by James Kaplan
The couple’s Caribbean sojourn might have been happy—they stayed at Claudette Colbert’s place on Barbados—but their return was less so: soon after Frank landed in Miami, he was handed a subpoena to testify before a federal grand jury investigating profit skimming at Nevada gambling casinos.
And Mia’s film would be shot in Europe.
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While Frank and Mia sunned on Barbados, Jobim flew to Los Angeles and went to work with Claus Ogerman, who had been installed by Sinatra’s people in a suite with a piano at the Beverly Hills Hotel. There were to be seven Jobim songs on the album: “The Girl from Ipanema,” “Dindi,” “Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars (Corcovado),” “Meditation (Meditação),” “If You Never Come to Me (Inútil Paisagem),” “How Insensitive (Insensatez),” and “Once I Loved (O Amor em Paz).”
Frank had also decided to include three American tunes, updated with a bossa nova beat: Irving Berlin’s “Change Partners,” Cole Porter’s “I Concentrate on You,” and “Baubles, Bangles, and Beads,” adapted from a theme by Alexander Borodin by Bob Wright and George Forrest for the 1953 Broadway musical Kismet. (Sinatra had recorded the last once before, at a brassy gallop, on 1959’s Come Dance with Me!) Ogerman would arrange these three without Jobim’s input.
The work was pleasant and quick. The composer and the arranger knew each other well, got along famously, and were not averse to mixing business with pleasure. There were many late dinners with champagne at Chasen’s—on Frank’s tab, of course—and Ogerman wrote the orchestrations afterward, starting at midnight and working into the wee small hours, producing arrangements that startled Sinatra’s longtime copyist Vern Yocum.
“When he picked up the charts at the Beverly Hills Hotel, he looked at them and he looked at me and he said, ‘Claus, do you think this is going to work?’ ” Ogerman recalled. “The pages looked so empty to him. He was used to having full scores, movie scores or whatever, and my scores were really light. But that is also a plus, because if you write too much, you get in the way of the performer.”
It was a lesson Frank had taught Nelson Riddle at the beginning of their relationship; Ogerman knew it intuitively, and he had worked with Jobim before. What he had in mind was nothing less than a revolutionary album, one that would use the Brazilian’s quiet genius to bring out Sinatra’s sublime artistry, an LP that would achieve great power with as little ornamentation as possible.
In the meantime, Frank had returned to Los Angeles and thoroughly rehearsed the new material with Bill Miller. He also went into training, cutting back on his drinking and smoking, getting as much rest as possible, and deploying his old voice-conditioning trick, swimming laps underwater, to build his lung capacity.
(On January 26, he took a side trip to Las Vegas to testify in a closed-door hearing before the federal grand jury, appearing relaxed and confident as he stepped from a limousine with his attorney Rudin, the Associated Press reported. Sinatra’s remarks to the grand jury—which handed down no indictments—remained sealed.)
Frank was no less relaxed and confident when he walked into Western Recorders on the night of the thirtieth. “He really knew every word and every nuance and every tone, every melody, perfectly,” Ogerman remembered. “I think he said it once—‘I have to be as good as or maybe better than every musician in the studio.’ That was his goal. So he prepared himself.”
On the other hand, the composer, referred to poetically by Stan Cornyn in the album’s liner notes as “this slight and tousled boy-man, speaking softly while about him rushes a world too fast,” was unprepared for meeting his idol. “This man is Mount Everest for a songwriter,” Jobim had admitted to the lyricist Gene Lees. “He was in awe of Frank,” Lee Herschberg, the recording engineer who worked on the date, said of the shy Brazilian. “Maybe too much, ja,” Claus Ogerman agreed.
But Jobim quickly relaxed, along with everyone else in the studio, including Frank. “Sinatra, I think, understood that he had to be, how do you say, joyful, to make life easier for all of us,” Ogerman said. “It was a very pleasant atmosphere.”
And a very quiet one. Like the charts, the instrumentation was sparse: ten violins, four cello, one trombone, three flutes. A piano (Miller), a double bass, drums (played by a Brazilian named Dom Um Romão), and Jobim on guitar. The sessions began “like the World Soft Championships,” Cornyn wrote in his liner notes. “And Sinatra makes a joke about all this. ‘I haven’t sung so soft since I had the laryngitis.’ ”
Sinatra and Antonio Carlos Jobim, 1967. In the songs and the personality of the shy Brazilian genius, Frank found a serenity that eluded him elsewhere. The two made sublime art together. (Credit 24.1)
“Very gentle with this piece, fellas,” Frank told the string players, just before recording “How Insensitive.”
He was serious. He had a way of rising to the occasion among those he respected, and the presence of the shy and quiet Brazilian poet and the serious German arranger-conductor calmed him. As did the music itself. “The arrangements were just spectacular,” Lee Herschberg said. “It was a simple album to make, actually; it went very quickly.” The musicians, some of the cream of L.A. studio talent, “were running like a Rolls-Royce, with very little repeats,” Ogerman remembered. “One or two takes, and this was it.”
Behind the double glass of the control booth, a small crowd—Sonny Burke, Lee Herschberg, Stan Cornyn, Warner Records executive Mike Maitland, Mia Farrow, Nancy Sinatra, and Keely Smith, among others; “gold cuff-links, Revlon red fake nails, Countess Mara ties,” in Cornyn’s words—looked on in wonderment as Sinatra sang with an exquisite tenderness he hadn’t tapped since Wee Small Hours, twelve years before.
After the final session, the beautiful album in the can, Sinatra took a small group of the guys—Jobim and Ogerman and Dom Um Romão, Mo Ostin and Mike Maitland and Sonny Burke—out for a late dinner at Stefanino’s on Sunset. “What was nice there, Sinatra was very loose,” Ogerman recalled. “It was like a two-hour monologue. He talked about the old days with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, and who was his roommate and all. And he knew all the names still of every musician in the Tommy Dorsey band. It was amazing. Very pleasant. It was all very pleasant.”
And it was always the same.
On that last night, after Jobim and Ogerman’s work was done and the musicians had gone home, Nancy Sinatra brought in her own players to record a novelty number called “Somethin’ Stupid.”
The love duet was a trifle from the pen of former folkie C. Carson Parks, whose brother the multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and musical eccentric Van Dyke Parks might have first brought it to Frank’s attention. Another account says that Carson Parks’s manager got a version that Parks had recorded with his partner Gaile Foote to Mo Ostin, whereupon it found its way to one of the Sinatras, Frank or Nancy.
Whatever the case, Frank, having just descended from the Parnassian heights, hardly took this throwaway single seriously. While Billy Strange, the arranger of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” conducted the orchestra, he began the vocal, in tight harmony with his daughter:
I know I stand in line
Until you think you have the time
To spend an evening with me.
Except that he was pronouncing his s’s like Daffy Duck. After the laughter subsided, they completed the opus on the second take. Mo Ostin bet Frank the song would bomb. It didn’t.
Released on March 18, “Somethin’ Stupid”—which, with its chorus of “And then I go and spoil it all/By saying somethin’ stupid/Like ‘I love you,’ ” quickly became known as the Incest Song—would soon climb to the top of the Billboard singles chart. Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim, by contrast, only went to number 19 on the Top 40 and stayed there just six weeks. That’s Life, which had been released on the last day of 1966 and risen to number 6, would be the last Sinatra album to hit a single-figure position on the charts until Duets and Duets II in 1993 and 1994. Frank was still on top of the world, but his recording career had off
icially begun its commercial decline.
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“They were model, adoring newlyweds,” Tina Sinatra wrote of her father and Mia.
There wasn’t anything Mia wouldn’t do for Dad, or he for her. She brought out my father’s gentlest, most caring side: the fireside Frank…
I didn’t feel threatened by Mia. I felt grateful to her, because she made my father happier than I’d ever seen him. When I spent time with them in the desert, Dad’s old restlessness was missing in action. As we passed the time playing word games, he seemed quiet and relaxed. Mia was so proud of how she’d converted the guest room into her dressing area, and Dad glowed along with her. She’d had it done all in pink, which didn’t quite blend with the earth tones in the rest of the house, but neither of them cared. They were making up the rules as they went along.
But then she went away.
In the middle of February, as Frank prepared to go to Miami to open a two-week stand at the Fontainebleau, Mia flew to London to begin shooting the spy thriller A Dandy in Aspic. Her co-stars were Tom Courtenay and Frank’s old friend and Manchurian Candidate opposite number Laurence Harvey. “It’ll be the first real separation since their marriage,” Earl Wilson wrote in his column. “But Frank’ll join her in England when able to do so. All is happiness.”
“Frank didn’t seem to mind, although he wouldn’t come back to London with me,” Farrow wrote in her memoir.
Frank minded. I think it will be better if she doesn’t work, as he had once said of Juliet Prowse.
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Jackie Mason, born Yacov Moshe Maza, was a former rabbi turned fast-talking borscht belt comedian: he had a Yiddish accent and a sense of humor even more lacerating, if possible, than Don Rickles’s. Rickles, after all, had taken on the role of court jester: he could say whatever he wanted to the king (or the Chairman, in this case) as long as the king laughed. Mason didn’t care whom he offended; his was a high-wire act without a net. He had been mocking Frank’s hair transplants (the surgeries, which began not long after Sinatra’s fiftieth birthday, were an open secret) and elevator shoes for a while and had begun mining rich material from the Sinatra-Farrow marriage at the beginning: “Frank soaks his dentures and Mia brushes her braces…then she takes off her roller skates and puts them next to his cane…he peels off his toupee and she unbraids her hair.”
Frank didn’t like it. Taking in Joe E. Lewis’s late show at the Aladdin (where Mason was also playing) the previous November, he’d heckled his old pal from the audience. “I really came in to see Jackie Mason,” he said.
“Aw, shut up,” Lewis shot back. “Why don’t you go to a brewery and let them put a head on you?”
“Nah, I’m just kidding,” Sinatra said. “If that bum came out here on the stage now, I’d bite him on the neck. He’s a creep.”
Before too long, Frank, or someone acting on his behalf, put a real bite on Mason: the comic got a phone call threatening his life if he didn’t stop making jokes about Sinatra. Mason hired a bodyguard and kept making the jokes. A few days later, three shots were fired through the glass patio door of his hotel room at the Aladdin. The bullets lodged in Mason’s bed, on which he had been sitting minutes before. The Clark County sheriff’s office investigated the shooting but eventually closed the case due to uncertainty about whether the attack had been motivated by the comedian’s Sinatra jokes or Mason’s complicated love life.
Insisting it was the former, Mason cleaned up his act, removing Mia jokes and trimming back the Sinatra humor to bland gibes about Frank’s womanizing. But then, appearing in early February at the Saxony Hotel in Miami, he said, “I have no idea who it was who tried to shoot me…After the shots were fired, all I heard was someone singing: ‘Doobie, doobie, doo.’
“I was warned by anonymous threats all week, on the telephone and by people I don’t know in the hotel lobby, to shut up about Sinatra,” Mason recalled, “but I didn’t think much about it.”
Then, at 5:00 a.m. on February 13, while Mason sat in his car with a lady friend, a few blocks from the Saxony, “all of a sudden,” he remembered, “the door opens and a fist comes in, right into my nose and busted me—a fist with some kind of a ring on it that’s supposed to cut your face open.” He sustained multiple face lacerations and a broken nose—he was hospitalized—and told reporters he was convinced his remarks about Sinatra had led to the attack.
Mason later told his lady friend, who’d jumped out of the car and fled during the incident, that the assailant said, “This is not the worst that can happen if you don’t keep your mouth shut about Frank Sinatra.”
Frank arrived in Miami two days later.
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Laurence Harvey had assured Mia Farrow that the Dandy in Aspic shoot would require her to be in London for only ten days, followed by three days in Berlin. The work in London went fine, Farrow recalled, but then in Berlin the film fell behind schedule, and the three days turned into a week, then more. Frank seethed with impatience on the transatlantic phone line.
Impatience was putting it mildly. Many years before, as Dolly roamed Hoboken, busy with her Democratic Party work and her midwife and abortion work, she had had little time for her only child. She had dominated him with her distance, making him feel small. It was the last way he wanted to feel, then and now.
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Shecky Greene had been drawing his customary big crowds at the Riviera in Vegas when Jilly Rizzo called him with an unusual request: Would he consider opening for Frank at the Fontainebleau in February?
Ordinarily, Greene didn’t open for anyone: he was a star in his own right, a “topliner,” as Variety would put it, earning $25,000 a week at the Riviera. But this was Sinatra, and Rizzo told Shecky he’d be paid his Vegas rate in Miami, so he said yes.
Frank Sinatra was fascinated with Greene for several reasons: for one thing, he was a brilliant, original comedian who didn’t do material as such; “I never had an act,” he said. Instead, the compact, beefy comic, a Jew from Chicago with the build of a football lineman, a square athletic jaw, and sad, basset-like eyes, simply came out onstage and did mostly improvised bits, frequently breaking into Yiddish, which he knew, or other dialects that he didn’t (like Sid Caesar, Greene had a genius for making faux French, German, or Chinese sound like the real thing), or bursting into song, in a rich and tuneful baritone.
By the mid-1960s, Greene had become a Las Vegas institution and, as he freely admitted, frequently lost most of his big salary at the racetrack. He had a serious gambling addiction, a drinking problem, and anger issues, all compounded by a disintegrating marriage and a deep ambivalence about show business. “Fear,” he said. “I had terrible fear.” He sometimes suffered crippling anxiety attacks, occasionally onstage. And these things, too, fascinated Sinatra, because to some extent they reminded him of himself.
But there was also a third quality about Shecky Greene that intrigued Frank endlessly: Greene was not afraid of him.
“I watched guys, successful guys, Italians and Jews, fall on their knees to this guy,” Greene recalled. “I watched Jews that I had respect for in Miami; they’d kiss his ass. One day we were on what’s-his-name’s boat that owned the Fontainebleau—Novack—and the food came, and Sinatra threw the food over the side of the boat. I said, ‘Why the fuck did you do that?’ He said, ‘It’s none of your business.’ So I took my shoes off and I threw them over. He said, ‘What did you do that for?’ I said, ‘I’ve got to go down now and get the food.’ Every time he did something, I did something. And there was this strange thing, that the people that he couldn’t control, he gained a respect for.
“I didn’t kiss his ass,” Greene said. “And he loved that. His mother once said to me, ‘He likes you because you’re me.’ ”
For his part, Greene was impressed by Sinatra—to a point. “The man was a great singer, and I appreciated his talent. But his talent didn’t have anything to do with who he was.” Who was he? “When I wasn’t drinking, I really studied him,” the comic said.
“He wanted me around all the time; he always wanted to go for fuckin’ Italian food. So I studied him, I watched him do fuckin’ things, and I said, ‘Is this show business, or is it life? I don’t know.’ I couldn’t figure it out.”
Being part of the entourage meant being available at all hours, especially the hours before dawn. “He couldn’t go to sleep, so he’d love to tell stories,” the comic recalled. “The more he drank, the more stories he would tell. After a while, they were very boring. He’d talk about the Tommy Dorsey days—he did this, and then he did that. Very boring.”
Greene was then in a pitched battle with his own demons. He, too, was drinking massive amounts, and alcohol unleashed furies in him. He was alleged to have pushed a piano out a penthouse window at the Fontainebleau; whether this was or was not the case, he did admit to having torn a hotel room apart in Frank’s presence. “Every piece of furniture was that big when I finished,” Greene said, holding his thumb and forefinger a few inches apart. “I was insane. But my match was him, because he was completely insane.”
The comedian recalled a time when he and Sinatra were alone in Frank’s suite at the Fontainebleau. “He grabbed me and says, ‘Come here.’ He puts me in front of the mirror and he says, ‘You’re the sickest son of a bitch I have ever met in my life.’ Well, I was doing some very weird things at the time. But I said, ‘No, you come here.’ And I grabbed him under his arm and put him in front of the mirror. I said, ‘No, there’s the sickest son of a bitch.’ I said, ‘I may be second, but believe me, you’re first, and I’m a long way from you.’ ”
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Like Greene, Sinatra had mastered his performing fears by creating an assertive stage presence; unlike Shecky, Frank carried this aggression—which often magnified into brutality—to his offstage life. “It was a cross between megalomania and fear,” Greene said. “But it was a silent fear; he thought nobody else knew about it.” The effect was compounded by fame and power. And alcohol. “After two drinks, I saw a change,” the comic remembered.