Sinatra

by Anthony Summers

  Joey Bishop had sent Frank a telegram after the near-drowning. “Did you forget yourself?” he asked. “You could have walked on the waves.” In an article entitled “The Enigma of Frank Sinatra,” Richard Gehman wrote of Frank’s need to sustain the notion that he had power over events and over his fellow human beings. He pointed out that Frank had in fact become an “immensely powerful force—a law unto himself . . . as he has grown bigger and more powerful he has grown more demandingly arrogant.”

  His power, Gehman reported, was both personal and financial. He could demand a share of the profits in any movie in which he starred, could dictate which songs were plugged. He also made himself so inaccessible that meaningful reporting about him was almost impossible.

  “Sinatra has become the most feared man in Hollywood,” Gehman wrote. “A veteran Hollywood reporter told me recently, ‘No one will talk about him. He’s an untouchable.’ ” While preparing his article, Gehman noted, he himself received a threatening call in the middle of the night. “If you know what’s good for you,” the voice on the phone told him, “lay off Frank.”

  “It would be disturbing,” wrote the editors of Good Housekeeping, which published Gehman’s article, “if this enormous power were in the hands of a completely stable and predictable human being. When it is in the hands of a man torn by emotions that he apparently either cannot or does not care to control, it is something to view with alarm.”

  Gehman thought that was going too far. He later reminded readers of the compassionate Sinatra, the Sinatra who responded, when a club owner’s widow found herself in financial difficulty, by showing up with a twenty-one-piece orchestra and performing for free. Above all, Gehman thought, Frank’s sheer talent ought to be given more weight than the dark side of his personality. “It does not matter how powerful, or corrupt, he is or may become. We can forgive him so long as he continues to enchant us solely by existing.” For all his flaws, Frank never lost that seductive power.

  ONE DAY IN MARCH 1962, Frank had gone into the recording booth to sing “I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues.” On that track, radio host and Sinatra devotee Jonathan Schwartz has said, Frank sounded “as if he stood before the microphone reading a sports section and chewing gum.” At a previous session, he had ripped up his sheet music rather than do another take. He had been in a foul mood because, after months of festering resentment, he was making his last recording for Capitol Records.

  Frank had wanted more creative control, and the company had not given it to him. “Fuck you! Fuck your company!” he had yelled when Capitol’s Alan Livingston tried to find a way through the impasse. Though Capitol had been his label through the glory years of his recording career, the break had become inevitable. “I helped build that,” he had told a colleague as they walked along Vine Street past Capitol’s trademark circular headquarters. “Now let’s build one of our own.” He had established Reprise Records—“Reprise,” Frank explained, because he intended to make records “to play and play again.” He pronounced the word, however, not as “repreese” but as in “reprisal.” Some dubbed the new company Revenge Records.

  Promotional copy said the new company brought the world “a new, happier emancipated Sinatra . . . untrammelled, unfettered, unconfined.” The aspiration was to bring Frank and the artists he contracted more creative freedom and more money. He produced ten albums in the first three years, recording his versions of “Ring-A-Ding-Ding,” “In the Still of the Night,” “Call Me Irresponsible,” “The Second Time Around,” and new takes on old Sinatra favorites. Indulging his interest in jazz, Frank also made an album with Count Basie. In the same period he performed in eleven foreign countries, appeared on television, and kept up a hectic pace on other fronts—all this amidst his personal turmoil during the Kennedy presidency.

  Frank had said when he launched Reprise that he saw his future “not so much as an entertainer but as a high-level executive. . . . I’ve been getting fascinated with finances.” Billy Woodfield photographed him in a grand office, shirtsleeved, cigarette in hand, presiding over a meeting of twelve executives. There was a UPI news ticker to one side of him, a picture of President Kennedy on the sideboard. Another photograph showed Frank standing below a huge tabulated blowup crammed with numbers and headed “Comparative Gross Receipts.”

  Though more publicity gimmick than a reflection of how he really spent his time, the pictures evoked an image of Frank as The Chairman of the Board, a nickname that was to stick. (It had been coined, ironically, by the disc jockey William B. Williams, when searching for a sobriquet that spoke to his musical authority.) Yet Frank had chosen an inauspicious moment to start the new company, and Reprise got off to a shaky start.

  The big moneymaking singles were increasingly being sung by young men and women for a young market. Frank was in his late forties, the fans who had made him only slightly younger. No Sinatra single had made the top ten since 1956; it had become difficult for him even to get into the top forty. Capitol was taking its commercial revenge, undercutting Frank’s company by reissuing Sinatra albums that it controlled at discounted prices. Reprise was in trouble.

  Then, in August 1963, at a time when everything seemed to be going wrong for him, Frank was suddenly going about showing friends a certified check for a million dollars ($6 million today). So delighted with it was he that he did not deposit the check for days. Frank had sold two-thirds of Reprise to Warner Brothers Records, and the million dollars was only the downpayment. The deal was driven by the fact that Frank owed the company money, a Warner Brothers source told the FBI. Warner soon after acquired a major slice of Frank’s movie projects, guaranteeing him $250,000 a picture plus 15 percent of the gross. It made him the highest-paid actor-entertainer in Hollywood.

  Nine Sinatra movies were churned out from 1961 to 1965, five of them involving members of the Rat Pack. After 1961, however, there were no more films that could really be described as Rat Pack movies. Frank liked to work with Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, but he had come to loathe the name Rat Pack. Movies made by Sinatra and friends, moreover, no longer attracted large audiences.

  There was also a disaster movie, The Devil at 4 O’Clock, which was indeed a disaster, and two war movies that earned good reviews and good box office. None but the Brave, about the ordeal of American servicemen stranded on an island in the Pacific, did respectably at the box office; Von Ryan’s Express, about a mass escape by Allied prisoners from an Italian prison camp, was a major hit. There had also been The Manchurian Candidate, the fine film about American soldiers brainwashed in Korea, which culminates in a plot to assassinate a presidential candidate. It was at the same time a complex political satire on the United States of the McCarthy period. Frank gave a superb performance as the army major, himself a shattered veteran, who thwarts the murder of the presidential nominee. The movie attracted meager audiences, though, and was soon withdrawn. Frank thought it “without doubt the finest picture I have ever made.” He had a queen of diamonds, the “control key” for the brainwashed assassin of the movie, imprinted on the bottom of his Palm Springs pool.

  In the deal with Warner, Frank became “special assistant” to Jack Warner himself, a prestigious title in a mighty empire. He operated from an office of appropriate grandeur, decked out in orange of course, with inscribed photographs of Democratic presidents on display. In the anteroom stood the bust of himself that Jo Davidson had cast two decades earlier.

  By 1965 Frank was presiding over Reprise Records; two movie companies, Artanis—“Sinatra” spelled backward—Productions and Park Lake Enterprises; Cal Jet Airway, an airplane charter business; and Titanium Metal Forming, which made parts for aircraft and missiles. The air charter company boasted two jets—an eight-seater Lear and a three-seater Morane-Saulnier—and a helicopter. Often Frank would leave Palm Springs about noon, early for him, make the seventeen-minute commute to Burbank aboard the Lear, then drive to the Warner Brothers lot in his black Dual-Ghia. The Lear was also handy for whisking houseguests to and f
rom Palm Springs or to Las Vegas.

  Frank’s enterprises employed seventy-five people full-time, including secretaries answering fan mail, his pilots, and, ubiquitous now, a posse of bodyguards. The Palm Springs house had recently been enlarged and boasted a saltwater pool—in the middle of the desert. He rented a five-bedroom apartment on East River Drive in Manhattan and a ten-room house in Beverly Hills. Though he had lost his Nevada gambling licenses, he still owned the buildings that made up the Cal-Neva Lodge on Lake Tahoe. Look magazine calculated his annual income in 1965 at $3.5 million ($20 million today) before taxes.

  Money gushed out as fast as it poured in. He “lives like royalty,” said his producer friend William Goetz. When Frank went on a sea cruise, he chartered not only a yacht but a seaplane to follow it. He once had a barber flown from New York to Miami to give him a haircut. For all the millions Frank spent on self-indulgent excess, though, a constant flow went to help others. He had been performing at benefits since the 1940s, raising vast sums for children’s hospitals, the aged, refugees, mental health, the blind, for the fight against cancer, and many other health-related charities. In 1962, declaring that as an “over-privileged adult” he should do something for underprivileged children, he had undertaken a World Tour for Children that took in ten countries and raised, in today’s dollars, nearly $6 million. He himself paid the expenses, which were about half that sum.

  He sent Jule Styne’s mother, whom he did not know, four dozen roses a day when she was sick in a New York hospital. He pulled Phil Silvers out of a dire professional hole by performing alongside him. He cheered up the singer Joey Napoli by sending him a hundred canes when he suffered severe injuries in a car accident. When his pianist Bill Miller’s home was destroyed in a mudslide in which his wife died, Frank paid the hospital bills not covered by insurance, found Miller a new home, and completely furnished it.

  He paid the hospital bills when serious illness felled Buddy Rich, Joe Louis—whom he had flown to Texas for top-flight treatment following a stroke—Lee J. Cobb, Claudette Colbert’s husband Joel Pressman, and later Peggy Lee. He looked after the bills for Mabel Mercer when she was old, ailing, and penniless.

  Horrified to hear that Billie Holiday was dying a miserable death in the psychiatric ward of a New York hospital, Frank pulled strings to get her transferred to a private hospital. Her death had a deep effect on him and he later recorded the song “Lady Day” as a tribute to her:

  So many shadows in her eye

  . . . Lady Day has too much pain.

  Frank arranged medical care for the husband of his maid at a hotel. He gave $1,000 to a bootblack at another hotel when he learned he was a former champion boxer fallen on hard times. A girl’s leg was saved when Frank rushed specialists to the scene of an accident on an escalator at Bonwit Teller’s. He sent an attorney to represent an elderly immigrant couple threatened with eviction. He helped a child burned in a household accident. He arranged for a truckload of food and goods to be sent to the children of a dying woman in Long Beach.

  Tina Sinatra was with her father one day when, after seeing a television news report about a poor family whose home had been destroyed in a Christmas tree fire, he ordered his business manager to “send them a nickel.” When he referred to a nickel in that context, she explained, he meant $5,000.

  Frank asked Whitey Littlefield, a business associate, to buy a bus for delivery to a school in Ohio. “The one condition,” Littlefield said, “was that no one was ever to know where the bus came from.”

  Frank’s generosity was most often driven by nothing other than heartfelt goodwill. So much of the giving was triggered by random chance, by a press or radio report of some small human misery. At the same time, there may have been something of the Sicilian padrone about him, of a compulsion to garner authority and respect by dispensing help to the needy. “In a certain way,” said the bandleader Peter Duchin, “he was very emotional . . . very Italian.”

  IN EARLY NOVEMBER 1965, a month before Frank’s fiftieth birthday, the writer Gay Talese flew to Los Angeles to interview him. Talese had been assured by his editor at Esquire magazine that the interview was “all set up.” Instead he was fobbed off by a publicist with a string of lame excuses. Limited to only a very brief exchange with Sinatra, he spent five weeks watching Frank and talking to those around him.

  The article Talese wrote is still acclaimed as the most closely observed piece ever written on Sinatra. He studied Frank in the studio, in a Las Vegas casino, on a movie set, and drinking late at night in a private club. Esquire readers learned of Frank’s arrogance, of his compulsion to control others, and of the anxiety he instilled in those around him. Yet, Talese wrote, “In an age when the very young seem to be taking over . . . Frank Sinatra survives as a national phenomenon, one of the few pre-war products to stand the test of time. . . . He does not feel old, he makes old men feel young, makes them feel that if Frank Sinatra can do it, it can be done.”

  Yet Frank was feeling the passage of time. Three years earlier he had said, “As a singer I’ll only have a few more years to go—as an actor maybe a few more than that, but not many . . . and frankly I’m getting a bit tired.”

  As Frank reached fifty, he performed on an hour-long NBC show to mark the occasion. He also agreed to be filmed for Sinatra: An American Original, a CBS News documentary to be narrated by Walter Cronkite—even though, his publicist told Talese, he feared the network would “try to nail him with the Mafia.” Billboard ran an eighty-nine-page tribute, and there were major stories in Life, Look, and Newsweek.

  Frank also recorded a musical milestone, the album September of My Years. The voice was lower now, that of an older man, a man, moreover, who had smoked many thousands of unfiltered Camels. “The silken baritone of 1943,” the writer Arnold Shaw thought, was now “like torn velvet.” Wistful, haunting, the songs on the album proclaimed that Frank was now well into middle age: “How Old Am I?,” “Last Night When We Were Young,” “It Was a Very Good Year,” “Hello, Young Lovers,” and “This Is All I Ask”:

  And let the music play as long as there’s a song to sing Then I will stay younger than spring.

  At the birthday party first wife Nancy threw for him, a glittering black-tie affair at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, daughter Nancy teased Frank about his baldness. Now about to achieve prominence as a singer herself, she sang to the tune of “Tit Willow”:

  The rug he once cut he now wears on his head My Daddy, my Daddy, my Daddy. . . .

  Frank’s hair was so sparse now that he had in his retinue a woman whose sole duty was to care for his sixty toupees. He would soon consult a hair transplant surgeon in New York. When he pulled out his gold lighter to light a woman’s cigarette, Talese noticed, his fingers were “nubby and raw . . . so stiff with arthritis that he could hardly bend them.”

  Frank was very much set in his ways. In his dressing room at the Royal Festival Hall in London, the broadcaster David Jacobs had witnessed an astonishing ritual. “I was ushered into the presence and there was Frank Sinatra sitting in his dress shirt and his silk socks, bow tie and his underpants. It occurred to Mr. George Jacobs, the black valet, that it was time the master got dressed.

  “So he jumped up on the table, which I thought was very strange, and Mr. Jacobs went to the cupboard and got out Sinatra’s trousers, which were hanging on one of those old-fashioned kind of trouser hangers that you clip at the very bottom. And he unclipped them, did a most wonderful movement like a magician, and held them for Sinatra, who was still standing on the table.

  “And Sinatra put one stiff leg in one leg of the trousers, and ditto the other, and stepped onto a chair. And when he got to the chair Mr. Jacobs held him under the armpits and lifted him down. Mr. Jacobs zipped up Sinatra’s fly. Then he got the jacket out and Sinatra put one stiff arm into the jacket, and then the other, and he was buttoned up.

  “And I said to him, ‘Forgive me, but would you mind telling me why you dress in this extraordinary fashion?’ He looked at
me and said, ‘Well, when I go out onto the stage I don’t want to stand there in a crumpled suit—like yours is.’ He then walked out to tumultuous applause in a spotlight, and as soon as he got to the center of the stage he jumped up on a stool and cocked his legs and crossed his arms—and you couldn’t see his suit anyway.”

  “I’m a symmetrical man almost to a fault,” Frank acknowledged as his fiftieth birthday approached. “I demand everything in its place.”

  The spirit of 1965, however, was not about symmetry. That year, in a poem later published in his anthology The Fall of America, Allen Ginsberg wrote of: “Frank Sinatra lamenting distant years, old sad voic’d September’d recordings, and Beatles crying Help! their voices woodling for tenderness.” The Beatles had made their assault on American culture the previous year. They had been greeted at Kennedy Airport by some five thousand screaming teenagers, and seventy-three million people had seen their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.

  Jule Styne had declared in 1962 that Frank had “defeated rock ’n’ roll.” Two months after the Beatles’ arrival, though, they had the top five singles on the Billboard chart, and the top two albums. Frank had no single and just one album on the charts, at number ten. As fate would have it, the Beatles had not only signed with Capitol Records, but had been brought on board by Alan Livingston, with whom Frank had fallen out.

  “We came out of nowhere,” Paul McCartney said later, “with funny hair, looking like marionettes or something. . . . I think that was really one of the big things that broke us—the hairdo more than the music originally. A lot of people’s fathers had wanted to turn us off.”

  Frank was such a father. “Long hair,” said George Jacobs, “drove him batty. . . . He didn’t care how good the new music was . . . to him it was all one big excuse to take drugs.” Frank would later smash a car radio with the heel of his shoe because every station seemed to be playing the Doors’ “Light My Fire.” “He genuinely hated rock ’n’ roll, hated the Beatles,” Rock Brynner remembered. “It was generational. He had nothing but contempt for all of that.” The new sound repelled Frank, his son said.