Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  “I don’t think he was aware of the way I was going to achieve that crescendo,” Riddle later said, “but he wanted an instrumental interlude that would be exciting and carry the orchestra up and then come on down where he would finish out the arrangement vocally.”

  The arranger’s mind turned immediately to one of his masters, Maurice Ravel, and the French composer’s great and sensuous ballet, Boléro. Riddle has written of the piece’s “absolutely tantalizing slow addition of instruments to this long, long crescendo, which is really the message of Boléro…[I]t is excruciating in its deliberately slow addition of pressure. Now that’s sex in a piece of music.”

  His rough idea was to write a chart with an Afro-Cuban flavor—the mambo movement was then at its peak, with Cuban bandleaders like Pérez Prado, Machito, and the Spanish-born, Cuban-trained Xavier Cugat in the forefront—but with the clock ticking, he was stuck. He phoned George Roberts for advice. “Why don’t you steal the pattern out of Kenton’s ‘23 Degrees North, 82 Degrees West’?” the trombonist, an alumnus of Stan Kenton’s big band, said.

  Kenton’s band had been incorporating Latin influences into its performances since the mid-1940s; the title of his 1952 hit “23 Degrees North, 82 Degrees West” referred to the map coordinates of Cuba. Riddle didn’t steal the pattern, but he got the message. He wrote a long, sexy crescendo for Roberts’s bass trombone and the string section, and at the bridge—the song’s middle section—he sketched out eight bars of chord symbols for the trombonist (and fellow Kenton alumnus) Milt Bernhart to use as a framework. Bernhart’s solo itself was to be totally improvised, and it would have to be good.

  “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” was the last song Sinatra recorded on the night of January 12, which means that by the time the tape started rolling, the clock might have ticked over into the early hours of Friday the thirteenth. First, though, the band ran through the number once while Frank stood in the control booth with Riddle, producer Voyle Gilmore, and recording engineer John Palladino. Sinatra was listening carefully, making sure the recording balances were correct and the arrangement sounded right. Riddle’s heart was in his throat. Though he had dashed off the chart under maximum pressure, he knew Frank expected nothing less than greatness. “There’s only one person in this world I’m afraid of,” Riddle once confided to George Roberts. “Not physically—but afraid of nonetheless. It’s Frank, because you can’t tell what he’s going to do. One minute he’ll be fine, but he can change very fast.”

  When the run-through was finished, though, the battle-scarred studio musicians stood as one and gave Riddle a warm ovation, “probably because somebody knew that he wrote it in a hurry,” Bill Miller recalled. Years later, in an interview with Riddle, Jonathan Schwartz asked him if he hadn’t said to himself about the arrangement, “This is awfully good.” “No, I probably said, ‘Wow, isn’t it nice that I finished it in time,’ ” Nelson answered.

  But Frank knew it was awfully good. Though he was usually One-Take Charlie on movie sets, in the recording studio he would spend as much time as necessary to get a song right. Still, Milt Bernhart recalled, “it was unusual that he would have to go past four or five takes.” Accordingly, “I left the best stuff I played on the first five takes,” Bernhart said. But, the trombonist remembered, Sinatra knew that something special was happening.

  Frank kept saying, “Let’s do another.” This was unusual for Sinatra! I was about ready to collapse—I was running out of gas! Then, toward the tenth take or so, someone in the booth said, “We didn’t get enough bass…could we get the trombone nearer to a microphone?” I mean, what had they been doing? There was a mike there for the brass, up on a very high riser. “Can you get up to that one?” they asked. And I said, “Well, no—I’m not that tall.” So they went looking for a box, and I don’t know where he found one, but none other than Frank Sinatra went and got a box, and brought it over for me to stand on!

  Eleven takes, twelve, thirteen—some of them would have been false starts, only seconds long, but some went on longer, until Frank raised a hand, shaking his head, stopping the music, and telling the band and the control booth what had to change.

  Then take twenty-two. “Milt perspired a lot to start with,” recalls guitarist Bob Bain, who played on the session. Now the trombonist was soaked through. “He looked at me and said, ‘I don’t have another one left.’ ”

  The song starts at a lope, in 2/4 time, with a baritone sax or bass clarinet playing the now-famous repeating figure—bum-ba-dum-BOM ba-dum-BOM ba-dum-BOM—in the background. Despite the lateness of the hour and the number of takes, despite the number of unfiltered Camels he has smoked that day, Sinatra, under his Cavanagh fedora, is singing as easily and bell-clearly as if he had just stepped out of the shower and taken it into his mind to do a little Cole Porter. Perhaps, now and then, as he loses himself in the great song and the sound of the great band around him, he closes his eyes. The heavenly strings and the bright brass interplay effortlessly behind the first and second choruses, and then, as Frank caresses the last lines of the bridge—

  But each time that I do, just the thought of you

  Makes me stop before I begin…

  —Roberts and the strings lift the long crescendo higher and higher and higher until it seems they can go no higher and then Milt Bernhart goes wild on his slide trombone, simply blowing his lungs out. It is to Sinatra’s immense credit that his powerful final chorus, driving the song home, is as strong in its own right as Bernhart’s historic solo.

  “After the session, I was packing up, Frank stuck his head out of the booth, and said, ‘Why don’t you come in the booth and listen to it?’ ” the trombonist recalled.

  So I did—and there was a chick in there, a pretty blonde, and she was positively beaming. He said to me, “Listen!” That was special! You know, it never really went past that. He never has been much for slathering around empty praise. He just doesn’t throw it around very easily. If you weren’t able to play like that, then why would they have called you? You knew that you were there—we all were there—at Frank’s behest. Rarely, if ever, would he directly point something out in the studio.

  Another time, Bernhart remembered, Sinatra praised the French horn player Vince DeRosa on executing a difficult passage by telling the band, “I wish you guys could have heard Vince DeRosa last night—I could have hit him in the mouth!”

  “We all knew what he meant—he had loved it!” Bernhart said. “And believe me, he reserved comments like that only for special occasions. You see, it was very hard for him to say, ‘It was the greatest thing I ever heard…’ But that’s Sinatra. He could sing with the grace of a poet, but when he’s talking to you, it’s Jersey!”

  —

  By the mid-1950s, when Frank had come back and pushed his career into overdrive, Bing Crosby was pondering retirement. He had turned fifty; he had recently lost his wife, the mother of their four young sons, to ovarian cancer. He had less hair than ever (he’d begun wearing a toupee onstage in his thirties), more padding around the waist. He had plenty of money. He also had family and kidney problems. The golf course looked tempting. “I’ve always said that my favorite kind of picture would be one that opened with a shot of me sitting in a rocking chair on a front porch,” he told an interviewer in 1954. “The rest of the picture would be what I saw.”

  At that point, Bing had just finished making The Country Girl, a nonmusical adaptation of a Clifford Odets play about an alcoholic stage actor trying to make a comeback. His co-star (and offstage reputedly his paramour) had been the twenty-four-year-old Grace Kelly, somewhat implausibly playing his suffering young wife (but winning an Oscar for her troubles; Crosby was nominated). A year earlier, Kelly had with equal implausibility played Ava Gardner’s competition for the fifty-two-year-old Clark Gable in Mogambo, the movie Ava shot on location in Africa while a down-on-his-luck Frank, who’d accompanied her, fretted and cooled his heels.

  Despite Sinatra and Crosby’s many radio shows toget
her and even a couple of joint appearances on television, they’d never made a movie together. That changed in January 1956, when they teamed with Grace Kelly and Louis Armstrong (along with his All Stars) in MGM’s High Society, a musical remake of The Philadelphia Story, with a score by Cole Porter.

  Movie musicals were an endangered genre in the mid-1950s, quickly losing ground to TV, which not only gave audiences visual entertainment at home but also was bringing new visions of reality to daily life—visions that seemed to jibe less and less with the notion of characters’ suddenly breaking into song. It was a time when the movie studios themselves were imperiled by television and the rise of independent producers, some of whom were powerful actors like James Stewart—and Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra—who were putting together their own film projects. But some of the studios, mainly MGM and 20th Century Fox, were still turning out big musical entertainments, using Technicolor and wide-screen processes like Todd-AO, VistaVision, and CinemaScope to gain a visual edge on television while it was still possible.

  High Society, in Technicolor and VistaVision, was to be a major production in every way. The project first began to coalesce after the producer Sol C. Siegel paid Cole Porter $250,000 to write his first movie score in a decade; Crosby, Sinatra, and Kelly were soon brought on board with similarly rich deals (Crosby’s company co-produced, and Frank received the same fee as Porter). The great songwriter Johnny Green (“Body and Soul,” “Out of Nowhere”), also an MGM conductor and arranger, was to supervise the music; Conrad Salinger, another Metro stalwart, would collaborate on the orchestrations with Riddle. The director was the likable journeyman Charles Walters, who had helmed the slick and uncompelling The Tender Trap, and some of the problems with the final film can be laid at his feet.

  The Philadelphia Story had been a triumph of pre–World War II American movie comedy. Produced by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and brilliantly adapted from Philip Barry’s play by Donald Ogden Stewart, the film sparkled in every way, from George Cukor’s pitch-perfect seriocomic direction to the incomparable starring troika of Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and James Stewart to the Franz Waxman score and beautiful black-and-white cinematography by Joseph Ruttenberg. As a comedy of manners, as a paragon of prewar American filmmaking, the movie remains magical in every detail. It has Shakespearean charisma.

  High Society had big shoes to fill, and on paper it stood a fighting chance. Crosby and Sinatra were giants, Kelly was a dreamily beautiful screen presence, Louis Armstrong was not only a great musician but visual and vocal catnip, and composers didn’t come any better than Cole Porter.

  The Philadelphia Story benefited from all its brilliant elements and also from its elegiac feeling for the decline of a class, along with the powerful sense of romance that was still believable before the war, the Holocaust, and the bomb. (Just listen to a few bars of the Waxman score, and it all comes flooding back.)

  High Society, set amid the majestic “cottages” of Newport, Rhode Island, rather than on Philadelphia’s Main Line, tries for a sense of elegy—the grand old ways are giving way to the vulgar new ones; the rich are shuttering their mansions and selling them to save on taxes—but it doesn’t try very hard. Mainly it proceeds amid the garish Technicolor light of the Eisenhower 1950s, and it’s hard to care much about the goings-on: the peccadilloes of the wealthy; the culture clash between the proletarian reporters for the gossip magazine Spy (Sinatra and Celeste Holm) and the society toffs they envy and disdain. In the end, the only compelling things about the movie are its faces and moments and sounds. Fortunately, there are enough of all three to make High Society worth watching.

  Frank is good as Macaulay “Mike” Connor, and he’s fun to watch, especially when he breaks into one of Porter’s terrific songs (although Bing gets the best solo number by far, the great “I Love You, Samantha”), but as is distinctly not the case with his portrayal of Frankie Machine, he isn’t believable, not even for a second, as a hack writer aspiring to higher things, including Grace Kelly’s Tracy Lord. He looks great with his Technicolor tan and his luxuriant toupee (“Frankie now looks positively furry—instead of fringey—on top,” wrote Earl Wilson), and his snazzy sport coats and straw fedoras seem to have come straight from KHJ Radio Studios onto the MGM set, but strangely for a man who could act so wonderfully in dramatic roles and convey yearning so heartrendingly in torch songs, the quality of yearning that Jimmy Stewart projects with such absolute believability in his Oscar-winning turn in The Philadelphia Story is entirely lacking in Frank’s Mike Connor.

  The irony of Sinatra’s playing a reporter, and a reporter for a gossip magazine at that, is delicious. But there was one thing Frank did bring convincingly to the role: in Philip Barry’s play and in both movie adaptations, Macaulay Connor is an outsider, a bluish-collar trespasser in the world of the wealthy. In real life, Frank Sinatra, no matter how much wealth and fame accrued to him, always felt himself to be an outsider, an Italian-American kid from Hoboken who had crashed the big party. This is what put the chip on his shoulder, and there’s a hint of that chip in his portrayal of the Anglo-Irish Mike Connor. (Shades of his father’s prizefighting nom de ring, Marty O’Brien.) Sinatra emanates a street-kid defensiveness that’s interesting to watch, if not necessarily apropos. That defensiveness might also have contained a germ of his real insecurity about Grace Kelly, bricklayer’s daughter though she might have been.

  The two don’t entirely click together on-screen, which is a pity. This is partly the fault of John Patrick’s merely serviceable re-adaptation of Barry’s play—Mike’s passionate speech to Tracy when they’re in a clinch (“You’ve got fires banked down in you, hearth-fires and holocausts”) is trimmed down to a few words and some stage business—and maybe the result of a slight lack of chemistry between Sinatra and Kelly, one of the few female co-stars who seem to have dodged his fabled checklist (but who seems to have had quite a checklist of her own). “Sinatra got a kick out of ‘Gracie,’ as he called her, but he had felt humiliated pining around the set of Mogambo over Ava in front of Grace,” George Jacobs recalled. “He was certain she saw him as a major loser and he could not bring himself to make a play for her.” Frank and Grace had reportedly gone on a date about a year earlier; he is said to have been drunk when he picked her up, to have sobbed to her about Ava, and then to have tried to manhandle her. A friend of Kelly’s said that Frank phoned her the next day to apologize and the two of them laughed about it, but that was that for romance.

  He also would have known that even as High Society was shooting, Kelly, enacting a sort of reverse version of her film role, had fallen deeply in love with—and would soon marry—Prince Rainier III of Monaco. Her destiny was to be a princess; this would be her last movie.

  And Kelly’s subtraction from motion pictures was a real loss. She was of course lovely to look at, but she could also act and was a beguiling screen presence when the material was right. It’s a shame that High Society required her to follow in Katharine Hepburn’s quicksilver footsteps, and a shame that the movie wasn’t better: Kelly made a wonderful Tracy Lord, and even though she couldn’t really hold up her end musically—nor was she required to; she only sang a little harmony with Crosby on “True Love” and warbled a bit in a drunk scene—she stood up strong alongside her formidable co-stars.

  Bing Crosby is said to have been unrequitedly besotted by Kelly, and he brings the full force of his balked ardor to playing C. K. Dexter-Haven, the wastrel playboy who was once married to Tracy Lord and is still in love with her. The two of them have the on-screen chemistry that Sinatra and Kelly lack, a reaction made stranger and more poignant by Bing’s age: while his hairpiece is as lush as Frank’s, he looks a decade older than his fifty-three years, and in repose his face is sullen, even mean. But his Dexter lights up around Tracy, and even at the thought of her: his minor-key “I Love You, Samantha” (Tracy’s middle name, and Dexter’s pet name for her), sung as he dresses for a party celebrating her engagement to another man, is a tour de force of grea
t vocalizing, great stage business—he winds his watch and self-consciously pats his tummy as he puts on his tux—and great acting. The song is one of the movie’s three highlights, and Bing gets to share in the other two. There’s his charming duet with Louis Armstrong on “Now You Has Jazz,” and then there’s the irresistible “Well, Did You Evah?” with Sinatra.

  Crosby and Armstrong had sung together often, on the radio and on records, but Bing and Frank had never recorded before as a twosome; Sinatra said that the chance to duet with Crosby was his main reason for doing the movie. The song-and-dance routine takes place at a bachelor ball for George Kittredge (John Lund), the society stiff who is engaged to Tracy: as Dexter and Mike get loaded on champagne in the mansion’s library, they dish musically—and to 1950s ears titillatingly—on the general stuffiness of the surroundings:

  MIKE (singing): Have you heard that Mimsy Starr, she got pinched in the Astor Bar?

  DEXTER: Sauced again, eh?

  MIKE: She was stoned!

  DEXTER: Well, did you evah!

  MIKE: Never!

  BOTH (singing): What a swell party this is!

  The two play perfectly together, as though they’d been waiting their whole lives to do this number. Neither man dominates; each brings his own genius as a singing actor. It’s a miraculously graceful scene, one of the greatest in movie musicals (Charles Walters, who might not have been a brilliant director but sure knew how to choreograph, staged it). Sinatra and Crosby, Jeanine Basinger writes in The Star Machine, had to

  sing, dance, hit their camera marks, respect the sophisticated Cole Porter lyrics, deliver scripted dialogue, stay within their characters, pretend to be slightly drunk, keep the beat of the orchestra playback, move around a specially designed library set with limited space while following a specific choreography that had to look improvised, and never forget that they were rivals for the audience’s affection…They had to watch out for each other in more ways than one. (Each was keenly aware of the other’s star power.)…These men are what stars are, doing what stars do. They seem as if they’re making it up right in front of you. (The illusion of stardom is always the illusion of ease.)