by James Kaplan
Miller had been instrumental in the decision to move Sinatra up-tempo, but it had been Frank and George Siravo who’d made all the creative decisions in April. For the session on June 28, Miller had a new concept, one he controlled completely. The songs, “Goodnight Irene” and “Dear Little Boy of Mine,” had an earnest, folksy quality (“Irene” had recently been a big hit for the Weavers), and to heighten that quality, background voices were used—the Mitch Miller Singers. Miller himself, naturally, arranged and conducted. And Frank Sinatra just sang along with Mitch.
If he hated it, it didn’t show. Sinatra was in excellent voice on both numbers—utterly unsuited to his character and personality though they were. Listen to them, and even with the corny background chorus they almost make sense. In fact, “Goodnight Irene” went straight to number 5 on the Billboard charts, Sinatra’s biggest hit in over three years.
Ava had finished all her location shooting for Pandora. All that remained were some interiors, to be filmed at Shepperton Studios outside of London. With a fond farewell to Spain and an hasta la vista to Mario Cabré, she moved into a luxury flat near Hyde Park, and a corps of reporters and photographers promptly set up camp at her doorstep. She greeted them with husky-voiced, affectionate ribaldries when she went out in the morning and returned at night, and they, like everyone else, fell in love with her.
On July 5, Sinatra flew to England, in high spirits: Henry Jaffe had arm wrestled Bill Paley into giving Frank a five-year contract for a TV variety show, to commence in October. (CBS also threw in a new radio show, Meet Frank Sinatra, to start concurrently.) At $200,000 per annum, the deal was potentially worth $1 million, and while it was subject to all sorts of provisos, escape clauses, and caveats, it theoretically gave Sinatra the edge over Bing Crosby as the highest-paid singer in show business.
Landing in London was like stepping out of a time machine. In the States, it was a new, bad decade: President Truman had just sent U.S. troops to Korea; Joe McCarthy was rapping pieces of paper and barking threats. In England, where bombed-out buildings were still much in evidence, it felt like the early 1940s, a time that had been very good to Frank Sinatra. London, a town desperate for some cheering up, greeted him with the kind of hysterical acclaim he’d been missing badly lately—especially from teenage girls, who once again came out in screaming droves.
When he reunited with Ava, it was as a man who’d gotten his mojo back. He was a cock of the walk again, and she liked him that way.
He in turn devoured the adulation. One night, Ava’s co-star Sheila Sim and her husband, Richard Attenborough, picked up Ava and Frank to take them to the premiere of a new Noël Coward musical. Crowds were gathered outside Ava’s flat, and when she emerged, she whisked right through them and hopped into Sim and Attenborough’s car. Frank came out a moment later, a huge grin on his face, and signed every autograph book thrust at him. When he finally got in the car, Ava was furious: they had agreed ahead of time that they would skip all that. Frank just shrugged.
He may have been One-Take Charlie for the movies, but when it came to his music, he was a man possessed. The Palladium was at least the equivalent of the Paramount, and he rehearsed all day, every day, until the opening.
And he didn’t disappoint. Backed by England’s biggest big band, Woolf Phillips and the Skyrockets, Frank knocked them dead. Nancy junior writes:
Sipping tea on stage between songs, he began with “Bewitched,” “Embraceable You,” and “I Fall in Love Too Easily.” When he started singing “I’ve Got a Crush on You,” the screaming started. Saying “Steady now,” he changed the mood with “Ol’ Man River,” followed by a parody, “Old Man Crosby, He Just Keeps Singing Along,” that brought down the house.
The critics loved him too. “I watched mass hysteria,” wrote the New Musical Express’s reviewer. “Was it wonderful? Decidedly so, for this man Sinatra is a superb performer and a great artiste. He had his audience spellbound.” The Sunday Chronicle’s man mustered even less English reserve: “Bless me, he’s GOOD! He is as satisfying a one-man performance as the Palladium has ever seen.”
The deeper thinkers of Fleet Street tried, hard, to analyze Sinatra’s appeal. Most of the results reflected the eternal cultural divide between the two great countries separated by a common language. But the London Sunday Times’s distinguished drama critic, Harold Hobson—later to be a prescient champion of Harold Pinter, John Osborne, and Tom Stoppard—was far ahead of the rest of the world in his penetrating assessment of Sinatra:
People who simply put Frank down as “the Voice” are missing the point. It is not the voice but the smile that does such enormous, such legendary execution … the shy deprecating smile, with a quiver at the corner of the mouth. Here is an artist who, hailing from the most rowdy and self-confident community the world has ever known, has elected to express the timidity that can never be wholly driven out of the boastfullest heart. To a people whose ideal of manhood is husky, full-blooded and self-reliant, he has dared to suggest that under the crashing self-assertion, man is still a child, frightened and whimpering in the dark.
Kissing Ava good-bye—no tears this time; she’d be returning to the States soon—Frank flew back to New York and, on August 2, walked into the Columbia studios to record a number from an upcoming Bing Crosby picture (there was no escaping Crosby!), Mr. Music. The song, written by Bing’s personal tunesmiths Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen (Chester may have traveled with Sinatra, but he was still earning his money from Crosby), was called “Life Is So Peculiar.”
The arranger and conductor was the Canadian-born Percy Faith, who, long before “Theme from A Summer Place” and “Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet,” knew how to swing. Sinatra, backed by a superb small band (including his old pal Matty Golizio on guitar and the great Johnny Blowers on drums) and accompanied by singer Helen Carroll and the vocal group the Swantones, was in a fine mood, and it showed. The number is a trifle, to be sure, but it’s a charming, exuberant trifle—and something more.
In an earlier context, the producer George Avakian spoke of a contrast he observed at a 1946 Sinatra recording session: when Frank sang a couple of heavily orchestrated ballads, Avakian said, he seemed tense; yet late in the session, when laying down a couple of “pleasant throwaways” with a jazz trio, the singer was utterly relaxed.
So it was on the “Life Is So Peculiar” session. Even though this band was fourteen pieces rather than three, Sinatra was clearly comfortable with the jazz context and, even more important, with the triviality of the tune itself, which he would soon refer to, in an interview, as “a cute little novelty song.” But he sounds (if a bit husky around the edges) just great, easy and swinging. And most remarkably, his voice, imbued with a new maturity, actually harks ahead to the great Capitol sessions he will do two and a half years later, in a new, unimaginable lifetime.
And further: there’s a positively eerie moment at the end of the second chorus as Frank sings:
Life is so peculiar, but as everybody says,
That’s life!
The rascally lilt he gives to those two very familiar last words harks ahead two lifetimes, across the Capitol years and deep into the Reprise era, to the turbulent year in which Sinatra’s wedding to the twenty-one-year-old Mia Farrow would be bookended by two disastrous physical altercations, signaling the singer’s deeply disquieted state of mind. Frank was angry when he recorded “That’s Life” in October 1966, angry at a world that was starting to pass him by and angry at a record producer who’d just told him that his previous take of the song had been … well, not so interesting. (His audible anger made the final take very interesting.) In August 1950, of course, he was simply having fun.
In the middle of the month Ava returned to Los Angeles, and Frank was there to meet her. Then she vanished. “There’s no sign of life around [Gardner’s] pink stucco house on a mountain top behind Hollywood,” a wire-service report noted, a little plaintively.
Her trunks are in the garage, but the shades are
drawn and telegrams are piling up unopened on the doorstep.
She’s cut off her private telephone. And she’s cancelled the messenger service that used to take her calls.
Reports have her hiding away in a tiny cottage in Laguna beach … staying with friends … dining with Sinatra in a secluded beach café … and staging a roaring battle with him at Charley Foy’s nightclub in San Fernando valley.
She wasn’t in Laguna Beach, or staying with friends. In fact, Frank had quietly rented a house on the beach in Pacific Palisades, and she had moved in with him. For the briefest of moments, they had eluded the press.
But not their problems. As soon as Frank and Ava set up housekeeping, he began having his children over on weekends. She didn’t like it, and said so. Often. In front of the kids or not; she didn’t give a good goddamn. The one true piece of the wire-service report was that roaring battle at Charley Foy’s.
Over Labor Day weekend Frank returned to the Steel Pier in Atlantic City, where he had sung as a fresh-faced young pup with Harry James and His Music Makers. He could still draw a crowd, but this time what the people wanted to hear was “Goodnight Irene.” “I don’t think Frank liked it too much, but it was a big hit for him,” Johnny Blowers recalled. “I used to think to myself, How in the world did Mitch ever get him to do this? But anyway, he did it and it was big. It went over.”
Later, though, doing a radio interview with a local disc jockey, Ben Heller (who’d played guitar with Harry James way back when), Sinatra tried pushing the “jazz things” he’d recorded with George Siravo in April: “Bright, with good jump tempos, both to listen to as a vocal and to dance to.” Heller, though, wanted to know what was new.
“We’ve got a new one now that is moving pretty good called, if you’ll excuse the expression, ‘Goodnight Irene,’ ” Frank said.
“Hey, that’s a nice tune,” said Heller.
“You wanna bet?” Frank replied.
After a beat, he realized he might have gone too far, even for him. “Nah, it’s pretty good,” he added.
“You should sing a lot of songs like that,” Heller told him.
“Don’t hold your breath,” Sinatra said.
Life was getting more and more peculiar for Frank Sinatra. Later that week he dispatched an intermediary to the New York office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation with an extremely unusual offer. An FBI memo reveals:
DATE: SEPTEMBER 7, 1950
TO: MR. TOLSON
FROM: J. P. MOHR
SUBJECT: FRANK SINATRA
___________ [name deleted] called at my office today after having endeavored to arrange an appointment to see the Director. I explained to ____________ that the Director was extremely busy, that he was fully committed and would be unable to see him. stated that he had been requested by Frank Sinatra to contact the Director with … a proposition that Sinatra had in mind. ___________ said he was a friend of Sinatra, that he considered him to be a sincere individual and that he has known him for six years. ___________ described Sinatra as a “Dago who came up the hard way” and said he is a conscientious fellow who is very desirous of doing something for his country. ___________ stated that Sinatra feels he can do some good for his country under the direction of the FBI.
___________ stated that Sinatra is sensitive about the allegations which have been made concerning his subversive activities and also his draft status during the last war. Sinatra feels that the publicity which he has received has identified him with subversive elements and that such subversive elements are not sure of his position and Sinatra consequently feels that he can be of help as a result by going anywhere the Bureau desires and contacting any of the people from whom he might be able to obtain information. Sinatra feels as a result of his publicity he can operate without suspicion …
___________ stated that Sinatra’s principal contacts are in the entertainment field in Hollywood and New York City. ___________ further advised that he didn’t know whether Sinatra has any current information with respect to subversives. He said that Sinatra understands that if he worked for the Bureau in connection with such activities it might reflect on his status and his standing in the entertainment field but he is willing to do anything even if it affects his livelihood and costs him his job.
___________ said that Sinatra is willing to go “the whole way.”
… I told ___________ that I wasn’t aware of Sinatra’s activities other than what I had read in the papers. I told him further that I wasn’t aware of Sinatra’s possibilities and that that was something we would have to analyze and determine. I further told ___________ that we would not ask Sinatra or any other individual to engage in any activities that would reflect on the individual and that any action taken by the individual would have to be a voluntary decision on his part. ___________ was also informed that I was not aware of the fact that Sinatra could be of use to us but that I would call to the Director’s attention ___________ ’s visit to me and that we would consider Sinatra’s request and that if he could be utilized we would communicate with him.
On the bottom of the letter is a handwritten notation by Tolson: “We want nothing to do with him. C.”
Then one by Hoover: “I agree. H.”1
What had possessed him? The Communist witch hunts were in full swing; guilt by association was guilt presumed. Sinatra knew the FBI was sniffing around him—in June he’d requested permission to go abroad to entertain U.S. troops, but had been denied a security clearance because of “subversive activities”: namely his mid-1940s idealism, reconsidered in the hard light of 1950. The bureau was even watching his Manhattan dentist, Dr. Abraham Weinstein. In a typical screed that May, Westbrook Pegler managed to lump Sinatra, George Raft, Leo Durocher, Frank Costello, “the Hollywood–Los Angeles underworld,” and President Truman’s supposedly lax Department of Justice into one subversive-smelling ball.
However hopeful Frank may have been about his upcoming TV show, he was scared: his career had sprung a leak. “Sinatra’s decline,” Pegler wrote, “has been just a matter of fair wear and tear … plus the natural waning of a hopped-up reputation.” Many others were saying the same. Was he really “willing to do anything” for the FBI, “even if it affect[ed] his livelihood and [cost] him his job”? His job was on the line in any case.
Ava blew through town on her way back to California to prepare for her new movie, Show Boat. Frank was starting his CBS television and radio shows, and was looking for a Manhattan apartment. In the meantime, he was once again borrowing Manie’s suite at the Hampshire House. A temporary—very temporary—love nest. Work was about to separate the lovebirds again, and the tension, as always, was erotic. But Ava wanted to get married, and while Frank told her he wanted that too, she could sense his ambivalence. When she called him on it, he’d shake his head. He didn’t know if Nancy would ever give him a divorce. It was the Church—she was just a better Catholic than he was.
Ava, her biographer Lee Server writes, “heard the whispered scuttlebutt from others: ‘She thinks she can wait you out, you two will blow over and she’ll have him back one day. That’s all she wants.’ ” Server continues:
To Ava, it was an infuriating irony: There they were, wanting to do the right thing and get married, and there was this woman using her religion as an excuse to keep them “living in sin” … The affair and the scandal had provoked the first serious rift in her relationship with Bappie, who disliked Sinatra and believed he was harming her career. “You hang on to him, Ava,” Bappie told her, “and he’s going to ruin you like he’s ruined himself.”
So there was more fighting, more makeup sex; they stayed in and they went out. Going out was always important. On Wednesday night, September 27, the two of them attended the Joe Louis–Ezzard Charles fight at Yankee Stadium: the news photographers snapped them sitting cozily close, Sinatra with his thinning hair and love-struck grin, Ava with a fur coat, thick red lipstick, and a cigarette between her fingers. Charles outpointed the former champ Louis in fifteen rounds
to become the world heavyweight champion.
The next day, Nancy Sinatra outpointed Frank in Santa Monica Superior Court, winning her separate-maintenance suit and custody of their three children. The Los Angeles Times ran a large photograph of her above the photo of Frank and Ava at the prizefight, and she won this contest, too, hands down, looking every inch the wronged woman in her demure checked suit, white blouse with Peter Pan collar, and brown leather gloves. Her chin is held high, her hair attractively (and no doubt freshly) coiffed in soft waves, her expression neither triumphant nor stricken but distant and philosophical. To glance back and forth between the pictures of her and Ava—who looks frankly vulgar—is to wonder what the hell Frank was thinking about.
Nancy (who had lived in Hollywood long enough to know the value of images) surely had all of it in mind when she dressed for her court appearance.
She dabbed away “a tear or so,” the Times reported, as Judge Orlando H. Rhodes awarded her “the Holmby Hills home, its furnishings and effects, a 1950 Cadillac, 34 shares of stock in the Sinatra Music Corp. and one-third of Sinatra’s annual gross earnings on the first $150,000 and 10% of the next $150,000.” For his part, Frank got a 1949 Cadillac, a jeep, the Palm Springs house, rights to some oil property in Texas, and “any phonograph records or radio transcriptions he may desire.” He was also given “all money in bank accounts”—not much at that point.
At the hearing, the Times account continued,
Mrs. Sinatra testified that on numerous occasions her husband would go to Palm Springs for week ends without her and that he would “stay away for days at a time.”
On other occasions, she said, when they were alone or had company he would go into another room, ignoring her and the guests.
