Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  —

  That same month, Frank and Peter Lawford dissolved their partnership in the Beverly Hills restaurant Puccini and sold the place to a Chicago syndicate.

  * * *

  *1 I Remember Tommy, though recorded earlier, wouldn’t be released until October.

  *2 The vocal group for the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. Sinatra joined the band as a member of the ensemble and ultimately became its standout.

  17

  People who call me controversial are those who don’t agree with me.

  —FRANK SINATRA AT A PRESS CONFERENCE IN TOKYO, APRIL 20, 1962

  Sergeants 3 premiered on January 7, and the critical reception was predictably withering. “Somewhere east of Suez the ghost of Rudyard Kipling must be whirling like a dervish in its grave,” wrote Hazel Flynn in the Hollywood Citizen-News. “It’s more din than Gunga, believe me, starting with a barroom brawl and ending with a howling massacre.” Time’s reviewer said, “The Clansmen loaf kiddingly through their parts, acquiring suntans…Perceptive viewers will realize that Sinatra and his Cub Scout troupe are pioneering in a new art form: the $4,000,000 home movie.”

  Not so surprisingly, despite—or possibly because of—the many public decrials of the Rat Pack, the picture would be a moderate hit at the box office.

  Performing at a New York nightclub, the group’s most enthusiastic member kept the flame burning bright. “Sammy Davis’ idol worshiping of Frank Sinatra increases—he now ad libs during songs, and drinks while performing,” Earl Wilson noted. “Opening at the Copa…he leaped atop a piano and began dancing. Impersonating Dean Martin, he sang into a glass and took a drink out of the microphone. ‘I am a member of the Clan,’ he shrugged. ‘That’s a little group of ordinary guys that get together once a year to take over the entire world.’ ”

  Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, the Leader found a way to distract the world from the bad reviews. When Juliet Prowse returned from New York on January 8, Frank was at the airport to meet her. And the next day, the world’s newspapers were blaring the tidings: Frank Sinatra, age forty-six, and Juliet Prowse, twenty-five, were engaged to be married.

  A strange dance ensued.

  The news of the engagement came as a surprise to everyone, possibly including the principals. “A great girl…a wonderful girl,” Frank gushed to the Hollywood writer James Bacon, who encountered him while he was finishing a round of golf at the Hillcrest Country Club in Beverly Hills.

  “You really shook us up,” Bacon told Sinatra.

  “I’m a little shook up myself,” Frank said. “I’m forty-six now. It’s time I settled down.”

  Just then, George Burns ambled up. “Hey, Nat,” Sinatra said. “I got engaged to Juliet Prowse today.”

  “Yeah,” Burns said, uninterestedly, and changed the subject.

  “He thinks I’m kidding him,” Frank said after Burns left. “He doesn’t believe me.”

  Neither did Prowse’s mother, whom the Associated Press contacted in Johannesburg. “I don’t believe there’s any truth to it,” she said.

  I don’t believe it because I haven’t heard a word from Juliet direct and we are a close family who keep in close communication. Furthermore, Juliet last told me she and Frankie were only good friends and there was no question of a big romance or marriage…Either this is untrue or it’s something completely new and a sudden turn of events. Otherwise it just doesn’t fit.

  But she was clearly failing to understand her prospective son-in-law, for whom sudden turns of events were standard operating procedure. Apparently, Frank had taken Prowse to dinner at Romanoff’s on the night she returned from New York and proposed marriage. One small condition: that she give up show business. He was expressing one of his deepest, most impossible wishes—that a woman of mettle subordinate herself entirely to him. (And, of course, remain a woman of mettle.)

  Taken by surprise, Prowse said that she would have to think it over. Sinatra asked if she might do so while they drove out to Palm Springs. By the time the night was through, they seemed to have hit on a compromise: she would mostly give up the business, outside the odd motion picture and TV guest appearance; otherwise she would devote herself entirely to Frank. He produced a diamond engagement ring, and she accepted.

  Sinatra’s friends were shocked, shocked. Not long before the announcement, Van Heusen had said, “I don’t think Frank will ever get noosed again.” Lawford refused to believe the news until Sinatra wired a confirmation. Onstage at the Copa, Sammy asked the audience for “a few moments of silence for our Leader, Frank Sinatra, who is leaving us.”

  “Juliet Prowse will ascend to the loftiest heights of Hollywood and Frank will spend his nights at home, a tamed tiger,” Earl Wilson teased. “We’ll miss you around the joints, Frank. Maybe she’ll let you out one night a week.”

  But not long after the announcement, shortly before leaving to visit her family in South Africa, Prowse suddenly told UPI, “I have no idea of retiring.” Asked what had changed her mind, she said, “Just thinking about it. The idea of not performing any more. It’s been a part of my life for many years, and I don’t feel I can put my feet up on the desk and never dance again.”

  Not surprisingly, Frank was on his own page. At the same time Prowse was talking to UPI, he was enduring the unfailingly pleasant Bob Thomas, who visited him at Goldwyn Studios, where The Manchurian Candidate was starting production. “The word was out that he didn’t want to speak publicly about his forthcoming marriage, but one has to take chances in this game,” Thomas wrote.

  I hazarded that his choice of a bride was his smartest move since playing Maggio in “From Here to Eternity.” Juliet is much admired in this sector of the press corps as bright, charming and talented.

  Sinatra failed to bridle, instead confirmed, “Yes, she’s a wonderful girl.”

  Encouraged, I pressed on: “And will it be a June wedding, as has been reported?”

  “I dunno,” he replied. “She’s going home to South Africa this weekend, and she’ll work it out with her mother.” Then lapsing into Sinatran [insert Amos ’n’ Andy voice here]: “Those matters up to the broads.”

  And what of reports that Juliet will give up her career after her marriage?

  “That’s right: I think it will be better if she doesn’t work.”

  Show business’ loss, I said.

  “Yeah, but my gain,” he retorted.

  But suddenly a juicy rumor began making the rounds: that in reality, the engagement was “merely a marvelous publicity stunt,” as Dorothy Kilgallen wrote on January 17. “The camps are quite equally divided,” she continued.

  To the loyalists who insist, “Frank’s too big to pull a publicity stunt,” the other experts explain wearily, “He’d do it to help the kid’s career. He likes the kid. It would be kicks for him to help her.” By a coincidence, the Sinatra publicity men were trying to book Juliet on at least one key television program on a date that would have followed the betrothal news immediately. They were turned down because the show’s producers didn’t think Juliet was well known to the vast American viewing audience.

  Even paranoids have enemies, and Kilgallen, no friend of Frank’s, was laying it on thick here. Prowse had been a steady TV presence throughout 1961, and she had just done the Como show for a big fee. Yet there was no denying that while her career had been doing fine, the betrothal had raised her profile considerably and been great for business—at exactly the moment when Frank wanted her to pull back.

  “Irresponsible people are saying those things,” he told Earl Wilson, about statements (Prowse’s surely included) that she was going to stay in the business. He repeated, “She’s not going to do any work. I’d rather not have it.”

  —

  He, of course, was working as hard as ever. In mid-January, he pulled Gordon Jenkins onto the Reprise roster (no doubt raising the blood pressure of Riddle, still stuck at Capitol) for, of all things, a new album based entirely on waltzes. It was a sweet idea, appealing to the old-fas
hioned side of Frank that Jenkins, with his singing strings and simple harmonies, represented. But it was also a business decision, and in a commercial climate where Reprise was struggling to get on its feet—and Capitol was swamping the market with Sinatra product—the move would prove problematic: on its release in October, the LP would rise no higher on the charts than number 26.

  The new album was originally going to be called Come Waltz with Me, after the title tune Frank commissioned from Cahn and Van Heusen. The provocation would certainly not have been lost on Capitol Records, which after all had issued Come Fly with Me, Come Dance with Me!, and Come Swing with Me! and had recently won the Swing Along with Me legal battle. But Sinatra was saved the trouble of returning to court when he heard Sammy and Chester’s song, which was a little sprightlier than most of the other numbers on the LP, five of which were decades-old work (none of it any later than 1927), in a bittersweet autumnal mode, by the great composer-lyricist Irving Berlin. Instead, Frank decided to name the album after the first track, Berlin’s “All Alone.”

  Irving Berlin was one of the funniest writers on Tin Pan Alley, but his work also drew from a deep well of sadness—he became a widower at age twenty-four and lost an infant son early in his second marriage, to mention just two external events in his life—and his waltzes of the 1920s have a haunting quality unparalleled in American songwriting. But Berlin’s sorrow and Sinatra’s were not precisely the same, for Frank’s musical melancholy came in one flavor only: torch.

  For this reason, 1925’s “Always,” a sweetly sad hymn of devotion, wouldn’t work on All Alone. But the title song was perfect for Sinatra’s purposes, as was 1927’s “Song Is Ended,” which closed the album. In between came three other immortal numbers by the composer—“What’ll I Do?,” “When I Lost You” (from 1912, the year of his widowhood), and “Remember”—along with half a dozen other tunes by other writers, all in three-quarter time, but none possessing the quality of the Berlin compositions.

  Those five alone are worth the price of admission. The conjunction of Frank’s magnificent singing—he truly is at the zenith of his art in these years—with Berlin’s deceptively simple, devastating songs and Gordon Jenkins’s shamelessly sentimental arrangements is uniquely effective. In the case of lesser numbers like Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane’s “Girl Next Door” (originally “The Boy Next Door,” sung by Judy Garland in the 1944 MGM musical Meet Me in St. Louis) and the 1926 weeper “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” (which had been a campy hit in 1960 for the post-army Elvis), Sinatra manages to dignify the material into listenability. Even he, though, can’t do much with a dog like Cahn and Van Heusen’s by-the-numbers title song for the 1958 Cary Grant–Ingrid Bergman movie Indiscreet. With few exceptions (“All the Way” and “Only the Lonely,” but not many others, come to mind), Sammy and Jimmy’s best tunes together were ring-a-ding-dingers; for some reason, each wrote his best love songs with someone else.*1

  The late Peter Levinson attended the All Alone recording sessions on January 15, 16, and 17. “Those were really something to see,” he recalled. “He really performed to the invited audience.” On the other hand, Levinson said, as blissful as Frank apparently was about his engagement, he “looked like hell when he came in. It was as if he’d just been to nine orgies. Sweater; didn’t have the rug on—nobody could believe that he sang as beautifully as he did on that album.”

  In fact, it might have been sorrow rather than dissipation that accounted for his haggardness at that first session: earlier in the day, he had been a pallbearer at the funeral of a friend, the brilliant comedian Ernie Kovacs, who’d just died in a car wreck at the age of forty-two.

  —

  In the meantime, though, Frank was doing an astonishing thing: making a great movie. Coming on the heels of Sergeants 3, The Manchurian Candidate, another independent production in which he was intimately involved, might have been expected to suffer from the same problems: over-control by the star and under-control by the filmmakers. But every picture Sinatra had ever made had been a power game, and the very few good ones had all been directed by men who knew their own worth and understood the intricacies of working with a highly intuitive, infinitely impatient thoroughbred. And if Frank respected both his director and the artistic possibilities of the material, his investment of time and attention could be absolute, as Otto Preminger had discovered to his surprised pleasure on The Man with the Golden Arm.

  With music and movies, the material was always what drew Frank in. He loved a great melody, but words also meant an enormous amount to him. For all his impatience, he was a close reader—of lyrics, fat historical biographies, potential movie properties, screenplays. He’d loved The Manchurian Candidate as a novel, and he was enthusiastic from the beginning about George Axelrod’s script, which, with its nightmarish, hall-of-mirrors quality, was extraordinarily faithful to Condon’s work.

  And in John Frankenheimer, Sinatra knew from the start that he had a director worthy of his time and commitment: a filmmaker with a clear artistic vision, a strong personality, and the sensitivity not to butt heads with him.

  Still just thirty when filming started, Frankenheimer was a big, handsome, athletic kid from Queens, with a presence not inferior to Sinatra’s and a wunderkind reputation amassed in the mid- and late 1950s, when television was live and artistic. Between 1954 and 1960, he directed 152 live TV dramas, an average of one every two weeks, doing his most significant work for the acclaimed CBS anthology show Playhouse 90 and only shifting to movies as the business changed. He’d directed adaptations of works by Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald; he had an acute sense of his characters’ psychology and a great visual flair, with a love of odd camera angles and movements. In a lengthy early 1960 appreciation in the New York Herald Tribune, the television critic John Crosby cited a number of fine directors produced by the still-new medium, among them Arthur Penn, George Roy Hill, Delbert Mann, Robert Mulligan, and Sidney Lumet. He called Frankenheimer, the youngest by far, “the most spectacular, most audacious, most colorful, most flamboyant.”

  By all accounts, John Frankenheimer was singularly obsessed with The Manchurian Candidate, a film that, according to Daniel O’Brien, the director regarded “as his first truly personal project, feeling that the story made an all too valid point regarding the political manipulation and conditioning of American society.”

  But then all three members of the production team seem to have been strikingly committed to the film and respectful of each other. Though Sinatra was clearly the straw that stirred the drink—“Without you, we wouldn’t have had a movie,” Frankenheimer told him in a conversation videotaped twenty-five years later—his dictatorial side was apparently not in evidence. “You let me do what I was able to do, you let George do what he was able to do,” the director recalled. “There was none of this constant interference that you read about today.”

  The seventy-one-year-old Sinatra gently corrected him. “We three people believed what we were doing,” he said. “We wouldn’t have been together if we hadn’t believed it. It’s not that I let you do what you wanted to do—not at all.”

  Though nostalgia might have misted the three filmmakers’ 1987 reminiscences, the proof is in the finished picture, which is Sinatra’s (and Frankenheimer’s) best, as well as in the fact that the shoot was completed in a lightning-like, and trauma-free, thirty-nine days. Much of the credit for this, Tom Santopietro writes, owed to Frankenheimer’s decision to handle Sinatra as had George Sidney (Pal Joey) and Vincente Minnelli (Some Came Running): “rehears[ing] other cast members in advance, bringing in Sinatra for only one pre-shoot run-through before the actual filming of a scene. Keeping the need for retakes to a minimum, Frankenheimer thereby ensured Sinatra’s continued goodwill.”

  Yet Sidney and Minnelli had made merely good, not great, movies with Frank: handling him wasn’t the only part of the equation. Pal Joey and Some Came Running were both studio pictures, and Sinatra had been a cog—no matter how big a cog, still a cog—in a
machine. The Manchurian Candidate was his. It was also, along with Suddenly and The Man with the Golden Arm, among the darkest material he had done—maybe the darkest. And with Suddenly and Golden Arm, he had still been in his thirties. In 1962, he was staring fifty in the face, and he looked it. “I thought it would be terrific to have that marvelous, beat-up Sinatra face giving forth long, incongruous speeches,” said George Axelrod, who took those speeches straight from Condon’s novel and put them in the screenplay.

  Frank loved that screenplay. He carried it around and read it aloud at the drop of a hat. He told everyone who would listen (and when Sinatra was talking, everybody listened) that he was more excited about the part than any he’d ever played. He loved those long, incongruous speeches.

  The words had entranced him, had drawn him in; he was fully engaged, and that was always the secret to his very best work. “Sinatra treated his fellow actors with courtesy and consideration, rehearsed with them when necessary, contributed his ideas for scenes and never questioned Frankenheimer’s authority,” O’Brien writes. “With Axelrod on set throughout the filming for consultation and dialogue changes, Candidate proved to be one of the smoothest productions of Sinatra’s career.”

  Casting also had a lot to do with it. The first principal role after Sinatra’s to be filled was that of the assassin Raymond Shaw: the thirty-two-year-old, Lithuanian-born British actor Laurence Harvey had signed on, for a fee of $270,000, in September. Harvey was a beautiful young man with a long, soulful face, a deep, resonant voice, and a slightly abstracted manner: he had had his first smash success in the 1959 English drama Room at the Top, as the social climber Joe Lampton. Hollywood had found him immediately and thrown him into a series of miscastings: as a southern colonel in The Alamo, as a romantic lead against Elizabeth Taylor (Butterfield 8) and Jane Fonda (Walk on the Wild Side). Harvey’s problem, where Hollywood was concerned, was that he wasn’t quite a lover or a fighter: he gave off an air of brittleness and confused sexuality. Fortunately, this was right on the money for the role of Raymond Shaw.