by James Kaplan
This is very much true of George Harrison’s Abbey Road recording of “Something.” An argument might be made that the quality of the song universalizes it, but it’s very hard to find good cover versions. Harrison himself said his favorite was James Brown’s very James Brown–ian rendition, but he might have had his tongue at least partially in cheek when he said it. He did not single out Sinatra’s covers of “Something.” (Frank would rerecord the number, with a Nelson Riddle arrangement, for his 1980 album Trilogy.)
In a way, Sinatra’s problems with “Something” crystallize his sometimes noble but almost always misguided attempts to record the work of modern songwriters: they just weren’t his thing. The 1970 “Something,” replete with groovy harpsichord and swingin’ flute, puts one in mind of Samuel Johnson’s notorious comparison of a woman’s preaching and a dog’s walking on his hind legs: it is not done well, but you’re surprised to find it done at all. And by the time Frank recorded the number for the second time, he had compounded the error, adding Vegas finger snaps and the infamous interpolation:
You’re asking me, will my love grow…
You stick around, Jack, it might show.
With that single syllable, he repelled sensitivity and completely undercut the essence of the song: he had made it his own, but not in a good way.
He finished the album on Thursday the twenty-ninth, laying down “Leaving on a Jet Plane” and “Close to You”; he took the weekend off and returned to the studio on Monday night to record three singles. The first two, duets with Nancy called “Feelin’ Kinda Sunday” and “Life’s a Trippy Thing,” were a naked attempt to recapture the lightning in a bottle of “Somethin’ Stupid.”
They did not. Father and daughter’s vocals and harmonies were sweet, but the songs themselves were bouncy and idiotic, and a peppy chorus doing the background vocals did not help matters. Nor did the lyrics:
Hey, Mr. Sunlight, gonna outshine your bright,
I’m talkin’ outta my head, I’m so high on life.
The singles died the commercial deaths they richly deserved, though they conceivably found a warmer welcome in Italy, where Nancy had a big following.
The last tune Frank recorded that night, another John Denver opus all too fittingly titled “The Game Is Over,” would not be released for a quarter century, when it finally came out on the 1995 Reprise box set. Sinatra wouldn’t make another record for two and a half years.
—
Dirty Dingus Magee premiered on November 18, a week before Thanksgiving, the timing set hopefully by MGM for a successful run through the Christmas season. “It’s kind of a western,” the movie’s coy tagline read. “He’s sort of a cowboy.” The poster showed Frank in a duster with a Stetson perched atop an outlandish wig, a hint of the kind of hilarity ticket buyers could expect.
Roger Ebert in the Chicago Tribune was very rough on the movie, and particularly tough on Sinatra. “‘Dirty Dingus Magee’ is as shabby a piece of goods as has masqueraded as a Western since, oh, ‘A Stranger Returns,’ ” he wrote, referring to The Stranger Returns, a notorious 1968 spaghetti Western starring the cult favorite Tony Anthony.
It’s supposed to be a comedy, and it was directed by Burt Kennedy, who is supposed to be a director of Western comedies (“Support Your Local Sheriff” wasn’t bad), but its failure is just about complete.
I lean toward blaming Frank Sinatra, who in recent years has become notorious for not really caring about his movies…
This time, as usual, the supporting cast is good. We get George Kennedy as a cigar-chewing sheriff; Anne Jackson as a madam of sorts; Lois Nettleton as a sympathetic nymphomaniac and Jack Elam, naturally, as the villain. They’re fun to watch, but where’s Sinatra? In Vegas?
Unfortunately, Sinatra was in much of the movie, usually wearing pink long johns and a silly derby atop that big hairpiece (the New York Times called it a “youth wig”) and looking unaccountably pleased with himself. The love interest, in a manner of speaking, was the leggy Michele Carey, who played Anna Hot Water, a sexy Indian girl in a miniskirt and deerskin go-go boots. Anna spoke pidgin English in a baby voice and, from a crouch in some bushes, got to utter the immortal line “What we do now? Make bim-bam?”
“Bim now, bam later,” Dingus replied. The exchange, sadly, bore Joseph Heller’s writerly fingerprints.*
“He needed this silliness after Grandpa died,” Nancy Sinatra wrote in his defense. He might have, but the world didn’t. The holiday turkey came and went with merciful quickness.
—
Though a Democrat, the ever-charming Dinah Shore found herself strongly drawn to the new presidential administration. Not only had Shore attended Richard Nixon’s inauguration, but she soon became fast friends with Vice President Spiro Agnew, with whom she often played tennis at her house in Beverly Hills. And in September 1970, Dinah Shore told an Agnew aide named Peter Malatesta that, as Malatesta recalled in a memoir, “Frank Sinatra also admired the Vice President and respected him for being so forthright in his views.”
“He needed this silliness after Grandpa died,” Nancy junior wrote of Frank and 1970’s Dirty Dingus Magee. He might have, but the world didn’t. (Credit 27.1)
Forthright was putting it mildly. Though while governor of Maryland Agnew had been a moderate on environmental and racial issues, as Nixon’s number two he quickly became the president’s hatchet man: a bellicose standard-bearer for the so-called silent majority, the disaffected Middle Americans who felt that opposition to the Vietnam War was unpatriotic, even immoral. The genial vice president, a decorated combat veteran of World War II, gleefully took on the protesters in colorful diatribes scripted by his speechwriters Pat Buchanan and William Safire, referring to the war’s opponents as “pusillanimous pussyfooters,” “nattering nabobs of negativism,” and “an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.”
Frank, who liked words and feared the protestations, warmed to such talk. When he expressed an interest in meeting Agnew, the vice president was “surprised and somewhat flattered,” Malatesta remembered, but also cautious enough to ask Malatesta to talk it over with Agnew’s chief of staff Arthur Sohmer and his senior political adviser, Roy Goodearle. “These two gentlemen had mixed feelings about such an alliance, but they voiced only minor concern and left the bottom line to Agnew and myself,” Malatesta wrote.
It made sense to me. Sinatra was one of the most charismatic and exciting performers in decades. I knew him to be a great host and a most generous person, and, though he had always been politically identified with the Democrats, particularly during the Kennedy years, I thought, why not? Let’s introduce him to our man. Who knows where it might lead?
That November, Agnew traveled to California with his wife, Judy, to spend Thanksgiving in Palm Springs, which he had visited for the first time the year before and quickly come to love. Malatesta suggested to the vice president that he meet Sinatra while in the desert, and Agnew agreed. The aide then called Frank—whom he knew slightly—and proposed he join a golf foursome with him, the vice president, and Bob Hope. “He said he would like to meet Vice President Agnew but that recent hand surgery prevented him from playing golf at this time,” Malatesta recalled; Frank said he’d grab a cart and join them on the second nine to kibbitz.
The spark of friendship between Agnew and Sinatra ignited on the first take…Over postgame cocktails, Frank invited the Vice President to visit his compound the next day. He explained that he had to return to Los Angeles but assured us that Nancy Sinatra, Sr., would be delighted to show us around. Agnew accepted with pleasure. As scheduled, he, Judy, and I made our first visit to the desert world of Frank Sinatra.
That Frank’s desert world now and then included the mother of his children as guest, hostess, and perhaps more is a fascinating sidelight of Malatesta’s account. “Although long ago divorced, Frank and Nancy were still very good friends, and even though we were newcomers it wasn’t difficult to observe that a lot of love lingered
between them,” he wrote.
Nancy was to be, on several occasions, hostess and party planner at the compound. She totally complemented Frank’s sense of style and understood the kind of ambiance he wanted his home to exude.
Judy and Nancy’s rapport was as instant as Frank and Spiro’s. We had a lush afternoon. I knew we’d be back!
—
Just before Thanksgiving, a full-length Norma Lee Browning column about Frank appeared in the nation’s papers under an alarming headline: “DIRTY DINGUS” MAY BE LAST FOR RETIREMENT-BENT SINATRA.
“It’s beginning to look as though an M-G-M Thanksgiving turkey, ‘Dirty Dingus Magee,’ will make history…as Frank Sinatra’s swan song,” Browning wrote.
With those who know Sinatra best, it’s retirement Two to One. But not retirement just to loaf in the Palm Springs sun. Among the handful of his most intimate associates, the word is that he’s only quitting show business to go into some other kind—nobody’s saying what. Some say he’s retiring from ACTIVE performing to ACTIVE mogul-ing.
With the proceeds of the sale of Reprise Records to Warner Bros., Browning wrote, Frank had formed a holding company with Danny Schwartz and Mickey Rudin; the three now held a major stake in National General Corporation, which owned a movie-theater chain and produced and distributed films. “Schwartz is now executive vice president of that company and though it is sheer conjecture, I personally predict that Frank Sinatra may soon be joining it in an executive nonperforming capacity.”
But she was grasping at straws; mogul-ing sounded like pretty dry stuff. Danny Schwartz’s comment about his restless partner seemed closer to the truth: “He may become more involved as we get going but again he may not. He can change his mind every week, you know.”
Frank himself vouchsafed no comment about future plans except “I like to keep busy. Solitude is very depressing. I need activity.”
It was the truest thing he’d said in a long time.
—
On Saturday, December 12, Frank’s fifty-fifth birthday, Nancy junior married for the second time, to Hugh Lambert. Ever filial, she said she’d decided on this date because, “since Daddy likes to give things away on his birthday he ought to give me away.”
Like Nancy, Lambert had been married before: he had a young daughter and a teenage son. In a wedding photo, the forty-year-old groom—genial and boyish looking, with big spectacles and a mop of sandy hair—seems an apt, sunny consort; it is Nancy, with her raccoon eye makeup and unreadable smile, who appears to harbor depths. The ceremony took place at St. Louis Catholic Church in Cathedral City, two miles from Frank’s compound; sixty friends and relatives attended, though two hundred others showed up unexpectedly.
The area’s Mexican-American families usually attended Mass in the church on Saturday afternoons, Nancy later recalled. This Saturday, however, they found the church unexpectedly closed. All dressed up with nowhere to go, they were milling around in puzzlement when Frank Sinatra, Frank Sinatra junior, and Jilly Rizzo drove up.
When Frank learned St. Louis Church had been closed to its congregation, wedding party or no wedding party, the color came up in his face. He commanded the priest to open the doors, and the doors were opened. The townsfolk streamed in and filled the empty pews. “What they saw was like something out of a fairy tale,” Joyce Haber reported. The decor included hurricane lamps bound in white, green, and blue garlands; the gowns of the ladies in the wedding party had been created by the Oscar-nominated costume designer Donfeld. The bride wore a floor-length, $2,500 dress of off-white silk georgette chiffon trimmed with fifty varieties of imported laces; sister Tina, the maid of honor, wore lavender chiffon.
“Tina, who’s marrying Robert Wagner when his divorce comes through, later caught Nancy’s bouquet, to everyone’s delight,” Haber wrote. (But Wagner—who had brought his old flame the sixty-three-year-old Barbara Stanwyck to the wedding—would throw over Tina Sinatra and remarry Natalie Wood when his divorce from the actress Marion Marshall did come through.)
“There were four buffet tables and an enormous multi-tiered wedding cake,” the columnist continued.
When the strains of the Latin combo (bongos, guitars) died away, Frank offered a toast to the newlyweds with Taittinger champagne: “May these two young people always have good health and happiness and may we have lots and lots of grandchildren!”
No word on whether Frank granted favors to postulants on his daughter’s wedding day.
On the same day, at the same time, in a juxtaposition worthy of The Godfather, FBI and IRS agents were staging simultaneous raids of illegal sports-betting operations in twenty-six cities across the country, including New York, Detroit, Miami Beach, Los Angeles, Houston, and Las Vegas, “where agents arrested two executives of plush Caesars Palace, a gambling casino, on charges of using telephones to aid racketeering,” according to the Associated Press. One of the two was Sanford Waterman. Upon opening his personal lockbox, agents discovered $400,000 in cash.
—
Fifty-five: there was a certain weight to it. Friends, musicians, and hangers-on had begun to call him the Old Man—the same nickname a young Frank and his bandmates had once used for Tommy Dorsey.
—
Peter Malatesta knew he and the Agnews would return to Sinatra-world—“a private world so full of excitement, luxury, and warmth that it is utterly mind-boggling”—and they did, dining with Frank at the compound on the second-to-last night of 1970 before helicoptering up to Bob Hope’s new Hollywood estate for a big New Year’s Eve bash.
Frank’s own plans for the holidays were apparently more intimate. While rumors flew that (a) Ava had been sighted in the desert (in a chauffeured limousine cruising down Palm Canyon Drive) and (b) he was about to marry Aileen Mehle (“Says Suzy, not so, but we hear she wishes it were,” Norma Lee Browning wrote), Sinatra was spotted “strolling into a Palm Springs eatery with Hope Lange on his arm, smiling good-naturedly when the restaurant owner greeted Hope as Mrs. Sinatra,” Marilyn Beck noted in late December.
And though Frank, Lange, and the restaurant owner later assured the columnist that the episode had all been a joke, when the blond actress—who around the same time was also involved with John Cheever—divorced her husband, the director Alan Pakula, the following year, the proceedings revealed that she had been seeing a lot of Frank Sinatra.
* * *
* In Catch-22, Heller wrote, “I make you big Hollywood star, Yossarian. Multi dinero. Multi divorces. Multi ficky-fick all day long. Sì, sì, sì!”
28
Will somebody please get me the hell off the road?
—FRANK SINATRA
If there were any lingering doubts about Sinatra’s political about-face, he dispelled them by flying to Sacramento three days after New Year’s for Ronald Reagan’s second inauguration as governor of California. On the afternoon of January 4, as demonstrators waved Vietcong flags, shouted obscenities, and chanted “Free Angela”—a reference to the radical UCLA philosophy professor Angela Davis, recently arrested for conspiracy in connection with the armed takeover of a Marin County courtroom—Reagan told a crowd on the capitol steps that his top priority was revising the state’s welfare system, which he described as “a Leviathan of unsupportable dimensions.”
That night, Frank dined at the Republican hour of 6:00 p.m. with the governor and his wife and a large, irreproachable contingent, including the governor’s brother and sister-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Neil Reagan; Nancy Reagan’s parents, Dr. and Mrs. Loyal Davis; two of the Reagan children, eighteen-year-old Patti and twelve-year-old Skipper (the nickname of Ron junior); the Reverend Donn Moomaw, a former UCLA football star turned Presbyterian minister, and his wife; and a group from Hollywood that included Jack Benny; James Stewart and his wife, Gloria; Vikki Carr and her husband; Robert Cummings; Mr. and Mrs. Buddy Ebsen; Audrey Meadows and her husband; and Mr. and Mrs. John Wayne.
Jilly was nowhere in sight.
Afterward, Frank performed before five thousand peopl
e at a $500-a-couple inaugural gala at the War Memorial Auditorium: though Wayne, Benny, Carr, Ebsen, and Dean Martin also appeared, Sinatra was the shining star and the prize catch—as well as the producer of the show. He was the closing act, of course. After Jimmy Stewart introduced him, Frank sang a program of surefire hits, beginning with “You Make Me Feel So Young,” “Pennies from Heaven,” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” and concluding, naturally, with “My Way.” Along the way, he threw in a tribute to the governor’s wife, a woman he had once derided as a failed actress and failed Sinatra groupie, with a twinkling rendition of Jimmy Van Heusen and Phil Silvers’s “Nancy”:
Believe me, I’ve got a case
On Nancy, with the laughin’ face.
She beamed with pleasure: she had always been obsessed with him and would remain so into her old age, a close friend recalled.
—
Ten days later, Ronald Reagan did Frank a solid in return, appearing at the January 15 dedication of the Martin Anthony Sinatra Medical Education Center at Palm Springs Desert Hospital. Vice President Agnew was also present. Frank had underwritten the entire $805,000 cost of the center in memory of his late father. “He’s here,” Frank said at the ribbon cutting, pointing to his head. “And here,” he added, pointing to his heart.
It was a day of high purpose and emotional speeches: Frank Sinatra Day in Palm Springs, as officially declared by Mayor Howard Wiefels—although wasn’t every day really Frank Sinatra Day in Palm Springs? Dolly was present, naturally, along with Nancy senior, Nancy junior, Frankie, and Tina. Frank’s mother was in an uncustomarily sentimental mood. “It’s been a wonderful day—but sad, too,” she told Norma Lee Browning. “Frank is my only child and a wonderful son. And I love my grandchildren. But I just love Nancy Senior, too.”