Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  “Tears welled in her eyes,” Browning wrote, “leaving no doubt where she stands on this touchy subject.”

  At a private luncheon later, Frank was named Honorary Doctor of Medicine and an honorary member of the Desert Hospital medical staff by Dr. Daniel Kaplan, who presented him with a black doctor’s bag. “Does that mean he can operate?” someone called out.

  “Frank’s been operating for years,” Kaplan said.

  —

  And two weeks after that, Frank was confounding his political critics by headlining at a Beverly Hills fund-raiser for John Tunney, the young (thirty-six) and Kennedyesque Democrat whom Californians had recently elected to the Senate. Not only did Sinatra sing for a Democrat; he had turned down a personal invitation from Alan Shepard to watch the launch of Apollo 14 in order to do so. “Frank is married to the Democrats; it’s just an affair with the Republicans,” an unnamed pal told Dorothy Manners.

  Yet just two months earlier, Dwight Chapin, special assistant to President Nixon, had taken the time to send a memo about Sinatra to Mrs. Nixon’s chief of staff, Connie Stuart. “As you will recall, Frank Sinatra endorsed Ronald Reagan when he ran for the Gubernatorial election this year,” Chapin wrote.

  The President and Mrs. Nixon invited Sinatra to attend the [president of Mexico] Diaz Ordaz dinner in San Diego. Sinatra did not attend the dinner but he did fly in for the reception, although he opened the same night in Las Vegas. Last weekend Sinatra played golf with the Vice President in Palm Springs.

  I talked with [Laugh-In producer and Nixon friend] Paul Keyes today and he offered the suggestion that perhaps Sinatra might be available to do an Evening at the White House. There are obviously strong arguments pro and con in giving Sinatra the White House forum. I am sure that many of our friends in the entertainment field would think it wrong to have a former anti-Nixon person entertain at the White House. I am fairly well convinced that the publicity value alone—not to mention the development of a relationship between Sinatra and the President—would far outweigh the negatives.

  The wheels were in motion: he was being welcomed into the fold.

  —

  Nancy wrote that she felt closer than ever to her father after her marriage, recalling that Frank seemed more introspective yet also more relaxed. He and Big Nancy spent a good deal of time together, Nancy junior remembered; with Dolly living nearby, the family felt like a family again. But Frank’s tours felt disruptive to one and all—including him. “Will somebody please get me the hell off the road?” he kept saying.

  He wasn’t making records; he wasn’t making movies; besides the odd political event and benefit, he wasn’t doing concerts. In his time-honored fashion, he was managing to juggle three relationships (or four, if you counted Big Nancy): with Hope Lange, with his Dingus Magee co-star Lois Nettleton, and, more and more in 1971, surreptitiously, with Barbara Marx. He was attentive, he was romantic, and then, always and quickly, he was on to the next thing.

  No less important were the boys’ nights out with Jilly and other pals, including Jimmy Van Heusen and Irwin “Ruby” Rubenstein, the proprietor of Ruby’s Dunes. On Monday evenings, they met to watch the ABC football broadcast at Dominick’s restaurant in Palm Springs; Frank even had special hats and jackets designed with the initials DOM—it stood for Dirty Old Men—superimposed on a football graphic for the guys to wear while they took in the game.

  Just like those Turk’s Palace jackets of forty years before.

  —

  He was a distinguished gentleman; his luster gleamed ever brighter. In mid-February, a Norma Lee Browning column chronicled just a couple of his good deeds—he was planning to send his personal jet to Monaco to bring Princess Grace and party to the June gala for the Motion Picture and Television Relief Fund; he was having a recreational center for teens built in Palm Desert—and a major feather in his cap: he had just won a Golden Globe, the Cecil B. DeMille Award for outstanding contributions to the entertainment industry.

  In early March, he was on the other side of the camera for a change, photographing the first Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier bout, the Fight of the Century, at Madison Square Garden for Life. Though he’d wangled the assignment mainly because—unaccountably—he’d been unable to get a ringside seat, his pictures were good enough that the weekly put one of them, an image of Frazier bashing Ali in the face, on the cover of the March 19 issue and an eight-page spread of Frank’s surprisingly excellent fight snapshots inside, surrounding a four-thousand-word piece by none other than Norman Mailer.

  Mailer titled his surging, bulging, coruscating essay “Ego,” in honor of Ali, whom he dubbed America’s Greatest in that department—and with whose ego he unsurprisingly managed to conflate his own. “Everything we have done in this century, from monumental feats to nightmares of human destruction,” he wrote, “has been a function of that extraordinary state of the psyche which gives us authority to declare we are sure of ourselves when we are not.”

  He digressed and expanded upon Alan Shepard (who, despite Frank’s not having been at Cape Kennedy to see him off, had successfully flown to the moon, landed on the surface, and whacked two golf balls) and Picasso and Hemingway and Tolstoy and Proust; he expatiated brilliantly about boxers white and black in general and Frazier and Ali in particular; and yet, sitting ringside at the Garden, he had somehow neglected to take in the little man nearby in the dark suit and graying toupee, one of the foremost avatars of the quantity he was writing about in the century he was writing about and, notwithstanding the big Nikon in his hands, the third-most-photographed person in the building that night.

  —

  I wish to announce, effective immediately, my retirement from the entertainment world and public life. For over three decades I have had the great and good fortune to enjoy a rich, rewarding and deeply satisfying career as an entertainer and public figure. Through the years people have been wonderfully warm and generous in their acceptance of my efforts. My work has taken me to almost every corner of the world and privileged me to learn by direct experience how alike all people really are—the common bonds that tie all men and women of whatever color, creed, religion, age or social status to one another; the things mankind has in common that the language of music, perhaps more than any other, communicates and evokes.

  It has been a fruitful, busy, uptight, loose, sometimes boisterous, occasionally sad, but always exciting three decades. There has been little time for reflection, reading, self-explanation, and that need every man has for a fallow period, a long phase in which to seek better understanding of the vast transforming changes now taking place everywhere in the world. This seems a proper time to take that breather.

  —Frank Sinatra, March 23, 1971

  Receiving the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for 1971. “No one within range of him who has needed his support has ever been refused it,” Gregory Peck said. “Ladies and gentlemen, a man who pays his dues—Frank Sinatra.” (Credit 28.1)

  Jim Mahoney had massaged the statement adroitly; the family knew about it all ahead of time, of course. “It didn’t surprise me,” Nancy junior wrote of her father’s decision to retire. In truth, nobody was very surprised. “His record history was really falling; he also was not making good films,” Mo Ostin recalled—facts not lost on many others in show business as well. The buzz had been circulating for quite a while. “You read it here first,” Norma Lee Browning, one of the earliest buzzers, reminded her readers, stung by the fact that Frank had released the statement first to his now and then paramour Suzy Knickerbocker, as an exclusive for her New York Daily News column.

  “I look forward to enjoying more time with my family and dear friends, to writing a bit—perhaps even to teaching,” he added, taking the highest of high roads.

  “His fade-out from the world of entertainment—movies, TV, night clubs, records, Hollywood, Las Vegas, New York, London, wherever—is a blow to an industry already deep in the doldrums,” Browning wrote mournfully. “It marks the end of an era, and a rath
er marvelous one that will long be remembered, especially in this era of our so-called ‘new’ Hollywood’s so-easily forgettables. The Sinatra name is magic on a marquee.”

  It sounded like nostalgia, but it was simple truth.

  —

  Hollywood, which Frank had steadily dishonored over the past decade, seemed to have grown instantly wistful at the thought of his departure. On Academy Awards night, April 15, at the Los Angeles Music Center’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Gregory Peck presented Sinatra with his third Oscar, this time for his charitable works but also as a kind of unofficial farewell.

  It was a schizophrenic Oscars night: Patton won Best Picture; Woodstock, Best Documentary Feature. Starlets wore hot pants; grandes dames like Merle Oberon and Jennifer Jones drifted by in flowing gowns. The town’s Old Guard cocked a skeptical eyebrow at the New but in time-honored fashion tried to adapt: youth was always magic in Tinseltown. Even the fifty-five-year-old Peck wore his graying hair on the shaggy side. But when he opened his mouth to speak, it was as though the Old Testament had come to life.

  “Sinatra, Frank—baritone, as he is listed in the Who’s Who, will be the recipient of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for 1971,” he rumbled majestically under majestic eyebrows. Peck went on to speak of Frank’s innumerable unpublicized charitable acts, then ticked off just a few of the more public ones: the children’s institutions that had resulted from the 1962 world tour; the hospitals and colleges in America that had benefited from his largesse; the many benefit concerts. Then, in a neat trope, Peck springboarded Sinatra’s single acting Oscar into the present: “In 1953, this man was voted the Academy Award for his moving performance in a supporting role in From Here to Eternity. Never were the members of the Academy more prescient. Supporting actor—oh, yes indeed. No one within range of him who has needed his support has ever been refused it. Ladies and gentlemen, a man who pays his dues—Frank Sinatra.”

  As the orchestra struck up the title song from The House I Live In, the 1945 short for which Frank had won his first, special, Oscar, he took the statuette from his friend, looking pleased as Punch, and faced the camera. The toup was fringed, the face roundish: it was the Noblest Roman contour he would carry into the coming decades. The thickish sideburns were gray; the ears were beginning to sag ever so slightly with age. He rested his hands on the statuette. “This is truly an all-c—consuming thrill for me tonight,” he said, stammering a bit.

  Over the years, I’ve been part of the Awards wearing many different hats. Performer, emcee, presenter, recipient. But this is the top of the moment of my—little walk-on in life, you might say. And I’ve been doing a little more thinking and contemplating these days than I did twenty-five years ago. That’s because—

  Frank on assignment for Life, covering the Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier heavyweight-championship bout, Madison Square Garden, March 8, 1971. Sinatra himself was the third-most-photographed person in the building that night. (Credit 28.2)

  And suddenly, amazingly but not quite surprisingly, he was shifting with complete aplomb into his favorite impression, the always slightly offensive, never truly amusing, deep Kingfish voice from Amos ’n’ Andy: “I’m what is known in the vernacular as a re-tired man now.”

  There was light, uncomfortable laughter from the audience—Coretta Scott King was in the house! It didn’t matter to Frank; as always, he wrote his own rules. As a boy alone in his Hoboken bedroom, he had listened to Amos ’n’ Andy on his big Atwater Kent, and the voices of Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, white men imitating absurdly self-important black men, had enchanted and amused him, as they had much of America. He would remain amused by Amos ’n’ Andy for the rest of his life, and so, it seemed to him, would his audiences; it simply stood to reason.

  “One of the things I’ve been thinking about is why you have to get famous to get an award for helping other people,” he continued sincerely.

  I’m not being facetious about it…If your name is John Doe, and you work night and day doing things for your helpless neighbors, what you get for your effort is tired. So Mr. and Mrs. Doe and all of you who give of yourselves to those who carry too big a burden to make it on your own—

  He picked up the Oscar and held it toward the camera. “I want you to take your share of this Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award,” he said. It was pure show business, and the audience ate it up. A camera picked up Roz Russell and George Cukor, applauding furiously.

  But Frank wasn’t quite done. “Because if I have earned it, so, too, have you,” he went on. “In fact, your way of earning it was harder than my way. This has made it easier for me to spread a dab of sunshine here and there. I mean, in show business, they pay quite well. And being the quiet, conservative man that I am—”

  He paused for the laugh.

  “I have invested a chunk of three percent. And put the dividends to work in that noblest of all causes, charity toward your fellow men.”

  The camera cut to Nancy junior in the audience, sitting next to her beaming husband and dabbing a tear.

  “It’s the only investment in the world that pays a hundred percent,” Frank said. “Anyway, it’s put a great big bundle in here for me”—he pointed to his heart—“and I’d like to thank my dear brothers and sisters of the Academy for this joyous moment. Thank you.”

  He shook hands with Gregory Peck, and the camera pulled back to show the audience applauding—Tina, Nancy, Hugh Lambert, and next to him a tuxedoed Jilly, clapping wildly. And next to Jilly, Liv Ullmann.

  What a strange and wonderful thing show business was.

  —

  There were rumors: there were always rumors. Some said he was quitting show business because of his bum right hand; others, that he was secretly Gravely Ill, a two-word euphemism for a one-word disease.

  And then there were those who simply refused to believe it. “There are people taking odds in Las Vegas and in gin rummy games in Beverly Hills who doubt his retirement will last,” one newspaper writer opined. “He is still in demand, and the enticement of a profession which has been his whole life may be too much to reject.”

  To a great degree, it was wishful thinking; it was also truer than anyone knew at the time.

  —

  He was back at the Los Angeles Music Center on Sunday night, June 13, officially to raise money for the Motion Picture and Television Relief Fund, but also, as all who attended knew, to perform his last two concerts ever.

  The first was in the thirty-two-hundred-seat Dorothy Chandler Pavilion; the second, the one his family and friends would attend, in the more intimate Ahmanson Theatre. Gregory Peck produced the show. Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Sammy Davis Jr., Pearl Bailey, Don Rickles, Mitzi Gaynor, and Barbra Streisand were also performing, but Sinatra, fittingly, would close. Sinatra always closed.

  He had finished the first show, and he was sitting in the dressing room, waiting out his high-powered opening acts. Tommy Thompson of Life was there to observe for what would become a cover story. “He was nervous,” Thompson wrote.

  He had carefully orchestrated this finale and, being the most meticulous of men, he wanted it played with style and grace. He took the typewritten list of the 14 songs he would sing and he looked at it over and over again. He threw it down on the table and began doodling. His felt pen created a house, then he filled it in with black strokes, covering the windows and doors as if no one lived there any more.

  The house he lived in. It was a picture of his unconscious, but the drawing of it was also a performance. He was so rarely alone that almost his whole life was a performance: the frightened, chaotic, relentlessly mercurial man inside playing Frank Sinatra, the role of a lifetime. He gave very good value in the role.

  Various people visited the dressing room. Frank’s guitarist, Al Viola, came in to rehearse the duet they were going to play, “Try a Little Tenderness.” Cary Grant stopped by, another man who knew what it was to play a part the world expected. “Everybody wants to be Cary Grant,” he had once said. “Even I wa
nt to be Cary Grant.” Grant himself had retired five years earlier, without so much as a statement to the press, to take care of his young daughter.

  Don Rickles burst in, dragging Sammy Davis under his arm in a bear hug. “We warmed ’em up for you, Frank,” he called out. “You’re gonna be great out there, Frank. People love pity, Frank.”

  They left, and the seventy-seven-year-old Jack Benny entered, complete with violin, and did three minutes. “This man,” he said, waving a hand at Sinatra, “this man endorses Ronald Reagan for governor of California. Now I would have endorsed Reagan quietly, but Frank did it first. So I come out second with a little endorsement, and what do I get from Frank Sinatra the next day but a one-word telegram. It says ‘COPYCAT.’ ”

  Frank looked ready to fall off the couch. Benny started again. “Now, I would like to retire, only…,” Benny sputtered, “only, I can’t.”

  Frank held his sides, shaking with laughter.

  The old comedian left, and the room grew relatively quiet. “Are you really quitting?” Thompson asked Sinatra.

  Frank didn’t hesitate. “I’m absolutely serious about retirement,” he said. “You can’t make an idle statement like the one I made. At least I can’t. I’m not built that way.”

  “He drank some more vodka, but it did not seem to be relaxing him,” Thompson wrote.

  The evening had too many ghosts in it. He was as tense as a fighter waiting for the bell. “I’ve had a handful,” he said. “I’ve had enough. Maybe the public’s had enough, too.”

  I shook my head.

  “I’ve got things to do,” he went on. “Like the first thing is not to do anything at all for eight months, maybe a year.” He would roam around the desert taking pictures of cactus, he said. He would hang them on the brick walls of the hospital wing he has endowed in Palm Springs. He would “read Plato and grow petunias.” He would paint a little, maybe try once again with watercolors. “I’ve never been able to control them,” he said.