Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  —

  A week later—in the interim, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon waltzed back into office—Frank was back at Capitol and in a very different mood, laying down the first tracks for a new album meant to take advantage of the resounding success of Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! Sinatra himself came up with the new LP’s reverberant title, A Swingin’ Affair!, and he’d moved on with whiplash speed from the quiet world of Close to You. Saxophonist Don Raffell described the first full recording session for the album, on November 15, 1956:

  We had rehearsed the music and we’re sitting there. The double doors at Capitol open up and there’s Sinatra. He’s got a black hat on with a white band, black suit, black shirt, black shoes, white necktie—gangster. He doesn’t say anything to anybody, walks into the recording booth, and says, “You’ve had plenty of time to get the balance on this thing. I don’t want any fooling around or it’ll be your ass!”

  We did one take on each thing that we did. One! That’s it. That’s all he wanted to do. No slips, no nothing. He was an evil mother!

  Could he even help himself?

  A Swingin’ Affair! was an even more upbeat affair than Swingin’ Lovers, and once again Nelson Riddle’s arrangements were magnificent. “Where Lovers included several slower pieces, such as ‘We’ll Be Together Again,’ Affair is practically all variations on [‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’]; crescendos and bolero patterns abound,” Will Friedwald writes. “Almost every track is directly or indirectly patterned after that chart, starting slow and gradually mounting in dynamics, speed, and intensity.”

  Once again, sex was on Riddle’s mind. “I usually try to avoid scoring a song with a climax at the end,” he said. “Better to build about two-thirds of the way through, and then fade to a surprise ending. More subtle. I don’t really like to finish by blowing and beating in top gear.”

  Affair’s opening number, “Night and Day,” was, perhaps, the exception that proved the rule. The great Cole Porter ballad was a keystone for Sinatra: he had sung it as a waiter at the Rustic Cabin and included it in his first recording session as a solo vocalist in 1942. As Friedwald notes, Frank treated the song “in nearly all tempos and moods and in every era of his seven decades of performing.”

  This exuberant version is done at the same loping tempo as Swingin’ Lovers’ “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” and the arrangement pays direct homage to that classic track: the first chorus has a similar repeating bass figure in the background; there’s even another trombone buildup to the bridge (this time by Juan Tizol). But unlike “Skin,” which hews to Riddle’s rule and closes tenderly, like a lover murmuring postcoital endearments, Affair’s “Night and Day” really does finish blowing and beating in top gear. Geniuses contradict themselves.

  Between A Swingin’ Affair! and soundtrack sessions for The Joker Is Wild, Sinatra spent much of November in the recording studio, logging an amazing eight dates in the month. The session of November 26 might have been the most remarkable of all: besides “Night and Day” and two other numbers (“Lonesome Road” and “If I Had You”), Frank recorded a tune that would become a classic for him, Rodgers and Hart’s “The Lady Is a Tramp,” for the first time. (The song, which was to play a pivotal role in Frank’s next movie, Pal Joey, would wind up on the film’s soundtrack album rather than on Affair.)

  “Tramp” spoke to him in some deep way. Frank “seemed to take a particular delight in that song,” Nelson Riddle said. “He always sang it with a certain amount of salaciousness. He savored it. He had some cute tricks with the lyric, which made it especially his.” (There was actually only one trick, and how cute it seemed depended on your taste for the drolleries of Sammy Cahn—increasingly Sinatra’s go-to guy for special lyrics—who was probably responsible for the three changed lines: “She’ll have no crap games with sharpies and frauds/And she won’t go to Harlem in Lincolns or Fords/And she won’t dish the dirt with the rest of the broads.” It might reasonably be argued that Lorenz Hart didn’t need another artist painting on his canvas.)

  Might Frank’s affinity for the song have had anything to do with Ava, whom the lyric seemed to fit like a glove? Another inspiration could have been Betty Bacall, who also tended to speak her mind and brook no nonsense. But in truth, the lady of the song, that free-living beauty who took no guff from anyone and did precisely as she pleased, didn’t exist in real life. She was an ideal—someone, if the truth be told, who was a lot like Frank’s ideal image of himself.

  Dreaming of this paragon, Sinatra gave the tune a loving, lilting reading at a medium-swing tempo,*2 launched by Bill Miller’s deliciously inventive piano intro (improvised and not written, and showing the great keyboardist, as in many other instances, to be his boss’s musical equal). Then, opening like a great jewel box, comes Riddle’s terrific chart, with its sequential reveals of strings, woodwinds, and brass (including Harry “Sweets” Edison’s dulcet, minimal trumpet fills).

  On the evening of November 26, Sinatra was magnificently in voice and relaxed, a fact that is especially striking in light of the news he’d heard that morning: Tommy Dorsey, who had been depressed over his health, his finances, an impending divorce, and the decline of the big-band business, and who’d been taking barbiturates in order to sleep, had choked on his own vomit and died in his bed the previous night in Greenwich, Connecticut.

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  It is hard to know Frank’s true feelings about the death of his old boss, his musical mentor, the man he’d once tried to imitate in every possible way, from his astounding breath control to his spectacular wardrobe to the powder he used to clean his teeth.

  In his biography of Dorsey, Peter Levinson claims Sinatra was so upset when he heard the news that he had to leave the Joker Is Wild set and go home for the day.*3 Yet Frank also failed to attend Tommy’s funeral in New York on the twenty-ninth (though Sinatra had a lifelong aversion to funerals, which spooked him) and begged off from appearing on a televised memorial tribute put together by Jackie Gleason that Sunday, officially claiming he had back and neck pains but reportedly saying in private, “I didn’t like him. It would be inappropriate for me to appear on a memorial show.” (Bill Miller later speculated that Frank had refused to appear because he wanted to produce the show.)

  “I didn’t like him.” But Frank had also idolized Dorsey. The brilliant, cold, and domineering bandleader had generated ambivalence in almost everyone who ever came in contact with him, his own brother included. But there was also this: on the very day of Tommy Dorsey’s funeral, Frank signed an extraordinarily lucrative television deal with ABC for a new series, to begin in 1957 and extend for three seasons. The contract called for thirty-six half-hour episodes: a blend of variety shows and mini-dramas, some of which Sinatra would appear in and some of which he would only host. In return, he would receive $3 million up front and 60 percent of the residuals. The network also bought stock in Frank’s movie-production company, Kent Productions. And Jackie Gleason’s tribute to Dorsey, which appeared on December 2 in place of his regular variety show, was on CBS.

  —

  On the night of December 13, the day after his forty-first birthday, Frank attended the Hollywood premiere of Ingrid Bergman’s comeback film, Anastasia. In 1949, Bergman had created an international scandal when she left her husband after conceiving a child with the Italian movie director Roberto Rossellini. Bergman’s frequent co-tenant in the lurid headlines that year had been Frank Sinatra, whose affair with Ava Gardner was just becoming public.

  Never one to risk boring the press, Frank attended the Anastasia premiere with a gorgeous eighteen-year-old actress named Joan Blackman (she would later co-star with Elvis in Blue Hawaii). When Kendis Rochlen of the Los Angeles Mirror News asked him who his date was, he said, “Ezzard Charles.” The next day Rochlen wrote, “Ezzard was an eyeful in shocking-pink gown, shoes, coat and lipstick.”

  On the fourteenth, Blackman accompanied Sinatra to Las Vegas, where he was scheduled to perform at a gala show in honor of the f
ourth anniversary of the Sands, in which Frank owned a 4 percent share. His other guest for the evening was Joe Fischetti, the youngest (and least bright) of the three Fischetti brothers of Chicago, first cousins to Al Capone and toilers in the same field. “When no rooms were immediately available for [his guests],” Bill Davidson wrote, Frank “threw a tantrum in the lobby of the hotel, almost engaging in a fist fight with his old friend Jack Entratter.”

  Jerry Lewis, who had broken up with Dean Martin in July, was then headlining in the Copa Room. Two special shows were planned for the evening, featuring Lewis, Sinatra, and Danny Thomas. Twelve hundred gamblers waited in line to get in. Liberace, Lucille Ball, Esther Williams, Mitzi Gaynor, Jayne Mansfield, and Marlene Dietrich were there. But during the first show, at 1:00 a.m., Frank’s voice cracked, apparently once more with laryngitis, and he sat out the second, 4:15 a.m., show at the bar. He then failed to show up for the anniversary cake-cutting ceremony at the pool. Jerry Lewis, who did appear, amused all present by jumping into the water fully clothed, though the trick had been done more than once by then.

  —

  Dorsey had died; Bogart was dying. And Ava was driving Frank crazy. She was announcing to all who would listen that she might marry the handsome Italian comedian Walter Chiari, the so-called Danny Kaye of Italy, whom she’d been stringing along for a couple of years but whose attractiveness the recent mess with Sinatra in Spain seemed to have sharply increased.

  Gardner had also just sat for a two-part profile in Look (the two installments were picturesquely titled “The Private Hell of Ava Gardner” and “Ava Gardner: In Search of Love”). Hedda Hopper later alleged that the writer, Joe Hyams, hid a microphone in Ava’s car and rode around the desert near Palm Springs with her, secretly recording her incendiary comments about Sinatra. Speaking in confidence (she thought), she complained, “Frank double-crossed me…made me the heavy…I paid many of the bills.”

  Hopper, who interviewed Sinatra in his dressing room on the set of The Joker Is Wild, claimed that with the Look piece, “the Ava era finally ended for him…Frank sat with a copy of the resulting magazine story in his hand, cringing like a whipped dog…Even the ashes were cold after that.”

  Sinatra had spent the entire month of November shuttling back and forth between a movie set and the recording studio. And then there was the fact that he was forty-one now—not just forty but in his forties, officially middle-aged. Is it any wonder that over the winter of 1956–57, he began to fear that he was losing his voice?

  * * *

  *1 The quotation is from Kramer; the twenty-fifth of that month fell on a Wednesday.

  *2 Soon to be disparaged by jazz purists as “the businessman’s bounce.”

  *3 Levinson misidentifies the movie as Pal Joey.

  7

  What do you think I’m made of? Don’t you know I got a low boiling point?

  —SINATRA’S CHARACTER JOEY EVANS IN PAL JOEY

  After the vocal glitch at the Sands anniversary show, Frank played the rest of his stand without incident, finishing out his eventful 1956 by entertaining a gala New Year’s Eve party in the Copa Room: every woman present was given twenty-five newly minted silver dollars in a velvet bag. (One of which, considering Sinatra’s ownership stake in the casino, could have been said to be coming from him.) He rested for a few days in Palm Springs, then headed east for his January 10 opening at the Copacabana. Though she had a bad cold, Peggy Connelly postponed a doctor’s appointment to meet him at the airport. A questionable favor.

  The week was bitterly cold in New York, but that couldn’t keep the crowds away from the hottest act in show business. Among the hundreds jamming the basement nightclub for Sinatra’s premiere were Joe DiMaggio, Judy Garland, Pat Boone, Yul Brynner, Sammy Davis Jr., Johnnie Ray, Edith Piaf, Sugar Ray Robinson, Judy Holliday, Dinah Shore, Errol Flynn, and the ever-present Marlene Dietrich. Joey Bishop, opening for Frank, looked out at the glittering assemblage and said, “Are all these people out of work?”

  Davis, sitting ringside with a party of ten (he would sit ringside not just at the opening but at Sinatra’s every midnight show), ran backstage to wish his idol luck. “When I got to the dressing room Hank Sanicola told me that Frank had gone out for a walk, by himself,” he recalled.

  If ever there was a time for a performer to be alone, this was it. The strength to face that fantastic audience could only come from the same place that he’d drawn the power to attract them. I went back downstairs, not envying him this hour. It’s great to know that the world is out there waiting for you, but who could know better than Frank how easily you can close your eyes to bask in the flattery and the admiration of millions of people and then when you open your eyes they can be gone. It’s great to be the absolute hottest thing in the business but how do you live up to being a legend?

  Davis contrasted the new Sinatra with the one he’d spotted in Times Square during the down period just a couple of years earlier:

  I vividly remembered that night on Broadway in ’53 or ’54: the same man, walking by himself, hands in his pockets, coat collar turned up—nobody recognizing him. To see him come back from that, not only a better performer but bigger than ever, was a sight to behold. And he’d done it alone.

  Now “the lights lowered and a single spot shone on the microphone in the center of the stage,” Davis wrote.

  The music started, only the brass and the drums, like a signal, an announcement. I glanced toward the stairs. Frank was standing motionless, looking straight ahead, waiting.

  It was all there: the sound, the confidence, the distinctive hands, the shoulders, the cigarette cupped in his palm, the slight stretching of his neck—everything, and within three songs he’d more than lived up to the legend, he’d surpassed it.

  “Frankie sang for approximately an hour,” Earl Wilson wrote, “and also did several comedy hits in the manner of Joe E. Lewis whom he portrays in ‘The Joker Is Wild.’ Testing out his voice key, Frankie said, ‘If I could find my key—I’d [go to] my room.’ Lifting his glass in a toast he proclaimed, ‘Here’s to our greatest ally—Scotland.’ ”

  Ba-da-boom—the jokes were not only corny but canned: it was Lewis’s material. The audience didn’t care; they were crazy for Frank. He could’ve read the phone book and gotten ovations. He saw it; he felt it. Excited, he threw in an ad-lib. “Dot Kilgallen isn’t here tonight,” he said, grinning. “She’s out shopping for a new chin.”

  A momentary hush, nervous laughter. The patrons would have well known Kilgallen’s less than classic features from her weekly appearances as a panelist on the quiz show What’s My Line? The crowd had now tasted Sinatra’s real sense of humor: this was payback for the columnist’s snarky Sunday-supplement series on Frank the previous March. The next day, two usually friendly if not sycophantic journalists, Walter Winchell and Louis Sobol, both took Sinatra to task for the remark, Sobol calling it “in bad taste” and “inexcusable.”

  It all rolled off his back. He was flying, supercharged. “It was more than just his performance that was causing a sort of mass hysteria,” Davis recalled.

  The women were gazing at him with greater adoration than ever and now even the men were giving him a beyond-envy kind of respect, leaning in toward him, approving, nodding like Yeah! because Frank…was the guy with the guts to walk alone, the guy who’d fought the odds and won.

  But the guy with the guts to walk alone was increasingly getting liquid help. We have the testimony of an average citizen, one Harry Agoratus of Staten Island, who was fortunate enough to attend one of Sinatra’s Copacabana shows that January: “Mr. Sinatra was in excellent voice, very much at ease, establishing a marvelous rapport with the audience,” he told Richard Havers.

  After a few songs and a bit of chatter, he motioned with outstretched hand, thumb and forefinger a few inches apart, to a nearby table that had bottle and setup on it. Were they friends or strangers? I don’t know. But someone poured a few fingers into a glass and handed it to him. I subsequentl
y heard from others that he routinely did that and picked up the tab for the table. He was at the absolute top of his game. He had the audience, men as well as women, entranced. There were hundreds in the room, but he sang to each of us individually. While he sang there was total silence; when he finished, the room erupted. Those same women, who as teenagers jammed the Paramount Theater fifteen or so years earlier, now stood on the tables of the Copa to get a better view. When the show ended some tables did not want to leave. We left at close to midnight, and walked into a raging snowstorm.

  —

  Bogart died in the early-morning hours of January 14. Frank heard about it just before he was to go on at the Copa that night; he called Abe Lastfogel, his agent at William Morris, and canceled. “I can’t go on,” he said. “I’m afraid I wouldn’t be coherent.” Jerry Lewis stepped in for him at the dinner show, doing a Copacabana single for the first time; Sammy Davis Jr. did the midnight show.

  The funeral was on January 18 at All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills. Thousands gathered outside; inside, the two hundred mourners who filled the pews were a Who’s Who of Hollywood: Jack Warner, Harry Cohn, David O. Selznick; Hepburn and Tracy, Gregory Peck, Gary Cooper, James Mason, Joan Fontaine, Danny Kaye, Ronald Reagan; William Wyler, Richard Brooks, Billy Wilder. Three members of the original Rat Pack, David Niven, Mike Romanoff, and Swifty Lazar, served as ushers. John Huston gave the eulogy.

  Sinatra was absent.

  He had sent Peggy Connelly in his place. A terse item in Louella Parsons’s column of January 17 read, “Frank Sinatra will be unable to make it for Bogey’s funeral. His doctors won’t let him fly.”

  Perhaps he had simply caught Connelly’s cold. Then again, things were rarely simple with Frank.