Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  —

  Back on the upswing, covered with honors from Billboard and Down Beat and Metronome, Frank Sinatra truly seemed to have the world on a string. What was he doing sobbing to Cindy Bayes about the mess he had made of his life?

  In the darkness of 5:00 a.m., he knew he was alone and always would be. “My father was a deeply feeling man who could not attain a meaningful intimate relationship,” Sinatra’s younger daughter, Tina, wrote in her memoir. “I don’t know that he ever had faith in finding a soul mate, even during his pursuit of Ava. After that marriage imploded, he would hedge all emotional bets. He would keep a part of himself safe and shut off. As he once told me, ‘I will never hurt like that again.’ ”

  In protecting himself from hurt, he was only assuring himself another kind of pain, but one that was more easily anesthetized by ceaseless activity, by sex and romance, by alcohol. But that 5:00 a.m. moment always came, the moment when the anesthesia wore off.

  —

  Three weeks later, another mess.

  Sammy, rested and reenergized thanks to his stay in the desert and wearing a jaunty-looking patch over his left eye, celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday with a party at his new house in the Hollywood Hills. He was excited—about his recovery, which was proceeding well; about the gig that Herman Hover, the owner of Ciro’s, had promised the Mastin Trio as soon as Sammy was ready (Frank had leaned on Hover to make it happen); about the house, the first place he’d ever had to hang his hat in (although his white publicist Jess Rand had had to rent the place under his own name, for all too obvious reasons); about his birthday. The house was filled with friends—eating, drinking, smoking, laughing. Frank was there and a very pregnant Judy Garland. After a while Cindy Bayes arrived, escorted by Bob Neal, a dark-haired Texas playboy—in those days, there was still actually such a thing as a playboy—who had money to burn, being both an oilman and the heir to the Maxwell House coffee fortune.

  After many drinks were consumed, Judy Garland and Cindy Bayes wanted to move the party along—they decided to go catch Mel Tormé at the Crescendo, a jazz club on Sunset. The agreeable Bob Neal was game; Frank, however, had no desire to go hear Mel Tormé. For one thing, Tormé was another singer, and a sublimely gifted one at that, capable of things even Sinatra couldn’t do (scatting, for example). For another, Frank and Tormé had history: not only had Frank dated Mel’s wife, Candy Toxton, before she married Mel, but he’d also shown up drunk at the couple’s engagement party and chased Toxton up the stairs, forcing her to lock herself in a bathroom.

  Finally, Cindy Bayes told Frank that she, Garland, and Neal were going to the Crescendo whether he went or not. Perhaps not wanting to be edged out by the wealthy Casanova, Frank grudgingly agreed to go. Not a good start.

  The party proceeded to the club and listened to Tormé. Apparently, Frank behaved himself. But when the club closed at 2:00 a.m., the foursome, feeling no pain, walked into the foyer with drinks hidden under their overcoats. The headwaiter noticed and warned the group that what they were doing was illegal and that a couple of plainclothes policemen were standing nearby.

  This alone would have irked Sinatra.

  At that moment, however, Mel Tormé’s press agent (as a publicist was called in those days), James Byron, who’d been standing nearby, either called out to the party or approached them and asked Bob Neal the name of his date. He might have put it more pungently, asking who the broad was. Byron almost certainly would have been inquiring about Cindy Bayes, although Sinatra, for reasons of his own, would later maintain that the press agent had failed to recognize Judy Garland—an unlikely possibility, no matter how pregnant she was. It was all very straightforward: filling out the names of the group would allow Byron to plant an item in the gossip columns about Sinatra and Garland coming to hear his client.

  But Frank elected to take the inquiry amiss. According to Byron, “Sinatra said, ‘What business is it of yours? You’re probably a cop. I hate cops. You’re either a cop or a reporter. And I hate cops and newspapermen.’ ”

  According to Kitty Kelley, Frank’s language was more pungent. According to Kelley, Sinatra lunged at Byron in the phone booth, shouting, “Get out of there, you bastard…You fucking parasite. You’re nothing but a leech. You’re a newspaperman. I hate cops and I hate reporters. Get out of there right now and take off your fucking glasses.”

  By all accounts, all parties proceeded to the parking lot, where Frank yelled at Byron, “Why don’t you go out and make a decent living and not suck off other people? You leech.”

  “And who are you, Frank?” Byron said. “You’re dependent on other people. You’re dependent on the press and the public.”

  “I am not. I have talent and I am dependent only on myself,” Frank said.

  Accounts now diverge considerably. According to Byron, “Sinatra told me to take off my glasses and then he jumped me. He hauled off with his left and hit me on the side of the face. We exchanged several blows and I hit him in the nose a couple of times.”

  But years later, Cindy Bayes told her son, “The guy comes over to hit Frank and the guys from the parking lot were holding Frank’s arms down stupidly thinking they were helping him. Frank did not make the first hit.”

  This jibes with Sinatra’s account: “I went back to Byron and told him to take his glasses off. Then suddenly two guys held my arms and Byron tried to knee me. He succeeded in denting my shin bone and clawing my hand. I couldn’t do anything because I was held by two men. I broke loose. It ended when I gave him a left hook and dumped him on his fanny.”

  Of course it didn’t end there. Nothing with Frank ever ended anywhere near where he wanted it to end.

  —

  “I have talent and I am dependent only on myself.” His restlessness and his impatience were of a piece with the emotional disconnect. His simple need for movement frequently trumped good sense. This even extended to his music. He would have seen from the beginning how deep his musical bond—and yes, therefore his emotional bond—with Nelson Riddle was, and some part of him might have resisted it. Riddle, a shy man who was in awe of Sinatra as both a musician and a star, would not, could not, have pressed the issue. And so just as he constantly looked for new lovers, Frank sought (and would continue to seek) other arrangers, even as some part of him must have known Riddle could give him all he needed, and more. There was some musical sense to this, but there was an emotional story behind it as well.

  What else could account for the December 13 session with Ray Anthony and his orchestra, an outfit best known for “The Bunny Hop,” “The Hokey Pokey,” and the theme from Dragnet? Frank recorded two songs that day, both arranged by a former trombonist, not Nelson Riddle: his name was Dick Reynolds, and the tunes were “I’m Gonna Live till I Die,” a fast-paced belter whose title said the little the song had to say, and “Melody of Love,” a rather soppy waltz that, according to Will Friedwald, “may be the only Sinatra record completely bereft of anything resembling drama or even a climactic moment.”

  A large statement. And this in a life so filled with drama and climactic moments.

  He was searching. And in some ways flailing.

  —

  A couple of days later, Not as a Stranger wrapped. Stanley Kramer swore he would never use Sinatra in a movie again, not even if he had to go begging with a tin cup. Kramer didn’t mention Mitchum or Marvin or Broderick Crawford, only Frank.

  * * *

  * And whom Sinatra would tap no fewer than three times to direct him again, in Robin and the 7 Hoods, Tony Rome, and The Detective.

  3

  I’m not going to get married. If I feel the need for company, I call up for a date and go out somewhere.

  —FRANK SINATRA, TO A NEWSPAPER COLUMNIST, APRIL 1955

  You be nice to tender people.

  —HAROLD ARLEN TO FRANK SINATRA

  Maybe an angel could save him.

  Frank had first met Gloria Vanderbilt in the summer of 1945, when her husband, Leopold Stokowski, was c
onducting at the Hollywood Bowl. When the singer went backstage after the concert to congratulate the maestro, he took admiring notice of the sixty-three-year-old conductor’s swan-necked, ethereally lovely twenty-one-year-old wife, whose devotion to her husband bordered on worship.

  Nine years later, the bicoastal gossip mill buzzed with the rumor that the role of handmaiden to a living legend was wearing on Madame Stokowski. The maestro toured frequently, while she stayed in New York caring for their two young sons. In the evenings, she was frequently out and about with starry company. An item in Dorothy Kilgallen’s column that November noted, “Gloria Vanderbilt Stokowski, who was almost a recluse for so many weeks after her marriage to the maestro, has done the complete reversal. Now hangs out in Sardi’s.” (Another item higher in the column read, “Don’t be surprised if Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner decide they just can’t resist giving it another whirl.”) In private, Vanderbilt had asked her husband for a divorce; he had told her he would never let her go.

  At thirty, the heiress was as famous as her husband, having first come to the world’s attention at age seven, as the center of a sensational custody battle between her flighty and hedonistic mother and her aunt the philanthropist Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Brought up by her aunt in luxury on Long Island and Fifth Avenue, Gloria blossomed into an exotic-looking, dark-haired beauty whose photograph first appeared in Harper’s Bazaar when she was fifteen. At seventeen, she went to Beverly Hills to visit her mother and instantly fell under the spell of Hollywood, and Hollywood fell for her: stars like Errol Flynn, Van Heflin, and George Montgomery danced attendance. After a disastrous early marriage to an actor’s agent named Pat DeCicco—a shady minion of Howard Hughes and probably a small-time hood—she met Stokowski, who seemed to promise an ideal life of artistic purity.

  Gloria had long nourished artistic longings. She had studied acting; she also wrote poetry and had a gift for painting, avocations the possessive maestro liked better because they were solitary. Stokowski was far less pleased with his gregarious young wife’s attraction to the glittering life he called Vanity Fair and a circle that included her best friends, Carol Marcus (who’d twice been married to the writer William Saroyan) and Oona O’Neill Chaplin, as well as the songwriters Harold Arlen and Jule Styne (who’d moved back to New York to pick up his Broadway career) and the ever-provocative Truman Capote, who encouraged her to get out and get around, with other men if need be.

  In early 1954, after Vanderbilt and the theater producer Gilbert Miller acted together in a skit for a charity ball, Miller proclaimed her “a star in the making,” citing her “electric presence, dignity, poise, intelligence, beautiful speech.” That fall she was cast alongside Franchot Tone in a revival of Saroyan’s Time of Your Life, to be produced at New York’s City Center theater that coming January.

  Then Jule Styne called and said that Sinatra was coming to town and wanted to take her out.

  Frank was to begin a three-week stand at the Copa just before Christmas, and the gossip columns were reporting he’d be accompanied to New York by Miss Sweden of 1951, Anita Ekberg. Perhaps conversation with Ekberg was wearing thin; maybe he just wanted to cover his bases; in any case, he had suddenly conceived a desire to see Gloria Vanderbilt.

  Harold Arlen, also a friend of Frank’s, warned him, “You be nice to tender people.”

  Frank was fully capable of this. It wasn’t falsity. In one part of his complex and contradictory soul, he was ever receptive to, even solicitous of, those who inspired his better angels.

  Vanderbilt, for her part, was electrified by the call. “The phone can ring and your whole life can change,” she wrote in a memoir.

  I’d met him once before…But that didn’t count. It didn’t count because he didn’t exist for me, no one did then. I was veiled, and others existed in my thoughts only as people permitted to stand in Leopold’s presence. Now it was different—in an instant everything had changed, and all I could think of was whether I was thin enough, thin enough to meet him.

  The date was made through Styne: 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, December 21. There is a photograph of the two of them that night, at a performance of the new hit Broadway musical The Pajama Game,*1 seated—where else?—in the first row of the orchestra at the St. James Theater. Though photographers weren’t allowed into the theater, one had somehow managed to sneak in and get a shot: Frank on the aisle, handsome in a dark suit—you can almost smell the bay rum on his cheeks—but appearing strangely disengaged with the glorious creature on his left, studiously examining his playbill and actually appearing to be chewing gum. He looks almost bored. Can this be? More likely, it is the look of a man, oversensitive to begin with, who has detected the photographer in his peripheral vision and who, though he strongly wishes not to be seen or bothered, is doing his best, in the dignified surroundings of the orchestra section of a Broadway theater, amid the ladies in their furs and pearls and the gents in their black tie, not to create the all too expectable incident.

  On the face of it, they are a mismatch. Gloria Vanderbilt, a vision in white silk, her hair pulled back, a quadruple strand of freshwater pearls around her beautiful neck, diamond swags hanging from those lovely ears, fits far better with the tuxedoed toff seated on her other side, a blond hunk with a perfectly unreflective face and a no doubt irreproachable pedigree…But here she is with Sinatra, and this photographer, hoping to get the pair to look at his camera, has triggered his flash. Distracted from the playbill she holds in white-gloved hands, her head snapping up so quickly that the swag hanging from her left ear is a blur of motion, she shoots the man a look of cold fury. “She looks,” a biographer wrote, “like a gorgeous cobra that could kill you with one swift glance.” But her anger likely covers another, less imperious emotion; she is after all still a married woman, caught, if not quite in the act of betrayal, then well along in the intention.

  Yet Sinatra meant more to her than sex or even love. “I’m seeing him again tonight,” she wrote, breathlessly, of the morning after, “and all day, even though I got no sleep, instead of being tired I feel high, like I’m taking deep drafts of some kind of rare oxygen that connects not with another person but with an unknown place in myself…Because when I’m inside that place I have the courage to be free…He is the bridge, the bridge to set me free.”

  Sinatra’s affair with Gloria Vanderbilt was brief but fiery, the catalyst that loosed her from her marriage to the conductor Leopold Stokowski: “He is the bridge, the bridge to set me free,” she wrote of Frank. (Credit 3.1)

  Less than a week after they met, Vanderbilt would move with her sons out of the Gracie Square penthouse they’d lived in with Stokowski to a hotel on Park Avenue. The papers would soon announce the couple’s separation.

  But what was she to Frank?

  They would have just three weeks together, and then he was off to Australia, for concerts in Melbourne and Sydney. For those three weeks, they saw each other almost every night, for propriety’s sake in the company of an older pair, Frank’s friend the sports columnist Jimmy Cannon and the actress Joan Blondell, the four of them riding around Manhattan in a long black limousine. (A decade later, the weeks with Vanderbilt would find an unintentional echo in Ervin Drake’s “blue-blooded girls of independent means” lyric for “It Was a Very Good Year.”) Vanderbilt recalled that one night at dinner Frank “turned to me and said that he’d thought about me, wanted to see me again, ever since that night he’d watched me in the audience at the [Hollywood Bowl] concert, how I’d looked at Leopold as he conducted, my eyes never leaving him. I winced.”

  She winced because at the moment she felt disloyal, but could she also have been wincing at Sinatra’s vision of the perfect handmaiden? A woman of rare sensibility, delicacy, and beauty who would speak softly and walk a step behind? She had been twenty-one then; now she was thirty. She was a caterpillar molting.

  “At that point, I never thought I could be in love or involved with anyone again unless we could work together,” Vanderbilt recall
ed, fifty-five years later. “That’s what I really wanted.”

  But this was her dream, not his.

  For Christmas, he gave her a Tiffany bracelet engraved “For Miracle and Me”—because, she remembered, “we both said that it was sort of a miracle that we had met.” On New Year’s Eve, there was a party in his penthouse suite at the Sherry-Netherland, and when the other guests left, Frank turned off the lights and took her to the window. “You looked down over the park, which was just beautiful, and it was snowing,” she remembered. In the frost on the window he drew a heart and traced their initials inside: FS & GV.

  In his fortieth year, he too was sweetly dreaming that he might find what he needed with her. “We talked about having children together,” Vanderbilt said. “We talked a lot about places we’d like to go to together—the things that lovers talk about when they’re fantasizing, you know.

  “He never talked about Ava. He would drink Jack Daniel’s, but I never saw him drunk once. And I never saw him belligerent; I never saw anything like that.”

  She told him about her affection-starved girlhood and how terrifying it had felt to be a child in the public eye. Oddly, he confided back something for which the public had long criticized him. “He was very open in talking about his relationship with the Mob,” she recalled. “And how conflicted he was about it. He was drawn to it, he said.”

  He was stripping himself bare for her. But there were so many layers still beneath.

  —

  “The list of celebrities who can’t get to see Sinatra is almost more glittering than the roster of those who make it,” Dorothy Kilgallen reported a few days after New Year’s. “Latest victims of the velvet rope include Zsa Zsa and Rubi [the international playboy Porfirio Rubirosa]…and Marlon Brando.”

  Maybe Frank slipped the Copa doorman a C-note to keep Brando out. But no doorman on earth would have stood in the way of Sinatra’s January 7 visitor: on that night, Marilyn Monroe, newly platinum blonde and wearing a white ermine jacket, accompanied by the photographer Milton Greene and his wife, walked into the sold-out show and proceeded directly to a ringside table. Frank stopped the show and gave her a wink when she sat down.