by James Kaplan
Capitol’s Alan Livingston didn’t appreciate the dig. With Frank’s blister and bluster still ringing in his ears, he decided to take the battle straight back to him and kill Reprise in its infancy.
The strategy was simple and perfectly legal. “I put out so many Sinatra albums,” Livingston said.
I’d go into the catalog, find released masters and unreleased masters and put together combinations of records that were partly songs that had been released and some that hadn’t been released. I’d do it by composer and say, “Frank Sings…Whoever” and put out a new album. I flooded the market with Sinatra albums, which [retailers] were willing to buy. And when Reprise came in, they said, “We don’t need any more Sinatra records. We have more than we can handle.” That hurt him. And I didn’t care because I was angry with him. Frank was upset and threatened to sue me and everything else—which he had no basis to do. His contract was very clear. I could put out whatever I wanted. We had total control and we killed Reprise Records.
He was speaking only slightly hyperbolically. Reprise would survive, but it would be a near thing.
* * *
*1 The Apalachin Meeting, held in the upstate New York hamlet of that name in November 1957, was a historic summit of the American Mafia. The conference came to an abrupt end with a raid by local and state police, causing dozens of gangsters to flee into the woods. The incident was memorably dramatized in the 1999 movie Analyze This.
*2 The ad was written by Reprise’s brilliant in-house publicity man, Mike Shore—who, forty-five years later, told me that he had come up with the label’s name and denied the long-standing rumor that Sinatra had pronounced Reprise “re-prize”—as in “reprisal,” against Capitol. Mo Ostin also said that he’d never heard Frank say the name that way.
16
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
—LORD ACTON
Frank had denied the Clan existed, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t make money from it.
The commercial success of Ocean’s 11 had inspired an ambitious plan: over the next four years, his company, Essex, would produce a series of four more Rat Pack movies. The first was to be an adaptation of “Gunga Din,” Rudyard Kipling’s great poem-tale of British colonialism, only set in the Old West instead of India, with U.S. Army cavalrymen rather than English soldiers. An okay idea, on paper.
Of course Gunga Din, the movie, had already been made: George Stevens’s 1939 classic, starring Cary Grant, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Victor McLaglen, and Joan Fontaine, with Sam Jaffe in burnt cork as the titular Hindu water bearer. It was hard to improve on Grant, Fairbanks, and McLaglen, though MGM put out a pallid remake in 1951 called Soldiers Three, starring Stewart Granger, Walter Pidgeon, and David Niven.
Frank Sinatra didn’t care about classics or coattails. He dug Kipling (as he’d demonstrated on Come Fly with Me’s wacky “On the Road to Mandalay”), he had his four Summit pals on tap (plus a couple of Ocean’s 11 ancillaries, Henry Silva and Buddy Lester), and the public dug the act. What could possibly go wrong?
Plenty, as it turned out. In theory, Frank, with lots of money to spend and excellent taste in collaborators, had assembled a crack production team: the director, John Sturges, had a sure hand with Westerns and hard-hitting adventures (1955’s Bad Day at Black Rock, 1957’s Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, 1960’s Magnificent Seven). The screenwriter was the prolific and distinguished W. R. Burnett (High Sierra, The Asphalt Jungle), and John Ford’s poet of a cinematographer Winton Hoch (She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Quiet Man, The Searchers), an artist when it came to western vistas, would shoot the thing. Frank even hired Billy May to write a score.
But Sturges had also helmed Sinatra’s recent Never So Few, an uneasy blend of crackling battle sequences and flatly unbelievable love scenes between Frank and Gina Lollobrigida. And that movie’s shoot had been rife with cherry-bomb practical jokes, Frank initiating and Steve McQueen retaliating and all of it escalating, with close to anarchic results: not a sign of a director in control of his production.
The “Gunga Din” Western—its original title was Badlands; it then became Soldiers Three (until MGM threatened legal action), then, finally, Sergeants 3—was a co-production of Essex and Dean Martin’s company, Claude Productions (United Artists would distribute), and therein lay the problem: the inmates had officially taken over the asylum. Warner Bros. had at least been able to give notes on Ocean’s 11. Who would ride herd on Sergeants 3? Would the picture be a legitimate Western or a Rat Pack lark? The question was answered all too quickly.
Frank had sole producer credit—his first since that other Western of his, Johnny Concho—and he at least took his power seriously, as Essex executive producer Howard W. Koch discovered when, to his surprise, Sinatra flew in to the desolate Kanab, Utah, location a day after Koch and a skeleton crew had begun filming second-unit footage and demanded to see the rushes. When Koch told his boss he didn’t have a suitable projector on hand (the film was being shot in Panavision and Technicolor), Frank told him to get one. Immediately. Koch remembered that Kirk Douglas was nearby in New Mexico, shooting his own Western, Lonely Are the Brave. He phoned Douglas, arranged to borrow a projector, and had it flown in so Frank could see the first day’s dailies.
The movie shot from late May through June in Kanab, and the biggest challenge for the cast was the crushing boredom of the isolated high-desert location. “There was a Dairy Queen that was open until eleven o’clock,” Bishop recalled. “My advice to everybody was to get two scoops, because after that there wasn’t a goddamn thing to do.”
A bored Sinatra was always dangerous. Out came the firecrackers: “Cherry bombs were quite normal all the time, in dressing rooms and whatnot,” co-star Ruta Lee recalled. Between more staid diversions—poker games, screenings of Laurel and Hardy films—there were high jinks in the local hotel, where Frank had doors installed between adjoining rooms (the construction charged to the film’s budget) so the cast could drop in on each other for impromptu visits and pranks.
Another line item was “a planeload of girls from Vegas,” Lee remembered—a group of prostitutes flown in to play bar girls in the saloon scenes. A production supervisor, “an older gentleman, very moral and proper, who had to handle the arrangements was so upset,” a secretary on the film recalled. “He had to pay them more than scale and he didn’t know how to figure it all out, how to designate what they were really being paid for.”
The film was Sinatra’s plaything, and John Sturges had fallen into the unfortunate position of being Frank’s puppet. “John tried to be in charge, but the jokes never stopped,” Ruta Lee said, recalling that the director was “constantly, constantly” frustrated: “He was trying to make a decent film, but how do you tell the guy you’re working for to shut up and do his thing?”
The Los Angeles Times movie critic Philip K. Scheuer, visiting the set, asked Sturges if he could get the Clan to take orders. “Once I get ’em in front of the camera, yes,” the director replied.
“But,” Scheuer noted, “Sturges didn’t look so sure.”
That uncertainty is all too clear in the finished film, whose tone constantly whiplashes between drama and wink-wink Rat Pack fun. The pattern is set in the first few scenes: the picture starts with Winton Hoch’s beautifully photographed Monument Valley scenery, all red buttes and bluffs and electric-blue sky, and a deadly Indian attack on the peaceful town of Medicine Bend. When Sergeant Major Boswell (a glum, sideburned Joey Bishop, looking as if he’d rather be anywhere else) is sent to find the titular sergeants, the unfortunately named Mike Merry (Sinatra), Chip Deal (Martin), and Larry Barrett (a tubby-looking Lawford), he locates them in a saloon in the good-time town of Claymore—where Sammy Davis Jr., as the freed slave Jonah, the story’s Gunga Din equivalent, is doing a cringe-worthy dance on the bar while mean mountain men shoot at his feet. The three sergeants emerge from the rooms where they’ve been shacking up with those bar girls, and a cartoonish brawl ensues, complete wi
th bottles, picture frames, and chairs smashed over heads. All that’s missing is tweeting cuckoo birds and spinning stars.
Soon we’re back to another Indian attack, and somewhere in the midst of the nonsense a love interest for Lawford’s character, the beauteous cipher Amelia (Lee), is introduced. Like Sinatra and Lollobrigida in Never So Few, the two have zero chemistry—which is easy, since Larry Barrett has zero personality. Frank and Dean’s characters aren’t much better, though Dean does look dashing in his cavalry uniform. The whole thing is difficult to believe and just as hard to like.
But everybody had fun; at least the stars did. “Oh my God, what laughter, what game playing, what gag playing—it was absolutely glorious. It was just such a good time,” Ruta Lee recalled.
Like all Rat Pack merriment, it was great if you were on the inside, less so if you weren’t.
It was a centrifugal production. “When we were shooting up there—this is how loose this ship was run—the arrangement was that Frank would play a week at the Sands, then Dean would play a week, and then Sammy would play a week, and Joey would play a week,” Lee said. “And we all went down for each opening and for each closing. Frank had a fleet of planes, and that was it.”
—
Marilyn Monroe’s presence at Sinatra’s Sands performance on the night of June 7 (it was also Dean Martin’s forty-fourth birthday, the occasion for yet another riotous ringside party) was significant enough that he wanted it kept from the public—and especially from the eternally jealous Joe DiMaggio. A June 5 memo from Jack Entratter to his publicity and advertising directors read,
Please be advised that under no circumstances is any backstage photographer permitted to photograph Mr. Sinatra and Miss Marilyn Monroe together at the cocktail reception to follow the performance on June 7. Any photographer who attempts to do so will be permanently barred from the hotel. Be advised that this is not only a Sands requirement, it is a requirement of Mr. Sinatra’s and, as such, will be absolutely enforced. Thank you.
A follow-up memo the next day went to “All Concerned”:
Marilyn Monroe will be Mr. Sinatra’s guest. It is Mr. Frank Sinatra’s intention that Miss Monroe be accorded the utmost privacy during her brief stay here at the Sands. She will be registered in Mr. Sinatra’s suite. Under no circumstances is she or Mr. Sinatra to be disturbed by telephone calls or visitors before two p.m.
Ruta Lee vividly recalled seeing Monroe walk in on Frank’s arm. “She had a glow around her,” she said. “A built-in klieg light that followed her everywhere. As beautiful as Elizabeth Taylor was, Marilyn stole the show.”
But there was an eeriness about that klieg light: everything that happened in its hot beam seemed somehow askew. A reporter who, along with a photographer for World Wide, covered the cocktail reception after Frank’s performance recalled, “She was beautiful, a vision with a great smile, lots of teased blond hair, and a dress that was so low cut you couldn’t take your eyes off her bosom. However, she was quite inebriated.
“At the party, I remember Marilyn whining, ‘Oh, Frankie, c’mon, let’s make out for the photographers. I love you, Frankie. I want the whole world to know.’ I remember that she was standing behind him and had her hands around his waist, almost as if she was leaning on him for support.”
She was, in more ways than one. When Frank broke her hold to avoid being photographed, Marilyn nearly fell over. Worried, he told one of his bodyguards to keep an eye on her. But she sneaked back to Sinatra’s side and beckoned to the photographer.
“Just as [he] was about to take the picture, Frank’s bodyguard grabbed the camera,” the reporter said.
He gave it to Frank and whispered something in his ear. Then Frank walked to where we were standing and hissed, “Next time you try that, I’ll crack your skull open with this goddamn camera, the both of ya.” I remember that he talked out of the corner of his mouth, like an uneducated hustler or gangster.
At that moment, Marilyn Monroe came over and said, “Frankie, I’m gonna throw up.” He looked alarmed and said, “When?” and she said, “Now. Right now. I mean it, Frankie.” He said, “Oh, Jesus Christ, Marilyn, not again.” And he got her out of there quick.
Donald Spoto, one of Monroe’s few credible biographers, calls Frank “apparently the more smitten” party in the relationship. He quotes Milt Ebbins, who knew both of them well, as saying, “There’s no doubt that Frank was in love with Marilyn.”
Ebbins, as we’ve seen, is a reliable witness. (Frank even bought Marilyn a dog around then, a miniature white poodle she named Maf—short for “Mafia.” An odd thank-you.) What, then, to make of George Jacobs’s firsthand observation that his boss was disgusted by Marilyn’s slovenliness and disdainful of her intellect? What to make of the valet’s claim that she was deeply and unrequitedly in love with Sinatra—versus Spoto’s further assertion (widely supported by witnesses and correspondence) that DiMaggio was the only man the enigma known as Marilyn Monroe ever truly loved?
Simply that in the chaotic inner and outer lives of Frank Albert Sinatra and the former Norma Jeane Mortenson, all of the above was possible at more or less the same time.
—
In June, amid much drunken hilarity, the bored Sergeants 3 stars had made lightning heckling raids on the Vegas acts of Eddie Fisher, Vic Damone, and Danny Thomas. And on July 25, the Clan descended on Fisher again. It was a big occasion: Eddie was opening at the Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles, and his wife, Elizabeth Taylor, who’d almost died of pneumonia earlier in the year, was out for the first time since having plastic surgery to hide a tracheotomy scar. Hollywood royalty was in attendance: John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Joan Fontaine, Lucille Ball, Kirk Douglas, Danny Thomas, Groucho Marx, Yul Brynner, Jerry Lewis, Shirley Jones, Merle Oberon, Edward G. Robinson, Shirley MacLaine.
And Sinatra, Martin, Sammy, Joey, and Lawford.
Fisher was nervous—for more than one reason, one suspects. He forgot the lyrics to several songs. After the third time, Dean called out, “Come on, Eddie!”
Fisher threw up his hands and surrendered to the inevitable. “Okay, you guys, what do you want to do?” he asked.
It was a rhetorical question. Frank, Dean, Sammy, and Joey “charged onstage, liquor glasses in hand,” the Associated Press reported. (Perhaps tellingly, Lawford stayed seated.) “They took over, doing imitations, limericks, racial jokes and songs—while Fisher sat on the bandstand, somewhat forlornly.”
The elegant Ambassador Hotel, the home of the Cocoanut Grove, was not the Desert Inn, and Wilshire Boulevard wasn’t the Vegas Strip: Vegas was where Hollywood went to let its hair down. But at home, in grand assembly and celebrating the recuperating movie queen and her consort, Hollywood would have preferred decorum.
And the truth is that Hollywood now had an ax to grind. Sinatra and his set had accrued enormous power in the film capital—power that the inaugural gala had only enhanced—and were ripe for a takedown. The Fisher opening marked a turning point. “Frank and his henchmen took over and ruined Eddie’s performance,” Hedda Hopper sniffed. “This was a disgusting display of ego,” Milton Berle harrumphed. And in a column in Motion Picture titled “Has the Clan Gone Too Far?,” Sidney Skolsky wrote, “You sensed a feeling of audience resentment…This was the first time The Clan played to a hostile audience; the first time they received unfavorable comment in the press.”
While the former might have been true, the latter certainly wasn’t. And even though Eddie Fisher told Earl Wilson that he “felt honored, pleased and grateful…I like to be heckled by them and the audience was hysterical—it was marvelous,” in truth, the Rat Pack’s act was getting less marvelous by the minute.
—
That month, Reprise released its second album,*1 the one Frank had made with Billy May two months earlier. The LP was called Swing Along with Me. Alan Livingston, on the warpath against Sinatra, immediately cried foul.
The title, Livingston contended, was too similar to Come Swing with Me!, Frank’s second-to-last
Capitol album, which had also been arranged by May. Capitol’s lawyers took the matter to court and won their case: Reprise was ordered to change its title at once. On subsequent pressings of the LP, Sinatra Swings, instead of the offending Swing Along with Me, was printed in white script over the image of a fedora-ed Frank opening a barroom’s swinging door.
Despite any confusion the renaming might have caused, the Reprise album sold better than its Capitol predecessor, reaching number 6 on the Billboard charts despite Alan Livingston’s market-flooding campaign. There was a good reason for this: as terrific as Come Swing with Me! had been, Swing Along with Me/Sinatra Swings was that much better. From the rip-roaring castanet camp of “Granada” (May actually has his sidemen chant “cha-cha-cha!” at the end) to Frank’s magic-carpet-like vocal soaring over the twinkling, tinkling Arabian-bazaar melodrama of “Moonlight on the Ganges” to the thrill of the closer, “You’re Nobody ’til Somebody Loves You,” which starts as a caress and finishes as a powerhouse, a spirit of sheer fun infuses the Reprise LP, showing to what heights this artist was capable of ascending when he was artistically engaged.
—
A snapshot from George Jacobs’s collection shows Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe relaxing aboard Frank’s yacht, photographed as Frank never wanted the public to see them. The picture can be dated exactly: Sinatra, wearing corduroys, a golf jacket, and a billed cap, lies on a couch, suntanned and smiling and reading the August 29, 1961, issue of Look, with a cover story about Clark Gable by his widow. Marilyn, dressed in a white blouse, white pants, and sunglasses, reclines close to him, her knee intimately touching his elbow. She looks overweight—her chin is double—and slightly pixilated: distinctly less than glamorous.
