Also this year, 1954, Frank would star as Nathan Detroit—proprietor of “the world’s oldest established permanent floating crap game”—in the film version of the Broadway sensation Guys and Dolls, with its score by Frank Loesser.
Sinatra had originally wanted to play Sky Masterson, the role played by Marlon Brando. In fact, he would later say he believed the film would have been better if the two actors had switched parts (since the Masterson role was more a singing part). In the end, Sinatra and Brando feuded for most of the production; there was no love lost between those two. In fact, Sinatra said of Brando, “He’s the most overrated actor in the world.” And of Sinatra, Brando observed, “When he dies and goes to heaven, the first thing he’ll do will be to find God and yell at him for making him bald.” Of course, the film was a box-office success just the same, and in years to come, Frank would famously record the Masterson song “Luck Be a Lady Tonight.”
In February 1955, Frank recorded one of his best albums, In the Wee Small Hours. Most albums of the time contained a hodgepodge of material—ballads and upbeat songs, with no thematic line. But many of Frank’s greatest albums were “concept albums,” especially at Capitol, where he did more than a dozen of them, including In the Wee Small Hours. This album was a collection of love-gone-bad songs, or, as some writers dubbed them, “Ava Songs.” Music critic Pete Welding noted, “Ava Gardner may have left scars, but as happens so often with great artists, personal pain translated into artistic achievement.”
In August 1955, Frank was featured on the cover of Time magazine. The report called him “just about the hottest item in show business today” and said, “Four months shy of forty, he is well away on a second career that promises to be, if anything, more brilliant than the first.”
At the end of 1955, The Man with the Golden Arm was released. Many consider this to be Frank’s finest moment as an actor. He portrays the tragic Frankie Machine, a heroin-addicted, golden-armed poker dealer and would-be drummer. He wanted the part badly after reading sixty pages of the Nelson Algren book on which the movie is based and started making phone calls. For Frank, the filming was hard work, arduous twelve-hour days.
In the climax of the movie, Frank’s character endures a hair-raising drug withdrawal. Director Otto Preminger thought that the scene would be too difficult for Sinatra and suggested a great many rehearsals and the possibility of retakes. Frank had never been much for rehearsal when working on a film, and retakes were out of the question unless someone else flubbed a line. (He rarely did.) For Sinatra, a sense of immediacy was the key to his success as an actor. He knew just how he wanted to play that difficult scene. “I did some research on my part,” he remembered, “and for about forty seconds, through a peephole, I was allowed to see what happens to people when they try to kick heroin cold turkey—a youngster climbing a wall. It was the most frightening thing I’ve ever seen. I never want to see that again. Never.”
While filming that challenging scene, Frank told Preminger to keep the cameras rolling. “You’ll get what you want,” he said. “Trust me.” Then, with no rehearsal whatsoever, the extremely grueling scene was shot in one take. Besides the scene in From Here to Eternity in which Maggio dies, the drug-withdrawal scene in Golden Arm is Sinatra at his best as an actor. When the film was finally released, ticket buyers and critics alike praised his work. Arthur Knight in the Saturday Review summed it up best when he wrote that Sinatra’s performance was “virtuoso.”
Frank’s work in The Man with the Golden Arm would earn him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. Though he didn’t win the Oscar (Ernest Borgnine did, for Marty), the film remains a testament to his capabilities as an actor.
In December 1955, Frank turned forty years old, a milestone in any person’s life. His work, particularly his recordings, suggested an artist who had finally matured. His voice had only gotten better, enriched and emboldened by time and experience. “If the song is a lament at the loss of love,” he said at this time, “I get an ache in my gut, I feel the loss myself, and I cry out the loneliness, the hurt, and the pain that I feel. I know what the cat who wrote the song is trying to say. I’ve been there and back. I guess the audience feels it along with me.”
* * *
Frank started 1956 back in the recording studio cutting the Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! album with Nelson Riddle. This extremely popular album, considered his finest by some critics, contains what many Sinatra fans feel is the greatest single recording of his entire career, his rendition of Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” It took twenty-two takes to get the orchestration right.
Ironically, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” was added to Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! at the last minute. Frank telephoned Nelson Riddle at his home in Malibu in the middle of the night to tell him that they needed a few more tunes for the album. The next day, on the way to the studio, Riddle scored “Skin” in the backseat of his car while his wife drove. The arrangement was so superb that after the musicians rehearsed it for the first time in the studio, they gave Riddle a standing ovation. (Frank and Nelson rerecorded the song for Reprise in April 1963.)
Whether working with Nelson Riddle, Billy May, or Gordon Jenkins, Sinatra—who, as earlier stated, couldn’t read music—always surrounded himself with the best of everything in the studio: arrangers, producers, musicians, engineers. Not only was he talented in his own right, but he learned early on in his career something many artists of his stature never figure out: Other people have imagination and vision, too. What’s fascinating, though, is that despite the input of various composers, lyricists, arrangers, band members, and all of the other recording personnel, Sinatra’s records still come across as intensely personal statements.
Also in January 1956, Frank formed a film production company, Kent Productions, which would develop his own movie projects. (The Sinatra western Johnny Concho, in which he played the cowardly brother of a famous gunman, who of course redeems himself by the end of the film, would be the first film produced by Frank for the new company.)
Later in the year, Frank would star in MGM’s musical comedy High Society, a successful remake of The Philadelphia Story (1940). Sixteen years after The Philadelphia Story, High Society arrived in Technicolor and with music. Grace Kelly, in her last movie role, is the society girl, Bing Crosby is her ex-husband, and Frank is the reporter. Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong helps out with the tunes. Cole Porter’s score includes “You’re Sensational,” “True Love,” and “Well, Did You Evah?”
At the end of April, Frank found himself in Spain for four months filming The Pride and the Passion with Cary Grant and Sophia Loren. The convoluted plot had something to do with the moving of a giant cannon across war-torn Spain by a band of Spanish resistance fighters.
Producer and director Stanley Kramer said of Sinatra, “He worked hard and insisted on doing a lot of things you’d normally expect a star would want a double to perform. He ran through explosions and fires. He often started scenes as though he didn’t quite know what was going on. It seemed like a palpable case of lack of preparedness, but after a couple of minutes he was going like a high-precision machine.”
Pack Master
In 1956, the legendary Rat Pack was born when the famous actor Humphrey Bogart organized a tight-knit group of celebrity friends, which he and his wife, Betty—more famously known by her stage name, Lauren Bacall—dubbed the Rat Pack. Frank Sinatra, a close friend of Bogart’s, was named “Pack Master.” The rest of this contingent included Dean Martin; Peter Lawford; Sammy Davis Jr.; Judy Garland and her husband, Sid Luft; David Niven and his wife, Hjordis; and a few other stars who lived in the ritzy Holmby Hills area of Los Angeles. It was an informal social group of antiestablishment celebrities who enjoyed blowing off steam by drinking, carousing, and getting into mischief together. “We admire ourselves and we don’t care for anyone else,” Bogart said of the Rat Pack jokingly. He said that they hated “squares.” Certainly anyone they found to be pretentious would be met with their
wrath.
For instance, Irving “Swifty” Lazar—the famous literary agent and the so-called recording secretary of the Pack—once bought a Rolls-Royce and offered a ride one evening to Frank, Dean, and Judy. Proud of the automobile and its pristine state, he couldn’t seem to stop bragging about it. As Swifty drove the stars about town, they busied themselves with their own little project: They built a bonfire in the backseat. It would take years for Lazar to forgive them. Another example: One time, Frank grew bored with Swifty’s constant bragging about his expensive wardrobe. While Swifty was gone from his home, Frank had the door to his clothes closet bricked up and then stuccoed over and painted the same color as the rest of the walls in the room.
The members of the Rat Pack admired Frank’s sense of style and his extravagant lifestyle. They marveled over his collection of one hundred suits and matching pairs of shoes. They loved the fact that he carried only hundred-dollar bills; anything smaller didn’t matter in Sinatra’s world. Moreover, his confounding sense of humor was the subject of fascination. For instance, a friend once wired him for money, saying he needed to “bail out an overdue hotel bill.” Frank sent him a parachute and $30,000—in fake money. (But then the next day he paid the man’s hotel tab.)
The way he treated reporters he detested was also the subject of great interest among his peers. For instance, after she wrote a sensational six-part exposé about him in the Journal-American, called “The Real Frank Sinatra Story,” Frank sent the Hearst columnist and TV personality Dorothy Kilgallen a full-size marble tombstone (weighing about a ton) with her name engraved upon it. Later he saw her in a restaurant wearing a pair of sunglasses. He walked over to her table and dropped a dollar bill into her cup of coffee. “I always knew you were blind,” he retorted.
For his entire life, Frank would wage battle with much of the press corps. “I feel that an entertainer has a right to his privacy that is as inviolate as any other person’s,” he once said, maybe somewhat naively. “Otherwise it means that a ‘public figure’ is a second-class citizen in that he is denied rights which others enjoy.” When he felt unfairly criticized, Frank could take his obsession with payback to great lengths, as he did when he began insulting Kilgallen during his performances:
“That broad, she’s got a face like a chipmunk.”
“That broad, her profile looks like one of my car keys.”
“That broad, she’s a chinless wonder.”
Frank’s vendetta against Kilgallen went on for years, much to the amusement of the other Rat Packers. No matter what she wrote about him, even if it was upbeat, he would never let up. “I began to wish he had never existed on the planet,” she would later say. “He was the devil incarnate. It wasn’t his talent that astounded me. It was his amazing capacity for pure, unadulterated cruelty.”
While he could dish it out, Frank usually couldn’t take it. He had a great sense of humor, but not when it came to his alleged ties to the mob. Comics who made jokes about that were usually excised from his life, such as Shecky Greene, who said, “Frank Sinatra saved my life. His goons were beating me up and he said, ‘Enough!’” It was a funny gag, but Greene was no longer a friend after he delivered it.
Lauren “Betty” Bacall
One of the men in show business for whom Frank Sinatra had the greatest admiration and respect was Humphrey Bogart. “Bogie,” at fifty-six years of age, was considered by many to be the elder statesman of Hollywood actors. He and Frank had long, fascinating conversations over the years about everything from moviemaking to art to books; they had a great deal in common. Bogie considered Sinatra a close friend, and the reverse was certainly true; Frank once sent a workman to the Bogart home and had an expensive hi-fi system installed without even telling Bogart and his fourth wife, Lauren Bacall (born Betty Joan Perske and always referred to as Betty in her private life). “Frank’s a hell of a guy,” Bogie said. “If he could only stay away from the broads and devote some time to develop himself as an actor, he’d be one of the best in the business.”
In February 1956, when Humphrey Bogart was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus, Frank was a constant and reassuring companion. Unfortunately, Bogie would have less than a year to live.
During this dreadful time, Betty Bacall—who was thirty-one at the time—began to cry on Frank’s shoulder. He would be there for her as a trusted friend and confidant during Bogie’s and her darkest days. Ethel Aniston was an assistant of Lauren Bacall’s at the time. She says she was hired by Sinatra to “keep an eye on Mrs. Bogart, make sure she got her rest, took certain medications.” Aniston did not live in the Bogart home at 2707 Benedict Canyon Drive in Los Angeles but rather “popped in and out just to make sure Mrs. Bogart was all right and then report everything I noted back to Mr. Sinatra, who cared deeply about them both.” She was paid $175 a week by Sinatra.
In fact, Betty was devastated by Bogie’s illness. The radiation, the sicknesses and gradual and merciless debilitation of her once-robust husband was too much for her to take. “She would most certainly have cracked up if she had to be alone to deal with it,” said Aniston. “She was unprepared for this kind of terrible thing.”
“I could not think in terms of Bogie not living,” Betty Bacall would later recall. “It was just totally unacceptable.”
On January 14, 1957, three weeks after his fifty-seventh birthday, Humphrey Bogart passed away. Frank, who was performing at the Copacabana in New York at the time, canceled five shows, saying he was too devastated to perform. Jerry Lewis substituted for him for some performances, Sammy Davis for others. Frank did not, however, attend the funeral. That wasn’t unusual for him; he often didn’t attend the funerals of people for whom he had great affection, saying he preferred to remember his friends as being surrounded by laughter rather than tears.
Of course, Betty was devastated and felt she now had little to nothing to look forward to. “I wanted to wake up smiling again,” she said. “I hated feeling that my life was over at thirty-two.”
Now newly widowed and with two small children to raise, Betty began to view Frank as a romantic partner, attending film premieres, dinners, and other Hollywood functions with him by her side. “At all of his small dinner parties, I was his hostess,” she would later remember. “People were watching with interest. It seemed to everyone that we were crazy about each other, that we were a great pair.”
Bacall fell hard for Sinatra, but Frank was more tentative with his emotions. To her credit, Betty was someone who would never back off from a good fight, and—as we have seen—Frank never shied away from fireworks now and again in a relationship. Even though Betty would insist she wasn’t a confrontational person, she actually loved to be challenged, especially by strong men. It excited her. Therefore, she and Frank fought about everything from the weather to her clothes, his choice of friends, and her spending habits.
They also bickered about her smoking. Frank—a chain-smoker himself—hated it when his women smoked. “Women who smoke from the moment they open their eyes until they put out the light at night—that drives me batty,” he said. “It’s unfeminine and dangerous—burn up the whole damn house, you know?”
And his flirting, not to mention the fact that he could walk into a room and have any woman he wanted, was a constant source of irritation to Betty. “I am a star,” she told him, according to Ethel Aniston. “And let me tell you something, Frank Sinatra, if that’s not good enough for you, then screw you.” Obviously, she had a lot in common with Ava, if only in terms of the way she expressed herself, which probably only served to enhance her in Frank’s eyes.
Which Is the Real Dad?
By January 1957, Frank’s children were growing up. Nancy would be seventeen that year, Frank Jr. thirteen, and Tina nine. When he would perform in Los Angeles, they were old enough now to go and watch the show. As they would sit in the front row they’d be all but swept away by the adulation of his audience as he sang his songs and graciously accepted their applause and standing ovations. The Sina
tra siblings learned at an early age that they had no choice but to share him with the world.
“We saw that people loved him as much as we did, or at least it felt that way to us,” Nancy recalled. “I would stare at him, my eyes not blinking, taking it all in—the suit, the way he stood, the music, the lights—all of it just so thrilling to me in the front row. The applause behind me would be deafening and I would turn around and look at the audience and see their faces. I would think, ‘That’s my daddy up there.’ I would burst with pride in those moments,” she would say, “we all would. But still there was something a little sad about it, or maybe unsettling would be a better word. We didn’t want to share our father with these strangers. We wanted him all to ourselves, but we knew that was never going to happen. So there was a sense of disappointment attached to the experience.”
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