Mia were seen around Hollywood, “looking madly devoted and happy,” according to Earl Wilson, and the marriage rumors began all over again. And on the fifth and sixth, that other devoted couple, Frank and Nancy junior, taped a new TV special, A Man and His Music Part II, at NBC Studios in Burbank. The shy and mousy Little Nancy had now transformed into a vamp in pink fringed minidress and pink go-go boots, her hair big and blond and her eyes slitted knowingly.

  But still the Daddy’s Girl act (which of course was not entirely an act) persisted. Striding out onto the op art set and throwing those boots apart boldly, she sang an oddly creepy intro—

  My pa can light my room at night

  With just his being near

  And make a fearful dream all right

  By grinning ear to ear

  —before a smash cut revealed a tuxed Frank, belting out “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby,” which then turned into an oddly incestuous duet.

  Nevertheless, it was a smooth and entertaining television hour, and Frank seemed to be having a grand time, with both Nelson Riddle and Gordon Jenkins on hand to conduct their respective segments.

  June’s blissful beginning made the events of the night of the seventh and eighth all the more strange.

  Dean Martin turned forty-nine on the seventh, and late that night Frank took his pal and eigh
t other people, including Jilly Rizzo, Richard Conte, and three women (Mia not among them), to celebrate at the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel. In an adjacent banquette sat fifty-four-year-old Frederick Weisman, the president of Hunt’s Foods (and brother-in-law of the philanthropist and art collector Norton Simon), and Franklin Fox, a Boston businessman. The men had come to the Polo Lounge for a drink in honor of their two children, who were about to be married, but soon the commotion from the next booth made conversation impossible. Weisman leaned over and asked the group if they could keep it down and also asked them to tone down their language.

  Frank gave Weisman a withering look. “You’re out of line, buddy,” he said. “I don’t think you ought to be sitting there with your glasses on talking to me like that.”

  As Fox later recalled, Sinatra then made an anti-Semitic remark.

  Weisman stood and took exception, but by now Frank and Dean and their party were starting to leave. A moment later, though, Frank turned and came back to Weisman’s table.

  “He came back to vent his anger and Fred stood up,” Fox remembered. “My efforts were simply to keep Sinatra away from him and I did that by sidearming him. I was standing in front of Fred when Sinatra threw the telephone…Dean Martin was trying to get him out of there, and the next thing I knew Fred was lying on the ground, and Sinatra and his party had walked out. I was trying to help Fred on the floor…When we weren’t able to revive him, we called an ambulance and he was carried out of the room on a stretcher.”

  George Jacobs tells a different story, saying that the telephone in question—“one of the phones the Polo Lounge was famous for parvenus wanting to be paged on”—was not thrown by Sinatra but used as a weapon by Jilly, who bashed Weisman’s head repeatedly. Still another account had the attack occurring in the valet parking area outside. And years later, Dean Martin’s ex-wife Jeanne insisted that it was Frank who had struck Weisman.

  In any case, Sinatra and Martin were long gone by the time the police arrived, Frank to Palm Springs, Dean to Lake Tahoe. And Frederick Weisman, his skull fractured, lay unconscious in the intensive-care unit of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, not expected to live.

  In the immediate aftermath of the incident, Beverly Hills police chief Clinton Anderson publicly embarrassed Frank, telling reporters, “Sinatra has been in hiding, but we’ll get him. We want to find out the cause of the fight and the physical condition of Weisman at the time.”

  Frank called Anderson and told him the fight had been Weisman’s fault. The businessman had cursed at him, then hit him, then fallen to the floor, Frank said; “I at no time saw anyone hit him and I certainly did not.”

  Frank was terrified. “Now I’ve gone and done it,” he said to a friend. “I really fucked up. If this guy croaks, I’m fucking finished.”

  Mia had flown to Palm Springs to keep him company, as had Jack Entratter and his wife, Corinne. “That’s the only time I think I ever saw that man scared,” Corinne Entratter recalled. “For two weeks we all sat there staring at each other. Mia and I tried to learn how to play backgammon. Nobody went anywhere. We were like prisoners…Nobody knew how it would come out.”

  Weisman regained consciousness seventy-two hours later, but his condition remained serious, and Frank remained guilty and scared. According to a friend of Farrow’s, she and Sinatra argued when she told him that what had happened in the Polo Lounge had probably not been his fault. The adverb disturbed him.

  By the twenty-seventh, Weisman was able to talk to the police about the incident, but he remembered nothing after the moment he was struck. This of course implies that he would have remembered who struck him. But due to the conflicting stories and lack of evidence—and, according to one source, threatening phone calls—his family decided not to pursue criminal charges against Sinatra. George Jacobs claimed that Frank paid Weisman “millions” in hush money, although Weisman’s brother said at the time, “There’s nothing to settle. We just want to forget it ever happened.” On June 30, the Los Angeles district attorney closed the investigation.

  Sinatra was enormously relieved, and with relief came a kind of euphoria. Farrow was not surprised, she recalled, when, one morning in Palm Springs, Frank led her outside, clasped her hands, and asked her to marry him. “In the closing space between us,” she writes, “I placed all the hope of my lifetime.”

  —

  He went to Billy Ruser’s in Beverly Hills—the same store where he’d bought Ava emerald earrings he couldn’t afford in 1953—and paid $85,000 for a nine-carat diamond ring. He was headed to Europe to start making a new movie for Warner’s (as it turned out, it would be his last film for the studio), a spy picture called The Naked Runner. Sinatra was to play an ex-assassin for the OSS who is forced back into action when his son is kidnapped—a plot twist that might have given Frank pause but didn’t. He asked Mia to come with him to New York before he left.

  As they flew east in his Learjet, Farrow recalled, Frank was, as was his wont, pushing her to eat. He urged her to try the dessert. Under the cake was a little box, and in the box was an engagement ring with a huge pear-shaped diamond. He had to tell her which finger to put it on. This, Mia thought, was a ring she’d better not swallow.

  They spent the Fourth of July weekend at the Cerfs’ in Mount Kisco—“I don’t have a recollection of burning passion,” Christopher Cerf recalled, “but he was very, very attentive to her”—and then Sinatra flew on to London with George Jacobs, Jimmy Van Heusen, and Brad Dexter (now a vice president of Artanis Productions as well as The Naked Runner’s producer) for company, but without Mia.

  —

  It was the greatest culture clash London had ever seen. While the Beatles and the Stones, just then shifting into psychedelic mode, strode the streets of the British capital in tinted granny glasses and feather boas and great bird’s nests of hair, the toupeed little American who’d kicked them off the top of the charts jetted in and took over the town.

  Sinatra rented a big apartment in Grosvenor Square, across from the American embassy, and, between commuting to Shepperton Studios to make the movie, spent his evenings at the Playboy Club and befriending the locals: “countless Mia-like waifs in their Biba miniskirts and Mary Quant tights strutting their great stuff on the King’s Road. This was heaven on earth for leg men,” George Jacobs wrote. Chester, in his time-honored fashion, made sure Frank didn’t lack for female companionship.

  Back in New York, in the middle of a heat wave, Farrow was letting the world know what a hot commodity she’d become. On July 7, she finally announced she was leaving Peyton Place and signing with 20th Century Fox. Her asking price for a starring movie role was $200,000. On Sunday night, July 10, she hobbled into P. J. Clarke’s, the celebrity watering hole, on crutches—she’d cut her leg badly when she accidentally sat on a pair of scissors in her mother’s apartment—but beaming as she flashed her new rock. “It’s a friendship ring from Frank,” she said, her smile suggesting that no one should mistake the enormous piece of ice on her finger for anything but exactly what it really was.

  Her mother was concerned—first, that Mia was rushing into this ill-considered union (“If Mr. Sinatra is going to marry anyone,” the fifty-four-year-old Maureen O’Sullivan had said the previous year, “he ought to marry me!”), and second, that she was going to embarrass herself. Lauren Bacall had famously scuttled her chances of marriage to Frank, and wound up publicly humiliated, by mentioning their engagement before he’d officially sanctioned it. O’Sullivan phoned Sinatra in London and put it to him straight: What could be said publicly about the nine-carat diamond on her daughter’s finger?

  Frank thought for a moment before answering. Mia could announce the engagement, he said, but not a definite date for the wedding. O’Sullivan summoned up her dignity as a grande dame and a mother. Couldn’t he do any better than that?

  All right, Sinatra said. Sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

  Maureen O’Sullivan let the world know on July 14. “I couldn’t
be more delighted,” she told the Associated Press. “Frank is a wonderful person and I know they’ll be very happy together.” The age difference didn’t matter, she insisted. “I know people who are antiques at 35 and others who can watusi at 70. Frank has always been absolutely sweet when I’ve seen him,” she said, not very convincingly.

  Back in Los Angeles, Farrow found herself the biggest story around. Photographers were camped out around her house; she had to crawl on the floor to avoid being seen. She phoned Frank and asked him what to do. “Let’s get married right away,” he told her. They would meet in Vegas.

  Brad Dexter told a different story. The night of the announcement, he recalled, after having dinner and playing blackjack at the Colony, a London gambling club managed by Sinatra’s old pal George Raft, Frank asked Dexter what he thought of the engagement.

  Dexter didn’t hold back. “It’s too big an age difference, Frank,” he said. “You’re talking about thirty years in age. It doesn’t make sense. When she’s forty you’ll be seventy, but if that’s what you want, go ahead and marry the girl.”

  “The age business doesn’t mean a thing,” Sinatra contended. “Besides, she’s a good kid and I’m lonely. I need somebody.”

  “I know you’re lonely, but I think you’re confusing the love you have for your son with what you feel about Mia. Junior won’t respond to you, but Mia does.” Dexter then told Frank that he ought to consult a psychiatrist.

  “He went crazy,” Dexter recalled. “Went ape, began to tear up the apartment on Grosvenor Square, busted lamps, turned the table over.”

  Still furious, Frank picked up the phone and called Jack Entratter in Las Vegas. “Make all the arrangements,” he told him, “because I’m leaving London tomorrow and Mia and I are getting married.”

  —

  Don Digilio, the managing editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, had been covering the town for a long time. He knew Jack Entratter as he knew all the casino managers, and somehow he got wind from an unidentified source that the wedding would not take place between Thanksgiving and Christmas as Frank had vaguely said, but at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, July 19, at the Sands Hotel. The source told Digilio, strangely, that “the ceremony would definitely take place unless an emergency occurred or news stories brought newsmen and photographers to the hotel.” The source further said that Sinatra wanted the wedding kept secret until after the ceremony. The news appeared on the front pages of many papers on the morning of the nineteenth, and the world’s press quickly descended on Las Vegas.