Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  Shirley Jones vividly recalls Sinatra’s excitement about the film, and her own. “When they told me that I was going to play opposite him, I was thrilled,” she said. “I was a little nervous, because I knew that he was a ladies’ man, and I knew that I may have a little problem here every now and then…But this is the interesting thing: he was so thrilled about playing this role.

  “We did all the costume fittings, all the pre-photography; we did some rehearsing at the studio. One day we finished rehearsing and I was about to leave the studio, and one of his henchmen came over to me and said, ‘Shirley, Frank wants to see you in his dressing room.’ I thought, ‘Uh-oh.’ Anyway, I went up there, and he was in the bathroom, taking a shower. I went in and I sat down—there was a piano there—on the piano stool. He came out with a towel wrapped around him, but just very nonchalant. [He said,] ‘Oh, thanks for coming up, sweetheart. I just wanted to talk to you for just a few minutes.’ He said, ‘Do you know how excited I am to play Billy Bigelow?’

  “I mean, he was genuine,” Jones recalls. “I said, ‘I know, Frank. It’s only the best role for a male singer that was ever written. And you’re so perfect for it.’ ”

  After the twenty-one-year-old had sat for an awkward few minutes with the nearly naked thirty-nine-year-old star, Sinatra seemed to realize that Carousel was all Jones was interested in discussing. “He finally went in and put a robe on,” she said. “And he came back out and said, ‘Let’s talk about [the movie] a little bit—do you think that this is the way they would want it played?’ He was talking about Rodgers and Hammerstein, because he knew that I had already done Oklahoma! and that I was the only person ever put under personal contract to them. I said, ‘Oh, God, Frank. Of course. It’s a great role, and you’ll be just sensational.’ He gave me some compliments. He said, ‘We need to work things out together. If I need your help, I’ll ask, and if you need mine…’ He went on like that. Just really excited about it. It was a great conversation.”

  On August 15, the same day he laid down the four Our Town tracks, Sinatra and Cameron Mitchell, who was to play Billy Bigelow’s partner in crime Jigger Craigin, prerecorded the great chantey “Blow High, Blow Low.” The song—unlike the Our Town numbers, which were to be issued as commercial recordings after Frank sang them live on the September broadcast of the play—was meant to be dubbed into the film of Carousel. And, as is the case with three of the four songs Sinatra recorded for the movie (a lovely duet of “If I Loved You,” with Shirley Jones, remains), the master tape of “Blow High, Blow Low” has been lost to history, a victim of the controversy that surrounded his sudden withdrawal from the film a few days later.

  Fox, which had introduced CinemaScope in 1953 in a 35-millimeter format, had recently developed a new 55-millimeter version that delivered a less grainy print. The studio had decided to break in the new format on Carousel, shooting some scenes in both CinemaScope and CinemaScope 55, presumably to deliver a better-quality print to those theaters that were equipped to project it.

  Shirley Jones, who got to Maine a few days ahead of Sinatra, vividly remembers standing on a dock with the producers Phoebe and Henry Ephron, waiting for the star to arrive. “We had the two cameras there, which I knew about way ahead of time,” she said. “I assumed everybody else did. [Frank] came right from the airport to the dock, got out of the car, and came over and looked at the two cameras. Didn’t say hello to anybody. He said to Henry King, the director, ‘Why the two cameras, Henry?’ Henry said, ‘Well, you know, Frank, we’re doing two separate processes.’ Frank said, ‘Does that mean I’ll have to do a scene twice?’ Henry said, ‘Not all of them. Every once in a while, you might have to, because the cameras aren’t [always] on at the same time.’ And Frank said, ‘I signed to do one movie, not two.’ Got back in the car, and went back to the airport.”

  Gordon MacRae, who’d co-starred with Jones in Oklahoma!, came east on a moment’s notice from a Lake Tahoe nightclub gig to fill in for Sinatra. And 20th Century Fox sued Frank for $1 million. (Sinatra eventually settled with the studio by agreeing to do another film for it at an unspecified future date. And in a supreme irony, Fox wound up never releasing Carousel in CinemaScope 55.)

  What accounted for Sinatra’s abrupt departure? The mystery has echoed down through the decades, taking on a kind of haunted quality because of the magnitude of the missed opportunity: all the world seems to agree that Frank, with his real-life raffishness and existential doubts, not to mention his astounding voice, would have made an amazing Billy Bigelow. Could he have been scared? “How can I play Billy Bigelow?” Sinatra is reported to have asked a friend before going to Maine. “He’s a big, strong guy with a big, strong voice, and look at me!”

  “Through the years, some have muttered that Sinatra was actually more concerned about whether he had the tools to successfully pull off the role, utilizing the two cameras dustup as an excuse,” Tom Santopietro writes.

  This scenario is shot down by Carousel producer Henry Ephron, who years later recalled Sinatra bluntly telling him at the time: “Well, forget it, kid. It’s me or the camera. One of us has to go. Listen, Henry. You know me. You’ve heard me say it—it’s been printed a thousand times—I’ve only got one good take in me.”

  Even more interestingly, Ephron went on to state that while prerecording songs for the film before leaving for the location shoot, Sinatra turned in a brilliant recording of “If I Loved You” but had difficulty with Billy Bigelow’s “Soliloquy,” the eight-minute rumination by Bigelow about what sort of boy his son will be. The song represents the ultimate challenge for singing actors, and whatever the reason for Sinatra’s difficulties, whether the song was beyond his range or, more likely, that it was just a night when he was not in good voice, Frank stopped the session, telling Ephron, “Let’s try it another time. I’ve had it for tonight.”*3

  But the story doesn’t quite shoot down the possibility that Sinatra had serious misgivings. On the one hand, it seems highly unlikely that he wouldn’t have wanted to take on the challenge of creating the definitive “Soliloquy”—and the definitive Billy Bigelow. On the other hand, it also seems at least mildly doubtful that as canny a movie actor as Frank wouldn’t have known ahead of time, along with Shirley Jones and others, about the two cameras. Two other theories adduced by Friedwald—that “Sinatra beat it rather than being holed up in Maine for a whole summer” or “that the singer left because of Rodgers and Hammerstein themselves, who doubtlessly considered Sinatra too hip and too real to fit into one of their productions”—sound even more improbable.

  Did Frank have doubts about being able to pull off the role? “I think he did,” Shirley Jones said. “But it’s the kind of doubt that everybody has when they’re starting a new film. Because he was so excited about it. He said, ‘This is the best opportunity I’ve ever had.’ It was that kind of thing.

  “Now, he may have got cold feet,” she said. “I heard different stories. After that, I went to see Frank in Vegas, and I went to a party where he was, and I tried to get it out of him: ‘What the hell happened, Frank?’ ‘I don’t want to talk about it, Shirley. I-don’t-want-to-talk-about-it-Shirley.’ That’s all I ever got from him.

  “But you know what I think?” Jones said. “I’ve since heard it from several people. I was told just recently that Ava Gardner was doing a film, on location, and he thought she was having an affair, and she said, ‘Get your ass down here, or I’m going to.’ He was still trying to get her back. I mean, he never gave up on her. And I think something happened in the interim where he thought maybe he had a chance to get her back. And he left the movie to do so.”

  Letting his golden chances pass him by.

  She—Ava—was the ground tone of his life, his late-night obsession and midday daydream, the receptacle of all the uncertainty that his mother, Dolly, had instilled in him. Wherever he was, whomever he was with, she was in the back of his mind, or the forefront. And all the success in the world was only a temporary solace to a mind as
complex and fragile as his.

  —

  A week after he walked off the Carousel set, Frank appeared on the cover of Time. It was his first Time cover, a huge distinction in the days when Henry Luce’s magazine empire dominated American culture and reverberated around the world. Yet despite Sinatra’s staggering rate of productivity thus far in 1955—a great album (Wee Small Hours), a number 2 single (“Learnin’ the Blues”), and two movies (Young at Heart, Not as a Stranger) released; two more films (Guys and Dolls, The Tender Trap) completed, as well as numerous recordings—and despite the comparative lack of brouhaha in his life in the recent past (the walk off excepted), the magazine chose to go with a strange, arrestingly dark cover image, a trompe l’oeil painting by Aaron Bohrod that depicted a menacing-looking Sinatra in a gangsterish outfit (black-banded fedora, big-collared, open-necked pink shirt, dark jacket) floating over a scattering of controversial newspaper clippings (SOCKS COLUMNIST AT CIRO’S, reads one headline; another says, AVA STAYS AWAY, above a picture of the actress) and a grotesque tragedy mask, all set against a black background.

  Time was certainly looking to arrest attention and goose newsstand sales with the provocative cover; at the same time, there was a mean-spiritedness about the image that felt almost vindictive. There was also, in the white-bread Eisenhower 1950s, more than a hint of racism in depicting a Sinatra who, counter to his usual elegant turnout, had been made to resemble a street-corner goombah, if not a low-level mafioso.

  The cover story, written in highly colorful, and occasionally overwrought, Time-ese by the magazine’s man in Hollywood Ezra Goodman, was of a piece with the cover. The lead paragraph recounts an apocryphal-sounding tale of Sinatra’s Hoboken boyhood; the story ends with Frankie, in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, chasing some boys who tried to bully him, cursing and waving a “jagged chunk of broken bottle.” Having set this dubious foundation, the story intones,

  Aaron Bohrod’s Time cover painting of Frank was both attention-getting and mean. Depicting Sinatra as a street-corner goombah, if not a low-level hood, it slapped him on the wrist for his bad behavior and comported with the facile racism of the era. (Credit 4.1)

  Thirty-odd years have passed over Hoboken since that day, but what was true then still holds true. Francis Albert Sinatra, long grown out of his Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, is one of the most charming children in everyman’s neighborhood; yet it is well to remember the jagged weapon. The one he carries nowadays is of the mind, and called ambition, but it takes an ever more exciting edge. With charm and sharp edges and a snake-slick gift of song, he has dazzled and slashed and coiled his way through a career unparalleled in extravagance by any other entertainer of his generation.

  He is childlike. He is serpentine. He is armed and dangerous. His gift of song is a snake-oil trick. He first appears in the piece as a kind of megalomaniacal Nathan Detroit: “Said Frank Sinatra last week, as he sat cockily in his ebony-furnished, ‘agency modern’ offices in Los Angeles’ William Morris Agency and tilted a white-banded black panama off his forehead: ‘Man, I’m buoyant. I feel about eight feet tall.’ ”

  Then, in case the reader didn’t get the message, Goodman drives it home. “The man looks…like the popular conception of a gangster, model 1929,” he writes. “He has bright, wild eyes, and his movements suggest spring steel; he talks out of the corner of his mouth. He dresses with a glaring, George Raft kind of snazziness—rich, dark shirts and white figured ties, with ring and cuff links that almost always match. He had, at last count, roughly $30,000 worth of cuff links.”

  Was this the same Frank Sinatra who was often photographed wearing beautiful conservative bespoke suits, white shirts, dark silk neckties, and white pocket squares? The same Sinatra who’d spoken so eagerly to Shirley Jones about the possibilities of Carousel? The same man who had sung “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning” with the kind of tenderness that, Ava Gardner once said, “makes me want to cry for happiness, like a beautiful sunset or a boys’ choir singing Christmas carols”?

  Apparently, it was. Time quoted “one of his best friends,” who said, sounding an awful lot like Sammy Cahn, “There isn’t any ‘real’ Sinatra. There’s only what you see. You might as well try to analyze electricity. It is what it does. There’s nothing inside him. He puts out so terrifically that nothing can accumulate inside.”*4

  Sammy, if it was Sammy, had a point: Frank was incomparably complicated, electric, mercurial. But he was also wrong: nobody who is not in a vegetative state has nothing inside. Sinatra’s terrific output came straight from the formidable chaos brewing within.

  —

  He couldn’t stay off the newsstands. On September 10, Frank reopened the Dunes in Vegas, riding into the casino on a camel. A widely printed Associated Press photograph showed the singer in a jeweled turban and a silk sultan’s outfit and surrounded by young women dressed as harem girls. The caption: “He gets paid for this.” In many papers, the photograph accompanied a Bob Thomas column in which Sinatra gave his version of the Carousel story: “When I got up to Maine, they spring this two-process gimmick on me. I just don’t work that way…I have wanted to do ‘Carousel’ for seven years. It broke my heart not to.” He also commented on 20th Century Fox’s million-dollar lawsuit: “I would have been insulted if they had sued me for less.”

  The following week, the September issue of Confidential (“Tells the Facts and Names the Names”) hit the stands with a cover story titled “From a Detective’s Report: The Real Reason for Marilyn Monroe’s Divorce.” The story, about the previous November’s Wrong-Door Raid, alleged that Sinatra had been not a bystander, as he had told the police, but a full participant. In a subterranean way, the Confidential story was as significant as the Time cover: the bimonthly scandal sheet was said to have had a circulation of five million—bigger than TV Guide, Look, the Saturday Evening Post, Time, or Life. It was the forerunner of today’s celebrity gossip industry, the equally influential underside of the straight American story of the 1950s. “Everybody reads it,” Humphrey Bogart said, “but they say the cook brought it into the house.” The Confidential piece would have further repercussions for Sinatra.

  On Sunday, September 18, Frank’s voice, but not Frank, joined Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis on a historic episode of The Colgate Comedy Hour. This was the show where Martin and Lewis, who were in the midst of epic battles and had less than a year to survive as a comedy team, seemed to declare an uneasy truce in a skit spoofing the popular quiz show The $64,000 Question. When Dean, playing the emcee, pushes Jerry, as the contestant, underwater in a dunk-tank isolation booth, Jerry rises up and splutters, “Haven’t you heard? The feud is over!” In a poolroom sketch later, Jerry, purporting to be a songwriter, tries to sell Dean a goofy tune called “Yetta, I Can’t Forget Her.” As delivered by Lewis in his Idiot Kid mode, the song is pure malarkey, but when he turns on a radio the next moment, lo and behold, there’s Sinatra singing it, quite charmingly, showing the spell he can weave with even the lowliest material. At show’s end, Dean thanks Frank for recording “Yetta” and says, “We’d like you all to join Jerry and myself in watching Frank Sinatra in Our Town, tomorrow night, on NBC color and black-and-white network!”

  The Wrong-Door Raid started out as a lark but wound up having serious repercussions for Frank.

  No official reproduction, no videotape or DVD, was ever made of that September 19 telecast (although a partial kinescope of the show exists) for one reason: Thornton Wilder, having somehow been talked into allowing a musical adaptation of his masterpiece, was so disgusted by the result that he wanted it swept under the rug of history.

  He had a point. Though there is something to be said for the talent and good intentions of all involved, and something to be said, too, for using Sinatra’s star power to bring Wilder’s great play to a mass audience, it was clear from the moment Frank walked up to his mark in a 1950s suit and fedora and spoke, in an unreconstructed north Jersey accent, the words, “Mornin’. The name of our town is Grover
’s Corners, New Hampshire,” that the enterprise was wrong, all wrong. Frank even gave a little tell about how out of place he felt—needlessly rubbing his right index finger alongside his nose between the town’s two map coordinates, “Latitude forty-two degrees, forty minutes” and “longitude seventy degrees, thirty-seven minutes”—before launching into Cahn and Van Heusen’s theme song (“You will like the folks you meet/In our town”) and hitting a Freudian clam, on live national television, on the word “our.”

  The New York Times critic J. P. Shanley thought the show was just swell, pronouncing it “magnificent entertainment” and writing that though adding music to the story was an “extremely risky” gamble, the “tender narrative of joy and sorrow in the hearts of a group of unspectacular Americans lost none of its charm in the television adaptation…And it was complemented splendidly with songs by James Van Heusen and lyrics by Sammy Cahn.”

  “Complemented” is a strong word to use about a narrative that was arguably quite complete in the first place. “Ornamented” is more like it, and to a great degree one’s taste for the production depended on one’s liking for the ornaments hung on Wilder’s great play. As for the show’s most memorable song, even putting aside the discordance of Frank Sinatra’s singing about love and marriage, the tune was jarringly bouncy and contemporary sounding in the solemn early-twentieth-century setting. As for the other numbers, Van Heusen could always write a beautiful melody, especially on the title song, but it’s hard to believe that the man who had found Syracuse so stifling and provincial could be anything like sincere about glorifying small-town life. And as nimble a lyricist as Cahn was, Grover’s Corners was way out of his wheelhouse.