Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  The newlyweds house-hunted that September, a process that drove Mia to despair. The realtor was showing them Beverly Hills mansions, she writes, and she couldn’t picture herself in any of them. Frank’s patience was wearing thin, and she was unable to say why she was so upset. After a while they saw an English Tudor–style house, not too aggressively posh, that appealed to both of them. Frank bought it.

  It was a five-bedroom, five-and-a-half-bath fake English country home cozily nestled in a wooded bend of Copa de Oro Road, just north of Sunset in Bel Air. Copa de Oro—Spanish for “cup of gold.” Dick Powell and June Allyson had lived in the house in the late 1940s and early 1950s, while Allyson had an affair with Dean Martin. Such was Hollywood domesticity. But Powell and Allyson managed to stay married for eighteen years anyway, until his death in 1963. Frank wasn’t thinking on such grand terms. “If I could have one or two good years, that’s all I can expect,” he’d told Dean just before marrying Mia. He said the same to both his daughters after the wedding.

  Still, Frank had never bought a house with Ava. Edie Goetz found the newlyweds a decorator, and they moved in, though settling down wasn’t quite on the program. As September turned to October, Frank tended to his busy slate of record and film projects, while Mia, too, actively sought movie work, somewhat to her husband’s chagrin.

  —

  Ava came to New York at the end of September for the world premiere of The Bible. The Daily News film critic Rex Reed, profiling Gardner for Esquire, caught her in a candid mood. Young, prettily handsome, and provocative, Reed was carving out a reputation as a bad boy, shouldering into the ranks of the New Journalists, and he made sure to take note of the drinking Ava. As the world had long known, Ava plus alcohol equaled great copy, and Reed waited until she’d had plenty of it to ask her about her three famous ex-husbands, Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra. Ticking down the list, he finally came to Frank:

  Sinatra? “No comment,” she says to her glass.

  A slow count to ten, while she sips her drink. Then, “And Mia Farrow?” The Ava eyes brighten to a soft clubhouse green. The answer comes like so many cats lapping so many saucers of cream. Unprintable.

  Interestingly, though, Reed bowdlerized the passage when it was reprinted later in his anthology Do You Sleep in the Nude?:

  A slow count to ten, while she sips her drink. Then, “And Mia Farrow?” The Ava eyes brighten to a soft clubhouse green. The answer comes like so many cats lapping so many saucers of cream. “Hah! I always knew Frank would end up in bed with a boy.”

  According to another source, what Gardner really said was, “I always knew Frank always wanted a boy with a cunt.”

  And according to two sources, Sinatra was in New York that same weekend, and Farrow was conspicuous by her absence.

  —

  The previous spring, a record by the soul singer O. C. Smith had grabbed Frank’s attention. The song, a chorus-backed blues taken at a meditative tempo, was called “That’s Life.” Sinatra liked the number enough that he called Jimmy Bowen into his office and played him Smith’s single. “I think we ought to make a record of this, James,” he said. “What do you think?”

  Bowen, who had now gained Frank’s trust by being unafraid to tell him the truth, happened to agree with him. “Absolutely,” he said.

  In June, Sinatra taped the tune, with a Nelson Riddle arrangement, for his second Man and His Music special with Nancy. To the accompaniment of an orchestra and a jumpy blues organ, Frank transformed the soul singer’s mellow reading into something tough and canny, rendered in the rascally rasp he had now polished to perfection.

  Still, Bowen knew well that a hit single would require something more. He had Ernie Freeman modify Riddle’s arrangement considerably, speeding up the tempo and adding a gospel choir backing, à la Ray Charles.

  The session for Sinatra’s “That’s Life” single was set for the night of October 18, in Western Recorders’ new state-of-the-art eight-track facility, next door to United Recording on Sunset Boulevard. Neither Jimmy Bowen nor his engineer, Eddie Brackett, had ever cut anything in eight tracks, so they booked the musicians an hour earlier than Sinatra to make sure everything would go smoothly.

  But there were technical problems from the beginning, and in the midst of them Frank walked in half an hour early, accompanied by Mia, Mo Ostin, and a contingent of cronies. Even before Sinatra started, he was impatient to leave. “James,” he said, “I gotta get this thing done. I got a dinner date I’ve gotta go to.”

  “When he was in a hurry, he wasn’t thinking chart position,” Jimmy Bowen recalled. Sinatra sang the song twice with the orchestra, then came into the booth to listen to the playback. Something bothered Bowen about the takes: the rhythm section was obediently reacting to the beauty of Sinatra’s vocal and calming down with him. It wasn’t the big, macho sound the producer wanted. Frank looked at Ostin and asked what he thought. “It’s great, Frank,” Mo said. “Frank shot me a look of impatience,” Bowen remembered, “and put me on the spot. ‘Well, okay?’ ”

  I knew this wasn’t going to go over real well, but I had to stick to my instincts. That was my job. “Well, not if we really want a killer hit, it isn’t. We’ve got to cut it one more time and make it stronger on the bottom.”

  Dead silence for what seemed like a minute—but was probably fifteen seconds. Sinatra fixed those cold, steely-blue eyes on me during that silence. The cronies were cringing, thinking I’d lost my marbles. “Let’s do it,” he mumbled, and headed back out into the studio.

  With his back against the wall, Bowen read the riot act to his rhythm section. “Now look, I want you to stand on this son of a bitch,” he said.

  They went back out and nailed it, just drove the song and gave Sinatra a huge energetic push. Frank was pissed, and you could hear him channeling it when he snarled, “That’s life, that’s what all the people say.” He came off wonderfully intense, and when it ended, he signed off, “Ohh, yeahhh.”

  Frank turned and walked out the back door. Never said “Thanks,” “Good night,” “Good job,” nothing. His people were still staring at me like, You have fucked up big-time. My feeling was, Screw it, I got what I wanted, which is what he wanted.

  The producer spent the rest of the night mixing the record, finally leaving the studio with an acetate at 4:00 a.m. Bowen also left an acetate to be delivered by hand to Sinatra’s house later that day. He went home and fell into an exhausted sleep, only to be awakened some time later by a call from Sinatra. “James,” Frank said, “it’s just brilliant. Thanks.” Then he hung up.

  A month later, the song would enter a Billboard chart crowded with the likes of the Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations,” and the Monkees’ “Last Train to Clarksville” and muscle its way up to number 4. Seldom had Frank’s anger been put to such constructive use.

  —

  On November 3, he began a two-week stand at the Sands, accompanied by Antonio Morelli’s orchestra, Gordon Jenkins conducting. It was Sinatra’s twenty-eighth opening in the Copa Room and his first since marrying Mia Farrow. The standing-room crowd craned their necks as Joe E. Lewis escorted Farrow, who’d let her buzz cut grow out to Peter Pan length, to her ringside seat. Then Lefty delivered the downbeat, and Frank began his act with “The Shadow of Your Smile.” He looked straight at his bride as he sang; she gazed back lovingly. She knew the lyrics word for word, she recalled; she breathed along with him. She felt his emotions flow out into the showroom. She was part of his voice, part of him. It was an indescribable thrill to be the one woman, amid a roomful of women each of whom felt he was singing to her, to whom Frank Sinatra really was singing.

  The room exploded with applause after every number. (As he performed “Strangers in the Night,” he consulted a cheat sheet, because, as he said, “Believe it or not, I never learned the lyrics.”) Half a dozen songs later, Sinatra paused, sipped from his glass, stared out at the silently worshipful audience, and introd
uced a few celebrities: Don Drysdale, Willie Mays, and Leo Durocher; Richard Conte, Andy Williams, and Tina Sinatra—who, having turned eighteen in June, was finally old enough to get in. “Smokey the Bear was supposed to be here tonight,” Frank began.

  You all know Smokey. That’s Sammy Davis. But he couldn’t make it. He has an opening of his own—down in Watts. It’s a gas station. He calls it Whitey’s. He sells three kinds of gas—regular, ethyl, and burn, baby, burn.

  He was referring (in Las Vegas, which was still prehistoric in its racial attitudes) to the summertime 1965 riots in the Watts district of South Los Angeles, disturbances triggered by the African-American residents’ unhappiness at their treatment by the Los Angeles Police Department. Though the riots had calmed and not recurred in the summer of 1966, racial unrest, and sporadic violent incidents, continued throughout the city.

  “But Sammy’s okay,” Frank continued.

  He had a wedding anniversary recently, and I sent him a gift—yeah, I sent him and Mai [sic] a love seat covered in zebra skin, so when they sit together they won’t be so conspicuous…Well, let’s see. What else is new? Oh, yeah. I got married—she’s here.

  Mia stood, to an ovation from the audience. “Yeah, I sure got married,” Sinatra said. “Well, you see, I had to—I finally found a broad I can cheat on.”

  It was as though he had slapped her face in front of five hundred people. There was a collective intake of breath: Farrow hung her head and reddened.

  Frank tried for a save. “Ain’t she pretty?” he said. And then, “I guess I’d better sing. I’m in a lot of trouble.”

  After his show—it was only midnight; the evening was just getting started—he took Durocher and a few other buddies to the Aladdin to see Joe E. Lewis’s set. First, though, Earl Wilson wrote, “he stopped at a blackjack table, got a fistful of $100 chips and won about $3,000, stuffing several big chips in the pocket of a chum who had previously lost.” He spent nearly two hours gambling while Mia sat and watched, though her alienation from Las Vegas was now complete. One night around that time, Sheilah Graham looked on as Sinatra gambled heavily in the Sands casino while Farrow waited patiently on the sidelines. Finally, the columnist recalled, “she touched his craps-swinging arm and said, ‘Let’s go.’ He flung her hand off angrily and shouted, ‘Look, don’t tell me what to do. Don’t try to change me.’ ”

  —

  On November 8, Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California, defeating Pat Brown by almost one million votes.

  —

  Despite the greatness that Strangers in the Night had contained, Jimmy Bowen considered the album retrograde; the last thing he wanted was to build another old-fashioned-feeling (read: Riddle-influenced) Sinatra LP around a hit song he, Bowen, had proudly produced. “We can’t do just one thing that’s modern and innovative and then go back and do ‘Wee Small Hours’ for the other nine tunes,” he told Frank.

  Accordingly, That’s Life, the album, recorded over two nights in mid-November, contained eight tunes that jibed completely with the title song in composition and production, only they were less interesting. The result was an LP that was, in a formal sense, the mirror image of Strangers in the Night: strong title number, weak backup. Even though only some of That’s Life’s material—the beyond-cheesy “Winchester Cathedral,” for example—was completely bad, none of the rest was especially good, or even especially catchy. And outside hit-single territory, the thinness of Ernie Freeman’s arranging became all too conspicuous. It was, and is, dispiriting to hear Frank sing “The Impossible Dream” (“That was Mia’s request,” said Rob Fentress, who attended the session, “and he didn’t like the song”) against a background of swelling chorus and screechy strings: it was the sonic equivalent of Assault on a Queen or The Naked Runner, and a listener could be forgiven for wondering whether Sinatra was past it as a singer as well as a movie star.

  —

  He and Mia went to New York together at Thanksgiving, to see Dolly and Marty, to do some Christmas shopping, and to attend the social event of the year, Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball. The air was crisp; Sinatra bought Farrow an early present, a long gray mink coat, as an unspoken apology.

  The ball took place on November 28, at the Plaza hotel. Four hundred eighty attended, carefully chosen from the elite of two continents by the pixieish author, who was newly rich from the huge success of In Cold Blood, his “nonfiction novel” about the 1959 murder of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas.

  It was heaven for Capote, his apotheosis in society and the media. He’d invited everyone who was anyone, from the honoree, Katharine Graham, to Alice Roosevelt Longworth and Margaret Truman Daniel and Lynda Bird Johnson, to Henry Ford II and Tallulah Bankhead and Rose Kennedy and Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper and Marianne Moore and the maharani of Jaipur. And, of course, the Cerfs. Christopher Cerf, who remembered the evening as “a black-and-white blur,” danced with Mia Farrow, on whom he had a shy crush. “That’s one of the highlights—at least from other people’s point of view—of my life,” he said. Naturally, Frank had sanctioned it.

  Farrow’s eye mask was a white butterfly; Sinatra’s, also appropriate, represented a black cat. Peter Lawford was another invitee. The masks, and the crowd, and the blur, and Capote’s painstaking seating arrangement, made it easy for Frank to ignore him completely.

  The ball was a real arrival for Truman Capote and another form of arrival—in New York and in glittering political-social-literary society—for Frank Sinatra. Even if he had well and truly arrived many years earlier, and again and again in the years since, there was never anything wrong with arriving one more time.

  The newlyweds at Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball, November 1966. Frank’s fifty-first year was a time of short-lived joy and devouring furies. (Credit 23.2)

  —

  Then, two weeks later, another birthday, with the strange and unmagical number fifty-one.

  24

  Never fight a Jew in the desert.

  —FRANK SINATRA

  In December 1966, the Brazilian songwriter Antonio Carlos Jobim was having a few beers with friends in his favorite Rio de Janeiro bar when a waiter brought him a telephone and told him he had a call from the United States and that the caller was Frank Sinatra.

  Jobim was shaken but not stunned: Sinatra, the idol of his generation, had first expressed interest in recording his compositions in 1964, the year Stan Getz and João Gilberto’s recording of the songwriter’s most famous tune, “The Girl from Ipanema” (“Garota de Ipanema”), became an international hit, propelling Brazilian bossa nova—literally, “charming new trend”—to worldwide popularity. The following year, Sinatra’s home label, Warner Records, had released an album called The Wonderful World of Antonio Carlos Jobim, on which Jobim played (and sang, in a rudimentary but soulful voice) his own songs and Nelson Riddle wrote the arrangements.

  When Jobim took the telephone that day in December, Frank told the composer that he would like to make an album with him. The songwriter didn’t have to think twice. “It’s an honor, I’d love to,” he said.

  At thirty-nine, Jobim was already a colossus: a unique composer whose influences included Heitor Villa-Lobos, Debussy, and Ravel. His songs, many with lyrics in Brazilian Portuguese by the poet Vinicius de Moraes, were like nobody else’s: deceptively simple, faintly melancholy, and iridescently lovely. They hummed with eros and nostalgia and lingered in the ear, comparing favorably with the greatest works in the American Songbook. (The lyrics to a number of his compositions had been translated into English by less-than-stellar writers—Norman Gimbel’s all-too-easy-to-parody text to “Girl from Ipanema” was a case in point*1—but the tunes themselves were strong enough to weather the transformation.*2

  Unknown to Jobim, Sinatra was calling at a critical moment in his own career. Maybe Frank had a bad taste in his mouth after “Winchester Cathedral” and “The Impossible Dream”; certainly, as always, he was restlessly seeking fresh inspiration. He had complaine
d that the old giants, the Harry Warrens and the Harold Arlens, weren’t turning out songs anymore; he couldn’t lean on Cahn and Van Heusen, and Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh, forever. He couldn’t record standards forever. With rock shaking the foundations of popular music, Sinatra needed something new. What better than the delectable fusion of samba and jazz whose very name spoke of newness?

  To underline his wish for change, Frank told Jobim that he wanted Claus Ogerman—the German composer-conductor who had written the charts for the Brazilian’s first American LP, 1963’s all-instrumental The Composer of Desafinado, Plays—to arrange their album. Sinatra asked Jobim if he could get to Los Angeles right away to start working on the arrangements. It was a more or less rhetorical question.

  —

  “On the night of Thursday, January 12, 1967, Frank gave a sixty-fifth birthday party for Joe E. Lewis at Jilly’s South in Miami Beach,” Earl Wilson recalled, omitting to mention that the comic had recently suffered a mild stroke. “It was the wettest party I ever attended.”

  The little bride, Mia Farrow, was the hostess. At times she sat on Frank’s knee. Frank and Mia made a tour of the room, greeting personally each of the 150 guests, talking with them for a few minutes, making them feel welcome.

  “Have you met my girl?” Frank asked the guests, tweaking her on the cheek. He said he would be back in New York in midsummer to film The Detective.

  What would Mia be doing? No films in Europe! “I don’t want to leave my fella,” she said, holding his hand.

  The happy Sinatras went island-hopping in their private jet, but came back in a week, with Mia denying rumors that she was pregnant and letting it be known that she would make her first major movie with a starring role, A Dandy in Aspic.