by James Kaplan
The director was outraged. His agents had been working for years to develop cases against Giancana, Rosselli, and Trafficante; now it turned out they were working for the government. The turf war between the FBI and the CIA was aggravated, and once the new administration took office and Hoover found himself fighting for influence with the incoming attorney general, the director made it his business to let Bobby Kennedy know whom his brother was doing business with. The FBI stepped up its surveillance of the mafiosi; Frank Sinatra appeared in more than a few of the bureau’s internal memos. A few months later Johnny Rosselli was spotted leaving Romanoff’s in Beverly Hills with Judy Campbell, who had begun paying visits to Jack Kennedy in the White House while Jackie was out of town.
But we are getting ahead of our story.
—
The revels of early 1961 over, Frank headed back to the recording studio—or rather studios. He wanted to get moving on his second Reprise LP, a tribute to Tommy Dorsey arranged by Sy Oliver, the man who, along with Sinatra, had transformed Dorsey’s sound in 1939 and 1940. But because he still owed Capitol two more albums, he decided to begin the first, another swinger with Billy May, at the same time. Two albums at once—an amazing feat, if possible. As it turned out, it wasn’t. The physical and emotional effort of commuting from United Recording to that big round tower on Hollywood and Vine on March 20 and 21 was too much even for Sinatra. He had always possessed nearly superhuman energy, but he was also every bit of forty-five years old, and on some of the outtakes from the Oliver sessions he sounds as though the proverbial shot glass was stuck in his throat.
On an aborted “In the Blue of Evening,” for example, Frank’s voice is ominously husky to begin with. Then, when he gets to
There in the dusk we’ll share a dream—
he suddenly breaks off into a barrage of throat clearings, along with a strangely tame “excuse me.” On Dorsey’s great theme, “Getting Sentimental over You,” he sounds magnificent—but also undeniably hoarse. You can see why he decided to pull the plug on the two sessions and regroup later. According to Will Friedwald, “Oliver later told Frank fan Ed O’Brien that they had come too close to the original Dorsey sound—a dance band with a small string section.” But Friedwald also says that Frank was worried about more than an unoriginal arrangement: he “was afraid that his voice was thinning as fast as his hair and that he required the crutch of a lush violin section to cover up any technical shortcomings.”
Come Swing with Me! is a different story. Working with the irrepressible, hard-drinking Billy May always invigorated Frank and was especially helpful during a time of ever-worsening tensions between the singer and the record label he was divorcing. (At one point, he reportedly walked into Studio A wearing a necktie embroidered FUCK YOU.) Yet “Sinatra was careful not to let his disdain for Capitol bring down either his relationship with May or the quality of the album,” Friedwald writes. At the same time, “he just wanted to get the sides in,” said May. “He didn’t spend any extra time on them, but we just ran everything down and got them in as fast as we could. He sang everything at least twice, and there were no deliberate problems one way or the other. I mean, we were aware that he was pissed off at Capitol, and everybody in the studio was trying to be nice to him.”
It was an up production, and Frank rose to the occasion. He had decided to base the album’s sound on May’s Capitol LP Big Fat Brass, which, as its title indicated, was a swinging, swaggering outing, built on a band without saxes or strings. Like Big Fat Brass, Come Swing with Me! was stereophonic, the band divided in the studio to give the new technology full emphasis and to underline its clever pleasures. From first track to last, Come Swing with Me! is a brassy, joyous affair, and Sinatra’s voice is the greatest instrument in the band. If his singing understandably lacks the tenderness and passion of his work on Ring-a-Ding Ding!, a labor of love on a label of his own, it’s never less than superlative. He was showing Capitol what it would be missing.
—
Exhausted by trying to make two albums at once and still suffering post-gala fatigue, Frank announced he’d be taking the entire month of April off. Leisure never sat well with him. As he told a reporter in 1957, “I’ve just got to be busy, that’s all. I take a vacation for five days and I’ve had it. I get restless.” His natural impatience quickly led to devilry of all sorts, and self-dislike always lurked in the shadows. Heavy drinking followed inevitably, and with drinking came the release of anger.
Allergic to solitude, he received a steady stream of guests in Palm Springs: Sammy Davis Jr. and May Britt, the Lawfords, Jimmy Van Heusen, Marilyn Monroe. Frank was always justifiably proud of his hospitality; at the same time, he was acting badly.
“Frank was awful during this time,” an unnamed guest told Kitty Kelley. “He yelled at Marilyn, saying ‘Shut up, Norma Jean. You’re so stupid you don’t know what you’re talking about.’ She was drinking out of a flask by that point and rather pathetic. He barked at George [Jacobs] constantly: ‘George, get this; George, fill the drinks; George, clean my ashtrays; George, clear the table.’ He never said ‘please’ or ‘thank you’ and was always yelling at that poor guy, but George never said a word. He just took it all with silent dignity.”
He also took it all in. (He would serve his revenge quite cold and at book length but seasoned with remarkable amounts of empathy.) Like most men, Jacobs watched Marilyn Monroe with a particular fascination, yet as two of the world’s downtrodden the valet and the tragic goddess seem to have enjoyed a close emotional bond. Monroe was in terrible shape in the spring of 1961, and George Jacobs felt for her. The Misfits—the film written by her then husband, Arthur Miller, directed by John Huston, and released to mixed reviews and indifferent box office—had been her latest Waterloo.
Newly divorced from Miller, Monroe had recently undergone a nightmarish confinement in New York’s Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic and had returned to California in a delicate state, which made Frank’s taunting about her stupidity all the crueler. And crueler still, because, according to the former valet, “she loved Frank Sinatra with all her heart,” and, Jacobs said, the love was unreciprocated.
The situation seemed uncomfortably reminiscent of the floozy Ginny Moorehead’s hopeless love for the aloof writer Dave Hirsh in Some Came Running. “Mr. S had a ton of misgivings about Marilyn,” Jacobs writes, recalling that she was overweight, frequently drunk, and often unwashed, the last, of course, being the biggest turnoff for Frank. Sinatra claimed, according to the valet, that he didn’t even want to sleep with her—but, ever chivalrous, now and then managed anyway.
With these two self-loathing icons, sex was the tail of the dog. Frank needed it for the sense of conquest and a flitting glimmer of intimacy; Marilyn needed it to validate the one thing the world respected her for. Because she almost entirely lacked self-respect, the fix could never be sufficient. Of course Frank, like Marilyn an autodidact, shared her deep fear of intellectual inadequacy, and of course he could never admit it, to her or anyone else. Far easier to enjoy the weak lift that mocking her afforded.
—
In an unsteady state to start with during that Palm Springs sojourn, Frank picked a fight with—of all people—Desi Arnaz.
In the decade since the Cuban-American former bandleader and his wife, Lucille Ball, had become America’s favorite TV couple, Arnaz, an idiosyncratic but dynamic businessman, had built their production company, Desilu, into a television powerhouse. Desilu produced a long string of hit series during the 1950s, including I Love Lucy, Our Miss Brooks, The Jack Benny Program, and, starting in 1959, the ABC crime drama The Untouchables. Though Lucy and Desi divorced in 1960, their company, with its thirty-three soundstages in Culver City and in Hollywood, continued to thrive. In January 1961, Sinatra’s production company, Essex, moved its offices into Desilu’s Gower Street facility in Hollywood. Frank and Desi had been friendly acquaintances for years.
All was well until Sam Giancana decided he hated The Untouchables.
In the spring of 1961, though The Untouchables had been on the air for over a year, certain groups began to get exercised about it. The Federation of Italian-American Democratic Organizations urged a boycott of Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company products—the show was sponsored by Chesterfield cigarettes—and a group of 250 members of the Brooklyn local of the International Longshoremen’s Association picketed an ABC studio in New York, threatening to stop handling Liggett & Myers products on the docks in protest of the show’s use of Italian names. In March, Liggett & Myers dropped its sponsorship of The Untouchables.
Though many perfectly respectable Italian-Americans were undoubtedly unhappy about the show, the moves against it that spring seem to have been initiated by men who felt the program cut a little too close to the bone. The head of the Brooklyn local of the International Longshoremen’s Association was Anthony “Tough Tony” Anastasio, who controlled that borough’s dockyards with an iron hand and, it was well-known, was a Gambino-family labor racketeer and the brother of the murdered mobster Albert Anastasia. (The brothers spelled their surnames differently.) And though the chief spokesman for the Federation of Italian-American Democratic Organizations was the distinguished New York congressman Alfred Santangelo, the federation’s boycott of Liggett & Myers was apparently financed by Sam Giancana.
Giancana took The Untouchables personally, and not just because of his ethnicity: he had started his criminal career as a driver for Al Capone. Fidel Castro wasn’t the only Cuban Sam Giancana wanted dead that spring; Desi Arnaz was now on his hit list too.
And though Frank Sinatra had never watched a single episode of The Untouchables, he suddenly decided that he felt Mooney’s pain and—as his first vacation week in Palm Springs got under way—took it upon himself to give his old pal Desi a piece of his mind.
Late one night in the first week of April, well-oiled and accompanied by Dorothy Provine, Frank drove to the Indian Wells Country Club, whose restaurant Arnaz frequented. Jimmy Van Heusen and a lady friend followed close behind. When Arnaz appeared at the restaurant, accompanied by two bodyguards, there was a confrontation. Though Variety reported that “precise details of tiff are not known,” a UPI dispatch described “a bitter argument that started between [Sinatra] and Desi Arnaz over portraying Italians as thugs in Desilu’s television series.”
According to Kitty Kelley, who interviewed Van Heusen’s lady friend, Arnaz, who’d also been drinking, came over to Frank’s table with his bodyguards. After introducing the producer to Provine, Van Heusen, and the other woman, “Frank turned to Desi and told him what he and some of his influential Italian friends thought about the show making the Italians gangsters. ‘What do you want me to do—make them all Jews?’ said Desi. He said that he wasn’t afraid of Frank’s friends, and the argument went on from there.”
UPI reported, “Associates of the men said the discussion degenerated into an argument during which the Cuban is reported to have suggested Sinatra was a failure in the television industry.”
Van Heusen’s lady friend recalled Arnaz telling Frank, “I remember when you couldn’t get a yob. Couldn’t get a yob. So why don’t you forget all this bullshit and just have your drinks and enjoy yourself. Stop getting your nose in where it doesn’t belong, you and your so-called friends.”
Very few people would have dared to talk this way to Frank Sinatra.
But the tactical fact was that Desi Arnaz had two bodyguards with him; Frank, a date and another couple. Arnaz and the two men went back to the bar, leaving Frank spluttering. “I just couldn’t hit him. We’ve been pals for too long,” he said.
“Yeah, what’s the point,” Van Heusen said.
According to the songwriter’s lady friend, the two couples—along with two women Sinatra picked up from a nearby table—then headed to Van Heusen’s Palm Desert house at 4:00 a.m. “for a party.” What happened instead was an alcohol-fueled tantrum of epic proportions. Frank “walked into Jimmy’s den, where a large Norman Rockwell portrait hung on the wall,” Kelley writes.
One of the composer’s most treasured possessions, it portrayed Van Heusen sitting at the piano in his pajama top, and it was a special gift from the artist. Grabbing a carving knife from the kitchen, Frank lunged at the painting and slashed the canvas to shreds.
“If you try to fix that or put it back, I will come and blow the fucking wall off,” he said.
Van Heusen did not say a word; the women exchanged frightened glances. Finally, one of the two women picked up at the country club said solicitously, “I love your records, Frank.”
Looking at her contemptuously, Sinatra said, “Why don’t you go slash your wrists.”
In fact he was brimming with self-contempt, and the whole incident was loaded with unconscious significance. In the fall of 1953, with the slow-motion car wreck of his marriage to Ava Gardner in a particularly dire phase (Ava was on her way to Rome to make a movie and to Spain to rendezvous with her bullfighter boyfriend), Frank had slashed his left wrist in Jimmy Van Heusen’s New York apartment. Chester had found him just in time and got him to the hospital—yet in Sinatra-world Van Heusen had been not his rescuer but party to Frank’s deepest humiliation. Now the songwriter had witnessed another humiliation, and he had been repaid.
—
“How could you stand there and let him do that?” Van Heusen’s lady friend asked him later.
“Tomorrow he’ll be so sorry that he’ll send me some print worth five thousand dollars or something,” the songwriter said.
“Why do you put up with his craziness?” she asked. “Pick up hookers for him? Go over there all the time and stay up with him until all hours of the morning and sit back and watch him treat people like dirt?”
“Because he sings my songs, that’s why,” Chester said. “I’m a whore for my music.”
Several days later, just as Van Heusen had said he would, Frank sent him an expensive Japanese print. And three weeks later, with his leisure—and other things—eating at him, Sinatra flew Nelson Riddle and forty musicians to Mexico City, on his (considerable) dime, and played five concerts, gratis, for handicapped children. He would do several other benefits that spring and summer.
—
Promptly on the first of May, his sort-of vacation over, Frank got back to work on his Dorsey tribute at United Recording. This time around, Sy Oliver had a beefed-up string section for him: twelve fiddles, two violas, three cello. And those strings weren’t a crutch but a velvety setting for that still-great voice. This time around, there was no shot glass in Sinatra’s throat. He’d admitted to himself, if to nobody else, that one LP at a time was all he could handle.
And he did credit to the LP. At the same time, though, I Remember Tommy was an exercise in nostalgia rather than an important new statement: a good album, not a great one. To listen to the updated “Polka Dots and Moonbeams,” for example, is to hear superb mid-career Sinatra—without either polka dots or moonbeams. Polka dots and moonbeams no longer existed. Frank’s March 1940 recording of the great Burke–Van Heusen tune with the Dorsey orchestra may be a relic, an artifact of a romantic era (and a romantic twenty-four-year-old Frank, captured in amber) that the war and the nuclear era had all but effaced, but it tugs at the heartstrings in a way the new version simply can’t. This isn’t entirely Sinatra’s fault. During the Dorsey era, Sy Oliver had arranged the band’s up-tempo numbers and Axel Stordahl the ballads; during the Capitol era, Nelson Riddle had written Dorsey updates of both kinds (“Everything Happens to Me,” “How About You?,” “Oh! Look at Me Now,” �
��Violets for Your Furs”) and had improved on the originals. Oliver and Stordahl were great men, but their greatest days were behind them.
This was far from true of Sinatra, though nostalgia, especially about his Dorsey days, was a powerful force for him. While he would always be ambivalent about his crusty, domineering mentor, Tommy loomed larger in Frank’s life than any other male figure, including his own father. Sinatra would continue to hold warm feelings about his days as a boy singer and would continue, throughout his career, to pay musical tribute to Dorsey.
—
Nostalgia was the last thing on Frank’s mind when he recorded “The Curse of an Aching Heart” on the night of May 18, though the song was a very old chestnut indeed; it had been written in 1913, and twenty-two years later the Hoboken Four, including the nineteen-year-old Frank Sinatra, had sung it as their audition piece for Major Bowes’s Original Amateur Hour. It got them on, and it got Frank started, and the rocket-fueled 1961 version was a sign of how far he’d traveled since.
The song, the first to be recorded for a new album of swingers, the first Sinatra–Billy May Reprise LP, jumped out of the gate like a racehorse. The hell-for-leather tempo and blaring Vegas-y brass bespoke lives lived late at night and without apology, the plaintive words strikingly out of sync with the music:
You dragged and dragged me down until
The soul within me died.
It was surely the most cheerful screw-you song ever sung. And Frank sang it without a hint of regret or reproach—whatever his feelings on the subject. Or subjects. For however often he’d carried Ava’s torch into the recording studio, the lyric of “Curse” can also be read as a slap at Capitol Records.
Reprise had released its first group of albums in February: Ring-a-Ding Ding!; The Warm Moods, by the great tenor saxophonist Ben Webster; Sammy Davis Jr.’s Wham of Sam; Mavis, by the jazz singer Mavis Rivers; and a comedy LP by Joe E. Lewis, titled with his catchphrase, It Is Now Post Time. Sales and reviews were strong. And in conjunction with Ring-a-Ding Ding!’s release, the fledgling label ran an ad in Billboard, reading, “A new, happier, emancipated Sinatra…untrammeled, unfettered, unconfined.”*2
