Long before a recording, Frank would tell Riddle what he wanted, and the arranger would take notes. He worked on his arrangements far into the night, sometimes all night. In the studio, Frank might insist on endless takes, working on and on until satisfied he had a song absolutely right.
“If I wasn’t conducting the orchestra to his liking,” Riddle said, “he’d shove me out of the way and take over. When he’d take over conducting like that I’d feel awful.” “That gentle sweet man,” said the writer Charles Higham, who used to eat with Riddle at Musso and Frank’s on Hollywood Boulevard, “would come to the table shaking after a session with Frank.”
Riddle conceded, though, that the shots Frank called were usually the right ones, that doing things his way got the optimum result. “There’s no one like him,” he would say. “Frank not only encourages you to adventure, but he has such a keen appreciation of achievement that you are compelled to knock yourself out for him. It’s not only that his intuitions as to tempi, phrasing, and even configuration are amazingly right, but his taste is so impeccable . . . there is still no one who can approach him.”
Frank praised Riddle as “the greatest arranger in the world.” He was, he said, “the finest musician” “with the biggest bag of tricks” of any orchestrator he knew.
Nine Sinatra-Riddle albums were produced between 1953 and 1962, some of them with titles that became part of America’s cultural language: Songs for Young Lovers, Swing Easy, In the Wee Small Hours, Songs for Swingin’ Lovers, Close to You, A Swingin’ Affair, Only the Lonely, Nice ’n’ Easy, Sinatra’s Swingin’ Session. The period during which Frank produced those albums with Riddle, and later those with Billy May and Gordon Jenkins, was Sinatra’s golden age, an extended flow of excellence matched only by the Beatles in the 1960s.
While Frank and Riddle planned the albums together, concept and direction were Frank’s alone. “First I decide on the mood, perhaps pick a title,” he said. “Or sometimes it might be that I had the title and then picked the mood to fit. . . . Next comes the pacing of the album, which is vitally important; I put the titles of the songs on twelve bits of paper and juggle them around like a jigsaw until the album is telling a complete story lyric-wise. . . . Tommy Dorsey did this with every band show he played. He never told me this; it just suddenly came to me as I sat up on that stand night after night. But this is what I’ve tried to do with every album I’ve made.”
Sinatra now knew how to get the best out of his musicians. He and Riddle booked the same musicians again and again. The men they hired often marveled at how much Frank knew about their individual backgrounds. Capitol had state-of-the-art equipment, and Frank rapidly learned how to use it to best advantage. David Hanna, a publicist who met him in 1954, listened fascinated to his “lucid, intelligent, and wonderfully knowledgeable forecast of all the revolutions that were coming in the field of sound electronics. The many-syllabled, technical words rippled off his tongue as casually as the lyrics to a Rodgers and Hart song.”
Rita Kirwan of Music magazine sat in on a late-night recording session to which fans had been admitted. “The ordinary work-a-day atmosphere of the studio becomes charged with excitement. For Frank has the rare ability to establish contact with his audience . . . no matter what the mood he wants to evoke. He breaks the contact constantly when he records, interrupting himself to work over a line, to question the conductor about the arrangement, about tempo or tone or phrasing.
“He breaks the contact when he stops to clown around, to say something in his strange, indistinct diction, so different from the diction of his performances. But even as he draws his spellbound audience up short twenty-seven times in one song, abruptly coming down to earth to correct himself or the orchestra, he can re-establish whatever mood he wishes the instant he begins to sing again.
“From around 8 P.M. to beyond 12 in the morning his recording sessions usually continue. The producer’s voice through the mike in the control booth becomes thick with too many cigarettes. . . . After many takes, an array of five minute rests and frequent cups of coffee, Sinatra’s exhaustion begins to show in his shoulders. . . .
“Everybody listens to the playback. Sinatra, with his head in his arms, leaning against the glass-paneled control booth, listens harder than anyone. An epidemic of yawns seizes the musicians. Frank looks up. ‘Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s the one. Whadda you think?’ The producer nods . . . Sinatra flops on to one of the chairs, crosses his legs and hums a fragment from one of the songs he’s been recording. He waves to the janitor now straightening up the studio and says, ‘Jeez. What crazy working hours we’ve got. We both should’ve been plumbers, huh?’ ”
Many of the songs he now recorded were old standards, brought dramatically to new life by Riddle. Frank alternated theme and mood and pace from album to album: from Swing Easy, contriving to mix exuberant hope with regret and still swing, to the marvel of melancholia that was In the Wee Small Hours, to Songs for Swingin’ Lovers, a celebration of romance and seduction.
The music reflected Frank’s and Riddle’s apprenticeship in the big bands, and the jazz that was holy writ to both of them. Above all though, from the carefully designed covers to the delivery, the albums were personal and particular to Frank. This was, critic Henry Pleasants has written, “the moment when swing left the dance floor and moved in behind the singers.”
The singer, meanwhile, remade himself. “I changed record companies, changed attorneys, changed accountants, changed picture companies, and changed my clothes,” he remembered. The public saw the changed appearance, the fresh image, on the carefully crafted covers of the new albums: the bow ties were gone for good; the narrow face, a little worn now, attractively so; a mischievous smile or a lonesome pose, as required; a suit rendered rakish by a loosened tie and, usually, a cigarette.
Hats, which Frank had long favored, became his jaunty trademark. How he wore them as he sang, pulled well down or tipped back, became “the barometer of his feelings,” one observer thought. The headgear covered up his increasing baldness. It was part of George Jacobs’s daily duty to “spray hair coloring on the ever-expanding bald spot on the back of Mr. S.’s scalp.” Increasingly, Frank wore hairpieces.
All of that was as nothing compared to the way his voice had changed. Frank Jr. had until now thought of his father’s singing voice as “romantic, tender, wistful.” One day in 1953, though, as he listened to the radio at home, something struck him as different. “Even at the age of nine,” he said decades later when he himself had become an accomplished musician, “I noticed that something drastically had changed in my father’s approach. . . . Gone was that soft, gentle, dreamy and crooning sound. . . . From that day forward his sound was different. Defiant, assertive, even forceful. And there was something else. . . . In the days of crooning the records he made were merely pleasant musical conversation. But from ‘I’ve Got the World on a String’ every record he made was a statement.”
“I didn’t care for his original voice,” Nelson Riddle said. “I thought it was far too syrupy. I prefer to hear the rather angular person come through in his voice. . . . To me his voice only became interesting during the time when I started to work with him.” The voice was older now— Frank would turn forty in 1955—and the throat that produced it had been roughened by cigarettes and, increasingly, liquor. Jule Styne, who lived in Frank’s apartment for a while early in the Capitol period, recalled him staying “up all night, drinking booze—way, way too much brandy.”
Admirers of the new Sinatra, his son pointed out, no longer called him Frankie, as the teenage bobbysoxers once had. He was no mere idol now but a singer, and one who presented himself as a tough sophisticate. This Frank was a cool guy. He occasionally changed the lyrics a little, threw in the odd “man” or “cat” that was not in the original. He replaced a “darling” with “baby” in Cole Porter’s “Night and Day.” He sang “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” as “I’ve got, got, got you,” to Porter’s annoyance. “Don’t sing it,” he s
aid, “if you can’t keep to the line I composed.”
Frank studied the lyrics of songs with immense care. “I’ve always believed that the written word is first, always first. Not belittling the music behind me, it’s really only a curtain. . . . The word actually dictates to you in a song—it really tells you what it needs.”
“He could practically have talked the thing for me and it would have been all right,” Riddle said. “Frank’s personal interpretation of a lyric is like people who read poetry or an actor in a role,” the singer Joe Williams said. “With Frank, each song is a vignette for the story.” The writer Richard Iaconelli saw Sinatra as conducting a ballet with microphone, cigarette, and outstretched hand, pursuing the concept of “song as miniature stage-play.”
Riddle suggested the play was essentially about sex. “Music to me is sex,” he said. “It’s all tied up somehow. . . . I always have some woman in mind for each song I arrange.” Frank, he thought, “points everything he does from a sexual standpoint.” Yet the singing on the 1950s albums is something beyond sex, beyond mere performance. David Halberstam thought Frank’s delivery “plaintive, almost wounded,” the sound of someone who had “lived” his songs. The critic Charles Taylor thought Frank’s performances “went beyond luxuriant self-pity and approached luxuriant tragedy.” The writer Mikal Gilmore saw “darkness” in Sinatra, “a desperate hunger for the validation that comes from love, a ruinous anger towards anything that challenges that validation.”
“He can say ‘I love you’ with more conviction than anyone I know,” said Freddie Karger, who composed some of the music for From Here to Eternity. “They’re not simply words for him. They convey something he really feels.”
Riddle believed he knew exactly what the something was. “It was Ava who did that,” he said, “who taught him how to sing a torch song. That’s how he learned. She was the greatest love of his life, and he lost her.”
From the Wee Small Hours album, recorded in early 1955:
I get along without you very well,
Of course I do . . .
I’ve forgotten you just like I should,
Of course I have,
Except to hear your name,
Or someone’s laugh that is the same
But I’ve forgotten you just like I should.
Yet he had not forgotten Ava, never would.
19
The Lonely Heart
MEN, MARK TWAIN OBSERVED, “will risk fortune, character, reputation, life itself” for sex. Frank had come close to losing all for Ava Gardner, but could not let go of his passion for her. On and off, for more than twenty years, he would talk of their getting together again.
“Frank would call me in Madrid, London, Rome, New York, wherever I happened to be, and say, ‘Ava, let’s try again,’ ” she remembered. “I’d say, ‘Okay!’ and drop everything. . . . And it would be heaven, but it wouldn’t last more than twenty-four hours.”
Frank tried just months after their formal separation, in December 1953. Ava was in Rome, getting ready to start shooting The Barefoot Contessa, when he called to say he was heading for Europe. She told her publicist David Hanna, “It’ll be a mess. Why the hell does he do it? . . . I can’t tell him not to come.”
He got as far as London, laden with presents, on Christmas Eve, Ava’s birthday, only to learn she had left Italy for Spain. Frank chartered a plane to Madrid, and on Christmas night the couple were seen in a restaurant singing carols. They were in Rome, throwing a party, by New Year’s Eve.
They wound up that night at a club the American singer Bricktop ran on the Via Veneto. Ava “was sitting half on his lap,” Bricktop remembered, “and it seemed to me that she was really trying to get him to enjoy himself. He looked so sad.” Frank told colleagues they had been “trying to work things out.” Ava, however, told Hanna there was “not a chance” they would make up, in part because she had found herself another lover. She had gone to Madrid to spend Christmas with Luis Miguel Dominguín, the premier matador of Spain, eligible and handsome, a man who counted Picasso and Stravinsky as personal friends. She continued to see him under Frank’s nose.
“Tell him I’m at the hairdresser’s, tell him anything,” Ava urged Betty Wallers, a guest from England, “so long as he doesn’t find out about Luis.” Frank waited in the house she had rented, alternately forlorn and enraged. George Jacobs thought his boss’s Christmas mission a “very masochistic thing” that “added insult to his own injury. . . . Yet he still wanted Ava in his life, whatever the circumstances . . . still hung on to the hope and the dream.”
Back in the United States, Frank learned Lauren Bacall was about to travel to Italy to join her husband, Humphrey Bogart, Ava’s co-star in The Barefoot Contessa. Would she, he asked, mind carrying a coconut cake to Ava? Bacall hand-carried the cake, in a large, awkward box, across the Atlantic and to Ava’s dressing room. Ava responded coldly. “She was clearly through with him,” Bacall has said, “but it wasn’t that way on his side.”
“He would call her practically every moment,” Reenie Jordan recalled. “He’d call and call her saying ‘I need you,’ and she’d go to him.”
When Ava returned to California between movies, Frank invited her to stay at his place in Palm Springs. She agreed on the condition that he would not be there. Frank duly made himself scarce and dispatched Jacobs to pick Ava up at the airport. She got dead drunk on the ride back, and had to be carried into the house.
The apartment Frank had recently taken, at Wilshire and Beverly Glen in Los Angeles, looked to Jacobs like a shrine to Ava Gardner. “There were pictures of her everywhere, in the bathrooms, in the closet, on the refrigerator.” It was the same at the Palm Springs house.
Lonely, Frank got Jule Styne to move into his new place. “I come home at night and enter the living room and it’s like a funeral parlor,” Styne remembered. “The lights are dim and they just about light up three pictures of Ava. Frank sits in front of them with a bottle of brandy.” Sammy Cahn once found Frank in tears, drinking a toast to one of the pictures of Ava.
With adoration came rage. That same night, Frank smashed the framed photograph and tore Ava’s image into little pieces. Then, after drinking some more, he tried to put the pieces together again. He became frantic when he could not find the nose. Then it fluttered at last from his sleeve, to be spotted by a delivery man arriving at the door with more liquor. He got the gold watch on Frank’s wrist as a reward.
The agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar, who lived in the same complex, once returned to see Frank’s light on and his apartment door open. “Frank was hunched down in an easy chair,” he said, “shooting a BB gun at three faces of Ava that had been painted by the artist Paul Clemens.”
While Frank had been in Rome, Ava had posed for a lifesize nude statue of herself commissioned for a scene in The Barefoot Contessa. Frank acquired it, brought it to California, and later—when he moved into a new house on Coldwater Canyon—would install it in the garden.
He did not sleep well now. Styne would hear him pacing up and down, up and down. He would hear him on the phone in the early hours, telling Nancy, the one fixed point in his chaotic personal life, “You’re the only one who understands me.”
He had eaten dinner with Nancy and the children the night before winning the Oscar for From Here to Eternity. Daughter Nancy, by then nearly fourteen, had made a little speech and presented him with a medallion inscribed: “Dad, all our love from here to eternity.” For years, Tina recalled, her mother kept some of Frank’s shirts in the closet, his monogrammed towels in the bathroom. She hoped, even now, that her husband would come home.
The day he hired Jacobs as his valet, Frank had taken him to meet the family. “Mr. S.,” Jacobs recalled, “was like a little boy who had just gotten out of camp, coming home for a home-cooked dinner. Nancy, Big Nancy as she was called . . . was so maternal to Frank, she seemed like his mother rather than his wife, and I could see how the bull-in-a-china-shop boy in him could get tempted by
the sirens of the movie business. There was nothing ‘bad’ about Big Nancy and, alas, that wasn’t good. . . . The whole scene was sad.”
Frank told Jacobs he would have left Nancy even if he had not met Ava. Years later, though, he told his elder daughter he wished he had stayed. He was torn, and his loneliness was painfully obvious. The night he won the Oscar, he was stopped by a policeman as he wandered, alone and clutching the golden statuette, in Beverly Hills. Earlier, Charlotte Austen, one of several friends who had been celebrating with him at his apartment, had watched him leave. “Frank walked up the path holding that Oscar and looking so alone that it almost broke my heart,” she remembered. “Here it was the biggest night of his life, and the only woman he cared about was five thousand miles away in Spain with another man.”
AFTER AVA, TINA thought, Frank “would keep a part of himself safe and shut off. As he once told me, ‘I will never hurt like that again.’ ”
During the Gardner saga, Frank had issued what the press dubbed “Sinatra’s Law,” an edict that his private life was off-limits. Journalists who asked about it, he blustered, would be “through, dead, period.” It was a resolve he was to defend to the end of his days, sometimes with his fists. In spite of that, his love life was hardly a secret. To George Jacobs, his boss seemed “the Casanova of modern times.” “I got to know all of Mr. S.’s ladies, stars and non-stars,” he wrote in his memoir. “I’d pick them up, drive them home, pay them if they were pros, make the candlelit seduction dinner and buy the flowers and chocolates for them if they weren’t, then listen to their laments when Mr. S. let them down, which was inevitable.”
Frank led some women to believe—and perhaps on occasion believed himself—that he was looking for lasting, fulfilling love. Abundance of opportunity, however, was rarely rewarded by happiness. The fallout for some of the women was disappointment and pain. Even so, an impressive number of them still spoke of him, decades later, with affection.
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