Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  Was it really the writers’ fault? Variety compared Frank’s premiere unfavorably with his guest shot on The Edsel Show: “There’s no disputing that Sinatra’s own show lacked much of the spark and free wheeling quality of the automaker’s presentation.” Yet what Variety’s critic couldn’t have known was that much of that freewheeling quality flowed from careful rehearsal—on the part of Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney. Frank had treated The Edsel Show high-handedly, but he’d had Bing and Rosie there to bail him out. To make him look good. With his own program, his arrogance—always a mask for his deepest fears—undercut his collaborators and leached into his on-air manner. “We prefer the Sinatra of the Edsel show,” the radio and television critic Jack O’Brian wrote, “rather than the Frankie boy of his own ABC-TV premiere Friday night—the night club hero, cock o’ the walk, the self-confident ruler of all he surveys.”

  —

  Despite the fears of the two rival networks that The Frank Sinatra Show would clobber them on Friday nights, the program’s ratings began to slip almost immediately. (The first dramatic half hour, with Frank as the warmhearted cabbie, aired the week after the premiere.) A few weeks in, Charles Mercer of the Associated Press offered a trenchant analysis. “What is wrong with the Sinatra show?” he asked.

  Without knowing anything about his TV production schedule, I get the impression from watching his shows that they have been put together in great haste. A regular weekly TV variety show is almost a full-time job for any performer; care and diligence pay off when the show goes on the air.

  I also get the impression that Sinatra is doing something he never has done in the movies or in his outstanding guest appearances on Dinah Shore’s TV show: He is condescending to his audience.

  Mercer was right on the money. The demons were the same ones as always: Frank hated to rehearse and showed up late or not at all for rehearsals; he didn’t take the medium seriously. “I couldn’t escape the feeling,” Paul Molloy of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote, “that Sinatra’s thinking was something like: ‘Let’s give the peasants out there a few songs and jokes and get this nuisance over with.’ There is effrontery about this attitude that has no place in show business.”

  —

  At the end of October, Frank made front-page news by denouncing “the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear.” He was referring to rock ’n’ roll. According to the Associated Press, Sinatra had written the words in a piece for a Parisian magazine called Western World. The AP report quoted Frank further:

  It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people. It smells phony and false. It is sung, played and written for the most part by cretinous goons and by means of its almost imbecilic reiterations and sly, lewd—in plain fact dirty—lyrics…manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth.

  This rancid smelling aphrodisiac I deplore. But, in spite of it, the contribution of American music to the world could be said to have one of the healthiest effects of all our contributions.

  The story gained such instant worldwide currency that the Sideburned One, Elvis Presley himself, felt compelled to rebut Frank’s characterization the very next day. “I admire that man, he has a right to say what he wants to say,” Elvis told reporters. “He is a great success and a fine actor, but I don’t think he should have said it. He is mistaken about this. This is a trend, just the same as he faced when he started years ago. I consider it the greatest in music.”

  Presley’s words, filled with quiet dignity, contrast starkly against Sinatra’s rant, which bristles with hostility and defensiveness—and conveniently leaves out the fact that black rhythm and blues, from which, early and late, rock begged, borrowed, and stole, was filled with “imbecilic reiterations” and dirty lyrics, that it was an important American art form, and that it was, in many cases, great music.

  Comparing rock ’n’ roll to the music that had made millions of bobby-soxers scream, faint, and wet their pants was a more complex proposition. In Sinatra’s case, it was the artist, not the art form, that was transgressive and world changing: the sexuality of the rather tame ballads he sang was more romantic than carnal. The little things that drove the bobby-soxers wild—that little catch Frankie put in his voice in quiet passages, that spit curl that fell over his forehead—were more mild, on the face of it, than Elvis’s swiveling hips, which Ed Sullivan famously ordered his cameramen to leave out of the shot.

  But it has to be admitted that Presley had a point. A trend was a trend. How different, really, was the sexuality unleashed by the Sinatra phenomenon in the late 1930s and early 1940s from the carnality unleashed by rock ’n’ roll fifteen years later? How hypocritical was it of Frank to claim chastity for himself or what he did onstage? Comparisons between the intrinsic quality of the songs Sinatra sang and the varied corpus of rock ’n’ roll are another discussion. (Though, even putting aside “Mama Will Bark,” Frank sang his share of fairly cretinous numbers himself: “Red Roses for a Blue Lady,” anyone?) The most striking comparison between Sinatra’s teen-idol phase and rock ’n’ roll is the brevity of the former against the amazing durability of the latter. Frank couldn’t have known this in 1957, but it seems clear that he feared it.

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  On November 1, seventeen-year-old Nancy Sandra Sinatra made her television singing debut on The Frank Sinatra Show, along with two high-school friends, Belinda Burrell and Jane Ross. The trio—they called themselves the Tri-Tones—performed two distinctly noncontemporary songs, 1930’s “Exactly like You” and 1927’s “Side by Side.” Frank chimed in on the latter.

  Grandmas somewhere might have been charmed, but TV audiences continued to edge away from the show, displeased with the host’s forced patter and the general lack of flow and spontaneity. It didn’t help that after the premiere, the musical installments were taped rather than live; also, inexplicably, Sinatra had vetoed the use of a studio audience. It all felt canned and slipshod.

  Variety wondered why he was doing the show at all. What seemed to rankle the entertainment journal particularly were Frank’s little endorsing lead-ins to the Bulova and Chesterfield commercials. In a piece headlined SINATRA: SINGER OR SALESMAN?, the magazine decried the star’s “commercial prostitution”: “Sinatra isn’t the first and won’t be the last of the entertainers to become a dollar happy commercial pitchman, though rarely has an actor or singer of his stature (and he’s in the upstairs level in both depts.) gone so heavy in personalizing the pitch. Does he need the money? Does Rockefeller?”

  Frank might have been accused of a mild lapse of taste, but really, wasn’t shilling just the American way? All kinds of stars endorsed products, from cigarettes to automobiles; even Ernest Hemingway pitched Ballantine Ale, Pan Am Airways, and Parker pens.

  And in truth, though Sinatra’s income was substantial, he did need the money. He hadn’t finished paying off the back taxes he’d owed since his down period. He maintained two residences, several automobiles, a private plane, and a helicopter. He was supporting one ex-wife (his divorce from Ava didn’t include alimony) and three children. And he continued to spend as if there were no tomorrow, not just on himself, but, as always, on others in need.

  More to the point was the time he was failing to spend on his TV show. As always, he was pillar to post: he was shooting a new movie at Paramount, Kings Go Forth, a World War II drama co-starring Tony Curtis and Natalie Wood; he found time to guest star on another TV show, a tribute to Ethel Barrymore on NBC’s Texaco Command Appearance; and three days before Thanksgiving he returned to Capitol Studio A and recorded four singles, singing magnificently as an apparently unreproachful Nelson Riddle conducted his own arrangements, which were as beautiful as ever.

  The first three songs were updates of Sammy Cahn–Jule Styne compositions that Frank had sung in his 1947 movie It Happened in Brooklyn, then recorded with Axel Stordahl for Columbia: the irresistibly perky “I Believe,” the torchy “
It’s the Same Old Dream,” and the great standard “Time After Time.” Throughout his career, Sinatra would often come back, to great effect, to material he’d recorded before. These new versions showed his spectacular growth as an artist, his ease and maturity. They also demonstrated his wisdom in returning again and again to the great Riddle.

  The fourth song, Sam Coslow, Ken Lane, and Irving Taylor’s “Everybody Loves Somebody,” was another that Frank had recorded in the mid-1940s. Dean Martin had sung it on the radio at around the same time. The agreeable if not especially impressive number hadn’t done much for either Sinatra or Martin in the 1940s, and the slow and bluesy Riddle version would never come near the charts in 1957. That Dean Martin would score a number 1 hit with the song seven years later, knocking an English group called the Beatles off the top of the pops, would have been beyond the imagining of the wildest prognosticator.

  —

  Feeling his TV show needed freshening up, Frank did the November 29 broadcast live for the first time since the premiere and, for the first time, in front of a studio audience. His guest was Dean Martin. Wearing tuxes and sitting at a bar with drinks in front of them, the two sang a medley of song snippets and clowned around. To watch the sequence at a distance of decades is fascinating. Seated on Dean’s right, Frank, though still the far bigger star and Martin’s senior by a year and a half, comes across as a hyperactive, eager-to-please little brother. For one thing, Dean, with his leonine head, broad shoulders, and huge expressive hands, physically dwarfs him.

  But for another thing, though Martin was ostensibly a man whose career was recently in danger, he simply galvanizes the television screen. (His own variety-show premiere, on NBC in October, had won critical raves.) That he will become a massive star within six months is no surprise. The camera loves him: he’s in his physical prime, conveying an easy grace and charisma. His singing is smooth and utterly charming; his comedy is effortless. He not only dwarfs Frank physically; he outclasses him.

  By contrast, the TV camera, working in close-up here, isn’t doing Sinatra any favors. It doesn’t love him; it doesn’t even especially like him. His hair and face are thin, and so is his material. He trots out some corny Amos ’n’ Andy–style humor (“Dis muss be da place heah”); he smiles delightedly as he makes lame jokes about fried rice and fortune cookies while Martin sings “Slow Boat to China.” His figurative flop sweat is showing; he’s thrilled his big friend is there to help out.

  Dean looks delighted, too. (And drunk, though you can tell it’s an act: when he picks up his glass and sniffs the contents, he makes a face and puts it back down—must be that apple juice.) He’s glad to be there and glad to be with his pally: ingratiation, of Frank or the audience, has nothing to do with it. He just has plenty of charm to go around. The mutual affection of the two men is unapologetic and palpable. Martin even teasingly blows cigarette smoke in Sinatra’s face while Frank sings Cahn and Styne’s “Saturday Night (Is the Loneliest Night of the Week)”; Sinatra obligingly coughs. Frank then chimes in with an annoyingly loud “sweet sweet” backup as Dean croons his big hit “Memories Are Made of This.”

  But the best moment comes when Dean starts another hit, the lush, accordion-y “Innamorata,” with the words

  If my lips should meet

  With Frank Sinatra’s…

  “It’s a raid!” Frank yells, genuinely funny for once.

  A moment later, the gay humor established, Frank sings “I’ve Got a Crush on You” in Dean’s direction, and to his mock horror. “What I look like?” Martin cries, then proceeds to hand his cigarette over to Frank, who puffs on the smoked-down butt until the end of the medley. These two are best pallies, and they don’t care who knows it.

  Dean really did give the show a lift, though not quite in the way Frank had hoped. Jack O’Brian wrote a couple of days later, “The ‘live’ Frank Sinatra show Friday night seemed to be more a Dean Martin show. Dean really took charge as he out-casualed the voice.”

  The skids were greased for The Frank Sinatra Show; the knives were sharpened. Variety primly declared the program “still wanting in smoothness and substance” and took Frank to task for “spouting a torrent of flip expressions that presumably are supposed to be sophisticated and hep but come across in a completely affected manner.”

  True enough. But the flip expressions, and the byplay between Frank and Dean, would carry both men a good ways over the next few years. Variety—and America, still logy from its Thanksgiving turkey—had no idea what they had just witnessed: the Holmby Hills Rat Pack might have died with Humphrey Bogart, but a new one had just been born.

  —

  “Frank Sinatra hasn’t worked enough,” Hedda Hopper wrote a few days later, “so he’ll produce a picture he and Pete Lawford bought, titled ‘Ocean’s Eleven…’ They want Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. for the stars.”

  The concept had sprung from a chance meeting on the beach in Santa Monica between Lawford and an aspiring director named Gilbert Kay. Hollywood being Hollywood, Kay had shaken hands with Lawford, then pitched him a movie idea: a group of World War II veterans, former commandos, join forces to rob five Las Vegas casinos simultaneously. It sounded like a great notion, but Kay wanted to direct the picture. Hollywood projects happen when powerful people make them happen, and Lawford and Kay were near the bottom of the food chain. But with this idea in hand, Peter Lawford saw a way to get even further into the good graces of the man at the very top. When he told Sinatra about the idea, Frank smiled. He didn’t just like it; he loved it.

  —

  On the night of December 12, an all-star group of friends—including Dean Martin, Bing Crosby, Jack Benny, Tony Curtis, Eddie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds, Vic Damone, Jack Entratter, Leo Durocher, Mike Romanoff, Jimmy Van Heusen, and Sammy Cahn—threw Frank a forty-second-birthday party at Villa Capri. Cahn, who wrote a dozen special-material songs for the evening, also served as an efficient, articulate, somewhat overbearing master of ceremonies. (In his defense, it could be said that working a roomful of personalities this large was like going into a cage full of big cats armed with just a chair and a whip. Also, Cahn was overbearing in general.) As at Dean’s welcome-home bash in August, someone had thought to bring along a tape recorder, and so the clever songs, sung by various attendees as well as the birthday boy—Bill Miller was the very able pianist—were preserved for posterity, along with much of the party’s byplay.

  It was a lively, hilarious, and no doubt highly bibulous occasion. There is something haunting about listening to these bell-clear recordings (which were only privately circulated at first, but eventually, like so many other private Sinatra tapes, managed to leak out to Frank-ophiles: the celebrants were all so vivid, so charming, so necessary. This assemblage represented a certain crème de la crème of American show business when such a quantity still existed and seemed to matter to the culture at large, and when such a starry group could still convene around a central figure for what felt like an important occasion.

  Given Sammy Cahn’s special-lyrical skills, the evening was cast as a kind of roast, but by today’s standards—and also perhaps out of respect for, if not fear of, the roastee—it was a rather mild affair. No vulgarities or overt sexual references were caught on tape, in the songs or the remarks. The honoree was fond of liquor and the ladies, the lyrics claimed; he was less fond of reporters and rehearsing, he was quick to anger, and he could hold a grudge for a long time. None of it would have come as a shock to anybody, even Frank.

  Dean Martin sang the first number, a parody of Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top”:

  He’s the wop,

  Records sell like Nestlés…

  Except that Dean pronounced it “nestles.” “Nestlés!” the stage-managing lyricist called out irritably. “You’ll see why in a minute.”

  Martin resumed. Frank’s records might be the top, the song continued, but they didn’t top Presley’s.

  It got a light laugh, as did most of the other numbers. The true, table-pou
nding hilarity happened between the carefully prepared songs, triggered by you-had-to-be-there things: the infinitely perishable, non-fungible stuff of a life that was fleeting every second, even while Frank was seizing every moment as though his life depended on it.

  —

  In Spain in October, Ava Gardner, who lived exactly as she pleased and let the consequences be damned, did a profoundly stupid thing. Visiting the Andalusian ranch of a wealthy bull breeder she’d met through Hemingway, she let herself be persuaded, after drinking a great deal of absinthe and Spanish cognac, to ride a horse into a bullring.

  It was all a drunken stunt: she was playacting at being a banderillero, carrying a pair of the barbed spears that are thrust into the bull’s back before the matador takes over the final act of the pageant. The problems were twofold. “For starters,” as her biographer Lee Server writes, “she had little experience on horseback. And then there was this: It was a good way to be killed.”

  As the bull charged, her horse reared. “She was thrown from the saddle and sent to the ground with the speed of a whiplash,” Server writes, “landing with a great thump in the dirt, the ground hitting the right side of her face with the force of a wooden bat swung straight at the cheekbone.” The result was a swollen purple bruise atop her right cheekbone. A London plastic surgeon advised her to wait and hope for the wound to heal rather than take any measures that might permanently affect her face. In time, the swelling went down, but a solid bump the size of a walnut remained.