Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  “I’m tired of him intimidating waiters, waitresses, starting fires and throwing pies,” Lamb continued, colorfully. “He gets away with too much. He’s through picking on little people in this town.” The sheriff, Vegas denizens knew, was not one to make hollow threats.

  The Clark County district attorney, George Franklin, was also interested in seeing Sinatra. “One remark he supposedly made to Waterman as he was going out the door,” Franklin said, “was, ‘The mob will take care of you.’ Now I’d like to have a little talk with Mr. Sinatra. I’d like to get together with him on the subject of his friendships with members of the underworld. And I’d like to know who owned the night clubs where he sang in the early days, who started him on his way and things like that.” It all had a terribly tired sound by now.

  Though in early accounts Waterman said nothing about Frank’s grabbing him by the throat—“He was coming right at me,” he told deputies when he was arrested, claiming self-defense—three days later his story, and the district attorney’s, had evolved. On September 9, Franklin announced he would not charge the casino manager with assault with a deadly weapon, because Waterman still had Sinatra’s finger marks on his throat when questioned by deputies.

  Through Jim Mahoney, Frank said he had never touched Waterman. Sinatra had witnesses, he claimed, who would testify that bystanders had jumped the manager and wrestled him to the floor. This left open the intriguing possibility that the finger marks on Sanford Waterman’s throat were Jilly Rizzo’s.

  Frank kept his own counsel for two weeks. Finally, in an interview with United Press International, he said, “As for the remarks attributed to me relative to the mob, they’re strictly out of a comic strip. I don’t make threats and I’m not running for re-election.”

  This was a pointed reference to the fact that both Sheriff Lamb and District Attorney Franklin were running for reelection.

  “I wasn’t in the baccarat game,” Sinatra said. “There was no such argument about credit or how much I was going to play. As a matter of fact I just sat down at a blackjack table and hadn’t even placed a bet since the dealer was shuffling the cards.

  “At that point, Waterman came over and said to the dealer, ‘Don’t deal to this man.’ I just got up and said, ‘Put your name on the marquee and I’ll come to see what kind of business you do,’ and I walked away. That was all that was said.”

  “Sinatra did not say whether he planned to return to Caesars Palace to fulfill his contract,” Vernon Scott wrote. “His friends seriously doubt it.”

  According to Joyce Haber, what Frank told his friends was that he would never go back to Nevada. Never was a long time, but he was almost as good as his word: he wouldn’t play the Strip again for over three years.

  He wasn’t performing in Vegas; he wasn’t making movies or records. What was he doing? The thought would have occurred to him often that summer, and it wouldn’t have improved his mood.

  —

  Paramount, which had optioned The Godfather while the manuscript was still in progress, had initially shelved the book when The Brotherhood, a Mafia movie the studio produced, bombed. But now, in the late summer of 1970, with Puzo’s novel selling like crazy in the United States and overseas, a film adaptation was imperative. With the whole movie industry in the creative and financial doldrums, Paramount was hoping the picture could turn its fortunes around. As the studio considered casting and searched for a director, Mario Puzo, who had been hired to write the screenplay, sat in a rental house in Malibu, making final polishes to his script. It was around this time, one night that September, that he crossed paths with Frank Sinatra.

  Sinatra, the author wrote in a memoir, had been an idol of his from afar, but he had never wanted to meet him. “I just believed he was a great artist (singing, not acting) and that he had lived a life of great courage,” Puzo said. “I admired his sense of family responsibility, especially since he was a Northern Italian [sic], which to a Southern Italian is as alien as being an Englishman.”

  Millions of book readers now knew that the character of Johnny Fontane had been based on Frank Sinatra and that Frank was upset about it. The issue had initially been shunted aside before the novel was published, when Puzo’s publisher, Putnam, refused to let Mickey Rudin see the manuscript. “However, the movie was another story,” Puzo recalled.

  In the initial conferences with Paramount’s legal staff they showed concern about this until I reassured them the part was very minor in the film. Which it turned out to be.

  Now the thing was, in my book, that I had written the Fontane character with complete sympathy for the man and his life-style and his hang-ups. I thought I had caught the innocence of great show biz people, their despair at the corruption their kind of life forces on them and the people around them. I thought I had caught the inner innocence of the character. But I could also see that if Sinatra thought the character was himself, he might not like it—the book—or me.

  But of course some people wanted to bring us together. At Elaine’s in New York one night Sinatra was at the bar and I was at a table. Elaine asked if I would object to meeting Sinatra. I said it was OK with me if it was OK with him. It was not OK with Sinatra. And that was perfectly OK with me. I didn’t give it another thought.

  But one night that September in Hollywood, Puzo—who normally preferred to stay at home at night with a good book—went to a birthday party for a producer friend of his, at Chasen’s, and Sinatra was there, too, having dinner at another table.

  A man Puzo called “a famous millionaire” was throwing the party for Puzo’s friend; affably, the millionaire asked the author if he would like to meet Frank. Puzo said no. The millionaire had a right-hand man who tried to insist. Puzo said no again.

  “During the dinner there was a tableau of John Wayne and Frank Sinatra meeting in the space equidistant between their two tables to salute each other,” Puzo remembered. “They both looked absolutely great, better than on the screen, twenty years younger than they really were. And both beautifully dressed, Sinatra especially.” But then the millionaire took Puzo by the hand. “You gotta meet Frank,” he said. “He’s a good friend of mine.”

  Puzo considered wrenching loose and walking away but didn’t want to disrespect his host. As the millionaire made the introductions, Sinatra never looked up from his plate.

  “I’d like you to meet my good friend, Mario Puzo,” the millionaire said.

  “I don’t think so,” Frank said.

  Puzo was ready to leave immediately, but the millionaire somehow failed to get the message. He began to introduce Puzo again.

  “I don’t want to meet him,” Sinatra said.

  Now the scene had grown truly awkward. Puzo was trying to flee, and the millionaire, in tears, was stammering apologies—to Sinatra. “Frank, I’m sorry, God, Frank, I didn’t know, Frank, I’m sorry—”

  Sinatra cut him short. “His voice was now the voice I had heard while making love as a kid, soft and velvety,” Puzo recalled.

  He was consoling the shattered millionaire. “It’s not your fault,” Sinatra said.

  I always run away from an argument and I have rarely in my life been disgusted by anything human beings do, but after that I said to Sinatra, “Listen, it wasn’t my idea.”

  And the most astounding thing happened. He completely misunderstood. He thought I was apologizing for the character of Johnny Fontane in my book.

  He said, and his voice was almost kind, “Who told you to put that in the book, your publisher?”

  I was completely dumbfounded. I don’t let publishers put commas in my books. That’s the only thing I have character about. Finally I said, “I mean about being introduced to you.”

  Time has mercifully dimmed the humiliation of what followed. Sinatra started to shout abuse. I remember that, contrary to his reputation, he did not use foul language at all. The worst thing he called me was a pimp…

  Sinatra kept up his abuse and I kept staring at him. He kept staring down at his pl
ate. Yelling. He never looked up. Finally I walked away and out of the restaurant. My humiliation must have showed on my face because he yelled after me, “Choke. Go ahead and choke.” His voice frenzied, high-pitched.

  In the aftermath, Puzo wrote, he was depressed, feeling that Frank hated the book and believed the author had attacked him personally in the character of Johnny Fontane. But one night a few weeks later, after Paramount had named Francis Ford Coppola as director of the film, Coppola ran into Sinatra in a club, and Frank warmly put his arms around Coppola’s shoulders. “Francis, I’d play the Godfather for you,” he told the startled director. “I wouldn’t do it for those guys at Paramount, but I’d do it for you.”

  —

  Feeling better in October, Frank did three benefits for Reagan, in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego. He even managed to corral the usually apolitical Dean Martin—footloose and fancy-free, having recently separated from his long-suffering wife, Jeanne—into appearing with him. In L.A., Sinatra and Dino were joined by Bob Hope and John Wayne. “The audience at the Cocoanut Grove ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel chuckled through one-line jokes from Wayne and Hope and warmly applauded Martin’s rendition of ‘Everybody Loves Somebody,’ ” the Associated Press’s reporter wrote. But “the loudest applause was for Sinatra, who sang such classics as ‘Angel Eyes,’ ‘That’s Life’ and ‘My Way.’ ”

  After the performances, the actor turned governor took the stage with a fellow former actor, his wife, Nancy, standing by his side. “These wonderful entertainers,” he said. “How do you find the words to thank them for all this?”

  Reagan then shifted smoothly from vacuity to pointedness. “Many things have been said and written about people in show business,” he said. “I have never ceased being proud of the people of the profession I belonged to or ceased being a fan.”

  What, exactly, was he talking about? Democrats? Hollywood’s glitter people? In any case, the man who until recently had been the glitteriest of them all now waxed conspiratorial with a ballroom full of Republicans. “A lot of eyebrows have been raised,” Frank quipped, about his defection. “We shook them up a little bit.”

  We.

  —

  He himself still seemed shaken up a couple of weeks later, when Norma Lee Browning grabbed him on the run (“he won’t stand still for a sitdown interview,” she wrote) at the Palm Springs Tennis Club. “To end all the speculation, I got it straight from the horse’s mouth,” the columnist wrote on October 24. “Frank Sinatra will never ever play Las Vegas again.”

  “Absolutely never,” he told me when I asked him point-blank if the rumors were true.

  What about all those fans out there who flock to Vegas to see him?

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I’ve suffered enough indignities there. No more.”

  Will Nancy be going back? (Her contract calls for two more appearances at Caesars Palace.)

  “That’s up to Nancy,” said her father. “But I can tell you one thing, I wouldn’t go back even for Nancy’s opening.”

  Those are strong words from a man who idolizes his daughter, as Sinatra does. And vice-versa.

  The loss of the Sinatra name on the Vegas scene signals the end of an era.

  Sinatra also revealed he’s going back into the hospital for more hand surgery, which may mean he’ll have to cancel his upcoming movie with Otto Preminger. Which may mean “Dirty Dingus Magee” will be his last?

  I didn’t ask (one thing at a time), but I have a gnawing premonition that the entertainment world’s Number One Star entertainer is getting ready to dump showbiz.

  —

  The movie with Preminger was to have been a thriller, adapted from a mystery novel with the strangely Sendak-ian title Where the Dark Streets Go. Frank was to play a priest who investigates a murder. But he developed cold feet early, telling the columnist Marilyn Beck in July that he wasn’t looking forward to shooting in New York City in the wintertime. At that point, too, his hand still hurt like hell. And then there was the fact that the only other picture in which he’d played a priest, 1948’s Miracle of the Bells, hadn’t turned out too well. A month after Frank talked to Norma Lee Browning, he and Preminger would pull the plug on Where the Dark Streets Go. Preminger would blame intractable story problems—one problem undoubtedly being the difficulty of coming up with a plausible love story (he had offered the female lead to Jane Fonda). “I still want to make a movie with Frank,” the director insisted.

  But Frank’s interest in making movies seemed to have dwindled to a reflex by late 1970. Over the past two years, his name had come up in connection with a number of film projects: a story in which Sinatra would play a deaf-mute and not say a word in the entire picture; a Sinatra and Goldie Hawn movie, There’s a Girl in My Soup; even a picture co-starring Sinatra and Mia Farrow (one studio reportedly offered the exes $1 million apiece—for what property, it didn’t say). None of them went anywhere.

  In September, he’d signed with Warner Bros. to make a police thriller called Dirty Harry, but he would soon drop out of this project too, allegedly for medical reasons. The forty-year-old Clint Eastwood would take the role instead, and build a career on it.

  Frank now seemed to be at the other end of his career. Dirty Dingus Magee wouldn’t be his last film, but it would be his last for a good long time.

  —

  He wasn’t ready to pack it all in; not quite yet. On October 26, he was back at Western Recorders for the first time in nearly a year, laying down the tracks for the second side of Sinatra & Company as well as a couple of singles.

  He wasn’t ready to pack it in, but he had somehow fallen out of sync with himself. Was it that he had left the torch behind? That he had left Riddle behind? Once he had recorded great songs; now he was mostly recording pap—or failing to make true contact with the few estimable contemporary tunes he did attempt.

  For one reason and another (in good part because he was only one man and couldn’t get to everything), he had left dozens of important songs unrecorded: from the Gershwins’ “How Long Has This Been Going On?” to Rodgers and Hart’s “Isn’t It Romantic?” to Arlen and Koehler’s “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea”; the list goes on and on. Perhaps, in his terror of growing older, he felt the need to leave the American Songbook behind; perhaps he felt that to be associated with vanished or inactive greats like Porter and Gershwin and Berlin was tantamount to pigeonholing himself as a historical figure, no longer Young.

  What else can explain the second side of Sinatra & Company? What else can account for Frank’s decision to record the thumpingly banal “I Will Drink the Wine” and the abysmally titled “Sunrise in the Morning,” by the twenty-two-year-old English songwriter Paul Ryan? Or the equally awfully titled “My Sweet Lady” and the vaporous “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” by John Denver? Or one of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s most saccharine compositions, “(They Long to Be) Close to You,” a tune whose most successful version was recorded by the Carpenters?

  Yes, he wanted to sell records. He always wanted to sell records. And perhaps he could square the circle, could reach some mythic young audience that would be pleased to hear Frank Sinatra singing the songs of a new generation. The most poignant number on the B-side of Sinatra & Company is “Bein’ Green”—a tune composed by the extravagantly talented Joe Raposo to be sung by Sesame Street’s Kermit the Frog.

  Bennett Cerf and his son Chris had recently introduced Frank to the thirty-three-year-old Raposo, a genius pianist, brilliant composer, and overpowering personality who would die tragically young, of cancer, eighteen years later. Sinatra fell a little in love with Raposo, in a paternal way, mistakenly believing him to be an Italian-American (he was of Portuguese descent); the younger man would play an important part in 1973’s Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back, the first album Sinatra would make after his short-lived retirement.

  “Bein’ Green” is a sweet song seemingly without much meaning beyond the pathos of Kermit, a lonely, slightly schnooky charact
er who worries aloud about being overlooked:

  It’s not that easy bein’ green,

  Having to spend each day the color of the leaves.

  Frank sings it in the gentlest of voices—his Jobim voice—and the effect is unexpectedly lovely and surprisingly moving. The song is, after all, about being different—something Sinatra had known a lot about since his earliest youth, and something he clearly still felt strongly about, despite all his wealth and fame. Coming from him, the tune is a strange cri de coeur, one that has nothing to do with lost love, and is unique in his vast repertoire.

  It also could have occupied pride of place on a lost album called Sinatra Sings Children’s Songs—another good idea Frank passed up.

  On the night of October 28, he took a break to record two singles, both arranged by his old pal Lena Horne’s on-again, off-again husband, Lennie Hayton: “I’m Not Afraid,” a pretty Jacques Brel waltz with an okay English lyric by Rod McKuen, and George Harrison’s “Something.” Harrison had attended at least one of the Cycles recording sessions and had visited Frank in Palm Springs; the two men had formed an odd and temporary, but touching, bond. Sinatra would praise “Something” lavishly in concert, calling it “one of the best love songs to be written in fifty or a hundred years.”

  This was nice of him to say: it is a lovely song, and John Lennon and Paul McCartney were right to feel that it finally brought Harrison into their league as a writer. Yet many of the works of the great singer-songwriters of the 1960s and 1970s, including the Beatles’ ballads, are so strongly stamped with the personalities, and life stories, of their individual composers that they can be tricky to cover. They tend to lose in translation.