by Kitty Kelley
Critic George Simon wrote that Frank “produced some of his most emotional recordings during this period,” but the country was more interested in the belting renditions of Frankie Laine and Eddie Fisher than the searing torch songs of Frank Sinatra.
After leaving Columbia Records in 1952, Frank had not been able to get a contract with any recording company, including RCA Victor, where his good friend, Manie Sacks, was vice-president. Finally, the William Morris agency managed to obtain a one-year contract for him with Capitol Records, a fledgling Hollywood company, provided that Frank forfeit an advance and pay all his own studio costs.
June Hutton and Axel Stordahl persuaded Dave Dexter of Capitol to take a chance on Frank. The producer went to his boss, artists and repertoire chief Alan W. Livingston, and urged him to call Sam Weisbord and draw up a Sinatra contract. “I don’t know if he can come back on records,” Dexter told Livingston, “but I promise his output will be musically good—you won’t hear any barking dogs.” After the contract was signed, Livingston called Frank to discuss his choice of arrangers and the type of orchestra that should accompany him.
“By the way, your producer will be Dave Dexter,” he said. “He’s raring to help you kick off a whole new career.”
“That bastard?” screamed Frank. “I won’t work with him. He’s the jerk who rapped my records in Downbeat. Screw him, who needs him?”
Embarrassed, Livingston went into Dexter’s office to tell him what had happened. Dexter was furious. “Here’s a guy who is dead on his ass,” he said. “He’s been deserted by all but a few of his friends, he’s without a job, and he’s brushed off every day by the record companies, the picture studios, and the radio and television networks. But I believe in his basic talent just as the Stordahls do, and I’m the only guy in the world who’s willing to risk my job in spending $100,000 or more of my company’s money trying to bring the son of a bitch back—and he fluffs me. Next time you talk to him, Alan, tell him to shove it. The feeling is mutual.”
Livingston reassigned Frank to a more placid Voyle Gil-more, who chose Nelson Riddle to be his arranger. Axel Stordahl and June Hutton were dropped by Capitol a few months later.
“Handling Sinatra is like defusing a ticking bomb,” said Dave Dexter in 1976. “I look back now and I’m grateful that the job went to someone else.”
It was Voyle Gilmore’s patience combined with Nelson Riddle’s swinging arrangements that would carry Frank to the top of the music world again, restoring him as the country’s number one pop singer.
The collaboration with the quiet, aloof arranger who had once worked with Tommy Dorsey provided a fine showcase for Frank’s rich voice and emerging new style. The driving basses and swinging reeds of Nelson Riddle supplanted the fluffy lush strings and slow tempi of Axel Stordahl, creating some of the best popular music of the era. Riddle bestowed on Frank a swinging ballad style coupled with a jazz-influenced, finger-snapping spontaneity that characterized his music and came to be known to Sinatra fans as the Capitol Years (1953–1961).
“Working with Frank was always a challenge,” said Riddle. “And there were times when the going got rough. Never a relaxed man, as Nat Cole was, for example, he was a perfectionist who drove himself and everybody around him relentlessly. You always approached him with a feeling of uneasiness, not only because he was demanding and unpredictable, but because his reactions were so violent. But all of these tensions disappeared if you came through for him.
“I suppose, over our eight years of partnership, he threw out an average of about one arrangement a year—not bad going. But there’d never be any anger—after the first time through he’d just say, ‘Let’s skip that one,’ and go straight on to the next. He’d never give out any compliments either. If he said nothing, I’d know he was pleased. He just isn’t built to give out compliments, and I never expected them. He expects your best—just that.
“Frank is an instinctive musician. After a steady partnership, I worked for him off and on until 1978 for a total of twenty-five years. Then there wasn’t much for me to do anymore. I never really had an argument with him, but then I don’t argue. I hold my temper too long, but that’s why I could work with Frank, I guess. He’s very tough on people. For example, if I wasn’t conducting the orchestra to his liking, he’d shove me out of the way and take over. If he asked for diminuendo from the orchestra and didn’t get it immediately, he’d take things into his own hands, and you can believe that they damn well played softer for him than they did for me. When he’d take over conducting like that, I’d feel awful, but I didn’t do it fast enough for him, and I guess I’d have to say I’m in total accordance with that kind of behavior. He showed me how to insist on certain things from an orchestra, so I guess you could say I learned from Frank like he learned from me. But we always did things his way. He knows what’s good for him and for the music.”
The emergence of the long-playing record (LP) in the 1950s was important to a singer like Sinatra, who preferred to build a mood with his music and sustain it with songs that followed one general theme, as he did in albums like Come Fly with Me, Songs for Swingin’ Lovers, and Only the Lonely. The single recording he made with Nelson Riddle of “Young at Heart” became one of the most popular songs in the country in 1954, but Frank’s musical longevity remained in the LP albums he produced. His first Capitol album, Songs for Young Lovers, hit the album charts in 1954, two weeks after “Young at Heart” made its Billboard debut.
Brooding over Ava, Frank barely weighed a hundred and twenty pounds. He did everything he could to endear himself to her, hoping to change her mind about the divorce; he called her repeatedly and sent her all his records. He even had a large coconut cake delivered by Lauren Bacall, who was going to Rome to join her husband, Humphrey Bogart, Ava’s co-star in The Barefoot Contessa.
The touching gesture was not appreciated. “She couldn’t have cared less,” said Lauren Bacall. “She wanted me to put it down on some table she indicated—not a thank-you, nothing.… Her reaction had only to do with Frank—she was clearly through with him, but it wasn’t that way on his side.”
“Betty [Bacall was born Betty Persky] got a little miffed about that cake,” recalled Verità Thompson, Bogart’s hairdresser. “She had felt responsible for her charge and had hand-carried it by taxi and limousine and several thousand miles across the Atlantic by plane to ensure its arrival in one piece. And when she finally presented it to Ava, Ava thanked her but pushed it aside and didn’t even open the box. The action was so uncharacteristic of Ava that we figured it signaled the end of her relationship with Frank.”
It was no secret that Ava had started a love affair with a Spanish bullfighter, Luis Miguel Dominguin, who, after Manolete’s death, was considered the greatest bullfighter in the world and revered in Spain as no movie star had ever been.
But Bogart kidded her about the affair. “I’ll never figure you broads out. Half the world’s female population would throw themselves at Frank’s feet, and here you are flouncing around with guys who wear capes and little ballerina slippers.” Ava arched her eyebrow and told Bogie that he was being nosy.
She had already rented a house in Madrid and was planning to go there for Christmas to be near Dominguin, but at the last minute Frank called, saying he could not get through the holidays without seeing her. Unable to stay away any longer, he flew to Spain to celebrate her birthday. After the Christmas holidays, he accompanied her back to Rome and stayed with her in her apartment.
Ava had been posing in Rome for sculptor Assen Peikow for a classic Greek statue to be used in a cemetery scene, and Frank was bewitched by the white alabaster model of her face and body. At the end of the filming, the movie company gave him the statue, which he later installed in his backyard like a shrine.
Frank returned to Hollywood, admitting that his plans for reconciliation had failed. “We are trying to work out our problems,” he said, “but there are still problems.”
Sinatra remained so tortured by
Ava’s affair with the great matador that years later, when he was approached to play Manolete, he turned the part down, claiming that the American public didn’t like bullfighting. Sammy Davis, Jr., tried to persuade him otherwise, but couldn’t. “Maybe the subject brought back memories he wanted to forget,” Davis said.
Suffering bouts of insomnia and depression, Frank no longer wanted to live alone, so he moved his friend, Jule Styne, into his five-room apartment on Wilshire Boulevard. “He literally moved me in,” said the composer, who had been staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel. When Styne asked for his room key, the desk clerk informed him that Frank Sinatra had come to the hotel, packed all of his belongings, and moved him out. “I stood there wondering what this was all about,” said Styne. “I couldn’t understand Frank’s motives. I knew he was going through hell with Ava and perhaps he just wanted company. I was flattered, of course.”
The nights were the hardest for Frank, and he tried to fill them with dates and nightclubs and card games with the boys. “One time he called us over to play cards, and when we got there he was on the phone to his first wife, Nancy,” said one friend. “Sometimes he needs advice or wants somebody to talk to or maybe he’s just lonely, so he calls Nancy. Well, this time she was mad at him. She wouldn’t talk to him.
“By the time we got the game started, he didn’t even want to play anymore. He went into the den, opened a bottle, and started drinking alone. Okay. So we keep the game going awhile, and then Sammy Cahn gets up and he goes in to try to get Frank to join us. So what does he see?
“There’s Frank drinking a toast to a picture of Ava with a tear running down his face. So Sammy comes back and we start playing again. All of a sudden, we hear a crash. We all get up and run into the den, and there’s Frank. He had taken the picture of Ava, frame and all, and smashed it. Then he had picked up the picture, ripped it into little pieces, and thrown it on the floor. So we tell him, ‘Come on, Frank, you’ve got to forget about all that. Come on and play some cards with us.’ He says, ‘I’m through with her. I never want to see her again. I’m all right. I’ve just been drinking too much.’
“So we go back to the game, and a little while later Sammy goes back to Frank, and there he is on his hands and knees picking up the torn pieces of the picture and trying to put it back together again. Well, he gets all the pieces together except the one for the nose. He becomes frantic looking for it, and we all get down on our hands and knees and try to help him.
“All of a sudden, the doorbell rings. It’s a delivery boy with more liquor. So Frank goes to the back door to let him in, but when he opens it, the missing piece flutters out. Well, Frank is so happy, he takes off his gold wrist watch and gives it to the delivery boy.”
Despite his regular trips to the psychiatrist, Frank’s depression over Ava seemed to deepen. Some friends felt that he enjoyed wallowing in his misery.
“I come home at night and the apartment is all dark,” said Jule Styne. “I yell ‘Frank!’ and he doesn’t answer. I walk into the living room, and it’s like a funeral parlor. There are three pictures of Ava in the room, and the only lights are three dim ones on the pictures. Sitting in front of them is Frank with a bottle of brandy. I say to him, ‘Frank, pull yourself together.’ And he says, ‘Go away. Leave me alone.’ Then all night he paces up and down and says, ‘I can’t sleep, I can’t sleep.’ At four o’clock in the morning, I hear him calling someone on the telephone. It’s his first wife, Nancy. His voice is soft and quiet, and I hear him say, ‘You’re the only one who understands me.’ Then he paces up and down some more and maybe he reads, and he doesn’t fall asleep until the sun’s up. Big deal. You can have it.”
Everywhere Jule went, people asked what it was like living with Frank Sinatra; Jule told them in excruciating detail. Soon Jule’s stories of Frank’s drunken crying jags over Ava, his insomnia, his truculent depressions, and his late-night calls to Nancy got back to Frank. Eight months after Jule had been moved in, he came home to find a note from his host: “I’d appreciate it if you’d move.” He received no further explanation, no apology, no good-bye. So he packed his bags and returned to the Beverly Hills Hotel, wondering what he had done.
“I was told to leave in no uncertain terms,” he said, figuring the reason was Frank’s anger that Styne’s best-selling song, “Three Coins in the Fountain,” which he wrote with Sammy Cahn, had been given to another firm for publication and not to Sinatra’s firm, the Barton Music Corporation. Ironically, the song that Frank sang in the movie became a hit for the Four Aces and not for Frank.
“Why didn’t he get angry with Sammy Cahn too? It was Sammy’s song as much as it was mine,” said Jule.
Frank did not speak to Jule again for five years, and it took Jule that long to figure out that he had been kicked out because of the personal stories he told about Frank’s anguish and grief over Ava. Years later, he admitted that Frank’s request for him to leave was justified.
Ava did not apply for her divorce until 1954, when she established residency in Nevada, and even then she did not proceed, because she insisted that Frank pay the legal costs and he refused. Nothing was made final until 1957. And even after the divorce, Frank still kept talking about his beautiful ex-wife. While making movies he kept her picture taped to his dressing room mirror and told anyone who asked, “I know we could have worked it out. …”
“He never got her out of his system,” said Nick Sevano. “She had a hold over him no other woman ever had.”
His friends and associates agreed. Even the women he dated, most of whom were tall, thin, and brunette, knew that they had been chosen to be surrogates. Most did not mind.
“It was nightmare time after Ava,” said Norma Ebberhart, a beautiful actress with one blue eye and one green eye. “We spent a lot of nights together in Palm Springs trying to chase those nightmares away.”
Frank fell into many arms trying to recover from Ava, and reached out to every woman around him for comfort. He proposed to some but forgot most, running away as soon as they wanted more than he wanted to give.
“He was wonderful and I liked him very much,” said Vanessa Brown, “but I just didn’t want to marry him. He asked me several times, but I think he was looking for someone to take care of him—a basic, old-fashioned girl who would cook and clean and keep house. He needed that. It bothered him very much that I never had any food in the house. He said, ‘Can’t you make some pasta or something?’ ”
He swore to Mona Freeman that he didn’t care if he ever saw Ava again, and he said the same to Judy Garland, whom he dropped abruptly when she wanted to become the next Mrs. Sinatra. Elizabeth Taylor got the same treatment toward the end of her unhappy marriage to Michael Wilding when she found herself pregnant by Frank and wanted to marry him. He arranged an abortion for her instead.
No one woman seemed to be able to wipe away the scars of Ava Gardner.
“He always told me one of the things that fascinated him about Ava was that there was no conquest,” said comedian Shecky Greene. “He couldn’t conquer her. That is where the respect comes. He never got her. He couldn’t control her or dominate her. He’d get drinking and tell me how she always called him a goddamned hoodlum and a gangster. He’d never take that from anyone else but Ava. She was always a challenge to him, and he needs that. It’s a definite part of his personality.”
16
The night of March 25, 1954, Frank Sinatra walked into the Pantages Theater on Hollywood Boulevard with his thirteen-year-old daughter, Nancy, who was wearing a white ermine cape, and Frankie, Jr., ten, sporting a bow tie just like his father’s early trademark. Young Frank’s mimicry of his father had started when he was a year old, and by the time the boy was ten, Sinatra was to comment about his son, “He’s so like me it’s frightening.”
Big Nancy had remained at home with the youngest child, Christina, six. She had cooked a spaghetti dinner during which the children gave their father their own Academy Award, a St. Genesius medal bearing the inscripti
on: “To Daddy—All our love from here to eternity.”
After Columbia Pictures removed Frank from the star line-up of Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster, Deborah Kerr, and Donna Reed, and reduced him to the rank of a supporting player, he became the odds-on favorite to win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Also nominated were Eddie Albert (Roman Holiday); Brandon de Wilde (Snane); Jack Palance (Shane); and Robert Strauss (Stalag 17). Despite such formidable competition, reporters wrote about the awards as if Frank had already won.
“I ran into person after person who said, ‘He’s a so-and-so but I hope he gets it. He was great,’ ” said Louella Parsons. “So if Frank doesn’t step up to get his Oscar, he and the rest of the audience will be surprised numb.”
A week before the awards ceremony, Frank was eating dinner at La Scala in New York with Jimmy Van Heusen, Hank Sanicola, and music publisher Jackie Gale. As Frank left for the airport to fly to Los Angeles, the men raised their glasses. “Bring back that Oscar,” they said. “I’m gettin’ it,” said Frank.
Despite his optimism, Frank made his son and daughter promise not to be disappointed if he didn’t win. “Don’t you be either,” they said in unison.
The film itself won eight Academy Awards, tying the all-time record of Gone with the Wind.
That night Frank sat nervously as Mercedes McCambridge walked on stage to make the presentation for best performance by an actor in a supporting role. When she announced him as the winner, the audience cheered wildly and Little Nancy burst into tears. Frank leaned over to kiss her and grabbed young Frankie’s hand. Then he dashed toward the stage. Hugging the gold statue close to him, he thanked Harry Cohn, Fred Zinnemann, and Buddy Adler. Later, he said he regretted not thanking Montgomery Clift as well, but he never mentioned Ava, who had done as much as anyone to get him the role.