Frank

by James Kaplan

  He read on:

  This year’s race of the celluloid kings and queens was turned into a $275,000 telecast that will make it the most gala, colorful Oscar derby in 10 years. And by now the movie colonists, as eager as if this were a presidential election, have been predicting around their swimming pools who is likely to win the coveted gold statuettes.

  His gaze roved restlessly down the column. Hepburn a cinch … Best Actor’s contest a photo finish between Bill Holden, star of Stalag 17, and Burt Lancaster …

  There.

  “ ‘Eternity’ is favored to be awarded the best picture honor by members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, with ‘Shane’ a close rival,” the piece continued.

  Two stars of “Eternity,” Donna Reed and Frank Sinatra, are popular choices for the supporting Oscars.

  Miss Hepburn, Holden, Miss Reed, Sinatra and “From Here to Eternity” won the annual straw poll of academy voters released yesterday by Daily Variety, a show business trade paper. But Lancaster was only a handful of votes behind.

  As usual, only eight of the 20 globe-trotting acting nominees will be in the audience of 2500 executives, fans and stars at the Pantages Theatre on busy Hollywood Boulevard.

  Not one “best actress” nominee is in town. Miss Hepburn, Maggie McNamara and Deborah Kerr will be telecast at a branch meeting of nominees in New York. Ava Gardner is in Rome and Leslie Caron in Washington.

  Holden will be on hand but Richard Burton is in England, Marlon Brando in New York, Montgomery Clift in Jamaica and Lancaster in Mexico. Miss Reed and Sinatra will be among many supporting nominees who will pull up in limousines before screaming fans outside the ornate theater.

  Here was Louella. “Tonight’s the night for Frank Sinatra,” she wrote.

  He’ll either step up and get his Oscar for “From Here to Eternity,” or else he and the rest of the audience will be surprised numb.

  [But] whether Frankie wins or not, he’s delighted with the St. Genesius medal given him by 13-year-old Nancy, Jr. and Frankie, Jr.

  Was Parsons giving him the win or taking it away? He thought of the oracular pronouncement Chester had made when Frank had moaned that he didn’t think he had a chance: Anything can happen. There are a lot of upsets in these contests.

  It was cold and drizzly, a night for keeping the Cadillac’s convertible top up. He pulled in to the drive at 320 North Carolwood and walked to the front door, umbrella in hand. The door opened, and there they all were in the sweet-smelling foyer: behind, Nancy holding the baby’s hand, and in front, Frank’s two dates for the evening, Nancy junior in a white fur cape and Frankie in an overcoat and bow tie. Their eyes were big.

  He exclaimed: how beautiful; how handsome. Little Nancy beamed; Frankie frowned.

  Big Nancy was smiling her smile. Good luck, Frank.

  He kissed her on the cheek and thanked her. Then he kissed the grinning Tina and thanked her too.

  He patted the pocket of his tux jacket, where the medal sat. His right knee kept shaking, as if he were running in place.

  Let’s go.

  It was a long evening—ninety minutes, not nearly as long as the show is these days; but for Frank, endless. Donald O’Connor was the host, and he liked Donald; everyone did. But he couldn’t pay attention while O’Connor made his jokes and the audience tittered and the band played and the film clips were shown and the show halted for commercials and started again and the endless awards were given out: his knee wouldn’t stop shaking, and the only sound he could hear was white noise, a buzz in his head …

  He was sitting on the left aisle, three-quarters of the way back. Little Nancy, beside him, was squeezing his arm; next to her, Frankie was leaning forward in his seat, his mouth slightly open, watching the proceedings avidly.

  The buzz in Frank’s head stopped for a moment when Donna Reed won for Best Supporting Actress. Then it began again. When William Holden won Best Actor instead of Monty, his daughter gave Frank’s arm an extra squeeze. Don’t be too disappointed if you don’t win, Daddy, she whispered in his ear.

  Don’t you be, either, he whispered back.

  An hour and a quarter into the show, close to the end, Mercedes McCambridge walked to the podium. The buzz in Frank’s head stopped abruptly, and he watched her closely. She was a chunky little broad with a ringing voice and a short haircut, wearing an unflattering white strapless gown—not a looker, but she’d won Best Supporting Actress in 1949 for All the King’s Men.

  “Nominees for the best performance by an actor in a supporting role,” she began, “are Eddie Albert, in Roman Holiday, Paramount; Brandon De Wilde, in Shane, Paramount; Jack Palance, in Shane, Paramount; Frank Sinatra, in From Here to Eternity, Columbia—”

  Here, for the first time, there was applause.

  “Robert Strauss, in Stalag 17, Paramount. And who, please, is the winner?” She turned and took the open envelope, saw the name on it before she returned to the microphone. With a gasp, she said, “The winner is Frank Sinatra, in From Here to Eternity.” And as the audience erupted, she hopped up and down, one small hop, like a little girl who’d just gotten exactly what she wanted for Christmas.

  Barely anybody in the theater liked him, but at that moment everyone there felt exactly the way Mercedes McCambridge felt. A great gift had been given to them all: they had witnessed a miracle. Hollywood loves a show, and there was no show to compare to this. “A peculiar thing happened and I can’t explain it,” Louella Parsons wrote later. “I ran into person after person who said, ‘He’s a so-and-so but I hope he gets it. He was great!’ ”

  Little Nancy burst into tears and couldn’t stop crying. Frankie was gazing at his father in astonishment. Frank kissed his daughter’s wet cheek, grasped his son’s hand, and first walked, then trotted down the aisle. It was an easy, graceful trot, as though a great weight had been removed from his shoulders. The applause grew louder. Frank climbed the stage steps, shook Donald O’Connor’s hand, and kissed him on the cheek. “Unbelievable,” Frank said, shaking his head. He went to the podium, kissed McCambridge—she cooed with pleasure—and took his Oscar. He bowed deeply as the audience shouted bravos. Then he looked carefully at the gleaming statuette in his hands.

  “Um—” he began, glancing up, then looking back down nervously.

  “That’s a clever opening,” he said, to laughter. He smiled. The theater then went dead silent: nobody quite dared to breathe. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Frank began, still finding it hard to face the crowd. He clearly hadn’t prepared a speech. “I’m, I’m deeply thrilled,” he stammered. “And, and very moved. And I really, really don’t know what to say, because this is a whole new kind of thing. You know, I—song-and-dance-man-type stuff—” He grinned and glanced over at O’Connor. “And, uh, I’m terribly pleased, and if I start thanking everybody, I’ll do a one-reeler up here, so I’d better not. And, uh, I’d just like to say, however, that, uh—” He smiled mischievously. “They’re doing a lot of songs here tonight, but nobody asked me to—”

  He didn’t have to say the last word. He had now proved, definitively, that he could do something besides sing.

  He was grinning broadly as the crowd laughed, looking around and seeming at ease for the first time. “I love you, though, thank you very much,” he said, adding, as if further explanation were necessary, “I’m absolutely thrilled.” And he blew the crowd a big kiss, took McCambridge’s arm, and walked off.

  Watching on television in Santa Monica, Ralph Greenson turned to his wife. “That’s it,” the psychiatrist said. “We’ll never see him again.”

  He was right.

  Several of the biographies say that Frank thanked Harry Cohn, Buddy Adler, and Fred Zinnemann that night. In fact, he cleverly thanked everybody by thanking nobody. At his brief press conference backstage, amid the grinning faces of Cohn, Adler, Zinnemann, and Donna Reed—From Here to Eternity had virtually swept the evening, winning eight Oscars and tying Gone With the Wind—Sinatra expressed his regret that the
absent Montgomery Clift had failed to win the Academy Award he so deserved.1 “I wanted to thank Monty Clift personally,” Frank said. “I learned more about acting from Clift—it was equal to what I learned about musicals from Gene Kelly.”

  Then he posed for the cameras with Reed, both of them clutching their golden statuettes, both wearing the kinds of smiles that actors never smile in the movies. Frank had been photographed grinning like this once before, the time the cameras had caught him dancing with Lana Turner, the wedding band that joined him to Nancy clearly and indiscreetly visible on his left hand.

  The woman he’d left Nancy (and Lana) for, the woman whose ring he still wore despite everything, the woman who had been largely responsible for getting him the role of Maggio, was the one person he never thanked. She was in Madrid, as busy in her way as he was in his.

  He drove his son and daughter home, and it was only the thought of them, warm in the car with him and unable to stop talking about the miracle of the evening, that kept Frank from driving the Cadillac into a light pole. The Oscar sat on the seat between him and Nancy Sandra, like a fourth passenger. The rain had stopped; the streets were black and slick; the streetlights had halos. He drove west on Hollywood, turned south on Fairfax to Sunset, turned right, and continued west. When he pulled up in front of 320 North Carolwood, all the lights in the house were on.

  He knew people were waiting for him in the apartment on Beverly Glen: Jule Styne had thrown together a little congratulatory party, with Gene Kelly and Sammy Cahn and Betty Comden and Adolph Green and a few others. There would be a lot of champagne, and a fresh-faced starlet named Charlotte Austin. But Frank wasn’t in the mood to see anybody—everybody who congratulated him seemed, in some small or large way, to take responsibility for his triumph. The one person who had somehow managed not to do this, who had seemed genuinely happy for him without having to take anything at all from him, had been his ex-wife.

  Frank and Donna Reed hold their Oscars for From Here to Eternity. Hollywood rejoiced in Sinatra’s victory, the greatest career comeback ever. Louella Parsons wrote later: “I ran into person after person who said, ‘He’s a so-and-so but I hope he gets it. He was great!’ ” (photo credit 40.2)

  So he turned left on Sunset instead of right, away from Beverly Glen, and guided the Cadillac over the slick black boulevard, driving carefully through the curves. He passed the Beverly Hills Hotel and turned off Sunset, among the dark, quiet streets with their tall palm trees and big, self-possessed houses. After a little while he pulled over and parked.

  Sitting under a streetlight, he picked up the statuette and held it. He looked at it, ran his hand over its cool smoothness, turned it in the light. It was deliciously heavy: eight and a half pounds, the size of a newborn.

  He opened the car door and got out, the statuette in his hand.

  “I ducked the party, lost the crowds, and took a walk,” he said years later. “Just me and Oscar! I think I relived my entire lifetime that night as I walked up and down the streets of Beverly Hills. Even when a cop stopped me, he couldn’t bring me down to earth. It was very nice of him, although I did have to wait until his partner came cruising to assure him that I was who I said I was and that I had not stolen the statue I was carrying.”

  But he had not stolen the statue. He was Frank Sinatra.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The true origin of this book was a slightly rowdy dinner at a Santa Monica restaurant called Guido’s in September of 2004. I was finishing Dean & Me, the memoir I co authored with Jerry Lewis; Jerry was in the midst of preparing his annual Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethon and in order to give some of the participants in the show a night off, his manager Claudia Stabile hosted an impromptu party. Present, among others, were the bandleader Jack Eglash, the guitarist (and Claudia’s husband-to-be) Joe Lano, the pianist and arranger Vincent Falcone, the singer Jack Jones, and, to my great good fortune, me. The occasion was convivial and uninhibited and show-biz gossipy in a Vegas-centric way, and at a certain point in the evening the conversation turned to Frank Sinatra.

  Several of the men present had worked with Sinatra; almost everyone at the table, myself excepted, had known him well. Given the atmosphere of boozy hilarity, it wouldn’t have surprised me a bit if the talk had been mildly iconoclastic or gently scathing—the Old Man (as they all referred to him) had been dead for six years, after all—but, in fact, it was uniformly reverent.

  These were musicians talking, they were speaking of Sinatra as a musician, and they spoke with awe—of his pitch, his incomparable way with a lyric, his transcendent professionalism, his collegiality. And even his vulnerability. At one point Vinnie Falcone, who was Sinatra’s conductor and accompanist toward the end of the singer’s career, spoke of his fruitless efforts to get Frank to record the great and legendarily difficult Billy Strayhorn classic “Lush Life.” “Come on, Boss, just you and me and a piano,” Vinnie said. Sinatra shook his head. Even the gods know their limits.

  The evening stayed with me. Here was a vision of Frank Sinatra as a man and an artist, without the traps and trappings of celebrity, without a trace of the bad behavior for which he was so celebrated and which so often seemed to be the main, if not the only, topic of conversation. Sinatra lived and breathed in the talk of these awed colleagues. And so when yet another major biography of him came out just months after that dinner at Guido’s—an apparently exhaustively researched book, in which, remarkably, the subject (and certainly the great artist) neither lived nor breathed—my interest was piqued.

  The book you hold in your hands would have never existed without Phyllis Grann, great editor and—I am proud to say—great friend. To encourage a first-time biographer to take on Sinatra—not only a gigantic subject but also, perhaps, the most chronicled human in modern history—might have looked like sheer folly to most people (including, often, the biographer himself) but never to Phyllis, who evinced a mysteriously deep and abiding belief in me from the first time we met.

  From the word go with Frank, it was starkly clear to me that I was far out of my depth, miles out at sea where my limited expertise was concerned. I proceeded with maximum misgivings, even with terror. But I worked hard at it, slowly and steadily; and the one thing I never lost sight of was that dinner at Guido’s. Here was a genius and a great artist, a man who had changed—shaped—the twentieth century, and I owed him his due. If I wasn’t qualified to provide it, I owed it to Sinatra to qualify myself. My affection for him may have wavered—he had a genius, too, for making himself dislikable—but the one note I could never find within myself was the condescension, even the contempt, on which so many other writers based their narratives. Frank always brought me back. I dreamed of him, spoke to him, even, saw him plain in all his electric variability.

  Idolatry, too, was out. Idolatry was fine for the idolators, but, once again, I felt I owed my subject more: I owed him a biography he deserved. If he continued to hold my affection despite his considerable, even spectacular, flaws, that was all well and good. It would sustain me. It did sustain me.

  But I had help, and I needed every bit of it.

  There are four men whose loyalty and perspicacity lifted me from sloughs of despond and ignorance and gave Bernoulli-like loft to a much-heavier-than-air project. First I must single out Peter Bogdanovich, a man who, quite simply, I am lucky to know, and who, luckily for me, knew Frank Sinatra. As my earliest reader, and as a first-rate writer himself, Peter literally kept me going, chapter by chapter, with his heartfelt enthusiasm and incomparable cultural-historical perspective.

  That Will Friedwald and Michael Kraus, who both know as much about Sinatra as anyone has a right to know, gave freely of their time and steadily approved of what I was doing still amazes me. I will always remember their generosity. I was wildly fortunate to have these two frighteningly learned, gimlet-eyed men parsing every sentence of the book.

  To a great editor of another sort, my brother and friend, Peter W. Kaplan, I owe more than I can say.
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br />   As I do to my longtime literary agent, Joy Harris, my ally, advocate, and friend through thick and thin—and sometimes a lot of thin. From our first day working together, I have felt that Joy understood me completely and was able to wait almost indefinitely for me to do what we both felt I could do. She also has never put a foot wrong. A writer can ask for no more.

  To Karen Cumbus, and to Aaron, Avery, and Jacob Kaplan, I owe the greatest debt of all: the blessing of having someone for whom to do my work and to whom to give my work; a safe harbor in a tempest-tossed world.

  I would also like to extend deep gratitude to Damian Da Costa, Ted Panken, and Katherine Bang.

  And to the following: Monty Alexander, Peggy Alexander, Bette Alexander, Iris Hiskey Arno, Ajay Arora, George Avakian, Brook Babcock, Jean Bach, Adam Begley, A. Scott Berg, Tony Bill, Bill Boggs, Ernest Borgnine, Shannon E. Bowen, Laurie Cahn, Mariah Carey, Jeanne Carmen, Christopher Cerf, Iris Chester, Jonathan Cohen, Jeffrey Collette, Frank Collura, Kenny Colman, Peggy Connelly, Stan Cornyn, Neil Daniels, Houstoun Demere, Angie Dickinson, Frank DiGiacomo, John Dominis, Renée Doruyter, Todd Doughty, Bob Eckel, Chris Erskine, Vincent Falcone, Michael Feinstein, John Fontana, Dan Frank, Gloria Delson Franks, Mitchell Freinberg, Bruce J. Friedman, Drew Friedman, Gary Giddins, Vince Giordano, Steve Glauber, Irwin Glusker, Starleigh Goltry, Bob Gottlieb, Chuck Granata, Mary Edna Grantham, Connie Haines, Betsy Duncan Hammes, Bruce Handy, Bill Harbach, Lee Herschberg, Suzanne Herz, Don Hewitt, Rebecca Holland, Anne Hollister, George Jacobs, Bruce Jenkins, John Jenkinson, Jack Jones, Mearene Jordan, Robert Kaplan, Kitty Kelley, Ed Kessler, Steve Khan, Andreas Kroniger, Suzy Kunhardt, Theodora Kuslan, Andrew Lack, Claudia Gridley Stabile Lano, Joe Lano, Peter Levinson, Jerry Lewis, Richard Lewis, Abbey Lincoln, George Lois, Mark Lopeman, Carmel Malin, Karyn Marcus, Gene McCarthy, Barbara McManus, Sonny Mehta, David Michaelis, Bill Miller, Mitch Miller, Jackeline Montalvo, Pat Mulcahy, Leonard Mustazza, Eunice Norton, Dan Okrent, Ed O’Brien, Tony Oppedisano, Neal Peters, Saint Clair Pugh, Mario Puzo, Alison Rich, Jenny Romero, Andrew Rosenblum, Frankie Randall, Adam Reed, Mickey Rooney, Andrew Rosenblum, Ric Ross, Steve Rubin, Mike Rubino, Jane Russell, George Schlatter, Gary Shapiro, Mike Shore, Liz Smith, Tyler Smith, Ted Sommer, Joe Spieler, William Stadiem, Jo Stafford, Nancy Steiner, Karen Svobodny, Laura Swanson, Gay Talese, Bill Thomas, Thomas Tucker, Sarah Twombly, Roberta Wennik-Kaplan, Tim Weston, Virginia Wicks, Bud Yorkin, and Sidney Zion.