by James Kaplan
A case in point is Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields’s great hymn to resilience, “Pick Yourself Up.” It’s a song that’s particularly apt to Sinatra (“Will you remember the famous men/Who had to fall to rise again”), though he’d never recorded it before; it’s also a song with a lot of words and a tricky, Kern-ian modulation in the bridge, and Hefti’s chart moves at a very brisk tempo. Sinatra needed no fewer than seven takes to get it right, three of them quite short but four at full length, and—suddenly the lyric was all too appropriate—it was work.
On the sixth take, something remarkable happened. As Sinatra began the bridge for the second time, his “Will you remember the famous men” was just miles off key—as far off as it’s possible to hear this greatest of singers sing any phrase on any recording, ever. He suddenly stopped, the orchestra stopped, and there was a deathly silence in United Recording Studio A. And with nowhere to hide, this man who famously never apologized quietly said, in front of dozens of people—musicians, technicians, onlookers—“Sorry. Sorry.” No jokes, no excuses.
And then, after the engineer’s “Ten-eighteen, take seven,” he picked himself up, dusted himself off, and nailed it.
The oldest oldie on Swingin’ Brass is Milton Ager and Jack Yellen’s 1927 chestnut “Ain’t She Sweet,” another number Sinatra had never recorded before. He loped through it with charm and confidence, with no way to know and no reason to care that ten months earlier, in a Hamburg, Germany, studio, a black-leather-clad rock-’n’-roll group from northern England had recorded a growling, hard-driving version of the same tune. They called themselves, rather risibly to most ears, the Beatles.*4
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On April 15, with the album in the can, Frank headed out to wow the world.
He didn’t like to be alone, and he made sure he wouldn’t be. Besides George Jacobs, his entourage included Jimmy Van Heusen; the banker Al Hart; Mike Romanoff and his beautiful young wife, Gloria; Leo Durocher and his even more beautiful young girlfriend (a blonde who, to Durocher’s chagrin, turned out to be a devout Jehovah’s Witness and a virgin); Howard Koch, the head of Frank’s movie-production company; a publicist who spoke five languages; a still photographer; a three-man television crew; and Bill Miller and a jazz quintet.
No lady friend accompanied Frank on the trip, though, according to Jacobs, he had eyes for both Gloria Romanoff and Durocher’s lady friend. And Van Heusen, of course, was expert in producing top-flight paid companionship at a moment’s notice. And then there was the distant, shimmering prospect of Ava.
A combination of art and economics dictated Sinatra’s choice of accompanists on the tour. As with his highly successful Australian swing of three years before, he decided to go with a small group, pianist Miller plus a vibraphone-based quintet. On the 1959 trip, the combination of Miller and Red Norvo’s group had been all things to Sinatra, its tight, rhythmic backing on the fast numbers inspiring the jazz singer in him, its rich instrumental textures behind the slow numbers stirring the balladeer. Norvo wasn’t available this time around, however, so Frank tapped the young vibraphonist/multi-percussionist Emil Richards, who’d been playing with him for a couple of years, along with three other old Sinatra hands: flutist and saxophone player Harry Klee, guitarist Al Viola, and drummer Irv Cottler. The only new face was a talented young Mexican-American jazz bassist named Ralph Peña. The group had rehearsed intensively with Frank at the Bowmont Drive house, with arrangements artfully written (by Hefti, Billy May, Johnny Mandel, and Bill Miller) to make six players sound—in combination with Sinatra—like five times as many.
The assemblage didn’t exactly steal away in the dead of the night. Bob Hope came to see his pal Frank off at LAX, as did an appreciative corps of reporters, who scribbled away in their notepads as the new, nicer Sinatra told them he felt “not older, but a little more mellow.” A UPI telephoto to the nation’s papers transmitted a symbolic image: a fedora-ed Frank smiling at ten-year-old Lisa Ashworth and her puppy, boarding the same Pan Am plane on the tour’s first leg.
There was just one problem with Frank’s big trip: he hated traveling. He was superstitious about flying (he’d just missed accompanying Mike Todd on the flight that crashed and killed him) and, according to Jacobs, had a “total lack of curiosity about the outside world. For all his shelves of biographies, for all his hours in the dictionary, geography, history, and culture left him totally cold. He was a homebody, not an explorer.” Where could he find his favorite snack, Campbell’s franks and beans, while he was visiting exotic places? And the main advantage of the entourage, besides affording company, was “to insulate [him] from the local traditions.”
This he seemed able to do all by himself. Upon arriving in Tokyo, he was reluctant to leave the New Japan hotel, even to see the Imperial Palace or the world-famous cherry blossoms. “The only cherries I want to see are the geisha girls,” he said, but when Van Heusen brought some up to the suite, they refused to kiss him. “You eat sushi but you won’t kiss my lips?” he yelled. Kissing was not popular in Japanese culture, a translator explained. “You call that culture?” Frank said.
He was more at ease giving a press conference (for which he didn’t have to leave the hotel). Looking “tanned and dapper,” according to a Pacific Stars and Stripes correspondent, Sinatra fielded reporters’ questions patiently.
“You have position, wealth, everything—what more do you want in life?” one asked.
“I’m not seeking to achieve anything specific,” Frank said. “I’d like to spend my time doing constructive work. I’m an overprivileged adult that would like to help underprivileged children.”
It was a good line. He backed it up with equipoise. “Flashbulbs popped as photographers ignored their three-minute time limit, but at no time did the crooner show his famous impatience with newsmen,” the Stars and Stripes man wrote.
Asked whether he was trying to create a “new Sinatra image” of kindness and patience to replace his controversial publicity, Sinatra said:
“I don’t really think so. People who call me controversial are those who don’t agree with me. I plan to remain controversial because we won’t make progress unless we’re controversial and rebellious from time to time.”
He gave his first Tokyo concert the next night, April 20, at the Mikado theater-restaurant. Calling Sinatra “a living legend”—an epithet just then beginning to be hung on him—Al Ricketts, Pacific Stars and Stripes’ entertainment columnist, enthused,
Frank, a bright red handkerchief tucked in his breast pocket, kept the pace slow for the first 15 minutes, then moved into high gear for the rest of the show. He waltzed his way past tunes like “Moonlight in Vermont” and “My Funny Valentine,” before capping his performance with a finger-popping version of “The Lady Is a Tramp…”
He was in complete command throughout, undeniably retaining his right to the claim of being the most exciting performer in show business today.
After another show at the Mikado and one at Hibiya Park, Frank presented Tokyo’s governor, Ryotaro Azuma, with a check for 9 million yen (about $25,000) for children’s charities, received a gold key to the city, and had an orphanage named after him. He then flew on to Korea and Okinawa, where he gave goodwill concerts at U.S. military bases and worried whether the young GIs, doubtless Elvis fans, would think him over the hill. But he’d underestimated his own appeal (and the hunger of soldiers far from home for American culture): Sinatra and his tight sextet wowed the kids, and their reaction gave Frank’s own dented morale a big boost.
He began to feel better about the trip. The sheer magnificence of his accompaniment, the big sounds produced by that little combo, lifted him, and he drove the musicians hard in return. “Frank worked especially well with the small group,” Al Viola recalled. “If you listen to those tapes, you’ll hear that he was kickin’ our ass! He would turn around to us as if to say, ‘Hey, you guys, come on—this is a concert!’ He didn’t want us to sound like we were hanging out at some bar.”
A
nd then there were the children: in Hong Kong, crowds of kids waving flowers lined the streets to greet him. He played another four charity concerts there and, in between, amused himself by having custom clothing made—a dozen orange blazers, two dozen pairs of fine wool slacks, custom elevator shoes in alligator and snakeskin—and playing practical jokes.
It was in Hong Kong that he had his only major meltdown of the tour, over a failed lighting cue. The Chinese operator forgot to turn off the pin spot after the dramatic ending of “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road),” ruining the effect, and Sinatra went bananas, trashing his dressing room and his suite at the elegant Peninsula hotel. “ ‘Fucking slant-eye Chink bastards,’ he’d shout and rip up a priceless antique screen or shatter a Ming vase,” the valet noted. “The guy got off on breaking things, as if it were sex.” On the other hand, only the performer understands the impossibility of discharging the energy built up by a performance. In any case, money made it all better afterward.
After handing a $17,000 check to the executive secretary of the Hong Kong Council of Social Service, Frank took his show back on the road, landing in Athens on May 1 and proceeding directly to Jerusalem.
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He had never been to Israel before, and it was a revelation—the first place on the tour that really spoke to him. Israelis were not only soulful but tough—in their embattled little piece of land, they had to be—and both were qualities for which Sinatra had great respect. On May 9, for ceremonies marking the fourteenth anniversary of Israeli independence, he stood on the reviewing stand alongside Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and General Moshe Dayan and watched male and female soldiers march by. The country’s stark beauty and solemn history affected him deeply; he became a willing, even a passionate, tourist at last. He visited the Western Wall and the Via Dolorosa and the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, the Sea of Galilee and the Golan Heights. He played seven concerts in six cities over nine days and went to see every sight he could. In Nazareth, he laid the cornerstone of an Arab-Jewish youth center to which he said he would donate the entire proceeds of the Israeli leg of his tour. Afterward, he told George Jacobs that the country made him ashamed of not having fought in World War II. Israel, he said, was a land worth dying for.
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While Frank was earnestly planting trees in Israel—one for his three children, another in memory of his late agent Bert Allenberg—the gossip columnist Dorothy Manners, filling in for the ill and aging Louella Parsons, ran an arrestingly strange flash: Ava Gardner and the sixty-six-year-old exiled Argentinean former dictator Juan Perón were the talk of Madrid, “seen everywhere together,” Manners dished. And then, cattily: “Ava’s preference for bullfighters is well-known. But this is the first time on record she’s taken the bull by the horns, so to speak.”
The reality was this: despite a rapidly diminishing bank account, Ava was still living like a star, in a duplex apartment in a sedate Madrid neighborhood of embassies and doctor’s offices, with a revolving household staff, a driver, and a live-in (male) personal secretary. Perón, who’d been given political asylum by Francisco Franco, was—along with his beautiful young third wife, Isabel—her downstairs neighbor.
At thirty-nine, Ava was in the midst of a three-year hiatus from moviemaking, feeling she had lost her single amazing attribute, her astonishing looks. Her life had become shapeless and dissolute, a constant round of late nights, drunken scenes, and quickly forgotten amours. “My job was basically to keep her company,” her personal secretary, an aspiring actor named Ben Tatar, recalled.
Ava loved to dance, not only flamenco. We used to dance at home. It came over her: she had to dance. She’d put some music on and we’d dance a little bit in the foyer of the apartment, and into the living room…She played a lot of Frank Sinatra’s records. She had every record he ever made. He called the apartment sometimes. I got the feeling they were still in love with each other. The first time I answered the phone when Sinatra called he said, “Who the hell are you?”
Juan Perón fully matched his upstairs neighbor’s eccentricity. Like a character out of Gabriel García Márquez, the aged ex-dictator sometimes went out on the balcony to give speeches to imaginary supporters; he also kept a coffin containing the body of his second wife, Evita, in the apartment. He had apparently been a fan of Gardner’s for years. “Ava did not think much of her new neighbor’s politics,” her biographer Lee Server writes, “but he was an old man now, and they were both occupying the same plot of land in Franco’s Spain so she tried to be friendly.” She went downstairs sometimes to eat Señora Perón’s delicious empanadas while “Isabel would sit and chat, speaking without jealousy about how the late Evita remained the most important woman in her husband’s life.”
Then Ava’s late-night flamenco parties—all that stamping on the ceiling—got on the Peróns’ nerves, and the friendship ended. Such was the reliability of gossip columns.
Meanwhile, her truest admirer was approaching. In every one of the tour’s shows, Sinatra had been singing one of his favorite standards, Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick out of You”—and every time he came to the line “Some like the perfume in Spain,” he would add an emphatic “Yeah!” “because [he was] heading to go see Ava,” the vibraphonist Emil Richards said.
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Rubirosa the playboy arrived (by yacht, no less) to put an end point to all that Israeli solemnity—and not incidentally to ferry Frank’s whole road show back to Athens. There, on the nights of May 18 and 19, Sinatra did two concerts at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, an outdoor amphitheater in the shadow of the Acropolis. Bill Miller considered the first performance—unfortunately unrecorded—the best of all the world tour shows.
In Athens, Frank’s incuriosity about tourism returned. Instead, according to his valet, he preferred sightseeing of the indoor variety, sticking to his suite at the Grande Bretagne and entertaining the hookers Van Heusen procured. Sinatra pronounced them “his favorite of all the international damsels he had sampled, not necessarily for their looks but for their warmth and hospitality.” Two of them brought him a giant moussaka.
Then Frank surprised his musicians, suddenly announcing he was giving them ten days off. “He called all of us into his suite,” Emil Richards recalled, “and—he was very embarrassed—he said, ‘I’m leaving right now, but you guys, before you leave, go in the bedroom and just take everything that’s on the bed; it’s for you guys.’ So he left. And we went into his bedroom, and the bed was full of drachmas, Greek money. We just stuffed our pockets with money to go have a good time for ten days.”
Richards repaired to the island of Hydra, where he spent a hedonistic three days basking in the sun, drinking ouzo, and eating the fresh catch brought in by the local fishermen. Then, on the fourth day, he heard the deep whistle of a big boat and to his surprise saw Rubirosa’s yacht in the harbor. “I look out, and there’s Frank on the deck,” Richards said. “And he says, ‘Come on! Pack your stuff, we’re going to Italy early.’ ”
The vibraphonist eventually pieced together what had happened: Frank had gone to Spain and dropped in on Ava—but not alone. “He brought Rubirosa, and he brought Romanoff, Howard Koch, and his valet George,” Richards recalled. “And she was pissed. She fed everybody, and she left. So Frank said, ‘Where the hell did she go?’ And he went to some taverna way out in the country, and there she was with a bullfighter.”
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In Rome, something better awaited him: his personal airplane, flown over for him because it lacked the range for long transoceanic routes.*5 The El Dago was a Martin 4-0-4, a two-prop workhorse built to seat forty for commercial use but reconfigured to Frank’s princely specifications with a hi-fi sound system, electric piano, movie projector, wet bar, and bedroom. The interior color scheme was (of course) primarily orange, with rich wood paneling, Asian touches (Balinese dancer prints), and deep pile carpet. Tiny twinkling electric stars dotted the ceiling.
The plane’s name, proudly printed along a stripe on the
custom livery, had caused a certain amount of controversy. In 1961, the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans, a Chicago organization dedicated to ethnic pride, had written to Sinatra urging him to change it, and now that the big new PR push was on, he finally had, rechristening it the Christina, after his younger daughter. “The switch is an improvement,” Dorothy Manners noted drily.
From May 24 to 26, Frank played Rome and Milan, with middling success. For one thing, surprisingly, he didn’t speak the language. (A planned album of Italian songs had been scrapped earlier that spring, reportedly because Sinatra had trouble pronouncing the words.) For another, perhaps because of his mixed heritage—his mother’s people were from Genoa; his father had been born in Sicily—he had mixed feelings about the homeland itself. According to Jacobs, people in the street loved him, but those who could afford tickets to his shows in Rome acted rudely: there were shouts (especially unwelcome now) of “Ava, Ava.”
At the May 26 concert in Milan, his entr’acte monologue, caught on a bootleg tape, sounds wooden, uncertain—a sure sign of disconnect with his audience. Trying for humor, he does an American imitation of an Italian accent as he picks up his teacup: “I’m-a have a little-a tazza tè.” The laughter is scant.
The London shows, beginning four nights later, were far more successful. It was Frank’s first appearance there since 1953, and anticipation was high. The English had long loved him—his had been the voice that had comforted them through the war, and they had stuck with him during his down period—and the feeling was mutual. Though Princess Margaret sponsored and attended the premiere at Royal Festival Hall, the atmosphere there was anything but restrained: the audience’s welcome for Sinatra was rapturous. Still, on the first number, “Goody Goody,” he’s audibly nervous. And though he gains his composure—and, buoyed by the crowd’s excitement, sings wonderfully—when the time comes for his tea break, he still sounds more than a little overawed by the occasion. “Thank you very much, Highness, lords and ladies, ladies and gentlemen,” he starts out, a little breathlessly, the boy from Hoboken in some disbelief at his surroundings. He then trips through a minor minefield of Anglicisms before reverting to Hoboken: “We’ve been having a marvelous time with this trip we’ve been doing since about six weeks ago…Rather gratifying experience, really, in doing this kind of work—I’m enjoying it tremendously. We get back home, I plan to visit some of the depressed areas in New York, like Wall Street and a couple of other places, and see if I can help ’em out a little bit. And then check right into a hospital.”
