Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  In December, Angela Lansbury had been signed to play Raymond’s mother, the arch-villainess Eleanor Shaw Iselin. Apparently, Sinatra originally wanted Lucille Ball for the role, a fascinating casting notion, as Tom Santopietro points out: “As Ball aged, she grew into an increasingly hardened performer, losing all traces of the vulnerability that so informed her brilliant multiyear run on television’s I Love Lucy. The resulting quality of toughness would have suited the role of [Eleanor] very well, although it is anyone’s guess whether or not Ball would have felt comfortable delving into the dark recesses of [her] warped character.”

  Lansbury, a fearless actress, was comfortable delving into anything. John Frankenheimer had Frank watch her performance as the mother of the irresistible young stud played by Warren Beatty in Frankenheimer’s about-to-be-released drama All Fall Down. In the Gothic piece, written for the screen by William Inge, there’s a hint of incest between the creepily clinging mother and her wayward son, a note not dissimilar to the relationship between Raymond and Eleanor in The Manchurian Candidate. Sinatra was sold. At thirty-six, Angela Lansbury was all of three years older than Laurence Harvey, but her canny, lived-in face consigned her to a trilogy of maternal roles in the early 1960s, beginning with her turn as Elvis Presley’s mom in 1961’s Blue Hawaii.

  The third big name to be cast was Janet Leigh, as Bennett Marco’s girlfriend, Rosie, a small role with big significance. Leigh, who’d been separated from Tony Curtis for almost a year and devoting herself to raising their two young daughters, hadn’t made a movie since Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho in 1960. For all the brevity of her screen time in The Manchurian Candidate, she and Sinatra (with whom she’d been rumored to have had an affair) would have one scene together that was equal or superior to anything either of them would ever do in the movies—and one of the greatest and strangest in modern cinema.

  —

  The Herald Tribune’s celebrity interviewer Joe Hyams visited Frank at the Goldwyn Studios after hearing an intriguing rumor. “According to the gossip around town Frank Sinatra is a ‘new man’ since his engagement to Juliet Prowse,” Hyams wrote.

  Friends and gossips report he not only looks younger but he’s become a lovable fellow. Over the years I’ve found Sinatra often affable but never, never lovable so I hastened to the set of “The Manchurian Candidate” to see the “new” man myself…

  There sitting in the dressing room with the door open was the man himself. By George, there was a change. He did look younger with his hair in the short West Point style hair-cut, in keeping with his role in the film and the uniform he was wearing.

  He was sitting quietly in a chair, Coke at hand instead of vodka, puffing leisurely on a pipe instead of dragging hastily on a cigarette. He was listening intently to a record album entitled “Relaxism,” a gift from Dean Martin.

  “What’s new, Joe?” he asked me pleasantly.

  “From what I hear, it’s you that’s new,” I said.

  It seemed to me that the calm blue of Sinatra’s eyes was beginning to freeze rapidly into ice-blue. So since Sinatra’s eyes have always been my barometer and I am a devout coward I changed the subject instantly.

  A little later, an assistant director called Frank to the set, and Hyams followed. “The scene was a two-shot with Laurence Harvey, and the take, consisting of solid dialogue, ran seven minutes and 35 seconds without a fluff, which is remarkable enough for a single take to almost be a record,” the reporter wrote. “Frank’s sure changed,” a member of Sinatra’s coterie told Hyams. “He knows his lines letter-perfect and there’s no clowning around.”

  How much of this was John Frankenheimer’s influence and how much Juliet Prowse’s was another question. (But the Coke, the pipe, and the relaxation record might well have been props suggested by Frank’s new press agent, Chuck Moses, who was also working as unit publicist for The Manchurian Candidate.)

  In early February, the cast and crew traveled to New York City for a week of location shooting—at Madison Square Garden, in Central Park, even in Jilly’s (Frank sent Rizzo a check—for $1—for the use of his joint). Another Herald Tribune reporter named Don Ross paid a call on Sinatra at the Garden, which was dressed as the scene of a political convention, with red, white, and blue bunting and several hundred male and female extras playing delegates, wearing summer clothing and carrying signs that said, “Benjamin K. Arthur for President” and “Big John Iselin.”

  Frank, once again in his army major’s uniform, seemed determined to continue the charm offensive. And when Sinatra was determined to charm, no human was immune. “Instead of putting a thumb in our eye, as he is said to do occasionally with newspapermen, he shook hands warmly,” the reporter wrote, gratefully.

  We chatted with Sinatra off and on for an hour and a half. He left us for brief periods to play scenes before the camera. We discovered him to be a pleasant man with considerable charm and a nice smile…We kept looking around for a glimpse of the tough bodyguards who are reputed to hover around Sinatra but we didn’t see anybody to fit that description. Neither were any of the madcap boy and girl clansmen around.

  Ross had expected to find a hungover Vegas lounge lizard; instead, he witnessed a surprising demonstration of Frank at the peak of his powers.

  His role in the film requires him to run along one of the Garden corridors searching for [Laurence] Harvey who, he fears, is about to shoot somebody. Sinatra ran down the corridor—a distance of about 50 yards—at full speed. He ran fast. We went down the corridor to meet him walking back, expecting him to be blowing hard. He was just breathing a little fast. For a man of his age—it was remarkable.

  “You’re in good shape,” we said.

  “Oh sure,” he replied, “golf, tennis, swimming and calisthenics three or four times a week.”

  “Don’t forget the blackjack games,” somebody said. He grinned.

  When the reporter asked Sinatra how he whiled away the long periods between takes, the answer befitted a man who always had a keen sense of his audience—and one who knew what the classy Republican readers of the Herald Tribune would appreciate hearing. “I like to read,” Frank said.

  I’m working now on that “Agony and Ecstasy” book about Michelangelo, and I’m reading a law book. It’s called “Musmanno Dissents…” I’m also reading Louis Nizer’s “My Life in Court.” I know him well. And, last, I’m working on “How to Train Your Dog.” I just got a Saint Bernard. He refuses to learn anything but he’s cute as hell.

  Of course a guy’s nose couldn’t always be in a book. In the evenings, Frank batched it with his pal Mike Romanoff, who’d come along to keep him company: they hit El Morocco and, one memorable night, Toots Shor’s, where the ubiquitous Earl Wilson witnessed an oddly portentous encounter. “Frank Sinatra and Richard Nixon—a couple of opposites if you can imagine a couple of opposites—were on opposite sides of Toots Shor’s celebrity corner the other night,” the columnist wrote.

  Mike Romanoff, dining with Sinatra, strolled over to Nixon and said a few Romanesque words…

  Nixon came over and offered his hand to Sinatra.

  Whereupon a barfly cried, “Attaboy, Frank, for making him come over to you!”

  It was an expensive evening for Sinatra—probably cost him about $1,000 in Shor’s. For Toots reached into Sinatra’s pocket, extracted rolls of bills, passed out about $500 to waiters, captains, bus boys and bartenders.

  Then, delighted at how easily he could do it, he followed Frank to his taxi, snatching out more $…for everybody but the customers. Sinatra enjoyed it, evidently, immensely. Frank left because he had a 7 a.m. call for his picture, “Manchurian Candidate,” at Madison Square Garden.

  “I’ve often gone to bed at 7 o’clock in New York but this is the first time I’ve ever had to get up at 7 o’clock in New York,” he explained.

  His commitment to the movie was remarkable. His commitment to Prowse continued to wend its strange way. On February 4—twenty-three years to the day after Frank’s wedding to
Nancy Barbato at Our Lady of Sorrows Church in Jersey City—the columnist Hy Gardner aired a rumor couched in curiously unromantic language: “that, if Sinatra goes through with his plan to marry Juliet Prowse, they might jump the gun and elope in early March when Frank is booked to entertain at the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach.”

  If?

  On Valentine’s Day, Mike and Gloria Romanoff threw an engagement party, at Romanoff’s, for Sinatra and Prowse. Louella Parsons opined, “All those who bet the marriage wouldn’t take place are beginning to renege on their bets and now believe that Frank means it when he says he wants to settle down.” Sammy Davis Jr. even announced that he’d secured the services of the great balladeer Joe Williams to sing at the wedding.

  Then, on February 20, Louella, whose tentacles were everywhere, received the hottest of hot tips: Prowse had canceled her wedding gown and trousseau.

  The next day, Essex Productions issued a terse announcement: “Juliet Prowse and Frank Sinatra today disclosed they have called off their wedding plans. A conflict in career interests led us to make this decision. We feel it is wiser to make this move now rather than later.” A publicity spokesman added, “Neither will be available for comment. There will be no amplification.”

  No amplification was necessary. A couple of days earlier, Prowse had told a reporter, “I don’t intend to give up my career. But naturally, I don’t intend to go at it full blast.”

  The full blast would have come from Sinatra, who had made his feelings on the subject crystal clear. It seemed telling that Juliet Prowse was rehearsing for a Donald O’Connor TV special when the announcement came out. “No tears whatsoever,” a spokesman for Prowse reported. “She’s beautiful, she’s fine.” “You couldn’t tell a thing,” O’Connor added. “She worked just as hard as she did on other days.” (“Why should she cry?” a friend of Prowse’s said. “Her asking price at Las Vegas jumped from five hundred dollars a week to $17,500.”)

  Meanwhile, according to Sidney Skolsky, Frank had retreated to Palm Springs, devastated.

  The barbs started flying at once. “Talk about short engagements!” a Broadway wag quipped. “Why, Frank has had longer engagements in Las Vegas!”

  Dean Martin said that he knew the true story: “Juliet wanted Frank to give up his career.”

  And Dorothy Kilgallen couldn’t help twisting the knife: “Frank Sinatra’s pals say he’s having a big laugh at the U.S. press, which he despises, for ‘falling for’ the story of his ‘engagement’ to Juliet Prowse.”

  It is highly doubtful that Frank was enjoying a big laugh about a love affair, even an inconstantly conducted love affair, that had gone bad. A few months later, Prowse would shed more light on the subject. “I would have married Frank,” she said, “but I’ve always been a little too difficult for him.” She also said that his flexibility about the subject of her working had diminished when he found out that his children opposed the marriage.

  As Frank had learned before, two difficult people was just too difficult. And, as should have been clear to all parties, he liked to lead when he danced. The engagement had lasted forty-three days.

  —

  On Sunday night, February 25, Frank and Dean played supporting roles on Judy Garland’s CBS musical special. Despite Garland’s innumerable past woes, not all of them exorcised by any means (she and Sid Luft were about to separate yet again), her career was then on what Will Friedwald calls “an upward spiral,” in the wake of her triumphant Carnegie Hall concert the previous April and a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her cameo role in Judgment at Nuremburg. At thirty-nine, she had—all too momentarily—risen from the ashes. She looked good—her weight was under control—and she sounded as extraordinary as only she could sound. Both Frank and Dean had had their ups and downs with TV (in Frank’s case, mostly downs), but here they rose perfectly to the occasion, complementing Garland but never competing with her, in a charming format (a rising young Norman Jewison directed) that segued solo numbers and duets in a kind of dream logic, on stark sets and with minimal dialogue.

  Martin was a well-behaved version of his usual twinkling self, not quite taking his singing seriously, largely getting by on his extraordinary looks alone. Frank, on the other hand, threw some real effort into his acting, gracefully playing the swain to Judy, holding both her hands and staring into her eyes, shifting smoothly from slight irony to wholeheartedness in a strange gloss on their real-life on-again, off-again relationship. God alone knows what they were thinking, but they’re fascinating to watch. And Sinatra sang beautifully and feelingly, both in solo and in duet.

  Not everyone was charmed. “The inclusion of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, neither in particularly good voice or well rehearsed, added little,” opined the syndicated critic Cynthia Lowry. “They seemed much more interested in insulting each other and being cute than in backing up the star.” And one William E. Sarmento, television critic for the Lowell, Massachusetts, Sun, singled out Frank for special censure. “Unfortunately the years have not been as kind to Sinatra’s voice as Miss Garland’s,” he wrote. “He spoke instead of sang a good portion of his songs, striving to remain on key during most of them. Sinatra’s real problem is that he is now stereotyped. He looks like someone doing an imitation of Frank Sinatra. He has been reading too much of his publicity.”

  This was circular: bad publicity about Sinatra’s bad publicity. But then a dependable fact about Frank was that there was never any shortage of bad publicity where he was concerned: more and more of it all the time these days.

  —

  With the crises of the president’s first year in office temporarily in abeyance, a nonpolitical trip to the Golden State could at last be scheduled. The visit was set for the weekend of March 23 through 25: Kennedy was to give a speech and receive an honorary doctorate at the University of California in Berkeley, view the missile facilities at Vandenberg Air Force Base, and possibly pay a call on former president Eisenhower, who was relaxing in Palm Desert. Kennedy too planned to relax, and—as arranged by Peter Lawford—the plan was for him to do it at Frank Sinatra’s compound on Wonder Palms Road.

  Since the First Lady was traveling in India and Pakistan, a jolly weekend was anticipated all around.

  Jack Kennedy had stayed in Frank Sinatra’s house in Palm Springs as a senator, but a presidential visit was something else entirely. “We worked for weeks getting everything perfect, planning parties, doing guest lists, trying to include everyone and not piss anybody off,” George Jacobs recalled. Tina Sinatra writes, “The news fed Dad’s fondest fantasy: that the Compound would become the western White House, Jack Kennedy’s home away from home.”

  Upgrades to the property, some of which had been under way already, went into overdrive. Frank pushed the construction schedule to seven days a week on the Christmas Tree House, a bungalow designed for the Sinatra children but now necessary for housing the Secret Service. A concrete helipad was built, and a hotline installed—a blue-and-white telephone with a red handset and a blinking light. “Two days before the visit, workmen were still hammering round the clock,” Tina writes.

  And then the president withdrew.

  —

  Trouble had been in the air for a while. Jacobs asserts that Joe Kennedy’s stroke had changed the family’s relationship with Sinatra for good: “Bobby, the Puritan, and Jackie, the snot, took over and decreed that Mr. Sinatra was Not Our Kind. All of a sudden, the Irish eyes stopped smiling. And Mr. S went from being the First Friend to just another greaser from Hoboken.”

  February 1962: Frank and Dean help a revitalized Judy Garland out with her CBS musical special. Three fascinating creatures not wholly in sync but amazing to watch nonetheless. (Credit 17.1)

  In fact, as Ronald Brownstein writes, Frank had “simply misread his man” from the beginning.

  For Kennedy, the association with Sinatra was always more casual, its effect equivocal. Despite his infectious charm, Kennedy was a reserved man with very few close friends. “There was a
barrier in Kennedy nobody got past; maybe Bobby didn’t even get past,” said [the Kennedy speechwriter Richard] Goodwin. “I don’t think it was contrived; that was the man’s nature.” Kennedy enjoyed Sinatra’s company, but those around him never sensed that the brassy singer penetrated the deeper fortifications that turned away so many others; to Arthur Schlesinger, the two men were “celebrity friends” whose relationship generated more sparks in public than private.

  Senator Kennedy had been a celebrity friend, but in President Kennedy, Frank had encountered, for the first and last time, a man whose celebrity outweighed his.

  Sinatra had been at center stage for most of his adult life. But in the glow of Kennedy’s glory he basked in the world’s brightest spotlight. If Sinatra sought no tangible rewards, no honorary appointments, what he needed from Kennedy was, in fact, more demanding, more intimate; he needed the most personal gift of all, the benediction of his presence. It was, as Sinatra would learn, if not the easiest reward for Kennedy to dispense, the easiest for him to withdraw.

  In fact, the wind had shifted early in the presidency: Frank was simply unwilling, or unable, to read the signs. Many news reports and gossip items throughout 1961 had spoken of displeasure in high places with Sinatra and the Clan. A couple of weeks before the Ambassador was felled, a UPI dispatch said, “Frank Sinatra has been asked officially to ‘tone down’ his public displays of affinity to President Kennedy and the administration. It is said that in conversation Sinatra calls Mr. Kennedy ‘Prez.’ ”