Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  Frank, of course, bought into the concept more than anyone. After all, he and Charlie were a lot alike—an idea that must have given the movie a lot of pop for mid-1950s audiences—except that Frank was a lot richer, the girls were more plentiful, and (the beauty part, at least in theory) he didn’t have to get married at the end. Ever since Ava had all but divorced him, he had tried to get used to the idea of life without her the only way he knew how: singing sad songs (In the Wee Small Hours) or semi-defiant ones (in May, his recording of “Learnin’ the Blues,” a great swinger by an out-of-the-woodwork young songwriter named Dolores Vicki Silvers, hit number 2 on the Billboard singles chart); and through an incessant round of flings, affairs, and romances conducted both sequentially and, with a boldness that Charlie Reader might have envied but only Frank Sinatra could really bring off, simultaneously.

  Around the same time (for example) that he was tracing his and Gloria Vanderbilt’s initials on the window of his penthouse suite at the Sherry-Netherland, he was romancing the nineteen-year-old singer Jill Corey, who came to the Copacabana during that laden Christmas–New Year’s stand of 1954–55. “I had a date with a singer by the name of Richard Hayes,” Corey recalled. “He took me to see Sinatra at the Copa. And we were seated on the stage area, and in the middle of the show [Frank] discovered me. My cheeks began to warm, because he directed his view at me. Richard didn’t seem to mind, because he was in awe of Sinatra. For a good twenty-five minutes, he was turning his head my way, then acknowledging somebody else, and then coming right back to me. I turned red; I was a nervous wreck.”

  There was no meeting that night, only heavy eye contact, and the next day Corey had to go to Pittsburgh for a club engagement. But two weeks later, she remembered, “I’m outside of the building, going down the steps, and the manager comes running after me: ‘There’s a phone call for you from New York.’ I said, ‘Who is it?’ He said, ‘It’s Frank Sinatra.’ ”

  Corey picked up the phone. “Where in the hell have you been?” barked Sinatra, to whom she had never spoken before. “I had five people searching for you. When are you getting back to New York?”

  Corey told Frank that she was headed back to New York the next day, to do a live television show called Stop the Music. He asked what time her show was over; eight o’clock, she said.

  “I’ll be onstage at the same time,” Sinatra said. “Would you mind if my chauffeur came and picked you up? He’ll have a little hat in his hand; you’ll recognize him.”

  Like Gloria Vanderbilt, Corey was instantly almost incapacitated by the prospect of meeting Sinatra. “I get back to New York, and I spend the whole day not getting ready for the performance that night but trying to find the right dress,” she recalled. “And all through my mind, I kept thinking, ‘Do I call him Frankie or Frank?’

  “I finish the show, and I see a man standing who looks like he’s in chauffeur clothes. He said, ‘Miss Corey? I’m here at Mr. Sinatra’s request to pick you up and take you back to his show.’ ”

  The rest played like a scene from GoodFellas. Jules Podell, the manager of the Copacabana, met Corey at the door to the club and escorted her to a ringside table. Sinatra’s show was almost through. “He took his bow, then he came up the steps, grabbed me by the hand, took me through the doors, and into a kitchen. Now, I’m nineteen. I’ve worked many, many places from the time I was fourteen, singing with a dance band, but I had never entered or exited [a club] through a kitchen. I said nothing. And we get to an elevator that takes you to the second floor, where you go down a hallway, and there is the Hotel Fourteen. I watch him as he’s helped change out of his tuxedo into street clothes. He said, ‘I’m hungry. Are you?’ I said yes. He said, ‘Well, let’s go for a drive through the park first.’ So we went for a drive through the park with the chauffeur. And he said, ‘Harwyn Club’—where Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier [had been] seen dancing. He said, ‘We can eat there. Is that all right with you?’ I said, ‘Yes, it’s all right with me.’ ”

  Not long afterward—after spending more evenings with Vanderbilt—Frank was off to Australia, and his dalliance with Ann McCormack. He would phone Gloria Vanderbilt several times from Down Under and from Los Angeles when he returned home; he would phone Corey, too, promising to take a few days off from Guys and Dolls to fly to New York and catch her opening at the Blue Angel. (Though Frank, Corey insisted to a columnist, was “just a pal—not a romance.”) He appears to have made good on his promise, even though he had just begun a new relationship with Peggy Connelly, was conducting an on-again, off-again intermezzo with Judy Garland, and, in his spare time, was spotted at a nightclub with one Ilsa Bey, identified in the papers as “the foreign beauty who owns a Texas oil well.”

  —

  In June, Dorothy Manners, filling in for Louella Parsons, reported that the high-flying Frank had chartered not one but two planes to ferry a crowd of friends from Los Angeles to Las Vegas “to catch Rosemary Clooney’s closing at the Sands, Noel Coward’s opening at the Desert Inn, and the new ‘Follies,’ with Peter Lind Hayes,…at the Sands.” According to Manners, the group included Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Judy Garland and her husband, Sid Luft, the songwriter Sylvia Fine (Mrs. Danny Kaye), the Beverly Hills restaurateur Mike Romanoff and his wife, Jimmy Van Heusen, and the Peter Lawfords.

  If the columnist’s attendance roll is accurate—and as we’ll soon see, there is reason to believe it is—the inclusion of the newlyweds Peter and Pat Lawford is a kind of minor major surprise. Conventional wisdom has it that as the result of an absurd misunderstanding or a baseless tantrum on Sinatra’s part, or a little of both, Peter Lawford was in the midst of an epic freeze-out by Frank: in late 1953, while Sinatra was down on his luck and Ava Gardner had one foot out the door, Lawford and his manager had a drink with Ava and her sister Bappie; Frank read a gossip column that airbrushed out the manager and Ava’s sister, and he predictably went ballistic. Several sources have claimed that Sinatra, who was notorious for being able to hold a grudge forever, didn’t speak to his former MGM pal for almost five years, from late 1953 until the summer of 1958, and that Frank only let Peter off the hook then out of sheer opportunism: because Frank had just become interested in the fast-heating presidential prospects of Pat Lawford’s brother John F. Kennedy.

  But there is reason to believe that by the middle of 1955, the thirty-eight-year-old junior senator from Massachusetts, the second-youngest man in the U.S. Senate, was already on Sinatra’s radar screen. Nancy Sinatra writes that her father told her he first met Kennedy soon after the senator’s marriage to Jacqueline Bouvier in September 1953. Other sources claim that the two men met at a Democratic Party rally in 1955. Addressing the rally, Frank spoke passionately about the widely held idea that entertainers should stay out of politics. If it came to a choice, he said, he would give up his career for the cause in which he believed so deeply.

  In addition, Jack Kennedy had long been a known quantity in Hollywood, having first cut a swath there before World War II as the glamorous and sought-after son of Joseph P. Kennedy—banker, co-founder of RKO Pictures, ambassador to England, and lover of Gloria Swanson—and having returned often as a rising politician and sun-loving sybarite, especially after acquiring a movie-star brother-in-law. Among his many West Coast liaisons in the late 1940s was a brief fling with Ava Gardner.

  It was natural that he and Sinatra would gravitate to each other, for many reasons.

  FBI files state that beginning in mid-1955, John Kennedy kept a suite on the eighth floor of Washington’s Mayflower hotel—room 812—as his “personal playpen” and that Sinatra, among other luminaries, attended parties there.

  Also by mid-1955, after John Kennedy’s twenty-nine-year-old brother, Robert, was appointed chief counsel of the powerful Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (which under its previous chairman, Senator Joseph McCarthy, and his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, had gone after Communists and which under its new chairman, Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, would
investigate organized crime), the Kennedy brothers were Democratic figures to conjure with in Washington and much in the headlines. For Sinatra, Jack Kennedy—a witty and articulate eastern patrician, fascinated with the acquisition, maintenance, and uses of power, and a hedonist to boot—would have had much of the same appeal as Frank’s idol Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with the added charge of youth and sex appeal.

  Clearly, Peter Lawford was worth reconciling with. And even though Frank had known almost from the start that his fury at Lawford was unfounded*1—and despite the fact that as a rule his furies needed no rational fuel to keep them burning—a year and a half would have given even him enough time to cool down.

  —

  Summer of 1955: Louella Parsons is on vacation, leaving the writing of her column to Dorothy Manners. Earl Wilson is on a working holiday, leaving the scut labor to his assistants while he dispatches bons mots from Italy. Frank Sinatra doesn’t do vacations.

  Between the end of June and the end of August, he stopped moving only to sleep, and he didn’t sleep much. Even as he started shooting The Tender Trap at MGM, he was signing (for $150,000) to star in Carousel for 20th Century Fox and a musical version of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town on NBC television in September. On June 29, he broadcast the last of his twice-weekly Frank Sinatra Show for Bobbi home permanents and the next night, at Hollywood’s KHJ Radio Studios, recorded a ravishing rendition of Johnny Mercer and Jimmy Van Heusen’s “I Thought About You,” with a hint of Hoboken (“I took a chrip on a chrain, and I thought about you”) and a glorious Riddle arrangement.*2

  For a couple of weeks in late June and early July, he was actually shooting two movies at once, shuttling back and forth between Goldwyn Studios, where he was finishing work on Guys and Dolls, and the Tender Trap set at Metro. On July 9 (the all-too-significant day Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” displaced Frank’s “Learnin’ the Blues” at number 1 on the Billboard singles chart), Guys and Dolls wrapped, and on the eleventh Sinatra chartered a bus with a bar on board to take Bogart and Bacall, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Van Johnson, June Allyson, Eddie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds, the Sands’ general manager, Jack Entratter, and Michael Romanoff to a Judy Garland concert in Long Beach. The contingent arrived feeling no pain. Judy introduced Frank onstage and asked him to sing a song; for some reason, he declined. On July 15 and 27, he laid down vocal tracks for The Tender Trap, and on the twenty-ninth, again with Riddle arranging and conducting, he recorded a single, an irresistibly bouncy torch song called “Same Old Saturday Night” (“Went to see a movie show/Found myself an empty row”), credited to Sammy Cahn and the otherwise unheralded (or perhaps pseudonymous) Frank Reardon, who at the very least had taken careful notes at the School of Van Heusen.

  In the meantime, Cahn and the actual Van Heusen, having clicked so well composing “The Tender Trap” for Sinatra, were now writing a mini-score of four tunes for the Our Town TV special. In his memoir, Cahn suggested that though it had been Frank’s idea to put the two of them together, there was really a kind of kismet to it. “For years people had been saying that Sammy Cahn’s meat-and-potatoes lyrics and Jimmy Van Heusen’s polka-dot-and-moonbeams music made for a happy combination,” he writes. Yes, but. The chemistry between lyricist and composer is a delicate one, and talent on both sides of the equation doesn’t always equal felicity of product. All kinds of subtle factors come into play, and in the case of Our Town, the musical, an argument can be made that despite the noble intentions of all parties, and the immortal quality of Wilder’s play, the project was misbegotten from the start, the central problem being Frank Sinatra.

  The character of the Stage Manager, Our Town’s onstage narrator and the framer of the action, is a reasonably elastic one, having been played over the years by actors as diverse as Henry Fonda, Spalding Gray, and Paul Newman. The constant is that the character is a New Englander of a certain age, a calm and philosophical presence who must convey the life-cycle events of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, whether mundane, amusing, or heartbreaking, with a wry stolidity and a humble simplicity. For all these reasons, Sinatra as the Stage Manager just didn’t add up. The idea of converting part of his narration to song was a good one—on paper. As, in theory, was the hiring of Cahn and Van Heusen to write the songs.

  Sammy and Jimmy had struck gold with “The Tender Trap” because it had a certain hard-hearted humor to it that played to both men’s strengths. Van Heusen was a cynic, a soured romantic, capable of writing a beautifully romantic tune if the poetry of the lyric charmed away his defenses. Cahn was an extraordinarily clever lyricist, but when he aspired to poetry, bad things often happened. Sentimentality was his Achilles’ heel (along with a certain didacticism), and when Van Heusen got anywhere near sentimentality (as we’ve seen with the songs he wrote for Not as a Stranger and Young at Heart), he tended to check out artistically and write merely serviceable music, far beneath what he was capable of.

  “When you write lyrics to Broadway musicals with books by Broadway writers—well, that’s one thing,” Cahn tells us. “When you confront the genius of a Thornton Wilder, you must react more deeply, and react we did. I believe it is our best writing.”

  “A Thornton Wilder” being the problematic phrase in that statement.

  On the night of August 15, Sinatra recorded all four songs, and three of them were pure Karo syrup. Faux-folksy sentimentality and didacticism washed over the lyric of the title number, “Our Town” (“You will like the folks you meet in our town/The folks you meet on any street in our town/Pick out any cottage, white or brown/They’re all so appealin’—with that lived-in feelin’ ”), and despite Van Heusen’s gifts, and Riddle’s, the tune was solid but unmemorable. “Look to Your Heart” and “The Impatient Years” were equally unexceptional.

  What, then, happened with “Love and Marriage”?

  It is a thoroughly charming song, and a thoroughly memorable one: cheerful, winning, and utterly false. The irony of its being sung by Sinatra is transcendent. Can Cahn and Van Heusen possibly have meant it sincerely?

  Will Friedwald writes that the two songwriters “wanted you to think of them as professionals first and artists second; to hear them tell it, they didn’t write music to express anything like an aesthetic longing in their souls, but rather they were something akin to musical tailors, crafting product for the specific needs of artists, producers and the marketplace.” He then goes on, however, to call “Love and Marriage” “wryly cynical in poking fun at the social conventions of the day.”

  There is no hint of irony in Cahn’s description of the song’s genesis. “We began by rambling around the room, thinking and talking about Mr. Thornton Wilder’s play,” he writes.

  As you may know, the first act is called “The Daily Life,” the second act, “Love and Marriage,” so at some point I turned to Jimmy and said, “Since we’re doing a musical, Mr. Van Heusen, would you please…?” Whereupon he went to the piano and started thumping out oompah, oompah—which led to “Oom-pah, oom-pah, Love and marriage,/Go together like a horse and carriage.”

  The tale smacks of biopic inevitability, even though at least one source reports that Sinatra “didn’t much care for” the song. On the other hand, we have Cahn’s fascinating and entirely credible-sounding account of Frank’s initial reaction to the mini-score:

  The first time we sat down with Sinatra to play him the Our Town songs was in the home of his ex-wife Nancy, where he’d gone, Sinatra fashion, for a home-cooked meal. He kept following the songs intently—when Sinatra is in deep thought he has a habit of stroking his lower lip with the back of his thumb—and when we were finished he looked up and said, “Gee, it’s good.” For him, that’s high praise.

  Throughout his career, when considering whether or not to record a tune, Sinatra always gave first thought to business. From the 1940s to the 1990s, he was always on the lookout for hits. If he happened to like or even love a number, all the better. Yet there is a famous, and famously long, list of great and go
od songs he never recorded for one reason or another, and in many cases the reasons were commercial. Conversely, there is a shorter but still substantial roster of tunes he didn’t love but recorded anyway, with an eye to the charts: perhaps “Love and Marriage,” that pluperfect hymn to 1950s hypocrisy which he sang so winsomely and convincingly, was one of them. In any case, the song would hit the Billboard charts at number 5 in November.

  As for the real story of love and marriage in Frank Sinatra’s life, the tale of the home-cooked meal at Nancy’s house in the summer of 1955 certainly gives us one version of it in a nutshell.

  —

  Constant activity was a balm to Sinatra’s ferocious impatience, his terror of boredom and solitude. After wrapping The Tender Trap at the end of July, he headed right over to 20th Century Fox to begin rehearsals and costume fittings for Carousel. If the part of the Stage Manager in Our Town was a misfit for him, the role of Billy Bigelow, the wastrel carousel barker in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s towering musical fable, seemed made to order. “Frank Sinatra is more excited over this venture than any he’s ever undertaken,” Louella Parsons had reported in July in a column announcing that twenty-one-year-old Shirley Jones, who’d just starred in the movie version of Oklahoma!, had been signed to play Carousel’s Julie Jordan, Billy Bigelow’s sweetheart.

  Louella could certainly be breathless, but in this case she was telling it straight: the role of Billy, a reprobate who works hard at reforming and in the process gets to sing some of the greatest songs of the American musical theater, seemed heaven-sent. Frank had been singing “Soliloquy,” Billy’s aria to fatherhood and the show’s centerpiece, for years, trying to grow into the great song. Here was a chance to show the world that at almost forty he was finally ready to make it his.