by James Kaplan
—
On May 5, while Frank was in Spain, a new single hit number 1 on the Billboard chart, supplanting Les Baxter and His Orchestra’s whistle-happy Muzak favorite “The Poor People of Paris.” The new record was Elvis Presley’s decidedly non-Muzak-y “Heartbreak Hotel,” which had been released in January and quickly became a million seller. Presley had performed the song on national TV in February, backed by, of all outfits, the Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra.
The television version of “Heartbreak Hotel” was a respectable enough synthesis of the Dorsey brothers’ ever more old-fashioned-sounding big-band music and Elvis’s brand-new R&B-tinged rockabilly; still, it was hard to escape the feeling that Presley had been defanged for adult consumption. But the single itself, which had been recorded in an echoey hallway at RCA Studios in Nashville and was roundly disliked at first by RCA executives, along with almost everyone who heard it except Presley, had an eerie presence that spoke powerfully both of blue-highway, backcountry America and of new changes coming. It was an enormously charismatic recording, and it reached across the Atlantic to the fifteen-year-old John Lennon, who, because the British Broadcasting Corporation didn’t play rock ’n’ roll in 1956, heard it on Radio Luxembourg. Lennon later recalled,
When I first heard “Heartbreak Hotel,” I could hardly make out what was being said. It was just the experience of hearing it and having my hair stand on end. We’d never heard American voices singing like that. They’d always sung like Sinatra or enunciated very well. Suddenly, there’s this hillbilly hiccupping on tape echo and all this bluesy stuff going on. And we didn’t know what Elvis was singing about…It took us a long time to work [out] what was going on. To us, it just sounded like a noise that was great.
Both the thirteen-year-old George Harrison and the twelve-year-old Keith Richards had the identical experience at the same time. Frank didn’t know it then, but “Heartbreak Hotel” would change his life too.
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“Frank Sinatra has been booked to sing the party’s 1956 campaign song at the democratic national convention,” read a newspaper squib in early August. “However, as far as we know, the G.O.P. hasn’t planned to retaliate with Elvis Presley.”
Satirical or not, the story was true: Frank had indeed been chosen to sing “The Democratic March” (to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas”) at the convention, which was to be held at the International Amphitheatre in Chicago in mid-August. Even more impressive, the party had asked him to kick off the event with “The Star-Spangled Banner”—a decision that caused amusement, disbelief, and consternation among some of the nation’s editorial writers, especially Sinatra’s old nemesis Westbrook Pegler.
Pegler, the first columnist to win a Pulitzer (in 1941, for his exposés on corruption in Hollywood unions) and one of the most disagreeable journalists ever to see print, had been rabidly anti–New Deal and anti-FDR in the 1930s and 1940s; after World War II, he’d moved ever rightward politically. In the late 1940s, in the wake of Sinatra’s visit to the Mob summit in Havana, Pegler mounted a vigorous newsprint campaign against the singer, calling him out as a friend of organized crime and a Red sympathizer, and an adulterer to boot.
In the ensuing years, the columnist went back to castigating other old enemies (Jews, blacks, the Democratic Party, unions), but Sinatra’s prospective appearance at the 1956 convention gave him fresh inspiration. On August 14, Pegler devoted his entire syndicated column to Frank, gleefully wielding a rake amid a whole field of old coals:
Sinatra…has a police record with two gun-raps, an old pinch in Jersey for an error which Dickens called “an amiable indiscretion,” one assault job, and stacks of envelopes in the newspaper morgues about his panting pursuit of Ava Gardner while his wife and kiddies languished in Hollywood, his eventual espousal of that morsel and their ultimate, and inevitable, divorce.
The column proceeded, in Pegler’s ever colorful and not particularly coherent style, to build an indictment by association, stringing together a series of reprehensible characters the columnist considered either tightly or loosely affiliated with Sinatra: from Frank’s New Jersey godfather the late mobster Willie Moretti, who had supposedly gotten the singer out of the “Jersey rap,” to the Democrats’ prospective vice presidential nominee, the Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver, “who qualified as a statesman of majestic stature by impressing into his political service an old friend of Sinatra and the Moretti boys, the sinister Frank Costello.” Pegler was referring to the New York mobster’s televised testimony before Kefauver’s Senate Special Committee on Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce in 1951, which had riveted the nation: unlike other gangsters who appeared before the committee, Costello refused to have his face shown on camera; instead, viewers saw a tight shot of his wringing hands as he continually pleaded the Fifth in a gravelly voice. The Kefauver hearings not only sent TV sales soaring but gave America a primer on organized crime.
And then there was Jimmy Tarantino, whom Pegler seemed to have dredged up largely because his name ended with a vowel: a petty thief and blackmailer who in the early 1950s had managed to persuade Sinatra to help bankroll the scandal sheet Hollywood Nite Life (a precursor of Confidential). Frank had soon written Tarantino off for the lowlife that he was. But for Pegler, Jimmy was a gift that kept on giving.
After going off on tangential diatribes about Harry Truman and Eleanor Roosevelt, both of whom were to make keynote speeches at the convention, the columnist seemed to remember that he was writing about Sinatra and came to the point, which appeared to have something to do with the severe north-south division in the Democratic Party over the issue of civil rights. The northern bloc, in the columnist’s opinion, was “berating [the southerners] as ignorant, sub-human riff-raff on the ‘integration’ squabble and setting up Sinatra to challenge their primitive notions of good behavior and marriage.”
In reality, of course, it was Pegler who was berating the northern majority, whom he hated, for its support of civil rights, which he hated, and integration, which he (along with much of the rest of the country) detested and belittled. If he could make his mini-diatribe part of a larger harangue about Frank Sinatra, and throw in for good measure the unions, Truman, and Mrs. Roosevelt, all the better.
—
Something happened on the speaker’s platform at the International Amphitheatre on August 13, not long after Frank sang “The Democratic March”: as Bill Davidson related the incident in a 1957 Look magazine cover story about the star, Sinatra was just turning away from the microphone when the seventy-four-year-old Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, put a friendly hand on his shoulder and said, “Aren’t you going to sing ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’?” And Sinatra replied to the venerable man, the mentor of Lyndon Johnson and one of the most respected legislators ever to stride the floor of the U.S. Congress, “Take the hand off the suit, creep.”
The story is deliciously awful; it is also apparently not true. Sam Rayburn even sent a supportive telegram to Frank when the singer denied the story (and brought a libel suit against Look for over $2 million). What may be true is that Sinatra made a similarly crude remark at the convention to another elderly lawmaker, Senator Theodore Green of Rhode Island.
It is true that Frank couldn’t bear to be touched by strangers. “In bars or nightclubs where he was singing, people would get pally, say ‘Have a drink’ or something, and touch him on the shoulder,” Peggy Connelly recalled. “He would freeze, look down at that hand on his arm and stare, and not move until the hand was taken off.” It is also true that in the hot emotional atmosphere that almost always surrounded Sinatra, things frequently happened, and stories were told afterward, and the stories tended to pass through distorting lenses, bounce off mirrors, and turn strange corners.
Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Frank Sinatra weren’t the only luminaries at the 1956 convention. The thirty-nine-year-old senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a rising political power widely considered a viable contender for the vice pr
esidential nomination, had been picked by MGM’s president, Dore Schary, to introduce and narrate a short film about the history of the Democratic Party. “When the lights came up after the film,” biographer David Nasaw writes, “[Kennedy] was escorted onto the platform and given a standing ovation.” “Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts,” the New York Times reported, “came before the convention tonight as a movie star.”
Visibility and momentum aside, political pundits had misgivings about how Kennedy’s Catholicism would affect his chances to get the nomination. Even JFK’s own father wanted his son to give wide berth to the presumptive presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson, because Dwight Eisenhower was seen as a shoo-in for reelection and Joe Kennedy hated losing battles.
Stevenson refused to name a running mate, throwing the decision to a ballot on the convention floor. After the presidential candidate asked Jack Kennedy to make his nominating speech, it was assumed as a customary procedural matter that Kennedy was officially out of the running, but Kennedy kept his hat in the ring anyway. The choice went to three tight ballots, and Estes Kefauver was selected to accompany Adlai Stevenson on the ticket whose landslide defeat in November was a foregone conclusion. Vacationing in the South of France, Joseph P. Kennedy was delighted: his son had lost a skirmish but avoided the taint of association with the loser Stevenson and established himself as a force to reckon with.
Frank Sinatra was with Jack and Bobby Kennedy and their families when Kefauver won the third ballot. As soon as the 1956 ticket was determined, Frank recalled, Bobby Kennedy said, “Okay. That’s it. Now we go to work for the next one”—meaning the 1960 presidential election, and that there was no time to waste. Sinatra was impressed.
—
From Chicago, Frank headed straight to New York to play a weeklong stand at the Paramount with the Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra. In between sets, Sinatra and the band would leave the stage, the curtains would open, and the audience would be treated to a viewing of Johnny Concho.
Frank had had a brief and casual reunion with his old boss at the tribute to the Dorsey brothers the year before, dropping by and singing a few songs before going back to his set at the Copacabana. But this August week at the Paramount was to be a real gig, Sinatra’s first with Tommy since he’d left the band fourteen years earlier, and the power polarity had reversed: Frank was the boss now. He had come up with the idea of booking the Dorseys, and though the brothers “were still a hard-working act appearing on [The Jackie Gleason Show] every week and the original American Bandstand, as well as playing one-nighters,” as Richard Havers writes, Sinatra had left one-nighters far behind. Tommy Dorsey, prematurely aged at fifty, was all too aware of his own eclipse. When he heard that Nelson Riddle, his former third trombonist, would be joining Sinatra in New York to supervise his arrangements, Dorsey bridled, telling his manager, Tino Barzie, “I conduct the orchestra. It’s my orchestra.”
At the same time, the white-haired bandleader was enormously proud of his two protégés. Barzie recalled “that often when [he was] driving with Dorsey in his Cadillac on the road, Tommy would flip the radio dial, eager to listen to his alumni Sinatra and Riddle’s recordings of ‘It Happened in Monterey,’ or ‘You Make Me Feel So Young,’ which were then all over the airwaves. ‘Tommy would say, “Listen to that son of a bitch—the greatest singer ever! He knows exactly where to go and what to do.” ’ ”
Dorsey’s manager explained Tommy’s sensitivities to Sinatra’s manager Hank Sanicola, and all parties came to an accommodation: Riddle, who after all had little interest in conducting, would arrive in New York two days prior to the Paramount gig to run down his charts with the Dorsey band.
Riddle stayed at Dorsey’s house in the New Jersey countryside. Early one morning, Dorsey’s wife, Jane, found the arranger sitting on a log, tossing pebbles into the lake. “We looked up at Tommy’s bedroom,” Jane Dorsey recalled, “and [Nelson] said to me, ‘Janie, do you have any idea how much that man taught me?’ ” She responded that she had a pretty good idea. Riddle said, “He taught me everything I know. Every note I write I learned from that man upstairs…People rave over my arranging today, and I just think to myself, God bless Tommy Dorsey. If it hadn’t been for him, I never could have done this.”
Over dinner the next night, “Tommy said to Nelson, ‘I really like the things you’ve been doing with Frank,’ ” Dorsey’s biographer Peter Levinson writes.
Nelson then essentially repeated what he had told Janie, “I’ll tell you the truth—much of the skill and ability to do these things came from my time with you,” whereupon Dorsey began to cry. Nelson rushed over to embrace him…
In his depressed state, Dorsey exclaimed, “Nelson, I don’t want Frank to come down to rehearsal and give me any orders or cast any aspersions toward me or embarrass me in front of my boys. I couldn’t stand that.” Nelson said, “He won’t do that. Don’t worry, Tommy, he won’t.”
Dorsey, renowned during his heyday as a tough guy and a martinet who would physically throw musicians off the band bus if they gave him trouble, knew what Sinatra was capable of. During Frank’s three-year tenure with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra (1939–42), as he went from boy singer to national sensation, his ego had grown proportionately. “If Tommy Dorsey was late to a rehearsal,” Sammy Cahn once recalled, “Frank Sinatra acted as substitute orchestra leader. When Dorsey arrived, Sinatra would fix him with a glare of ‘Where the fuck you been?’ Dorsey would apologize that he’d been tied up in this and that and Sinatra’d say something quaint like ‘bullshit.’ ”
Then came Frank’s downfall. (Had Dorsey secretly, or not so secretly, rejoiced?) The last time Sinatra had played the Paramount, in 1952, had been at the nadir of his career. Frank had had to personally call the theater’s manager, Bob Weitman, and beg for a two-week booking. The seats were half-filled for many of his shows, and the papers were pronouncing him yesterday’s news. The movie then had been the not-so-good Meet Danny Wilson.
Now the movie was the truly terrible Johnny Concho. “Mr. Sinatra, the actor, might mention to the producer, who happens to be Mr. Sinatra, that he needs better writing and direction than he gets here,” sniffed Bosley Crowther in the New York Times. But it didn’t matter: Frank himself was a smash hit. After the negative review, Crowther continued,
For all that, it seemed like old times at the Paramount yesterday, when Mr. Sinatra appeared in person to entertain with songs and wisecracks from the stage. A capacity audience of loud enthusiasts, clearly reminiscent of those who gathered at the Paramount in the Forties when Mr. Sinatra appeared frequently as a soloist with Tommy Dorsey’s band, was on hand to greet him. And the old familiar chorus of shrieks and squeals, especially from the feminine patrons, often responded to his vocal tricks.
The patrons were lined on Forty-third Street west to Eighth Avenue and north to Forty-fourth Street when the doors of the theatre were opened at 9:50 a.m. A few placards, carried by teen-agers, proclaimed “We Love Frankie” and “Sinatra for President.”
Just across town, at Radio City Music Hall, High Society was doing land-office business. These days, it seemed, Frank simply couldn’t lose.
—
Yet a strange thing happened three nights into the Paramount run, where Sinatra’s opening act was a young comedian named Joey Bishop. Maybe it was the constant shifts between air-conditioning and hot outdoor air (the weather was scorching in Chicago and New York that August), maybe it was all the late hours, or maybe it was the fact that he was doing four shows a day, twenty-four songs per show, but Frank came down with a bad case of laryngitis. Could the recent unpleasantness in Spain, the high jinks with Ava, have had anything to do with it? “Emotional tension absolutely destroyed him,” his first publicist, the late George Evans, had once said. “You could always tell when he was troubled. He came down with a bad throat. Germs were never the cause unless there are guilt germs.”
Evans had known his client well, better than almost anyone else knew Sinatra in
the early days. But while Gardner, with her letters and late-night long-distance calls, kept a kind of pilot light of agitation burning in his life, why would whatever lingering guilt he might have felt over her have spiked in the late summer of 1956?
An alternate theory: in Los Angeles, Sinatra’s idol and close friend Humphrey Bogart was desperately ill with esophageal cancer, his body wasted by the massive surgery his doctors had performed to try to keep the disease in check, and constant rounds of chemotherapy. Betty Bacall, depressed and terrified, would naturally have reached out to her closest friends that August. One of the closest of all was Frank.
—
“Frank Sinatra’s Sands opening promises to be a gala affair,” Louella Parsons wrote, breathlessly, on September 12. “Reservations have been made by Lauren Bacall, Kim Novak, the Leo Durochers, the Nelson Riddles, Jimmy Van Heusen and Mr. and Mrs. William Goetz.”
Bill Goetz, an independent movie producer, and his wife, Edie, the daughter of Louis B. Mayer, the man who had fired Sinatra from MGM, were Hollywood royalty who had become close friends of Frank’s as his star had risen again. He would have been thrilled to have them at his opening. The same was true of Leo Durocher, the former manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants, who’d first met Sinatra at Toots Shor’s saloon on Fifty-First Street; Durocher was someone Frank could be himself with.
