Sinatra

by James Kaplan

He certainly acted that way. Podell was a frog-voiced, stogie-chewing, pinkie-ring-wearing despot, a man so legendarily disagreeable that once, when Sammy Davis Jr.’s act went on too long, he banged his huge ring on his ringside table and yelled, “Get off my stage, nigger!”

  But Podell was also a stickler, whose “unwavering demand for professionalism and perfection in every aspect of the club’s operation was one of the key ingredients in the Copa’s success,” according to a history of the nightclub. As the Copa’s general manager, Entratter learned attention to detail at Podell’s feet and followed his lead, with a twist: he was the good cop to Podell’s bad. Entratter was much beloved by performers, on whom he doted. He paid them well; he put them up in lush suites in the Hotel Fourteen, the hostelry in whose basement the Copa nestled. He listened to their problems. Taking the helm of the Sands, he replicated Podell’s perfectionism, brooked no nonsense, but ruled benevolently. He never lost sight of who his bosses were, but he was given his head, and maintained a solid sense of self-respect.

  And where Jack went, the stars followed. Top-billed talent played out their contracts at other casinos and migrated to the Sands: Martin and Lewis (together, then separately; Dean was ultimately offered one point in the casino), Danny Thomas, Lena Horne, Tony Bennett, Nat King Cole, Red Skelton, Milton Berle, Sammy Davis Jr., and, of course, Frank, who left the Desert Inn as soon as he could to join Entratter.

  Sinatra was a friend, and a project. At the Villa Capri birthday party in December, Entratter had (a little grumpily) recited, not sung, a Sammy Cahn lyric that reflected Frank’s constantly overstretched work life: “At the Sands he must play each year/In his contract it’s very clear/But who can get the silly bastard to appear?”

  The other piece of the puzzle was the casino manager Carl Cohen, hired away from El Rancho Vegas in 1955. Cohen was another big, tough Jew—like Entratter, six feet three and 250-plus pounds—but he was a blunter instrument, slow to anger but fast and skillful with his fists when provoked. He was, however, brilliant at his job, which involved managing many people, from dealers to pit bosses to cocktail waitresses, and keeping airtight control over a human activity that by its nature triggers highly volatile emotions and tempts the most straitlaced. “There wasn’t nothing you could pull over on him,” his brother once said.

  —

  At the end of December, the nineteen-year-old Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner, twenty-seven, had married, much to the chagrin of Wood’s overbearing mother, Maria Gurdin—the infamous Mud. It had been a quintessentially Hollywood wedding, but in part due to Mud’s disapproval the ceremony was small. The fact that Wood and Wagner were madly in love made the occasion all the more romantic. Among the few guests present were Sinatra and Tony Curtis, Wood’s co-stars in Kings Go Forth. Frank’s date was Betty Bacall, leading a non-bylined Hollywood Roundup column to speculate, “The affection these two show for each other inclines us to believe they might marry.”

  Two weeks later, marriage was again in the air; love, though, was a different matter. On January 10, Sammy Davis Jr. married a twenty-six-year-old singer named Loray White in the Emerald Room at the Sands. Frank did not attend. As late as the ninth, Davis had told the press that Sinatra was going to be his best man, but on the day of the ceremony Frank called from Los Angeles and said that he was unable to get away. Harry Belafonte stood for Davis instead.

  Of course Frank was busy—but then, he was always busy, and he frequently shuttled from L.A. to Vegas, on necessary business or just on a whim: to him the one-hour flight was the equivalent of a car commute for most people. The musical episode of The Frank Sinatra Show broadcast that night (Robert Mitchum and his sixteen-year-old son, Jim, were the guests) had been pretaped. He wasn’t in the recording studio that night.

  But Sinatra would have known all too intimately the true story behind Sammy’s marriage to the tall, handsome, and black Loray White: that it was a sham union between two people who barely knew each other, thrown together hastily when Davis’s romance with Kim Novak threatened to come to light and—in an era when America at large still looked upon interracial sexual relations with horror—become a national scandal. It was a poorly kept secret that Sammy, who hated the color of his own skin, was obsessed with white women, and Novak was, after all, a kind of white goddess. But beyond her substantial surface appeal, the actress shared a deeper connection with Davis: as an undereducated brunette from Chicago who had been turned into a blonde and a movie star by Harry Cohn, and an actress of limited skills and confidence, she suffered from a shaky sense of identity to equal Sammy’s; on a certain level, the two were soul mates.

  But Novak was a rebellious Galatea. She enjoyed using the relationship to provoke Cohn, who felt the casting couch was his droit du seigneur. He was also a man easily provoked, not to mention a studio chief worried about how a scandal of such proportions might affect box office. Cohn fought back, warning Novak that she was jeopardizing her career. And according to the photographer William Read Woodfield, a frequent documenter of Sinatra’s career and a friend of Davis’s, the studio head called on his longtime Mob associations (Cohn and the Los Angeles gangster Johnny Rosselli wore matching friendship rings) to have Sammy threatened, in stark terms, by armed hoodlums. Sammy then went to Frank for help. Woodfield claimed that in his presence, Frank phoned his Chicago friend Joe Fischetti to ascertain the source and credibility of the threats; Sinatra then told Davis what he needed to do to make them go away.

  By the time of Sammy’s wedding to Loray White—the marriage would last nine months—Frank’s nonattendance at the ceremony was overdetermined. For one thing, hadn’t he done a substantial enough favor for his friend not to have to fly to Las Vegas and dignify a fraud with his presence? For another, Sammy, as a little brother surrogate, could be annoyingly unruly. A few years earlier, he had palled around rather publicly with Ava, and though both swore up and down that they weren’t involved, where Ava was concerned, who ever knew? The thing with Kim, whether Frank was done with her or not, had been a little too close for comfort. Like all unequal friendships, Sinatra and Davis’s would continue to be fraught with volatility.

  —

  In the meantime, an ancient friendship was nearing its end. Emanuel Sacks, Manie, the record executive who had believed in Frank from the beginning and had signed him with Columbia, who had nurtured Sinatra’s recording career and extended him every possible indulgence even as Frank strained his heroic patience by demanding more and more, lay dying of leukemia in a Philadelphia hospital. He was fifty-six. It didn’t matter that the two had had cross words; it didn’t matter that—in part because of the mounting exasperation of working with Sinatra—Manie had moved on to RCA before Columbia dropped the singer, nor that Sinatra was now with Capitol. Sacks, along with Tommy Dorsey, had been one of the two true father figures in Frank’s life, and though fathers are meant to be contended with, and rebuked, and transcended, they remain fathers still.

  That January, Frank, doing location shooting in France for Kings Go Forth, took time off to fly to Philadelphia and sit by Manie’s side. He paid for the lost production days. On February 9, Sacks died. Sinatra, now back in Los Angeles, flew east for the funeral.

  —

  On March 3, when Frank stepped into Capitol Studio A for the first time that year, it was Billy May and not Nelson Riddle who met him there.

  Sinatra recorded four ebullient tunes that night, three of them Cahn and Van Heusen compositions, and two of those, “Nothing in Common” and “How Are Ya’ Fixed for Love?,” charming duets with Keely Smith, whose vocal expressiveness belied her visual shtick: the deadpan she wore in her Vegas lounge act with her husband, the wild-man vocalist and trumpeter Louis Prima.

  Nelson Riddle had vast scope and depth as an arranger, but nobody could do ebullience like Billy May. Though not one of the tracks Frank laid down that night was close to a classic, the music was sparkling and thoroughly worthy of this high-water period in Sinatra’s career. The last number of the evening, th
e undistinguished but winsome “Here Goes,” a blaring, Vegas-style roof raiser that Frank performed at an uncharacteristically breakneck tempo, was supremely upbeat, and—especially after a February that saw the deaths not only of Manie Sacks and Nelson Riddle’s baby daughter (of bronchial asthma) but also of Harry Cohn, who succumbed to a heart attack* on the twenty-seventh—he managed to imbue the lyric with what sounded like real optimism:

  Here goes, baby, here goes,

  Every worry, every fear goes,

  Every dull day in the year goes,

  I’m about to fall in love.

  It was a hopefulness he almost certainly felt in that moment. As Bing Crosby said, any singer worthy of the name is acting when he sings a song. But as was not the case with Crosby, who managed to blend emotional believability and clinical coolness in his delivery, inspiring the sentiment more than enacting it, Sinatra’s genius was to give you the emotion in the moment, to make you feel he was feeling it as you were. The transporting pleasure he felt while recording his best takes communicated itself clearly to everyone in the studio—as did its converse, his chagrin when, for whatever reason, he wasn’t feeling the song.

  “As a singer, there’s no one like him,” said the producer Voyle Gilmore, whom Sinatra would fire not long after this session. “As a guy, there was no one more difficult to handle. Each time you saw Frank, it was like meeting a different guy. How he treated you depended solely on how he felt at that moment and what was bugging him. And, believe me, he has a lot to bug him. Because he’s gotta be on the move all the time, he keeps getting involved in more than any human being can handle.”

  —

  “As a couple we were combustible,” Lauren Bacall writes in her memoir. “Always when we entered the room the feeling was: Are they okay tonight? You could almost hear a sigh of relief when we were both smiling and relaxed.”

  Between Frank and Ava, combustibility had been an aphrodisiac; infidelity—the threat of it, the idea of it, the reality of it—had been the tinder. With Sinatra and Bacall, commitment itself seems to have been the unspoken but flammable subject. Frank liked to make dreamy marriage talk with his girlfriends, but Betty, beautiful, formidable, and thirty-three, was serious business—serious enough to make him clam up about how far things might go. He loved squiring her—she was his intellectual and charismatic match; she was wonderful to be seen with—but what would come next? She was too proud to pressure him.

  But then as now, publicity conditioned the private lives of public figures. Throughout the fall and into the winter, the papers kept up an incessant drumbeat of speculation about whether the two would marry. The press of the day might have lacked the instantaneousness of the Internet, but not its power or tenacity. Bacall writes, “I recall a wire-service man on the Coast saying, ‘When are you and Frank getting married?’ and me pleading to be left alone, asking why they wouldn’t stop. He said, ‘We’ll keep at it until you do or you don’t.’ ”

  Paying a visit to the Kings Go Forth set at Paramount in December, she had watched the shooting of a scene in which Sinatra, playing the battle-weary lieutenant Sam Loggins, advised the young radio technician in his platoon, played by Tony Curtis, about his relationship with the gorgeous young Monique (Natalie Wood). When “Sinatra counseled Tony Curtis to marry the girl,” the biographer Arnold Shaw wrote, “Miss Bacall let out a huge horse-laugh.”

  In her memoir, Bacall is such a graceful and intelligent prose stylist, such a penetrating analyst of her own psyche and of the emotional states of her friends and intimates, that it’s easy to overlook the little things she leaves out—things like her own sharp tongue and hot temper, not to mention Humphrey Bogart’s affair with his makeup artist and wig maker Verita Peterson, not to mention her own jealousy about Sinatra’s unending attachment to Ava Gardner. Bacall mentions Gardner just twice in the memoir, and Frank’s unwelcome visit to Ava in December 1957 comes up not at all, though it certainly played a part in the blowup of the marriage that never was.

  Ava or no Ava, Betty and Frank “had a lovely Christmas eve at his house,” she insists. “We were planning New Year’s Eve in Palm Springs. He told me what food to buy—more than fifty friends were coming to his house. I was excited. Playing house, going to the market as though I were Mrs. Him. What a babe in the woods!”

  At Sinatra’s request, she hosted a small pre-party at the new Romanoff’s in the Springs, holding the fort until he arrived from Los Angeles. “I remember his arriving—my getting up to greet him—his saying to everyone, ‘Doesn’t she look radiant?’ ” she recalled. “The next day he wanted me to go home. No specific argument—that click again. Of course I was in tears, wanting to be there, thinking of everyone expecting me to be there. I made up my mind it would be better to stay and not to have to answer questions later.”

  On New Year’s Eve, as the crowd arrived, she put on her best smile, but everyone sensed that something was wrong. She and Frank never interacted; their friends’ eyes shifted uneasily from one of them to the other. “A nightmare,” Bacall remembered.

  That was the first time Frank really dropped the curtain on me. A chilling experience. I still don’t know how he did it, but he could behave as though you weren’t there. He drank heavily, which led me to believe he wasn’t very happy himself. I had to try to rationalize his behavior. I absolutely could not comprehend his ability to ignore me so totally.

  This seems disingenuous. How could the redoubtable Bacall have failed to reproach Sinatra, by word or by gesture, for flying to his ex-wife’s side? And if Betty had merely arched one of those famous eyebrows, let alone uttered a rebuke, Frank—who had once warned Ava, when she’d had the temerity to scold him for coming home late, “Don’t cut the corners too close on me, baby”—knew just how to retaliate. Alcohol was his self-anesthetic; ice, rather than fire, his weapon of choice. Fire, he knew, would lead to combustion, which could only lead to bed. Which would lead back to the question he preferred not to answer.

  By January, according to the ever-vigilant Louella Parsons, Frank and Betty were “in the deep freeze romantically. They haven’t seen each other in 10 days…Until just recently, neither dated anyone else and they were constantly together at Palm Springs, at his recordings and TV show. It’s impossible to predict about this unpredictable couple—so we’ll just wait and see what happens.”

  For all her grandiosity, the columnist could scarcely have imagined how big a part she would play in what did happen.

  Soon afterward, Bacall had to go to New York, reluctantly, to publicize a not very good film she’d just made, a weeper called The Gift of Love. Out of the blue, Frank, who’d come east for Manie Sacks’s funeral, called, “almost as though nothing had happened,” Bacall recalled, and invited her to dinner when he arrived in Manhattan. He came, they supped, they talked “like two friends who had insane electric currents running between them all the time.” She felt stronger in New York, away from Hollywood and close to her family; she even “felt in a position of strength with Frank,” she remembered. “I told myself that I expected nothing, but I knew I wanted everything. Though his erratic behavior was very much a part of him, I flatly refused to face what it might portend for our future together. I probably thought that if I didn’t face it, it might go away.”

  This is what she was thinking. But the way she behaved—acting from strength, keeping a slight distance—egged him on. He was “wildly attentive” in New York and, the night she returned to California, came right over to see her. “He didn’t know how to apologize, but he was fairly contrite, at least for him,” Bacall writes.

  He said he had felt somewhat trapped—was “chicken”—but now could face it. “Will you marry me?” He said those words and he meant them. Of course all my barriers fell. I must have hesitated for at least thirty seconds. Yes, I thought to myself, I was right all along—he couldn’t deal with it, was afraid of himself, but finally realized that he loved me and that marriage was the only road to take. I was ecstatic—we both were
. He said, “Let’s go out and have a drink to celebrate—let’s call Swifty, maybe he can join us.” I questioned nothing. That was my trouble—one of my troubles.

  It was a strange choice, so quickly diluting the fresh intimacy by adding an outsider—and this outsider. The little literary agent had been Bogart’s best friend; he was also the ultimate pragmatist and Hollywood operator, the man who had blithely counted Sinatra out when he was down, then welcomed him back open-armed when he rose from the ashes. The man who embodied Oscar Wilde’s definition of a cynic: one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

  When the lovebirds told Lazar of their plan—they were sitting in a booth at the Imperial Gardens, a Japanese restaurant on Sunset—he didn’t take them seriously at first. Chillingly, the agent “thought it a ‘great idea,’ but didn’t believe it—until Frank started to plan the wedding,” Bacall writes.

  “We’ll get married at the house and instead of our going away, we’ll have our friends go away.” He knew the way he wanted it—he didn’t ask what I might want. He wasn’t dictatorial, he just had his plan and it never occurred to him I might not accept it. I didn’t disappoint him. I was too happy, and I loved his taking over, that being one of my most acute needs.

  A young girl came over for autographs. Frank handed me the paper napkin and pen. As I started to write, he said, “Put down your new name.” So “Lauren Bacall” was followed by “Betty Sinatra.” It looked funny, but he asked for it and he got it. I often wondered what became of that paper napkin.

  Then Frank headed to Miami, where he was to open on March 11 for a twelve-night stand at the architect Morris Lapidus’s great Collins Avenue Xanadu, the Fontainebleau.

  —

  Ava Gardner hated and distrusted Frank’s gangster friends, preferring to have as little to do with them as possible. Lauren Bacall mentions no mafiosi in her memoir, a fact that suggests one of the many firewalls Sinatra built, or attempted to build, between the classy and the less than classy parts of his life. But Frank’s old friend Joe Fischetti, who had a no-show job as “entertainment director” of the Fontainebleau, based solely on his ability to persuade Sinatra to perform at the hotel, was there with Sam Giancana to greet Sinatra at his sold-out opening. And in March 1958, the crowd in the La Ronde Room, not to mention the nearly three thousand miles between Miami and Los Angeles, stood all too eloquently for the yawning gulf between Frank and his new fiancée.