Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  “We stayed at a villa,” Terrail recalled. “In Waikiki. A lovely house. A great time and also terrible. There is a wonderful drink in Hawaii—a mai tai. She loved mai tais. One is perfect. Two, okay. Three, four, too many. She would become unhappy, always fighting…In Hawaii every night Frank Sinatra called. It was difficult. He did not speak well of me. He would say to her, ‘What are you doing there with that son-of-a-bitch? Do you know what I have heard about him?’ ”

  —

  By the twenty-first, the papers were reporting she was back in Los Angeles, where she underwent what was termed minor surgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. “The hospital didn’t disclose the nature of the operation or where Miss Gardner is staying,” the Associated Press reported. “She has a sister, Bea, who lives here.”

  She had an ex-husband who lived there, too. On February 3, Frank and Ava were sighted together in the gallery of a golf tournament on his home course, the Tamarisk Country Club in Palm Springs.

  —

  On January 1, the newspapers announced that Nelson Riddle, finally liberated from Capitol Records, had signed with Reprise. Three weeks later, he and Frank celebrated by getting together and recording two numbers, the Cahn–Van Heusen theme for Come Blow Your Horn and another new tune by Sammy and Chester, “Call Me Irresponsible.”

  Yet if Frank and Ava couldn’t simply pick up where they’d left off, neither could Frank and Nelson. The infinitely sensitive arranger was still smarting from Sinatra’s infidelities, especially the fling with Don Costa. Maybe Riddle could have evoked the spirits of Debussy and Ravel in his charts, had the songs commanded. But the songs were mid-level Cahn and Van Heusen: the first jauntily mediocre, and the second sweetly sentimental. A return to greatness wasn’t in the cards—not yet, at any rate.

  Come Blow Your Horn was a cute title for a play and a movie, but what did it mean, anyway? Nobody involved with the picture seems to have seen it as anything but a light Hollywood entertainment. Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen, on the other hand, took their position as house songwriters to the swinger in chief very seriously, hence a tune that aspires to the heights of “Come Fly with Me” but is instead thoroughly earthbound:

  Make like a Mister Milquetoast and you’ll get shut out,

  Make like a Mister Meek and you’ll get cut out.

  The lyrics were Cahn at his arch and didactic worst; the tune was jaunty but indifferent, and Riddle, not having much to work with, couldn’t do much with it.

  “Call Me Irresponsible” was a more complicated matter. Cahn and Van Heusen wrote it, around this time, for Fred Astaire to sing in a movie called Papa’s Delicate Condition, a schmaltzy comedy set in turn-of-the-century Texas about a ne’er-do-well father and his adoring young daughter. Cahn’s lyric

  Call me irresponsible, call me unreliable,

  Throw in undependable, too

  read like a personal confession of his own (considerable) shortcomings as a husband and father, and Van Heusen’s melody is lovely, though second-rate. (“Here’s That Rainy Day” is great; “Call Me Irresponsible” is pretty good.) Put together, words and music make a song with syrupy appeal—enough to win it an Oscar after the movie (which wound up starring Jackie Gleason rather than Astaire) came out.

  Sinatra gives a beautiful reading of the song, and Riddle (who himself had deep-seated misgivings about his worth as a husband and father) has written a heartfelt arrangement, but the fit is off. For Frank, confession is akin to apology: an unnatural act. And Nelson’s greatest ballad charts for Sinatra are love songs and torch songs—two sides of the same coin for Frank—into which the arranger could project his own tormented romantic yearnings. Frank wasn’t really torching for Ava anymore, nor was she for him, not the same way. Each could still pique the other’s jealousy, and they would always matter enormously to each other, but they were both middle-aged now: still filled with immortal longings, but looking square at mortality.

  —

  At the end of the first week of February, despite the torrid affair Frank was alleged to be having with the actress Rhonda Fleming, he flew to New York with his wounded Ava and then, at least temporarily, parted company with her. He’d come east to celebrate his parents’ golden wedding anniversary on the ninth by throwing them a lavish party; in the meantime, as many newspapers eagerly reported, he had bought Dolly and Marty a big house in a fancy section of Fort Lee—in prosperous Bergen County, a big move up in the world—and also had given his mother a $25,000 diamond bracelet from Tiffany, delivered in an armored truck.

  They were a little old couple now, sixty-nine and sixty-seven—both had been teenagers when they’d married, much against Dolly’s parents’ wishes, in 1913—and they were living in quiet retirement, far from the battles of the past. Both were fiercely proud of their spectacularly successful only child, Dolly vociferously so (she had a disconcerting tendency, when speaking to others, to refer to her son as “Frank Sinatra,” always the two names), Marty in his gruff and silent way.

  Both were also intensely ambivalent about what they, and fortune, and Frank himself, had wrought.

  When he was a boy, Dolly had both spoiled him and whacked him when he got out of line—sometimes with a nightstick kept behind the bar of the Hoboken saloon the couple had run for a while. “She was a pisser,” he recollected to Shirley MacLaine. “She scared the shit outta me. Never knew what she’d hate that I’d do.” Once he became Frank Sinatra, her physical control over him ended, but she continued to speak her mind and make demands. “I remember Dolly as a warm and fun-loving grandmother—and as a self-serving, rough-and-ready woman who perpetually had her hand out,” Tina Sinatra wrote.

  As for Marty, “Grandpa didn’t believe in things that came easy, like Dad’s singing,” Tina continued. “He wanted his son to go to college and become an engineer; he couldn’t endorse Dad’s lofty dreams.”

  A human-interest reporter paying a visit to the redbrick house the couple still occupied in Weehawken found the place astonishingly modest (“For the [parents] of a millionaire singing-acting star, it would seem an incredibly tiny house, even to visit, but it is spotlessly clean and its five-by-10 foot ‘front yard’ immaculately planted”) and Dolly uncharacteristically reserved. “I’m sorry, I haven’t time to talk now,” she said. “I’d like to, but I can’t.”

  It was not the nature of convivial, rarely reticent Mrs. Sinatra, long known as “Lady Bountiful” in rundown New Jersey waterfront towns for her welfare and political activities, to be “too busy to talk.”

  But next Saturday there is to be a great celebration here, marking the 50th anniversary of her wedding to Martin Sinatra.

  And it is understood that if the details are not kept in strict secrecy, fans of her only son may overrun the town and Frankie will cancel his plans to fete his parents.

  Dolly’s tongue must have hurt from biting it. Ordinarily, she had no problem speaking her mind. As George Jacobs recalled, “I’ve never heard a woman curse like Dolly. ‘Fuck you, you fucking asshole son of a bitch fucking bastard motherfucker,’ was a typical Dolly sentence. It probably came in handy when she needed to muscle up votes or favors.” The old ward heeler in her was easily tapped. Frank had left the invitation list up to her, and she had asked three hundred Hobokenites, with two notable exceptions: her own sister, Frank’s favorite aunt, Josie Monaco, who’d infuriated Dolly by telling a Look magazine reporter in 1957 that Dolly was an absentee mother to her lonely son; and Frank’s godfather Frank Garrick, who’d fired the young Sinatra from a newspaper job in 1932. Neither Dolly nor Frank had ever forgiven him. “My son is like me,” Dolly liked to say. “You cross him, he never forgets.”

  Another striking absence from the anniversary festivities was Ava’s. Dolly and she adored each other. (Ava, too, swore like a sailor.) But she and Frank had plainly reached some sort of accommodation. Over the next week, they were spotted together and separately around town in Manhattan. “Everything happens to Frank Sinatra—including his ex-wife Ava Gardner
,” Earl Wilson wrote on Valentine’s Day.

  Ava showed up while he was here celebrating his parents’ 50th wedding anniversary—and Frank took her to dinner at La Scala with his dtr. Nancy Jr. and her husband Tommy Sands…Ava folded by 1:30 a.m. though—and Frank went on to his hangout, Jilly’s, which had the biggest crowd in town…mostly people who wanted to have a look at the Thin Swinger.

  A few days later, the columnist observed, “Ava Gardner has become almost Greta Garboish in her passion for privacy. After having supper here with ex-husband Frank Sinatra, she went back into her shell.”

  And a couple of days after that: “Ava Gardner, hair straight back, wearing little makeup, and very beautiful, emerged from seclusion to watch Lena Horne at the Waldorf and Peter Duchin at the St. Regis—with her sister and brother-in-law…and no beau of her own.”

  Five days later, not surprisingly, she had found company: “Ava Gardner and Peter Duchin visited the Colony, El Morocco and Lena Horne’s packed house show at the Waldorf.”

  But Frank was long gone by then, back to Los Angeles and Nelson.

  —

  For his first Reprise album with Riddle, Frank decided to go big. The Concert Sinatra (so named for the size of the orchestra, not because it was a live album) was recorded over four nights, from February 18 to 21, on a soundstage at Goldwyn Studios, with the largest group of instrumentalists ever to back a popular singer, seventy-three pieces. (Frank junior says there were more than eighty.) Felix Slatkin, Sinatra’s concertmaster and musical guiding light, was not among them. On February 8, the master violinist had died of a heart attack, at age forty-seven, the victim of a lifetime of bad habits. His loss tore a gaping rent in Frank’s artistic life. Both for his own sake and for hers, “as a kind of work therapy to keep her from being overcome with grief,” Will Friedwald writes, Sinatra insisted that Eleanor Slatkin participate in the making of the LP. “Unless she agrees to play,” Frank said, “I won’t do the album.”

  The album is gorgeous. Not to everybody’s taste; perhaps too grandiose for those who like their Sinatra intimate or swinging. But Riddle, inspired by the great canvas afforded him, rose to the occasion, writing charts that contained both majestic vistas (listen to the cosmic, three-quarters-of-a-minute intro to Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson’s “Lost in the Stars,” from the Broadway musical of the same name) and unexpected intimacies (Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “I Have Dreamed,” from The King and I).

  Besides the Weill-Anderson, the other seven tracks on the album were all in the Rodgers-Hart-Hammerstein domain and all also from Broadway: Rodgers and Hart’s “My Heart Stood Still,” from A Connecticut Yankee; Kern and Hammerstein’s “Ol’ Man River,” from Show Boat; Rodgers and Hart’s “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” from Pal Joey; and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and “Soliloquy,” from Carousel. They were theatrical pieces, because it was a theatrical album.

  And no song was more theatrical than the great 1945 “Soliloquy.” Sung by Carousel’s antihero, the wastrel Billy Bigelow, the formidably lengthy aria to fatherhood demanded both vocal and dramatic skills of the highest order. Frank had recorded it for Columbia in 1946, taking two separate sessions to lay down the nearly eight-minute tune: it was released by the label’s Masterworks (classical) division as two sides of a twelve-inch 78 rpm record. In 1955, he prerecorded the song, and three others in the score, for the movie version of Carousel, then walked off the picture, leaving the tapes in legal limbo. (Only one number, the Sinatra–Shirley Jones duet of “If I Loved You,” has been heard since.)

  Frank’s tantrum on the set of Carousel was not only his loss but also the movies’: he would have made a terrific Billy Bigelow. Yet even then, at age thirty-nine, he was getting a little old for the part. Now he was forty-seven, far too old to portray Billy on-screen, but the perfect age to sing him. A comparison of the 1946 and 1963 versions of “Soliloquy” tells the story in an instant: on the Columbia record (arranged by Axel Stordahl), Sinatra sings beautifully, but the youth in his voice detracts from the character’s raffishness. On the Reprise track, the first sound of Frank’s middle-aged baritone raises goose bumps: this is it. The years and the tears have given him the authority to sing this song.

  And he brings it off with seeming effortlessness, even though the eight-minute-five-second-long number was taped (on 35-millimeter film) in sections, because, as Riddle later recalled, “it was such an incredibly taxing thing.” The song is a triumph for both singer and arranger. Friedwald writes, “The Reprise version is about balances: Sinatra striking the right mix of aggressiveness and tenderness, Riddle finding the border between Broadway bravura and his own, less earthbound imagination.” The same could be said about the entire album.

  “Soliloquy” has been recorded by many other singers—by Sammy Davis Jr. and Mel Tormé in the 1960s; more recently by the Broadway stars Brian Stokes Mitchell and Mandy Patinkin and the bass-baritone Bryn Terfel. But Sinatra is Sinatra. No version besides his can reasonably be called definitive.

  —

  You can have fun with a son,

  But you’ve got to be a father to a girl.

  —Rodgers and Hammerstein, “Soliloquy”

  Singing about fatherhood was one thing; being a father was something else. With his two daughters, Frank Sinatra appears to have found an equilibrium between doting and distance, making up with warmth what he couldn’t provide in presence. Though he was absent most of the time, both Nancy and Tina seem to have lived with the expectation that he’d always be back, if only for a visit. (Their mother seems to have felt the same way.)

  The same cannot be said about the unfortunate boy who both did and didn’t bear his father’s name. When Frank Sinatra left his young family for Ava Gardner in 1949, little Franklin Wayne Emanuel Sinatra*1 was five years old—“the worst possible time,” his younger sister recalled. “My brother understood just enough to draw the loss inside. He felt bewildered and abandoned and quietly traumatized. I think that his world just fell apart.”

  As a little boy, Frankie was “cute, smart, and funny, the life of every party,” Tina writes. “When he was ten or eleven, he’d perform for anyone who’d listen, and mimic Dad’s TV appearance word for word.”

  By the time adolescence set in, though, so had a certain gravity. The thirteen-year-old who played the piano for Louella Parsons and others at a 1957 dinner party given by his mother pontificated about his distaste for rock ’n’ roll and his love of the standards. He was still copying Frank senior, only less charmingly.

  Aping his father was the one way Frankie could be close to him: any other intimacy wasn’t in the cards. The awkward distance between Marty Sinatra and Frank had replicated itself in the relationship between Frank and his son. “They shared a certain shyness with each other,” Tina writes. “That wasn’t so unusual for fathers and sons of the time, but I think that Frankie needed something more.”

  With adolescence, he became isolated and troubled. He fell in with bad company, got arrested for shooting out streetlamps with a BB gun. His mother decided that there were only two options for him: to go live with his father or to be sent to boarding school. The first, of course, was not an option at all. He was packed off to a boarding school in the San Jacinto Mountains west of Palm Springs.

  “Until September 1958, when I was put into a college preparatory school, my life with the family was very, very normal,” Junior later said. “Once outside the inner circle, my position within was never re-established.”

  He would spend much of the rest of his life trying to reestablish his position within. The means were both simple and impossible: Frankie had spent enough time watching his father perform in recording studios, on movie sets, and in clubs to know that he wanted, somehow, to follow him into the business. He’d continued playing piano, and he had real talent: at first, he thought he might become a songwriter. Given the crushing burden he bore, it might have been wiser to go into almost any other field—to teach college, sa
y (he was fascinated with military history)—but it was need, rather than wisdom, that propelled him: he wanted to be close to his father, even if his father had no idea how to be close to him.

  By the fall of 1962, enrolled as a music student at the University of Southern California, Frankie found himself pulled in two directions. His parents were urging him to finish college. But that summer at Disneyland, he’d spontaneously asked to sing with the Elliott Brothers dance band, a group of clean-cut guys in matching red jackets, and he had been a hit—billing himself as Frank Sinatra Jr. When Jack Benny, an old family friend, heard about Frankie’s performance, he called Frank and asked whether Junior might appear on his television show. “If my son is going into show business,” Frank told Jack, “there’s no one I’d rather he would start with than you.” At the beginning of October, Frankie appeared on The Jack Benny Program, singing a song and acting in a comedy sketch. The reviews were decent.

  By the end of the year, Frank junior was thinking less and less about finishing his studies and more and more about singing and acting. “He’s more of an actor than a singer,” Frank senior told a reporter. “His tonal quality’s pretty good. But he needs more training. He’s studying music and I want him to finish college.”

  But Frank claimed it was all right with him if Frankie went into show business. “If that’s what he wants,” he said. “Actually he wants to be an actor, arranger and singer in that order. That’s okay, but I want him to learn to sing. Wherever he goes, they’re going to ask him to sing.”