Who the Hell's in It

by Peter Bogdanovich

  “I thought it was about time!” Sinatra shouted over the tumult of the studio audience, which had risen to its feet and stood applauding for several long minutes as Jerry and Dean embraced. Finally, when they looked at each other, Sinatra stood between them, beaming, while Jerry could be seen (though not heard over the noise) saying to Frank, “You son of a bitch.” Laughing, Sinatra got each of them a microphone, and after they exchanged a couple of lines, Martin seemed to cue Frank that he wanted out of the moment. Sinatra stepped forward quickly and sent Jerry away with exaggerated majesty so that he and Dean could sing a duet.

  Whatever Sinatra may have felt was covered by a kind of magnanimous, even paternal, amusement. With no attempt to compete, he played straight for Martin and had a good time. Was he remembering that precisely when Dean and Jerry were on their first giddy waves of popularity, between 1948 and 1953, he had toppled to the bottom? When those swooning bobby-soxers of the war years had stopped following him, and he was counted out? When the Sinatra craze—a tumult we would see repeated for Elvis Presley and then for the Beatles, with Frank’s the first of its kind and the most fervent—was over?

  But, of course, that end had been only the beginning. The Oscar came, the fabled comeback began. Suddenly, there were two or three Sinatra movies every year (five released in 1955, his film peak), and the new, remarkably mellow theme albums for Capitol—before him, LPs had been only collections of singles—not only revolutionized the recording industry, but became the most conspicuous and popular alternative to rock and roll throughout the fifties and early sixties. Brilliantly conceived and executed mood pieces, most of the albums became classics, from “quarter-to-three” torch songs for In the Wee Small Hours (with an unheard-of sixteen songs) or Only the Lonely, to swinging make-out entertainments like Come Fly with Me or Nice ‘n’ Easy. All of these Capitol albums would remain in print and continue to sell until his death—and will, long after. Toward the end of the fifties, Dean Martin, having gone solo, became one of the mainstays of Sinatra’s Rat Pack of friends, always playing the Joker, their informal slogan echoing the late founder Bogart’s favorite maxim: “The whole world is three drinks behind and it’s high time it caught up.”

  Frank Sinatra as Pvt. Maggio, with Montgomery Clift (who helped Sinatra with a little coaching), in the picture that began Sinatra’s legendary comeback, From Here to Eternity (1953), winning him the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.

  When Sinatra retired in 1971, no one quite knew why—he was only fifty-five. Maybe he had discovered that you can have everything you ever wanted, even your own record company (Reprise, as of 1961), and still not be happy. On the other hand, maybe he was just trying to attract attention while he took a few years off. His last movies had not been very good or very successful. Of the seventeen starring roles he had done in the preceding decade, only three or four were even worthy of mention: besides Frankenheimer’s and Richard Condon’s engrossing The Manchurian Candidate (which Sinatra also produced), there was the ultimate, though quickly dated, Rat Pack vehicle, Ocean’s Eleven (1960), prosaically directed by Lewis Milestone; the uneasy Robert Aldrich Western, 4 for Texas (1963); and Mark Robson’s reasonably effective World War II film, Von Ryan’s Express (1965), in which Sinatra is extremely personable in the title role. His recordings for Reprise, though profitable and sometimes quite adventurous (like Watertown, a sort of pop opera, or the Antonio Jobim albums), and occasionally on a level with the fifties classics (like Moonlight Sinatra), never quite achieved the popularity of the Capitol catalog. Maybe Frank also remembered that exits and entrances are often the most rewarding parts of any performance.

  Yet, by 1971, Sinatra seemed to have completely lost what little interest he ever had in pictures, which is not to say that he hadn’t given some deeply resonant performances: I’m thinking especially of his complex portrait of a failed writer in Minnelli’s Some Came Running—excellently adapted from another James Jones novel—in which Dean Martin also was superb and Shirley MacLaine easily broke your heart in perhaps her greatest performance. As a portrait of a troubled American artist in his provincial hometown, this is one of the last important films of Hollywood’s golden age, and probably Sinatra’s most subtle, layered performance. The picture also was a favorite of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard making a relevant and textured reference to the Minnelli movie in his masterfully ambiguous Brigitte Bardot picture, Contempt (1963). Overall, Some Came Running is probably Sinatra’s best movie.

  Still, in all the unprecedented outpouring of tributes to, reminiscences of, and commentaries on Sinatra after he died (and the best published was Pete Hamill’s lovely Why Sinatra Matters)—though everyone naturally mentioned From Here to Eternity—hardly anybody singled out Some Came Running for special attention, though his role in the second was far more complicated and challenging, and he is better in it. Very convincingly he plays a sometime writer—clearly Jones’ surrogate—who after World War II returns to his Indiana hometown, where he deals with the intensely conventional middle-class hypocrisy of his brother (Arthur Kennedy); falls in love with a schoolteacher (Martha Hyer) who can explain artists to students but can’t understand the one she sleeps with; has an off-and-on affair with an ex-hooker (MacLaine); and becomes fast friends with a local gambler-boozer-playboy (Martin, in the first and best of the numerous films he and Frank would do together).

  Knowing that Sinatra as a serious singer always did his recordings with full orchestra, singing each song straight through, normally requiring only one or two takes, Minnelli wisely staged nearly all the most important scenes in Some Came Running in single continuous shots. The players really had to be good to work in this way, and they all were. In fact, Sinatra has the least showy role, but its central weight and complexity had to be dead-on or the whole thing would have collapsed, and as an actor Sinatra has rarely been as focused or committed as he is to the uneasy, never-black-and-white truth of the character he played. His commanding presence here totally suspends disbelief, and carries with it a troubled unspoken inner gravity which only a star-actor can bring with such seeming effortlessness.

  Sinatra also did a shattering job as a heroin addict in Preminger’s groundbreaking, Production Code–busting The Man with the Golden Arm. Though some of the fake Chicago sets and Eleanor Parker’s overheated acting hurt its effectiveness today, Sinatra’s work has enduring integrity and the pain he conveys remains palpable. As it does in his often searing impression of alcoholic comedian Joe E. Lewis in The Joker Is Wild, overpolitely directed by Charles Vidor. He makes a perfect Joey in the otherwise watered-down, weakly made Pal Joey, though his rendition of “The Lady Is a Tramp” could not be improved upon. Nor could his honest, touching job as a once-brainwashed returning Korean War veteran in The Manchurian Candidate, or his sadly tarnished modern-day Capra anti-hero in the ambiguous A Hole in the Head (in which, unfortunately, Eddie Hodges’ performance and the “High Hopes” song are now both awfully hard to take).

  Yet it was about his singing that Sinatra always appeared to be most serious, in person and on records. Will Friedwald’s amazingly detailed and fascinating 1995 book about Sinatra’s recordings (Sinatra! The Song Is You—subtitled, more to the point, A Singer’s Art) reveals at length how closely Frank was involved in every stage of these productions, no matter who the arrangers or producers were. Though Friedwald ranks Nelson Riddle’s arrangements the best fit Sinatra ever had—and I doubt anyone could seriously disagree—quality and musicianship were hallmarks throughout the bulk of this singer’s art. The personal hands-on touch is obvious, for example, in Sinatra & Company, his last album before the temporary retirement. One side featured a group of complicated Jobim songs, beautifully rendered; on the other were several new popular tunes, none of them to become standards but all evocatively performed. One selection, “Lady Day,” was an homage to Billie Holiday, from whom Sinatra certainly had learned some important things not only about phrasing but about acting a song, and it comes as close as a popular song ca
n to an operatic Italian aria—Sinatra’s other big musical heritage—with emotional resonance. Years later, when I mentioned the Italian opera connection, he nodded, pleased at the comment. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s what we had in mind.”

  Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin during a break in the filming of their first and finest picture together, Some Came Running (1958). Sinatra was not inherently funny, while Martin was, which delighted Frank and encouraged Dean.

  Usually, Sinatra would knock off three or four, sometimes five, songs in a single recording session. But on “Lady Day,” before being satisfied, he did the song on several dates, months apart, with three different arrangements. There is an asterisk next to this one title on the album, and down below it’s explained by the footnote: “Produced by Frank Sinatra,” a credit he rarely ever took. The song is placed as the last cut on side two so as to stand as his own unofficial farewell, too. He prepares you for it with the previous song—a tough, jaunty (not very appealingly arranged) rendition of “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane” that concludes with a melancholy ad-lib coda:

  Don’t know when I’ll be back again—

  Oh, babe, I hate to go …

  Then, at the close of “Lady Day,” with the whole orchestra playing the melody-line behind him so that his voice seems to be riding a series of soaring ocean waves—in opera it’s called sono voce (one voice)—Sinatra took his leave:

  And then the evening comes,

  And now she doesn’t cry.

  And it’s too late to say—good-bye …

  As it turned out, of course, three years later he returned. But the Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back TV special flopped. Performing before a group of Hollywood names in a small studio, Sinatra seemed ill at ease and out of shape. Several months after that, however, he came back with the proper panache. Broadcast live over national TV—the same way he would stage that reunion of the two other most popular entertainers of his generation—Sinatra appeared in a boxing ring at Madison Square Garden and, before twenty thousand delirious fans, he requested another chance—his way, in a song: Though he had told them he was “leaving,” he “just couldn’t say goodbye.” This would simply be “self-deceiving …”

  Let me try again!

  Who could deny him? From “Nancy” and “All or Nothing at All” and “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” through “The Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” “All the Way,” and “I’ve Got a Crush on You,” “Nice ‘n’ Easy,” “You Go to My Head,” “New York, New York” and “My Way”—these songs and scores of others indelibly charted the days and nights of his life and ours.

  And so, three more years after that, in 1976, I was at his table with Cybill in Las Vegas. It was the first time either of us had seen him sing in person, and especially memorable because we were seated (across from each other) with one of our shoulders quite literally leaning against stage center. He also not only introduced us to the audience from our seats, but played much of the show directly to us (especially Cybill), even slanting some of the songs to the kind of attitude he thought we might like, often kidding the cornier material. When he got to the words “my way” for the first time, he sang instead, “I did it … sideways!” Being physically so close to him was literally overwhelming—he towered directly above us—and the intensity of his dramatic numbers was impressive. Through age—he was now sixty-one—Sinatra seemed to have regained with a vengeance the kind of valiant vulnerability he had as a young man. More than that, he had achieved a remarkably old-world flavor in his performance, the sophistication and stature of a fine classical musician. He would tell me that for him each song was something like a one-act play for one player and, together with the expressive brilliance of his phrasing, and that voice, he was the most superb actor of songs.

  After that, I would see Sinatra perform in person five more times: twice in London, once at New York’s Carnegie Hall, twice at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles. Each time, he was subtly different, modulating the performance, altering it slightly for the differing audiences, because they each affected him in different ways, changing the songs or their order. Overall, I thought he was at his best in London, but he was never less than strikingly charismatic. Most sentimental with the L.A. crowds, he would salute the American flag and sing “The House I Live In” with an awful lot of strings. (He had received a Special Oscar in 1946 for the short film based on that song of tolerance, an ideal for which he fought enduringly in his career.) After one of these shows, in the mid-eighties, when I had just had a success with the movie Mask, he greeted me afterward, saying with a small grin of admiration, “Look who’s back from the dead.”

  At the time of the Carnegie Hall concert, in 1980, I had been shooting They All Laughed and arrived with Dorothy Stratten in the middle of his first song, “The Lady Is a Tramp.” We had the misfortune to time our entrance with the song’s line, “She loves the theater and never comes late,” which Frank, of course, directed pointedly right at us as we came down the aisle.

  In the early eighties, Sinatra and I almost did a picture together. It was a Las Vegas comedy-drama called Paradise Road (loosely based on a novel by David Scott Milton), which I had envisioned to star him and James Stewart, Lee Marvin, Charles Aznavour, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, all playing degenerate gamblers. Although Sinatra had brought Dean and Jerry together briefly on that telethon night, they had, nevertheless, not bonded again. So when I suggested to Frank that in the film they would play two guys who were in the same group but spoke to each other only through intermediaries during the entire movie, he thought this was funny but would not be easy to achieve. Still, he said he’d try to get Dean, and I should try to get Jerry, who had been a friend of mine for many years (see Lewis chapter). One afternoon, Frank called me, excited. “I spoke to Dean,” he said. “He’ll do it!” I was amazed and thrilled. “Yeah,” said Frank, “I asked if he wasn’t bothered about Jerry, and you know what Dean said? He said, ‘Aw, who gives a fuck!’” Sinatra laughed delightedly. Jerry agreed, too, but as often happens, business people and middlemen got in the way and, sadly, things never did work out.

  In 1981, I went to Sinatra’s compound in Palm Springs to talk about this project and to screen for him my film with Audrey Hepburn, They All Laughed. (While we had been shooting this in Manhattan, Sinatra had taken Audrey and me and a few others to dinner one night. Reagan was running for President, and when I said I wasn’t for him, I’ll never forget the patient, strangely innocent way he said, “Why, Peter?”) He allowed me to use on our They All Laughed soundtrack four cuts from his latest album, Trilogy (having sent me one of the first copies, signed “Francis”), including his rendition of our title song by the Gershwins as well as his last top-ten single, “Theme from New York, New York,” arranging for us to get all known publishing and performing rights in perpetuity to the four for an unheard-of $5,000 total. Normally, each song could have cost ten times that, so he must have bent the composers’ arms, too, I guess, to get me that whole package for practically nothing. It was a lovely and touching gesture as well—prompted, I believe, by the tragedy of Dorothy’s murder.

  He had a few Palm Springs friends over to dinner, then we ran the picture, which takes a while to reveal what sort of movie it is. But at a certain point, Frank called out, “It’s a romantic comedy!” and everyone relaxed. Later that evening, he played for us a just-completed mix of his new (and penultimate solo) album, She Shot Me Down. It was an unusually challenging saloon-song collection, in that sad mood of “wee small hours” loneliness which he’s such a master of. Before each cut played, Frank would tell us (just as he did in all his concerts) who the composers and arrangers were. And it was oddly moving to see, after all those decades of recording and performing, how vulnerable and excited he still was when playing for others a brand-new work of his. At least two of the songs on this last personal collection of his became Sinatra classics for me: “I Loved Her” and “Monday Morning Quarterback.”

  The next day was a Sunday and I came over in the morn
ing for a talk about our proposed picture. We sat across from each other at a card table in the den, and he seemed as up about the project as I was. At one point, talking about returning to form with a vengeance, we coincidentally both at the exact same moment moved our chairs forward with happy intensity. It spoke of a kind of uncynical enthusiasm on his part that delighted me. We both noticed and grinned at each other. During this conversation, I asked him who was his favorite composer and he answered, “Mozart.” After a while, his wife, Barbara, came into the room and, walking behind me, clearly made a high sign to Frank. He nodded, then asked me, “Are you Catholic?” I answered that I didn’t belong to any religious group. He said, “Well, we’re going to mass—you wanna come?” I said OK and he smiled and, standing up, said, “Sure, what the hell—it’s only an hour.”

  Soon after, the three of us piled into their station wagon, Frank dressed in tie and tweed sport jacket; he drove to the ultramodern-looking church which had been dedicated to his late mother, Dolly Sinatra, who had been killed not many years before in a plane accident, flying to her son’s opening in Las Vegas. The mass did indeed take about an hour, both Mr. and Mrs. Sinatra eating the wafer at the end. Afterward, we drove to his stables where Barbara Sinatra rode her Tennessee walking horse around the corral while Frank and I talked. Hearing that I rode, she invited me to join her but I felt he was rather relieved when, politely, I declined.

  After I brought up his legendary dislike of doing more than one take per movie scene, he quickly said he certainly would do more for me. Yet, upon my saying that I understood his desire to keep things fresh, he responded, “Yeah, otherwise it’s like singing a song twice for the same audience.” Sinatra used to come to a recording session, let the musicians rehearse the arrangement, and then he’d sing the song down once, maybe do one more take straight through, and that would be it. Shooting a movie scene over and over—and from numerous different angles—was anathema to him, and so it’s no wonder that two of his best picture performances were both for directors who often used to photograph an entire scene in one continuous take, with no additional coverage at all: Preminger on The Man with the Golden Arm, Minnelli on Some Came Running. Speaking once about Minnelli, Sinatra told me with warm amusement of the time Vincente—who was known to be very artistic but somewhat dreamy and absentminded—had come on the location and been very upset about the placement of a huge Ferris wheel: he wanted it moved a few feet. Frank quietly had suggested he simply move the camera instead, and Minnelli had been delighted with this solution. As he told the story, Sinatra smiled affectionately.