Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  And it’s not a simple arrangement. I mean, any other singer—say it was Vic Damone or Perry Como or anybody else—would just not say anything. You’d play it through several times, and he’d start trying to learn it, and where he’d come in and where he didn’t. Frank wasn’t that way.

  We played this thing down once, and after that he said, “OK, this was a couple of ticks too slow, the tempo should be dah-DAHT-buh—” He put it right on the money, where the pocket should be. The pocket is when you’ve got the right tempo and it feels right to everyone—it’s in the pocket. And in the third chorus, [he said] one of the trumpets had a wrong note, and he’s right. He retained all of this. He could hear the finished record after he heard this once. He could see right where it was going to go.

  Granata describes the scene as heard on the studio tapes: Frank snaps his fingers sharply, both to feel the right tempo and to demonstrate it to Mandel and the musicians. Once the beat is set,

  Sinatra continues to snap his fingers decisively, and Mandel, after taking a moment to match the pacing Sinatra has delineated, counts off to cue the band. “One, two, three, four!” The rollicking sound of one great big band blares forth. After the test take, it is clear that Sinatra has a winner on his hands, and the rhythm section breaks into a celebratory jazz-club style improvisation of the song.

  But that’s only the beginning. It takes two more rehearsals and no fewer than twelve takes of the song, ranging from eleven seconds to full-length—this is, after all, a very important recording—before Frank is satisfied. And in the end, nothing could be more satisfying. This is Cahn and Van Heusen at the top of their game, and Frank at the top of his:

  Life is dull, it’s nothing but one big lull.

  Until you find that you’re reeling, your heart going, “Ring-a-ding ding!” The song and the feeling it engenders are one.

  And amazingly, the next number, Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler’s “Let’s Fall in Love,” was no less exultant. Frank had first sung the song on the radio in the early 1950s but had never recorded it before. Now he decided to do something with the tune that no one had ever done before: begin in the middle.

  “Both casual listeners and serious fans generally like to hear songs they’re already familiar with, and when an artist goes into a tune they know, they’ll often start applauding,” Friedwald writes.

  Realizing that this moment of recognition constitutes a dramatic epiphany, Sinatra often delays it as long as possible. Sometimes he uses the verse, but if he doesn’t feel the verse is strong enough, he often utilizes the bridge as an introductory verse.

  On “Let’s Fall in Love,” Sinatra does both: he starts with the bridge, which is well known enough that listeners will find it vaguely familiar, yet strange enough that it won’t tip everybody off. He then moves on to the verse, which hadn’t been sung at all since Harold Arlen [and Koehler] wrote it for the 1933 film of the same name. We then come to the one significant alteration of a chart made by Sinatra on the date itself: both singer and ensemble rest for an entire measure before leaping into the refrain.

  Fifty years after the date, Johnny Mandel remembered that rest—a cavernous silence, falling between the last line of that gorgeous verse (“Why be shy?”) and the sharply commanding first word of the chorus (“Let’s”)—as having lasted for two measures, rather than one. Maybe it just felt that way. It’s an extraordinary, pulse-quickening pause, a lo-ong moment of absolutely erotic suspense, and just as extraordinary is the fact that Frank conceived of it on the spot, that night in the studio.

  As Mandel recalled it, after the band ran through the tune once, “Sinatra said, ‘You know, I’ve got an idea about this song.’ He says, ‘Right when we get to the end of the verse, right when I sing “Why be shy,” I want everybody to lay out for two bars, and then I’ll hit “LET ’S-uh-fall-in-love…,” and nobody comes in until the second beat after “Let’s.” ’ And we went back and just made the record like that. His instincts were that way. He just knew when he heard something how it should go and what would help it. I never have worked with anyone who had that kind of facility. I think he was the best musician I ever worked with.”

  —

  As a young and unheralded arranger in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Nelson Riddle managed to eke out a living by ghostwriting charts for busier, more established colleagues. He was known inside the business for being able to turn out orchestrations in hours that would take others days; he was so adept at imitating the styles of others that as a ghost he was truly invisible.

  Now he was, in effect, ghostwriting for himself. Though his contract with Capitol prohibited him from working for Frank Sinatra’s new label, he did just that in December, writing anonymous charts for three songs Frank recorded four days before Christmas, all of them Cahn–Van Heusen numbers: “The Last Dance,” “The Second Time Around,” and “Tina.” The first was a reorchestration of a tune Billy May had arranged for Sinatra’s most successful album, Come Dance with Me!; oddly, Riddle’s take on this good but not great song (with Reprise’s newly appointed A&R man Felix Slatkin conducting) is less stately and square than the ordinarily ebullient May’s version.

  The other two numbers became the A- and B-sides of Reprise’s first single. “The Second Time Around,” a hymn to fresh starts in mature years—“Love is lovelier the second time around/Just as wonderful with both feet on the ground”—would become a perennial for Sinatra. (Though when, in immature or mature years, had he ever had both feet on the ground?) “Tina,” the court songwriters’ shamelessly obsequious tribute to Frank’s twelve-year-old daughter (“Tina, Tina, nobody else but Tina/That’s the little lady’s name”), would take its place on the not-so-distinguished roster of tunes penned in honor of his womenfolk, joining “Nancy (with the Laughing Face)” and, years later, “Barbara.” (No one ever had the temerity to write “Ava”—but then, that was a song Frank sang dozens of times under various titles, always with torch in hand.)

  All three of the arrangements are up to Riddle’s high standards, but none of them is a knockout. Nelson’s depression may be partly to blame. His marriage was falling apart, his affair with Rosemary Clooney was leading nowhere, he was drinking heavily, and he was grinding out too much work, at too fast a rate, in order to support his large family and his house in Malibu. Despite his brilliance, he persisted in not thinking well of himself. Though he was one of the busiest and most highly regarded arrangers in the business, though he was still working extensively for the movies and with Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole, and though he’d written the gorgeous theme music for (and was also scoring) the hit TV series Route 66, the fact that he now couldn’t receive credit for writing for Sinatra caused him intense unhappiness. “My association with Frank is what really got my career going,” he told the writer Peter Levinson during this period. “And now I can’t work with him.”

  It would change. But it would never be the same as it was before.

  * * *

  *1 By way of comparison, $100 in 1960 equates, as of this writing, to almost $800.

  15

  I know we’re all indebted to a great friend—Frank Sinatra.

  —JOHN F. KENNEDY, AT THE INAUGURAL GALA, JANUARY 19, 1961

  Sinatra’s got it made—he’s got his own President.

  —JACK CARTER, COMEDIAN, MARCH 1961

  The day after New Year’s, UPI’s Vernon Scott filed a report about the wardrobe Frank planned to wear to the presidential inauguration. The Hollywood couturier Don Loper, who’d created Janet Leigh’s wolf-whistle-worthy silver sheath and Nancy Sinatra’s wedding ensemble, had gone all out for his first male client. “Among the articles in the eight outfits designed by Loper for the singer,” Scott wrote,

  were an Inverness cape, silk top hat, a double-breasted gray weskit, an ebony walking stick with a silver crook, a swallowtail coat and striped trousers.

  “Frank will be the most elegantly dressed man in Washington,” predicted Loper…“Everything I’ve made for [him] is te
rribly small, elegantly tailored and terribly chic. To me he is one of the most elegant men in the world,” Loper said.

  The blowback was immediate. It was one thing for Gary Cooper or Fred Astaire to look debonair; inverness capes, silk top hats, and swallowtail coats were another matter entirely. Not to mention that silver-handled walking stick. Joe E. Lewis sent a telegram: “Have heard about your new Don Loper wardrobe. Save the first dance for me.” Milton Berle quipped (at a testimonial for Gary Cooper, who was dying of cancer), “Sinatra would have been here tonight, but he was trying on his new Don Loper wardrobe and the zipper got caught in the sequins.”

  “This is the story of my life,” Frank complained to the Hollywood reporter James Bacon. “I buy some new clothes and it becomes a big crisis. I never once opened my mouth to anyone. I like the clothes and I will wear them to whatever affair formal attire is called for.”

  Frank could be excused for being overexcited. In December, Joe Kennedy had asked him to produce (with Peter Lawford) and star in the biggest affair of all: the inaugural gala, a benefit to help defray the Democratic Party’s $2 million campaign debt, to be held at the National Guard Armory on January 19, the night before the president-elect was sworn in. Twelve thousand people had been invited to the grand party, at $100 a pop; a box would set you back $10,000. Twelve thousand accepted. “This is the most exciting assignment of my life,” Frank said. “It will be the biggest one-night gross in the history of show business.” He had been working the phones for weeks, drumming up a crème de la crème cast of entertainers that only he could have assembled, a roster ranging from Joey Bishop, master of ceremonies, to Leonard Bernstein, who agreed to write a special composition for the occasion (“Fanfare for the Inauguration”) and conduct “The Stars and Stripes Forever”; from Helen Traubel to Milton Berle, Mahalia Jackson to Jimmy Durante.

  Frank used his considerable powers of persuasion to sweet-talk big names to fly in from around the globe: Ella Fitzgerald from Australia, Shirley MacLaine from Japan, Gene Kelly from Switzerland, Sidney Poitier from France. He persuaded the producers of two Broadway shows, Gypsy and Becket, to go dark for the night so Ethel Merman, Sir Laurence Olivier, and Anthony Quinn could come. Eleanor Roosevelt, letting bygones be bygones where Adlai Stevenson was concerned, happily agreed to do a reading. Nelson Riddle agreed to come with a full orchestra, which he would lead in the playing of “The Silver Bell Waltz” by A. A. Hopkins, an Abraham Lincoln favorite played at the sixteenth president’s inaugural ball, and “Lisbon Antigua,” a Portuguese popular song that Riddle had turned into a hit instrumental in 1956.

  Dean and Sammy would of course be there. Fredric March agreed to participate, as did Louis Prima and Keely Smith, Juliet Prowse and the Tom Hansen Dancers, Pat Suzuki, Alan King, Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, Nat King Cole, and Harry Belafonte and the Belafonte Singers. Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen jumped at the chance to bring some really special material: a medley of song parodies called “Ode to the Inauguration.”

  Then the boat began to rock. Dean, who distrusted all politicians and had never had much use for Jack Kennedy, came up with an excuse: he was shooting a movie in Los Angeles—funnily enough, a political satire called Ada; Dino played a southern hick maneuvered by corrupt forces into becoming a puppet governor—and, he said, couldn’t get away. Years later, the director of the film, Daniel Mann, said, “I never had a feeling that he was worried about the picture.” He wasn’t. But it didn’t matter how hard Frank tried to persuade his friend: when Dean was out, he was out.

  And then there was Sammy. After suspending his gig at the Latin Casino nightclub outside Philadelphia in favor of the inaugural gala, Davis ordered a new tuxedo from Sy Devore and had May, over her budgetary protestations, go to Bergdorf Goodman for a gown to wear to the show and a Chanel suit for the swearing in. He was thrilled. “It really can happen in America,” he thought. “Despite all the obstacles, still in 1960 an uneducated kid from Harlem could work hard and be invited to the White House.”

  Then something strange happened. Kitty Kelley writes that Sammy suddenly and inexplicably begged off, “not want[ing] his interracial marriage to mar the gala in any way.” But according to Davis himself, Jack Kennedy’s personal secretary Evelyn Lincoln phoned him three days before the inauguration and said, “Mr. Davis…Sammy…the President has asked me to tell you that he does not want you present at his inauguration. There is a situation into which he is being forced and to fight it would be counterproductive to the goals he’s set. He very much hopes you will understand.”

  He was devastated. “I lay on my back trying to understand it,” he recalled.

  The election was over. The votes were in! We’d all worked so hard for Jack to be President…Obviously my presence would be bad for him. I knew that I was expected to understand that…My hurt and embarrassment turned to anger at my friends, at Frank and Peter: why didn’t they stand up for me? But I knew they had, to the extent they could.

  Yet Nancy Sinatra asserts that Davis was waved off not three days before the inauguration but weeks earlier, when the Kennedys sent word to Frank that because of Sammy’s marriage to May Britt, he should not perform in, or even attend, the gala. Sinatra pled Davis’s case in vain, he told his daughter; his inability to help his old friend pained him deeply. True, he could have withdrawn from the inaugural, “but Sammy would never have allowed that,” Nancy writes.

  As though Sammy ever had any control over what Frank did or didn’t do.

  Newspaper accounts bear out Nancy junior’s chronology. Two weeks before the inauguration, an Associated Press dispatch about the gala reported, “Neither Dean Martin nor Sammy Davis Jr. will be in the show. Martin’s working on a movie and, said Sinatra, ‘Sammy’s worried about his old lady.’ He referred to the expectant May Britt, Davis’ wife.”

  But whoever informed Sammy and whenever it happened, the one thing all accounts agree on is that Frank never picked up the phone himself.

  —

  Sinatra and Lawford arrived in Washington on January 6, aboard Jack Kennedy’s private plane, the Caroline. A Lincoln limousine chauffeured by a GI whisked them from the airport to the National Guard Armory to continue preparations for the big show. Washington took notice of Frank’s grand entrance, and Washington—one company town being invaded by another—was nervous. A Republican congressman rose on the floor of the House to decry the use of that car and driver. Editorial writers tut-tutted about the participation of “the Clan” in the inaugural festivities (even though two-thirds of the group’s real talent was not participating). The keepers of decorum bemoaned the fact that Frank persisted in referring to the president-elect as “Jack.”

  D.C. was already on pins and needles about the installation of the glamorous young president. “Many Washingtonians are fleeing their homes to avoid the inauguration turmoil, but they are being replaced by hordes of visitors bent upon seeing the new administration take over,” wrote the political columnists Walter T. Ridder, Robert E. Lee, and William Broom.

  Hotels are sold out for inauguration week, and many persons are being bunked in Baltimore. Every limousine rental agency in town was rented out by mid-November…

  Many residents of the Capital are renting their homes for the week to incoming visitors at fancy prices ranging from $75 to $200 per day. With those prices, they also must furnish full-time maid service. One dowager, who offered her mansion for rental, was worried lest a member of the “clan” or the Hollywood “rat pack” wind up in her house.

  She was about to withdraw it from the market when it was snapped up by Bob Kennedy. He lives about 25 minutes out of Washington and apparently decided that the festivities would leave him no time for such a long commute.

  Frank continued to throw himself, unstintingly, into the role of producer. He paid Billy Ruser, the Beverly Hills jeweler, $90,000 to have silver cigarette cases inlaid with a silver replica of the invitation to the inaugural made for all the entertainers on the bill. He and Lawford attended closely
to every detail of the program, brainstorming with the writers—who included Bob Hope’s chief gagmen Melville Shavelson and Jack Rose, playwright Leonard Gershe, and famed humorist Goodman Ace, as well as Sammy Cahn—on scripted introductions and special lyrics. Frank even addressed himself to minutiae of transportation and accommodation, making sure that his performers were treated in a manner befitting the occasion. He hit up his old romantic rival Howard Hughes, a majority stockholder in TWA, for a chartered jet to transport Nelson Riddle and his orchestra, along with a Hollywood contingent that included Joey Bishop, Milton Berle, Nat King Cole, Jimmy Durante, Ella Fitzgerald, Gene Kelly, Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, Juliet Prowse, and Cahn and Van Heusen, from L.A. to D.C.

  “It was a big plane,” recalled the guitarist Bob Bain, part of the Riddle orchestra, “and they started serving as soon as you got on. The bar was open. I remember Felix Slatkin—he was a big, heavy guy, and he loved to drink—he got so inebriated that they had to carry him off the plane. All the comedians were telling these old vaudeville jokes. It was just a kick.”

  Frank had reserved an entire floor of the downtown Statler Hilton, where he was staying, for the performers—some of the performers. As Bain remembers, he and a number of the musicians—several of whom, including reedman Buddy Collette and bassist Joe Comfort, were black—were told when they arrived that “Frank had more guests than he realized, but we got you a nice motel in Maryland.” The nice motel then refused to accommodate Collette and Comfort, who wound up staying at a private home in Washington.