Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  Who was in Hawaii and Palm Springs all the while, wearing a colostomy bag and close by his ever-watchful wife.*

  —

  At the 1980 concert in Rio de Janeiro, Sinatra suffered a memory lapse. He was in the middle of singing “Strangers in the Night,” a song he knew “as well as my hand,” he recalled, when the rest of the lyric suddenly escaped him. The entire stadium began to sing it for him—in English. Frank was moved.

  The lapses, onstage and off, became more frequent. “I saw his memory start to go,” Vincent Falcone recalled. “He lost his ability to remember the lyrics. I remember when we did Mr. Reagan’s inaugural, he had me write out some things that he could refer to when he needed them. Then he had a little lectern built, and if he had a new song that he didn’t remember, he’d have the lyric.”

  Falcone worked elsewhere for a couple of years, then returned as Sinatra’s conductor in 1985. “That year, he turned seventy,” Falcone said. “You figure, ‘Well, what the hell.’ ” But he had gotten markedly worse. Now there were teleprompters onstage for the lyrics, big twenty-one-inch monitors, the print so large—Frank had had cataract surgery—that sometimes there were just four or five words on the screen. “The audience was looking at the words,” the conductor recalled. “They could see the lyrics. It got to be embarrassing.

  “The family tried to hide that, telling everybody he was fine,” Falcone said. “He wasn’t fine. He could hardly read. He lost his hearing in one ear. He couldn’t see the freaking monitor. Then it really got bad. It got to the point where he didn’t know anything. Can you imagine what that must have been like for him? Tony Bennett told me, ‘I went up to him and put my hand on his shoulder and said, “Hi, Frank,” and he turned around and said, “Get your fuckin’ hand off my shoulder.” ’ I said, ‘Tony, don’t you know that he didn’t know who you were?’ ”

  —

  He was on a cocktail of medications: diuretics, sleeping pills, barbiturates for his migraines, and Elavil, an antidepressant. And he was continuing to self-medicate with Jack Daniel’s, as he had for his whole adult life. Much of the time, especially to his daughters, he seemed flat, subdued. His feistiness was missing; he was somehow missing.

  This is when he began to die.

  —

  In March 1987, Dino’s adored son Dean Paul, a captain in the California Air National Guard, crashed his F-4 Phantom into San Gorgonio Mountain in a snowstorm. Neither he nor his navigator survived. It was almost exactly ten years after Dolly’s Lear Jet crashed into the same mountain.

  “Dean was half alive after that,” Paul Anka recalled. “Whenever I would run into him at a little Italian restaurant in Beverly Hills called La Famiglia on Canon Drive, I would ask him, ‘How are you doing, Dino?’ He would be sitting there with his false teeth in a glass of water, look up at me and say, ‘Just waiting to die, pally, just waiting to die.’ ”

  That December, amid grand excitement, Frank, Dean, and Sammy held a press conference at Chasen’s to announce a twenty-nine-city tour, named Together Again. It was the first time they’d worked together in twenty years. The tour began in March 1988 but quickly began to unravel: Dean was grieving, in his own fog of painkillers and booze; Sammy was suffering from liver problems and would soon undergo hip surgery. At the first concert, in Oakland, Martin flicked a lit cigarette into the audience. In Chicago, Frank told him he wasn’t holding up his end of the tour: Dino chartered a plane and flew home. Furious, Frank replaced him with Liza Minnelli and didn’t speak to his old friend for years.

  —

  For all the deficiencies of his voice and hearing and vision and memory, he was still capable of a good concert; on a good night, he could provide some of the same thrills he had always given. Writing in the New York Times, Stephen Holden praised “the spontaneity of phrasing and intonation he brings to almost everything he sings, no matter how many hundreds of times he has sung the songs. Even while reading lyrics from a prompter at the front of the stage, Mr. Sinatra still seemed compelled to experiment, trying out little tricks of phrasing, indulging in impromptu scoops and dives and interpolations that worked.”

  And after Daniel Okrent wrote an intelligent and graceful Esquire piece, “St. Francis of Hoboken,” analyzing and praising Sinatra’s late-age durability (and mentioning that his young son shared a birthday with Frank), he was delighted to receive, quite out of the blue, a lucid, graceful, and astonishingly mellow response from the Chairman himself, dated January 28, 1988.

  “Dear Daniel,” it began, and continued warmly, asking forgiveness for the letter’s lateness (when had Frank ever asked forgiveness, even for a letter’s lateness?) and adding the homey detail that it had been the Christmas season in the Sinatra household that had delayed him: “we are the bell-ringers and carol-singers and the tree-trimmers who lead the parade of peace to all of goodwill.”

  Okrent had clearly impressed Frank as one of the possessors of goodwill. Calling the Esquire essay “generous and insightful,” Sinatra thanked the writer for “explain[ing] me to me with a rose in your prose” and applying his “X-ray word-processor to see so deeply into the heart and soul of this very lucky son of Hoboken who remains eternally overcome at God’s plan for his life.” In closing, Frank sent love to little John Okrent, with whom, he said, he was honored to share December 12th.

  “God bless you always,” the sentimental old man wrote above his signature.

  —

  The first half of his seventy-fifth year, 1990, was a kind of nightmare. On January 25, a month after her sixty-seventh birthday, Ava died. Unsurprisingly, Barbara Sinatra writes nothing about her husband’s reaction to the loss of the greatest love of his life. Tina writes that she awoke to the news on the twenty-sixth and immediately phoned her father, only to be told that he hadn’t stirred from his room since hearing the news the night before. When she called him again that evening, “he was distraught, barely audible,” she recalled. “My heart broke for him. I wondered how long he’d stay in his room—and how he’d be received when he emerged.”

  Eleven days later, the last in a years-long series of strokes finally killed Jimmy Van Heusen. And in May, Sammy Davis died of throat cancer. Bowed by sorrow, Frank anesthetized himself as best he could.

  And he kept on, at a dizzying rate: he played sixty-five dates that year; seventy-three concerts in thirteen countries, from Ireland and Sweden to Australia and Japan, in 1991. He did eighty-four shows in 1992. His manager, Eliot Weisman, rationalized to Tina Sinatra that it was important to keep her father’s income stream going so that Barbara wouldn’t draw from the family trust—in which Sinatra’s children shared.

  In Rancho Mirage, early in the morning of May 6, 1992, his seventy-fifth birthday, Jilly died when his borrowed Jaguar was broadsided by a drunk driver. Rizzo’s car exploded into flames; unfamiliar with the car’s tricky interior door handles, he was unable to escape. Tony Oppedisano, a close friend of Jilly and Frank’s and Frank’s road manager, heard the news first, from the police. “I truly didn’t know how Frank would react when I told him that his best friend in the whole world—the brother he never had—had been killed,” he recalled.

  Oppedisano went to Sinatra’s house to tell him in person. “Frank collapsed,” he said. “He literally just dropped to his knees and started sobbing.”

  After the funeral, Sinatra took Jilly’s son Joey aside. “This is the worst day of my life,” he told him. “That’s it. My life is over.”

  Three days later, he did three nights at the Circle Star Theatre in San Carlos, California. He wasn’t heartless; he was numb.

  —

  On March 1, 1994, the Irish rock singer Paul Hewson, in the persona of Bono, the front man of the band U2, stood at the podium at Radio City Music Hall and introduced Frank Sinatra at the thirty-sixth presentation of the Grammys. Thirty-five years earlier, in May 1959, Frank had attended the first Grammy ceremony; this night he was to receive a special honor, the Grammy Legend Award. But he wasn’t just old news: in
1993, he had released Duets, an album on which, through the ambivalent magic of overdubbing, he was able to sing a baker’s dozen of hits and standards with other great or celebrated vocalists such as Tony Bennett (“New York, New York”), Aretha Franklin (“What Now, My Love?”), Barbra Streisand (“I’ve Got a Crush on You”), Natalie Cole (“They Can’t Take That Away from Me”), and Bono (“I’ve Got You Under My Skin”). Though the album was widely criticized for the sterility of its production—at no time was Sinatra actually ever in the recording studio with any of his duet partners; each sang his or her accompaniment to his recorded track—it was a huge international seller, going triple platinum in the United States alone. Frank was thrilled: he had always loved selling records.

  Bono spoke reverently of the honoree, who was also a new friend, in a show-business way. “Rock ’n’ roll people love Frank Sinatra because Frank Sinatra has got what we want—swagger and attitude,” he said. “Rock ’n’ roll plays at being tough, but this guy, well, he’s the boss. The boss of bosses. The man. The big bang of pop. I’m not gonna mess with him—are you?”

  The encomium continued for four long minutes, and then Frank emerged, looking pleased but bemused, in a tuxedo and a luxuriant, defiantly unnatural silver toupee. The audience leaped up, applauding and shouting, and Bono handed Sinatra the crystal gewgaw. “That’s the best welcome—I ever had,” Frank said, sounding a little choked up. There was a long pause. “This is like being in baseball, the bases are loaded, and you’re at bat, you don’t know what you’re gonna do,” he finally said, his voice rising emotionally to Lou Costello range.

  Over the next couple of minutes, he seemed alternately with it and frail and disoriented. Just as in the old days, he made a mean, unfunny joke (“This is more applause than Dean heard in his whole career”) and a crack about hitting the girl who threatened to water his drink backstage. The crowd tittered. Then, at sea, he held up his award. “I’m lookin’ for my girl, where’s my girl?” he said. “There she is. That’s my girl. Say hello to Barbara, everybody, please.” She stood, blond and gorgeous at sixty-six, and blew him a kiss. Frank blew her one back. “I love you,” he said. “Do you love me?”

  For just a second, he sounded genuinely uncertain. There was uncomfortable laughter.

  He continued. “I don’t quite know what to say to you,” he told the audience. “You know, there was no discussions about singing a couple of songs; otherwise if we had, there would be an orchestra here with me, but apparently that’s not what they wanted tonight, and I’m angry.” He shrugged self-deprecatingly. More laughter. “I’m hurt.” He said hoit. More laughter. “I’m just happy to be here in the Apple,” he said. “I love coming back all the time; it’s the best city in the whole world.”

  The remark produced the obligatory big applause, and Frank went on—only nobody heard him, because someone in the control booth had signaled the orchestra to strike up and, at the same time, cut off Sinatra’s microphone. Someone in the control booth had cut off Frank Sinatra’s microphone. A Grammys graphic came on the screen, and an anonymous announcer continued in voice-over: “In ceremonies tonight, Grammys were presented in the following categories…”

  Someone in the control booth had cut off Frank Sinatra’s microphone. Control had effectively been passed long before, but that night formalized it.

  —

  Five nights later, on a warm night at the Mosque in Richmond, Virginia—the air-conditioning in the theater was on the fritz; for some reason, the heat was running full blast—he collapsed while singing “My Way.” Rising from the stool he’d been sitting on, Frank suddenly pitched forward, his head hitting the teleprompter screen and then striking the stage. “There was one giant gasp in the crowd; everybody stood up,” saxophonist Jim Snidero recalled. The band stopped playing, despite Bill Miller’s frantic signals to continue. Tony Oppedisano rushed to Sinatra’s side and found him soaked through with sweat. As Oppedisano loosened his tie and opened his shirt, Frank’s eyes blinked open. “What happened? Can the audience still see me?” he asked. He was lifted into a wheelchair—the audience applauded as he waved weakly—and taken to a local hospital, where tests revealed he had been dehydrated due to the heat in the auditorium and a diuretic he was taking, one of his many medications. A waiter in the restaurant at his hotel also said he had consumed six double Jack Daniel’s with his steak dinner before the show.

  Less than three weeks later, he was back in action at the Mabee Center in Tulsa, beginning with “Come Fly with Me” and closing with “New York, New York.” Then on to Moline, Omaha, Wilmington, North Carolina, and Rochester, where he told the audience, “May you all live to be 750 years old, and may the last voice you hear be mine.”

  In August, at the Atlantic City Sands, he collapsed again onstage. After his medication was adjusted (he also started traveling with a doctor), his memory and energy were better, but his family and his manager concluded that after forty-eight concerts in 1994, he should tour no more.

  He wound up the year with two disastrously jet-lagged shows at the Fukuoka Dome in Japan, concluding the last complete set of his career with the song he hated, “My Way.” Natalie Cole, who had opened for Frank, recalled that he drank heavily on the flight home, then became disoriented and belligerent: “We had been in the air about an hour or so when Frank suddenly looked around at all of us in the cabin and bellowed, ‘Who the hell are all these people?’ ” He stood and began confronting each person there—some of whom he had known for years—with the question, “Who the hell are you?” She avoided him as best she could, she remembered, by going to sleep.

  —

  There was still one final performance, at the end of the Frank Sinatra Desert Classic golf tournament, in Palm Desert, California, on February 25, 1995. A full complement of musicians Frank had worked with over the years was brought out from L.A., and on the stage of the ballroom of the Marriott in Palm Desert he sang six tunes, beginning with “I’ve Got the World on a String” and concluding with “The Best Is Yet to Come.”

  Sinatra sang as well as he was capable of singing that night, according to Tony Oppedisano. “High notes, fine,” recalled the writer and radio personality Jonathan Schwartz, who was also there. “Shaky. No vibrato. No sustaining. But swing.”

  After Frank finished, his wife took his hand and guided him out to the front of the hotel, where a limousine waited. She went back inside to socialize, and for a few moments her husband stood there alone. Then Sinatra, being Sinatra, began to bang agitatedly on the top of the car. Schwartz was watching. “Finally,” he remembered, “some Italian gentleman came and put his hand on Frank’s head, Sinatra was gently pushed into the limousine, and the door closed on him forever.”

  —

  That May, Frank left his beloved desert for good and moved to the pied-à-terre he and Barbara had bought in 1986, a nine-thousand-square-foot, California-modern mansion at 915 Foothill Road, Beverly Hills. It was a huge, somewhat sterile place—the Sinatras had purchased it furnished, right down to the contemporary paintings on the walls—and, disoriented as he often was, he found it difficult to get used to. “When are we going home?” he kept asking his wife.

  “We are home, darling,” she told him.

  “No,” Frank said, “this is your home. When are we going to my home?”

  There were times, Tina recalled, when he’d get confused by the house’s open floor plan, which reminded him of a hotel lobby: “Sitting at the bar one day, he said to Tony, ‘I never see any people here—they must be doing lousy business in this joint.’ ”

  —

  He had stopped painting and doing crossword puzzles, and reading was difficult for him, even with magnifier glasses: the daily papers, which he’d once devoured, piled up. With little to occupy his mind, he grew steadily more bewildered and depressed. He stared at the TV, the volume turned up high. When an old friend, the television producer George Schlatter, put together an eightieth-birthday ABC special in Frank’s honor—he would only
have to sit and be sung to by an all-star cast, including Tony Bennett, Peggy Lee, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen—Sinatra tried to beg off, but Schlatter, a persuasive man, prevailed. The night before the taping, to break the ice, Barbara invited Dylan and Springsteen over for dinner. Frank and his two fellow music legends sang together around the piano and generally “got on like a house on fire,” she recalled. As for the show itself, Tina writes, Sinatra hated almost every minute of it.

  The next month, after Schlatter and his wife threw him an eightieth birthday party to which his children were not invited, Frank’s younger daughter, the family’s chief grudge collector, would not see or speak to her father for almost a year.

  —

  Thirteen days after Frank’s eightieth, on Christmas morning 1995, Dean Martin finally met the fate he’d been waiting for for eight long years. The two men had reconciled after their breach, though neither had had much to give the other. Now Frank himself had little to do but wait.

  —

  On November 1, 1996, he suffered a serious myocardial infarction. He was admitted to Cedars-Sinai, where a hospital spokesman told reporters that Sinatra had a pinched nerve. His doctors were able to stabilize his heart, but he developed a critical case of pneumonia, and when he finally went home, he required round-the-clock nursing care. Though he was a candidate for open-heart surgery, his physicians declared it too risky. If Frank were kept as comfortable, calm, well fed, and mobile as possible, they said, he might be expected to live for another two or three years. “His geography was limited to his room, the adjoining den, the dining room beyond, and the garden, for a little afternoon sun,” wrote Tina, who had now come back into his life—and, to a certain extent, mended fences with Barbara.

  “That Thanksgiving would be the most thankful of feasts we’d ever had,” Frank’s younger daughter recalled. “We kept dinnertime loose, geared to whenever Dad woke up. He walked to the table unassisted, clean shaven and clearheaded—and obviously moved to have his children and grandchildren around him. It had been a long time since we’d come together as a family.”