Sinatra

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  When Julie learned the truth, she contacted the Sinatras with her revelation.

  “Tina Sinatra fired the first shot with a ‘cease and desist’ order, essentially telling me to buzz off,” Julie recalled. This seems understandable. One can only imagine what went through Tina’s mind when a woman claiming to be Frank’s illegitimate child suddenly surfaced, given all of the Sturm und Drang of recent times. She wasn’t eager to welcome a stranger into the fold, someone who had no idea what it truly meant to be a Sinatra daughter, especially after what they had gone through with Bobby Marx’s possible adoption. Moreover, how could she even be sure Julie wasn’t a fraud? “That left me with no other option,” Julie said, “but to go to court.”

  A lengthy and very contentious legal battle would ensue after Frank’s eventual death. Though the Sinatras steadfastly refused to allow any DNA testing, there must have been enough evidence to convince them that Julie was telling the truth, because they agreed that Julie had the legal right to use the name Julie Sinatra, and they also provided her with a six-figure settlement.

  Today, Julie Sinatra believes that Frank Sinatra never knew he was her father.

  Duets

  In 1993, Frank Sinatra would find himself back on top of the charts with his first studio album in ten years, Duets. With Phil Ramone producing and Hank Cattaneo coproducing, thirteen of Sinatra’s better-known songs were recorded as duets with popular singers of the day. The repertoire included “I’ve Got the World on a String” (with Liza Minnelli), “New York, New York” (with Tony Bennett), “Witchcraft” (with Anita Baker), and “I’ve Got a Crush on You” (with Barbra Streisand).

  “There were a lot of people who didn’t believe it could be done and that he would change his mind or walk away from it,” said producer Phil Ramone. “I mean, right until the minute before he actually sang, he said to me, ‘This better work.’ And I said, ‘It’s gonna work.’ And he said ‘It’d better work.’ I thought to myself, ‘Oh, okay. I got it. The pressure’s here. We’d better make it work.’ ”

  During the sessions at Capitol in Hollywood, Sinatra sounded surprisingly strong and compelling for a man his age. As one music journalist asked, “Is Sinatra half the singer he was in 1942 or 1956? Actually, he’s about three-fifths the singer he was—but that still makes him about twice the singer anyone else is.”

  Although the album appealed to a wide audience—and as a result of its success, some of Sinatra’s most enthusiastic supporters were now under thirty—longtime Sinatra aficionados were divided in their opinions of the Duets recording. Was this really a Frank Sinatra album? Or was this just studio wizardry? One might have been able to overlook the fact that Frank was never in the studio with any of his duet partners had it not been so well publicized that the singers never had any real contact with him. Either they recorded their parts later in the same studio or actually phoned in their parts using a digital system that had been developed by George Lucas’s Skywalker Sound. This fact did not enhance the listening experience for many fans and critics. For instance, it sounded odd to hear artists like Aretha Franklin and Barbra Streisand mention Frank’s name in the middle of their songs (“What Now My Love” and “I’ve Got a Crush on You,” respectively), knowing that they were standing alone at a microphone in a darkened recording studio just listening to his vocal stylings on their headphones.

  However it was constructed, though, the album was still a big success, selling millions of copies and soaring to the number one spot on the Billboard chart. It was Sinatra’s most successful album ever. Teaming Sinatra with more contemporary artists had been an inspired idea, because it gave the project a broad commercial appeal.

  A follow-up album, Duets II, was issued a year later, using the same technology, with duets on songs such as “Embraceable You” (Lena Horne), “Where or When” (Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé), and “Luck Be a Lady” (Chrissie Hynde). For many, this was a much less engaging package than its predecessor. The only reason to purchase Duets II was to hear the duet with Frank Jr. on “My Kind of Town.” It’s a great and memorable performance by the Sinatra men, especially if the listener is aware of their tortured history.

  As with the first album, Duets II received generally favorable reviews and sold millions of copies.

  One More for the Road

  In 1994, Frank Sinatra was awarded a Legend Award for Lifetime Achievement at the Grammy Awards presentation at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. Pop group U2’s leader, Bono (who had appeared on the Duets album on “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” and in a video with Frank for the song), presented the award after introducing Frank.

  As Frank appeared onstage to a standing ovation, he paused for a long moment, taking in the young faces looking back at him. He then spoke thoughtfully and introspectively about New Yorkers, his love for Barbara, the backstage booze, about not being asked to perform. In truth, he was rambling. But this was his special night; he was overwhelmed by his own strong emotions at being so honored. After about three minutes, someone—widely rumored to be Sinatra’s press agent, Susan Reynolds—decided to pull the plug on him.

  Pierre Cossette, executive producer of the broadcast, later said, “Sinatra’s people were saying, ‘Get him off, get him off now. He can’t remember what he was going to say.’ ”

  Thus, without warning, the band began to play and Frank was simply forced to stop speaking. Understandably, his PR woman was trying to protect his image. No one wanted him to appear old and confused. To the viewing audience, however, what happened was insulting and disrespectful.

  Cut off in midsentence? Frank Sinatra?

  There was a time in the not so distant past when no one—let alone someone on his own payroll—would have dared cut off “the Chairman of the Board.” But according to a longtime associate, Frank was ready to retire after the Grammy incident. “He’s too smart. He knew that he wasn’t 100 percent that night. He knew that he couldn’t do it anymore. He said, ‘I’m gettin’ out while the gettin’ is good.’ ” He would call it quits when the tour ended.

  Tina had already made the tough decision to stop going to her father’s performances. She simply couldn’t take it. She didn’t want to hurt him, but watching him at half—sometimes a quarter—of his former glory was just too emotionally draining. It would take her days to get over each show.

  A week after the Grammys, on March 6, a frightening moment occurred onstage. It happened when he was at the Mosque in Richmond, Virginia. Halfway through an uncertain delivery of “My Way,” he began to feel dizzy. During the song, he turned to Frank Jr. to ask for a chair. Then he noticed a stool behind him and began to sit down. He touched the corner of the stool before slowly sinking to the floor, hitting the stage with a thud. The microphone fell from his hand and made a loud noise when it hit the floor. An audible gasp came from the stunned audience of thirty-seven hundred. His handlers were about to carry him out when he came to after maybe ten minutes. Someone brought out a wheelchair, and he got in it. As he was being wheeled offstage, Frank waved to the audience and blew them a kiss to let his fans know he was all right.

  After a three-hour stay at the hospital, his doctors wanted to keep him for observation, but he vetoed that notion. Instead, he flew back to Palm Springs in a private plane. Doctors diagnosed that the collapse was probably the result of “overheating,” and he may also have been slightly dehydrated after perspiring heavily throughout the performance. Barbara was upset with herself; she felt that she should have taken the initiative to go out on the road with him, just in case there was a problem.

  In just a couple of weeks, though, Frank was back onstage. However, from this point on, nothing would ever be quite the same. There was an almost palpable sense of fear among the musicians onstage and his audiences that what had happened in Virginia might happen again, and with more serious consequences.

  He had a great many more contracted dates, almost a year’s worth, but after they were fulfilled, it would all be over.

  “Th
is may be the last time we will be together,” Frank told an audience of more than five thousand at Radio City Music Hall in April 1994. Indeed, he would continue to perform throughout the rest of 1994, fulfilling commitments all the way up to his seventy-ninth birthday in December. Then, on Saturday, February 25, 1995, he gave what would turn out to be his final performance at Marriott’s Desert Springs Resort and Spa for a private party of about twelve hundred on the last day of the Frank Sinatra Desert Classic golf tournament.

  For five songs, Frank was young again. First, he did “I’ve Got the World on a String,” “Fly Me to the Moon,” and then “Where or When,” which writer Jonathan Schwartz reported was “performed by a forty-five-year-old man. It is everything Sinatra wishes to convey. It is a ballad with tempo that gathers rhythmic steam and explodes at its conclusion. Its last long line, the ‘where or when’ is sustained to the last drop of the high E-flat, not repeated for lack of breath.” Then “My Kind of Town”—his voice young and agile—and a standing ovation.

  “You mean it’s time to go home,” Frank said, laughing, as the applause died down.

  Ironically, the encore he chose was “The Best Is Yet to Come.” His road manager, Tony Oppedisano, said, “It was a jubilant evening, reaching for notes and holding them. It was a phenomenal, phenomenal show. He was fantastic and made mincemeat out of the critics.”

  “When are you going to learn to swing?” Barbara jokingly asked him as they entered the limousine that whisked them from the Marriott back to the Palm Springs compound.

  After that show, Sinatra was elated. That youthful part of him that had always wanted more, more, more, now wanted . . . even more. He felt that the audience’s reaction to his performance was so enthusiastic and that he was in such excellent voice for a man his age that surely he had another couple of years left in him. “I ain’t quittin’,” he announced. “Just takin’ some time off, that’s all.”

  The Sinatra family humored him. Frank Jr. agreed that, following a short rest, he and the old man would go back out again “and kick some ass.” However, everyone knew that this was not meant to be.

  It was over.

  Sinatra: Eighty Years—Her Way?

  May you live to be one hundred and the last voice you hear be mine,” Frank Sinatra used to say at the end of some of his performances. On December 12, 1995, he turned eighty. He had finally reconciled himself to the fact that he would no longer be performing. “I’ll never sing again in public,” he told Larry King, “because those days are just gone. But I’m very, very happy.”

  About a month prior to his birthday, a television special was taped at the Shrine Auditorium to celebrate the event. Called Sinatra: 80 Years My Way, it had been Barbara Sinatra’s and producer and longtime family friend George Schlatter’s idea, the proceeds of which would go to AIDS Project Los Angeles and the Barbara Sinatra Children’s Center. Frank wanted nothing to do with it. In fact, when he had attended a similar tribute to Sammy Davis, he was said to have told Eliot Weisman, “Don’t you ever do this kind of bullshit tribute thing for me.”

  Barbara was determined that her husband should participate in the affair, even though what he really wanted was to go off with his pallies on his eightieth birthday and get drunk. Nancy, Tina, and Frank Jr. also wanted nothing to do with the show and refused to participate in it. According to Tina, Frank even telephoned her and instructed her to get him out of the commitment. She said she would try, but in the end she faced too much opposition.

  A maid who worked in Sinatra’s home from time to time remembered, “Mr. and Mrs. Sinatra had many arguments about the TV show. He didn’t want to go; he thought it would be an embarrassment. During one battle about it, he took a plate and smashed it against a wall. He said, ‘Goddamn it, Barbara. I’m not going. Come on! You know I hate this kind of thing. You go. You have a good time. Tell everyone I said, ‘Thanks,’ but I was too sick to show up.’ Then he asked the cook to open a can of pork and beans for him.”

  The night before the taping, Barbara encouraged Frank to have dinner with Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan, who were scheduled to participate in the event; they came to the house and stayed about two hours. Barbara had reasoned that if Frank saw how excited younger entertainers would be in his presence, he would become enthused about the show. Steve and Eydie were also present for what had to have been a most interesting dinner party. It was a great success. Frank, Bruce, and Bob got wasted on Jack Daniel’s. Frank had a wonderful time with his new friends. After a dessert of cheesecake with raspberries, the singers gathered around the piano and sang such songs as “All or Nothing at All” and “It Had to Be You” while Sinatra watched, amused and bleary-eyed. “What great guys,” Frank said of Springsteen and Dylan. “We should have those two over more often.”

  Unfortunately, Frank’s instincts about the television special Sinatra: 80 Years My Way, which aired on December 14, 1995, were astute. If not for Steve and Eydie, Vic Damone, and Tony Bennett, the evening would have been a total loss. At the end of the show, during the finale, Frank went up onto the stage from the audience to sing the last two notes of “Theme from New York, New York” with a disparate array of performers, some of them colleagues, others pop stars and rock and rollers.

  Part Fourteen

  AND NOW THE END IS NEAR . . .

  Eightieth Birthday Family Showdown

  Another family battle between the Sinatra daughters and their stepmother, Barbara, would be waged in mid-December 1995. It was then that Barbara agreed to a dinner at the Beverly Hills home television producer George Schlatter shared with his wife, Jolene, on Frank’s birthday, December 12. The Schlatters would be present, as would the Kirk Douglases and the Gregory Pecks. Frank told Barbara that he didn’t want to celebrate the birthday in a big way. So when the Schlatters extended the invitation to a small gathering, Barbara accepted.

  The problem was that Nancy and Tina had expected the family to celebrate the milestone birthday with a quiet family dinner either at Frank and Barbara’s home, at Nancy’s home, or at a restaurant. It would be attended by the Sinatra daughters, Frank Jr., Nancy Sr., and Nancy’s two daughters. (Tina has no children. Frank Jr. has a son.) In fact, Tina recalled that she and Barbara had agreed to this arrangement many months earlier in July, and that the only detail left to work out was the specific location. Therefore, when she found out that Barbara had accepted the Schlatters’ invitation, Tina was quite upset.

  Perhaps Barbara was disappointed in the Sinatra daughters for not being fully supportive of the birthday television broadcast and accepted the invitation as retaliation. However, there was also a disagreement at the time concerning the rerelease of certain Sinatra songs.

  As it happened, Nancy and Tina were primarily responsible for decisions on the reissuing of their father’s music on Columbia, Capitol, and Reprise. Sometimes they reluctantly agreed to allow previously unreleased material to be issued, but both were adamantly opposed to the release of alternate takes of Sinatra sessions. Earlier in 1995, Capitol released Live in Concert, a collection of performances by Frank of standards such as “My Way,” and “New York, New York,” which sold around three hundred thousand copies. The Sinatra children held the rights to the original recordings; their father had signed those over to them and had promised not to rerecord them. The siblings felt it was a conflict for Frank to then allow a release of their live versions—in which, ostensibly, they would not participate financially. (It probably didn’t help that Frank dedicated the album to Barbara, “the love of my life.”) Frank’s offspring—though it’s not clear that Frank Jr. was involved—discussed with their longtime lawyer, Robert Finkelstein, the notion of taking legal action not only against Capitol but against Frank, too. “It was in our best interest then, as always, to protect the catalog,” Tina later confirmed. “Yes, it put Dad on notice; he was the artist who signed the agreements.”

  It’s unlikely, given everything that was already going on at this time, that the Sinatra children would have actually
litigated against their own father. Due to the situation of late, some speculated that perhaps they were actually targeting Barbara since she too would be profiting from royalties generated by these rerecordings. However, the fact that they even sought to put Frank “on notice” speaks volumes about the tension in the air.

  As for the birthday celebration, Tina learned of Barbara’s intentions from Frank’s secretary, Dorothy Uhlemann. Dorothy said that Barbara told her that since she hadn’t heard back from Tina or Nancy, she had accepted the Schlatters’ invitation for December 12. The daughters were free, then, to celebrate with their father the next day. “So, they’ll see you on the thirteenth,” a very cheery Dorothy said, probably trying to get off the line as quickly as possible.

  This didn’t make sense. Besides the fact that Tina thought she and Barbara had an agreement, George and Jolene Schlatter were longtime friends of hers, Nancy’s, and Frank Jr.’s. It made no sense that they would not include them on the guest list for any dinner celebrating Frank’s eightieth—unless they were asked not to. The fact that attorney Eliot Weisman and his wife, Maria, were also invited just made things worse.

  George and his elegant wife, the former actress Jolene Brand Schlatter, were very familiar with the way people trafficked in Sinatra’s world, and they both knew it was best to stay out of the line of fire. They’d been married since the mid-1950s and had been friends of Frank’s for decades. “First of all, you can’t take sides when it comes to Frank,” George Schlatter said in 1999. “There are a lot of people in his life, and all of them are not only vying for his attention but also to be in his favor. Sometimes people get shoved out of the way by accident, and sometimes not so accidentally. Oftentimes people crash into each other and force each other out of the picture, and Frank doesn’t even know it’s happened until it’s too late. Other times he pushes them out himself, and that, of course, has been his prerogative. My philosophy has been to just be fair and loyal to Sinatra, and to then let everyone else find their own way. In other words, I stay out of it. Especially the family interaction, I stay out of.”