Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  Like a number of other women who claimed to have been lovers of Sinatra’s, McCue wrote a memoir years later, and it is a seamy tale indeed, revolving around mobsters, drugs, and the brutal murder of Sammy Goldstein, who was a friend of Frank’s as well as Jilly’s. Much of her story checks out. There is evidence that she and Sinatra were actually involved: there are press accounts linking them and photographs of the two of them together. There is also evidence that she actually was about fifteen when they met, making her his youngest lover since Natalie Wood in 1954.

  Like Wood, McCue was sexually precocious, but the fact that the relationships were consensual makes them no less disturbing. Still, a kind of amoral sense can be made of them: in both cases, Frank was reeling from the end of a marriage and seeking a kind of reset with a fantasy virgin. It was a brand of consolation that his power could afford him. He was also a romantic: he spoke of Ravel’s ethereal ballet of young lovers, Daphnis et Chloé, as one of his favorite pieces.

  Diane McCue came from a very different place—the 3:00 a.m., come-what-may world of the Block and West Fifty-Second Street, a milieu in which Jilly was both Frank’s accomplice and his facilitator. But that fall, she accompanied Sinatra to an event in a different kind of world, one that was increasingly becoming his center, the Old Guard, golf- and tennis-playing, celebrity-and-society scene in Palm Springs. “On October 15, 1968, Frank and I arrived at the grand opening of Jilly’s West in a large stretch limo,” she recalled.

  There was a big gathering of movie stars and celebrities in front of the bistro. One of the female stars looked at me and leaned over to another male star. She asked him, “Who is that girl with Frank?”

  “I don’t know; she looks a little like Mia,” he said.

  The two stars, she later writes, turned out to be Lucille Ball and David Janssen.

  The Oakland Tribune’s society columnist, Robin Orr, took note of the event, chiefly because Jilly’s backer (and Frank’s friend) Danny Schwartz had made his pile in the Bay Area before relocating to the desert. “[Schwartz] and his wife, Natalie, for whom his Lear jet Natilus is named, were co-hosts at the swinging affair that opened the new night club,” Orr wrote.

  Four hundred members of the glittering worlds of society and Klieg lights attended, among them the Schwartzes’ good friends, Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball and her husband Gary Morton, and Jilly Rizzo, the official proprietor of the new club.

  Jilly is also an old friend of Sinatra’s and his piano bar on West 52nd Street in New York City has been the setting for many a Sinatra film. Scenes from “Come Blow Your Horn” and “Manchurian Candidate” were shot there.

  In any event both Jilly and Frank were on tap for the Tuesday night party and for the going-away party at the airport that sent Frank on his political campaigning way.

  The columnist failed to make mention of the blond fifteen-year-old stripper on Sinatra’s arm at the glittering party.

  —

  Diane McCue did not ride Frank’s Lear Jet to his next two stops, the Teamsters’ benefit in St. Louis and a rally for Hubert Humphrey at the Houston Astrodome on November 3, two days before the election. On Tuesday the fifth, the Democrat lost the presidency to Richard Nixon by just half a million popular votes, his campaign having been irremediably damaged by the chaos in Chicago, the continuing trauma of the war, and the former Alabama governor George Wallace’s independent candidacy, if not by the stain of Frank Sinatra’s Mob connections.

  It was a depressing outcome: in 1960, Frank had been able to use his influence to keep Nixon—a man, Shirley MacLaine recalled, Sinatra “hated with a deep vitriol”—out of office; now his influence had clearly waned. But he would soon find a way to adjust to the times.

  —

  The following week, he went to Western Recorders to make two singles with Nelson Riddle; neither man knew, on the night of November 11, that it would be the last time they would work together for eight years.

  The calls to Nelson came far less often now; Don Costa had become Frank’s go-to guy in his vain quest to produce Top 40 hits (“My Way of Life” and “Cycles” had both charted briefly, but the former only hit number 60, and the latter—close but no cigar—just number 41). And though Riddle’s livelihood no longer depended on Sinatra—he was making a good living writing scores for the movies and television—he resented his inconstancy. “Toward the end, Nelson didn’t particularly like Frank,” Bill Miller recalled. “He felt as if he was being fluffed off.”

  The two songs recorded that night were a so-so ballad called “Blue Lace” (music by Riziero Ortolani, lyrics by Patty Jacob and Bill Jacob) and Cahn and Van Heusen’s boppy title theme for the Julie Andrews movie Star! Neither added much luster to the Sinatra-Riddle oeuvre. The familiarly flickering flute figures in “Blue Lace,” though lovely in themselves, only harked back tantalizingly to the truly great work Frank and Nelson had done together: a dim reflection of a distant fire.

  The next night it was back to Costa. Because of the (relative) success of “Cycles,” Frank had decided to build an album around the song, an LP that was folk rock at its core, country and western around the edges—all except for the pounding “My Way of Life,” which was neither. Cycles was recorded over three nights, November 12 through 14, with Bill Miller conducting Don Costa’s arrangements.

  The spectators had changed. Gone were the Countess Mara ties and dangling charm bracelets, replaced by turtlenecks and chains with medallions and miniskirts. A new brand of celebrity onlooker had also appeared: among those attending the Cycles sessions were the falsetto phenomenon Tiny Tim and George Harrison and his wife, Pattie. A photograph from the session shows Sinatra in earnest conference with the Beatle, who looks delighted to be in Frank’s presence. It’s a touching image, also a stark contrast of musical present and past. Harrison, who was especially impressed by Sinatra’s efficiency, might well have just asked the main question on his mind: “How do you do it? It takes us months just to do one album.”

  The Beatles, whose performing days were over, were now exclusively a studio band, making musical magic with their brilliant producer George Martin and their audio engineer Geoff Emerick. Sinatra was still doing it the old-fashioned way, but the harsh truth was that trying to adapt to the present at the same time ill suited him.

  The terrible paradox was that the great and gentle voice singing the saccharine “Cycles,” and now the truly awful “Pretty Colors” and “Moody River,” was the same great and gentle voice that had sung “Dindi” and “Everything Happens to Me” and “What Is This Thing Called Love?” It was genius misused—or at best misplaced. There was worthy material on Cycles; both Joni Mitchell and Judy Collins had made a beautiful thing of Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” (which Frank, for some reason, insisted on calling “From Both Sides, Now”), and Glen Campbell (who’d played guitar on several Sinatra sessions) had made brilliant singles of Jimmy Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” and John Hartford’s “Gentle on My Mind.”

  But while Frank could sing these tunes magnificently—or, more correctly, could lend the magnificence of his voice to these tunes—his heart wasn’t in them, and it showed. They were songs of another generation, and for Frank Sinatra to sing them was much the same as for Frank Sinatra to put on studded denim and medallions and turtlenecks and Nehru jackets: he could bring the thing off, just barely, by force of personality; but the note was ajar, and the risk of risibility was real.

  —

  Lady in Cement was released on November 20 to not entirely terrible reviews. Flexing his new chief-film-critic muscle (and showing off a bit), the New York Times’s Vincent Canby gave the candy-colored, Miami-based picture an energetically ambivalent, so-bad-it’s-good-but-it’s-really-bad kiss-off, calling it “such a perfect blending of material with milieu that the movie’s extraordinary vulgarity and sloppiness can almost be cherished for themselves, like wide-screen graffiti.” But Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times echoed the feelings of many by focusing on Frank: “He pro
jects the ex-cop turned private shamus with a time tested fictional blend of insouciance, cynicism, battered but surviving idealism, wisecrackery, courage, libido, thirst and all the more interesting hungers. He clearly enjoys the role and it is this evident pleasure which carbonates the thin material with lively amusement.”

  All true. Lady in Cement made The Detective look leaden by comparison, and Sinatra, as he had not in his previous picture, looked terrific in it. Deeply tanned and rail thin in his tan summer suit (all the troubles with Mia seemed to have shaved pounds off him), he bounced through the cartoonish proceedings with surprising humor and energy, given his purported testiness during the filming. Frank’s scenes with Dan Blocker, who was wonderful as the mountainous, menacing Gronsky, were a delight, even if his repartee with Raquel Welch, who stepped neatly into Jill St. John’s high-heeled footprints, was very far from Bogie and Bacall. If you turned off your critical faculties, a lot of the movie was pretty good fun, and enough people did so to make Lady in Cement pretty profitable.

  George Harrison visiting Frank in the recording studio, 1968. Sinatra called Harrison’s “Something” “one of the best love songs to be written in fifty or a hundred years,” but he was never really comfortable singing it. (Credit 25.4)

  “As he has proved in the past, Mr. Sinatra has a very fine and rare talent,” Vincent Canby wrote at the end of his review, “but he needs good people to bring it out, like John Frankenheimer in ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ or Ella Fitzgerald and Antonio Carlos Jobim in last year’s television special.”

  This was both perceptive and prescient. It was unclear in November 1968 just where his film career might go next. “Frank Sinatra has had it playing detective roles,” Dorothy Manners wrote; “producers needn’t bother offering him one.” But what did that leave? Whether he liked it or not, he had aged out of the romantic-lead business. As it turned out, Lady in Cement was a kind of anticlimactic swan song. In the movies as in the rest of his career, Sinatra was stuck in a strange spot, a gigantic figure with narrowing possibilities.

  As if to signal his retrenchment, he announced he was leaving Los Angeles, his hometown of twenty-five years. In early November, after professors and scientists at the UCLA School of Medicine issued a statement warning of the dangers of the city’s persistent blanket of smog and urging all who were able to leave the city to do so, Frank took them at their word. “The air isn’t fit to breathe, so I’m moving out,” he announced. “The smog is so bad I had to visit my doctor three days a week because my nose and throat are affected by it.”

  “The most surprising thing about Frank’s latest statement,” the columnist Joyce Haber wrote, “is that, as his intimates know, the singer hasn’t got a nose and throat doctor. (He hasn’t got any doctor at all, unless you count his friend, the obstetrician Leon Krohn.)”

  (Actually, the most surprising thing about Frank’s latest statement was that it failed to mention the effects on his nose and throat of his on-again, off-again, but mostly on-again, habit of smoking two packs of unfiltered Camels a day.)

  “Sinatra said he was selling his house (or houses?) in L.A., which leaves him with his desert retreat, a brand new, stylish townhouse in Manhattan, and a brand new, stylish apartment in San Francisco, which he calls ‘a grownup, swinging city,’ ” Haber continued.

  But insiders, and me, are betting on Manhattan. Manhattan has Jilly’s, that tavern on West 52nd Street whose walls are covered with photos of Frank, including one monstrous blow-up with his friend, Larry Harvey. Not to mention a sign, near the men’s room, which flashes, on and off, “Home of the King.”

  But it wasn’t as though Manhattan’s air was a vast improvement on L.A.’s. And those insiders, and Joyce Haber, were failing to take into account Sinatra’s deep and abiding love for the desert. Palm Springs would remain his home and center of operations for the rest of his life.

  —

  “The Nehru jacket seems ‘in’ but the end’s beginning,” Jack O’Brian had written in an April column, adding the coup de grâce, “Half a dozen unchic restaurants ordered them onto waiters and they’ve become uniforms in beauty salons everywhere.”

  Frank seemed not to have gotten the memo: here he was in that white corduroy Nehru jacket (and love beads) in late November, in the fourth television special in his rebooted TV career, the coyly titled Francis Albert Sinatra Does His Thing. He still looked great—lean and with the same deep suntan he had worn in Lady in Cement. The toupee, though, was different: for his mod-themed TV show, he wore an aggressively modern, Caesar-fringed rug.

  Yet the note he struck at the top of the show was conciliatory. “Nobody would explain to me what my thing is supposed to be,” he said, grinning, “but it can’t be very bad since they’re letting me do it on television.”

  What he did was good enough. He sang “Hello, Young Lovers” and “Baubles, Bangles, and Beads” and—of course—“Cycles”; he did a medley of spirituals with Diahann Carroll; and then, wearing an outrageous psychedelic ice-blue Nehru jacket (it seemed to be ruffled with Lucite), he danced gamely but a bit clunkily while he sang Laura Nyro’s “Sweet Blindness” with the Fifth Dimension. “Thank you, group,” he said, when the number was over. “And don’t look now, Francis Albert, but your generation gap is showing.”

  It was. As was the fact—as evidenced by some awkward staging, extraneous sounds, and stiff byplay between Frank and a pair of ornamental female extras—that he’d allowed the dress rehearsal to go to air. But the reviews were respectful: out of touch or not, he skated by on being Sinatra.

  —

  Two days before Thanksgiving, he opened at Caesars, backed by—shades of 1939—the Harry James Orchestra. José Feliciano, the Fifth Dimension, and Pat Henry were also on the bill. The Sands fiasco was more than a year behind him, and Vegas was much changed. After purchasing the Desert Inn and the Sands, Hughes had continued his buying spree, snatching up the Castaways, the Frontier, and the Silver Slipper. His teams of Mormon bean counters were in place, making sure the count was correct and funny business kept to a minimum. Sin City was well on its way to being Disney in the Desert. “Vegas in the old days, when it was really owned and run by the Mob, was one of the great cities of all time,” Polly Bergen said. “It only got boring when the corps [corporations] took over. It’s sad to say that, but it’s really true.”

  Nor was Caesars Palace’s Circus Maximus anything like the Copa Room. “When Frank went to Caesars, it was like four of the Copa Rooms together,” recalled the longtime Sinatra observer Rob Fentress, who attended many of Frank’s shows at both casinos. He was exaggerating, but only slightly: the Sands’ showroom seated about 350; Caesars’, 1,100 or more. Sinatra could command an audience of any size—in Rio de Janeiro in 1980, he would sing for 175,000 people in a soccer stadium—but the thrilling intimacy of the Copa Room was now a thing of his past. For all Variety’s enthusiasm (“Frank Sinatra’s return to the Strip was, as someone might term it, a gasser,” wrote the entertainment journal’s longtime reviewer “Duke”), his most passionate fans could tell the difference. The stress of the past year, and the size of the big new room, combined to diminish him, slightly but noticeably. “The electricity of the Sands days was not there,” Fentress said. “And his voice was not the same.”

  —

  Paul Anka first met Frank in 1959 or 1960, when the young Canadian pop phenom was playing Vegas for the first time. “I was like eighteen or nineteen—they wouldn’t even let me in the casino,” he recalled.

  I meet Sinatra and the guys, and they hang out. The greatest times I ever had were in that steam room. Everything went on in there that you could imagine…The women who were around all the time! Not only were they good-looking but they knew what they were doing…If you wanted to get laid—and really get laid—that’s where you could get laid.

  “The little Arab,” as Frank called him—Anka was of Lebanese and Syrian ancestry—was a very talented young man, a skillful songwriter as well as a singer, and at the same
time the perfect Sinatra acolyte: fun-loving, undemanding, and starry-eyed. “Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr.—they were little gods in black tie and patent leather shoes,” he wrote in his memoir.

  They didn’t talk like other people, they didn’t behave like other people, they didn’t have to play by the rules the way other people had to, the normal day-to-day regulations didn’t apply to them…

  Eventually Frank and the rest of the Rat Pack adopted me. I got little jewels of wisdom about performing and behavior from them. From watching the rehearsals in the Copa Room in the Sands Hotel I learned about style, and an insider’s insights about how to present yourself on stage. It was like going to the college of cool.

  Over the years, Anka became an adjunct member of Sinatra’s circle, hanging out with him, when their schedules coincided, at the Sands, the Copa, Jilly’s, the Fontainebleau. Sometime in the late 1960s, he recalled, he had a dinner in Florida with Frank “and a couple of mob guys” at which Sinatra suddenly announced, “I’m quitting the business. I’m sick of it, I’m getting the hell out.”

  The words triggered a memory. A couple of years earlier, on vacation in the South of France, Anka had heard a French pop song called “Comme d’habitude” (As usual). “I thought it was a bad record, but there was something in it,” he recalled. He’d acquired the publishing rights. Now he thought he could turn the melody into a Sinatra song.

  “At one o’clock in the morning, I sat down at an old IBM electric typewriter and said, ‘If Frank were writing this, what would he say?’ ” Anka remembered.