by James Kaplan
To sweeten the deal, Sinatra added to the final LP the original recordings of two of Cahn and Van Heusen’s sugariest movie themes, 1961’s “Pocketful of Miracles,” complete with children’s chorus (from the dreadful Frank Capra picture of the same name), and “Call Me Irresponsible.”
The purpose of the album was nakedly strategic: to try to wrest the Sinatra market back to Reprise. In this sense, it would be a success upon its release in August, rising to number 8 on the Billboard chart and scoring Frank’s first gold record on the new label and the first since 1960’s Nice ’n’ Easy.
Artistic success was a knottier matter. Did you really need to buy this album if you already owned the original records? Sinatra had considerable artistic pride (though with Capitol in the end he’d been willing to cut off his nose to spite his face): he genuinely wanted to make these remakes fresh and new, and to a minor extent he succeeded. His singing is mostly great here, and Riddle’s charts, largely the same as before, are unbeatable. As Friedwald points out, the instrumental backings sound amazing in stereo (many of the numbers were originally recorded in mono). The songs themselves are a mixed bag.
“All the Way” and “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning” not only are beautifully sung but possess a mature wisdom not quite present in the original recordings. The difference is especially striking in the new “Wee Small”; the only difference is that the first, Ava-soaked version was devastating, and the update is not. The new “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” with Dick Nash playing the famous Milt Bernhart solo (Bernhart had a soundtrack-recording date and couldn’t reappear), is a solid, hard-driving stand-in for the original. The second “Second Time Around” is quietly lovely. And the 1963 “Young at Heart” should displease nobody—except those who re-listen to the 1954 version and find it sprinkled with stardust and needing no improvement.
The new rendering of Carolyn Leigh and Cy Coleman’s “Witchcraft,” on the other hand, is a good enough reading that goes south fast as Sinatra strains for novelty. There’s nothing horribly wrong with changing “that wicked witchcraft” to “that coo-coo witchcraft”; all it does is cheapen the line and focus attention on the singer as a celebrity rather than on the song itself. But Frank goes for a jazzy melodic improv on “It is such an ancient pitch” (the kind of thing Ella Fitzgerald could nail without batting an eyelash) that, ironically enough, goes badly off pitch. By the time he throws a lame Reginald Van Gleason imitation into the outro—“Ew, you’re a fine witch”—one is put in mind of Orson Welles’s famous remark to the playwright Abe Burrows about the movie version of Guys and Dolls: “They put a tiny turd on every one of your lines.”
As for “Nancy (with the Laughing Face)” and “Oh! What It Seemed to Be,” the less said, the better. Sometime in his dewy past, Frank had brought a sweetness and feeling to these old-fashioned tunes that was no longer his to supply.
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The lives of Sinatra and Giancana continued to intertwine. In January, the FBI had interviewed Frank and Mickey Rudin, in the Sunset Boulevard offices of Essex Productions, about the finances of Cal-Neva. Rudin told the agents that expansion plans for the hotel would necessitate a cash infusion of some $4 million and that Essex/Park Lake planned to apply for a loan from the Teamsters’ pension fund. “Both RUDIN and SINATRA advised they wished to go on record that there were no under-the-table payments of any kind involved, that this was a simple straight forward business transaction with sufficient collateral involved,” the bureau’s report stated.
But after the FBI reviewed the minutes of a September 1962 Teamsters meeting at which Jimmy Hoffa had personally rejected Mickey Rudin’s loan application (Hoffa turned down Giancana’s request for a Cal-Neva loan at around the same time), the bureau smelled a rat. Just where was Sinatra planning to come up with this $4 million?
On April 24, 1963, five days before Frank began the Sinatra’s Sinatra sessions, the FBI’s special agent in charge for Los Angeles wrote an impassioned memo to J. Edgar Hoover, asking permission to plant a wiretap in the entertainer’s Palm Springs house—which, the special agent noted, was now his primary residence. “The Los Angeles Division during recent weeks has been in receipt of information that would tend to indicate the above-captioned individual apparently intends to spend more of his time in the Palm Springs area, than in Los Angeles,” the letter begins. (Apparently, he’d been reading Hedda Hopper.)
The memo continued at great length, reminding Hoover—no doubt redundantly—of Frank’s past and present associations with “some of the more infamous individuals of modern times,” their exotic names rendered, FBI-style, in attention-getting, all-capital letters: “BONANNO of Phoenix, FISCHETTI of Miami,” “the late WILLIE MORETTI of New Jersey,” “LUCKY LUCIANO,”*2 “SAM ‘MOONEY’ GIANCANA,” and “JOHNNY FORMOSA,” who, the special agent pointed out, had “during the past season at Cal-Neva [been] present at Cal-Neva Lodge with apparently a great deal to say about its operation.”
But as the document gathered length, reminding the director of things he also already knew—Giancana’s disappointment in Sinatra’s efforts to get the Kennedy administration to tone down its antiracketeering efforts; Sinatra’s stakes in the Sands (“SINATRA is an owner of considerable points”) and Cal-Neva (“at present [he] is about a 100% owner”)—it looked more and more like a request to conduct a fishing expedition. The memo concluded, hopefully,
The long continued association of SINATRA as a possible front for investments for hoodlums of both national and international stature has led to the belief by this division that a confidential source if established in Palm Springs concerning SINATRA would undoubtedly develop information of extremely valuable intelligence nature, and furnish a picture of top level criminal investments and operations.
Authority is requested to conduct a preliminary survey to determine the feasibility of a misur [microphone surveillance] installation at SINATRA’s residence in Palm Springs, California.
In a memo written on the same day the Sinatra’s Sinatra sessions began, the director gave the special agent a firm slap on the wrist:
TO: SAC [special agent in charge], Los Angeles
FROM: Director, FBI
SUBJECT: FRANK SINATRA
“Francis Albert Sinatra” (True Name)
ANTI-RACKETEERING
Re your airtel 4/24/63.
Bureau authority not granted at this time to conduct a survey to determine the feasibility of a misur installation in Frank Sinatra’s Palm Springs, California, residence. In the event you develop information which would warrant such an installation, you may resubmit your recommendations. You are reminded that all misurs must be completely justified.
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A May 1 Bob Thomas column spun Frank’s change of residence as a sign he’d mellowed. “After going at top speed for most of his 45 [sic] years, Frank seems to have found the secret of slowing down,” Thomas wrote.
Whereas he once appeared to be an opponent of fresh air, he is now an ardent golfer.
The change in the Sinatra way of life was signaled by his move from his mountaintop bachelor’s place to his home in Palm Springs. He has followed the move of Red Skelton, Dinah Shore and other stars who now make the desert their permanent home. He maintains a flat here for use when he is working.
“The life down there is wonderful,” he remarked…“It’s the only way I can get complete relaxation. Even if I try to stay home at night here [Los Angeles], something always comes up so I have to go out. Down on the desert nobody can get to me. It’s surprising what a difference that much distance can make.” He covers the 125 miles in 27 minutes by his private plane.
Eleven days later, Frank went to Hawaii to relax with a friend who might have been even more in need of a rest than he was. Under the heading “HOTELS AND RESTAURANTS FREQUENTED BY SAM GIANCANA,” the mobster’s FBI file lists the “Sheridan [sic] Surfrider Hotel, Waikiki Beach, Hawaii,” and begins, “GIANCANA, under the name of J. J. BRACKETT, stayed in the Surfrider Hotel in the
company of FRANK SINATRA from May 12, 1963 until May 16, 1963.”
Three days after that, Frank was running hard again, flying to New York to do a benefit for the blind at Carnegie Hall, then making a quick turnaround to begin shooting a movie that would show his exquisite work in The Manchurian Candidate to have been a distinguished anomaly.
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The name of the picture was 4 for Texas: another craps-themed title in the Rat Pack series that had begun with Ocean’s 11 and continued with Sergeants 3. At this point, crap was more like it. The latest installment, a Western spoof, was to star just Frank and Dean, only one of whom knew how to do comedy. Anita Ekberg and Ursula Andress were on hand as eye candy. (Warner Bros. had offered Sophia Loren a cool million for just four weeks’ work on the picture; she’d wisely declined.) Robert Aldrich was the director (and co-producer and co-screenwriter), and he was an accomplished pro. He had helmed the noir classics Kiss Me Deadly, The Big Knife, and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?; he’d also made successful Westerns (Apache, Vera Cruz) and World War II adventures (Attack, Ten Seconds to Hell). He had handled big egos like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford and tough guys like Burt Lancaster, Jack Palance, and Lee Marvin. But the man who said that a director “needs the power not to be interfered with and the power to make the movie as he sees it” had never encountered Frank Sinatra before.
Aldrich had also never directed broad comedy before, and Western spoofs are tricky under the best of circumstances, and the circumstances on the shoot of 4 for Texas were far from ideal. The newly relaxed and desert-dwelling Frank sounded an ominous note in mid-June. “Sinatra, tanned and rested, tells me he’s taken up golf; is on the links every morning,” Hedda Hopper wrote. “He doesn’t dig these crazy people who go all over the world to make pictures. Even resents having to go to the Mojave desert for ‘Four for Texas.’ ”
“Resents” was accurate. Unlike the untried Bud Yorkin, Robert Aldrich refused to jolly Frank along; what was worse, the director was uncomfortable making a comedy and refused to admit it. Sinatra, exquisitely intuitive, sensed Aldrich’s unease and elected to torment him by putting minimal effort into his performance. “Out for a good time playing cowboys with Martin, the star had no intention of treating Texas as anything more significant than another Clan-style lark,” writes Daniel O’Brien. “Frustrated at the latter’s refusal to follow or even listen to his advice, Aldrich regularly argued with Sinatra, their fierce conflicts recalled by [the executive producer] Howard Koch at the director’s memorial service over 20 years later. Aldrich got on much better with Martin, rating the actor as a true professional.” Howard Hawks had felt much the same about Dean during the making of Rio Bravo four years earlier.
A couple of weeks into the shoot, Frank decided to take a break and fly to New York. This was his common modus operandi on a picture to which he felt minimal commitment: blow town for a while, let them film around him. Except that in this case, he had a far more compelling reason to beeline to Manhattan than mere escape.
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They’d been talking on the phone again, in the deep watches of the night when talk verged on dream, and they’d forgotten all the impossible and remembered all the spectacular, and Ava had come back to New York. Not only come back: she had moved her suitcases into Frank’s new penthouse, and all at once, implausibly enough, things between them seemed serious again. Frank, who knew little of the territory between agony and ecstasy, was over the moon. “She’s back, and I’m the happiest man in the world,” he told friends. “It’s on. All the way.”
The problem was that Sam Giancana was back too.
Frank’s relationship with the Chicago gangster was not entirely dissimilar to his relationship with Ava: In each case, grand, incompletely understood passions were involved; in each case, togetherness and apartness were equally difficult. In each case, Frank gained by the association. Both Ava and Mooney dominated Sinatra and, to some extent, were also dominated by him. And apropos of dominance and subservience, the mobster was in town that week with Phyllis McGuire, who was appearing with her sisters on The Ed Sullivan Show.
Ava, who greatly regretted Frank’s idolatrous fascination with the Mob, hated gangsters in general and Giancana in particular. Lee Server puts it well:
Ava had met the fierce, gnomelike gangster on a number of occasions in her time with Frank, as she had met many others of his ilk…Often in the past she had found herself surrounded by them at her table in a club as she waited to watch Frank perform somewhere, or backstage where she’d see them swarm around their favorite singer kissing and grab-assing like—she’d tell him—so many gravel-voiced fags. It was one more thing for them to argue about. Frank thought the mobsters had style, guts, took no shit from anybody. Ava thought they were slobs and psychopaths who spent a lot of their adult years in jail.
“These creeps are going to bring you down,” Ava once told him. “One of these fucking days, Francis, you are going to end up at the bottom of some river somewhere wearing cement shoes. And I’ll be damned if I’m gonna end up down there with you, you stupid frigging wop.”
But Sinatra and his weaselly friend were all but joined at the hip that June week. Ava seemed good-natured enough about it at first—even if in a hurry to anesthetize herself. On Saturday the eighth, Frank took her, and Mooney and Phyllis, to dinner at his parents’ grand new house in Fort Lee. There, amid the brand-new furniture Frank had bought, just off the living room with its artificial Japanese cherry tree, plaster statues of the saints, small founts of holy water, an autographed chair from Sammy Davis Jr., and photographs of Popes John XXIII and Paul, Dean Martin, and Ava herself, “We had a great time,” McGuire recalled. “We took Dolly and Marty a bottle of Crown Royal in a purple felt bag. Ava was so fascinated with it that she couldn’t wait until we got there to have a shot, which she chased with beer. She was adorable, and Dolly loved her.”
Dolly had always loved her. At one point during the evening, she grabbed Ava by the forearm and asked, “So when are you two gettin’ married again?”
Yet Frank’s domineering and narcissistic mother could only see her ex-daughter-in-law as a wish reflection of herself: foulmouthed, free-spirited, taking no prisoners. (And of course, wondrous to look at.) Her son’s actual welfare concerned her no more than it had when she’d whacked young Frank with a stick or pushed him underwater at the Jersey shore.
The McGuire Sisters did their Sullivan stint (the twenty-one-year-old sensation Barbra Streisand also appeared on the show that night), then Giancana took Frank and Ava and Phyllis and her sisters, and a few others, out to celebrate. “We went to Trader Vic’s, which was closed because it was Sunday,” the McGuire Sisters’ road manager, Victor Collins, recalled. “But Sam knocked on the door and another Dago opened it and said, ‘We’re closed.’ Sam said, ‘Yeah, well, you just opened,’ and, by God, they opened.”
Inside, the drinking began, and the demons were loosed. Frank and Ava “got into the worst fight you ever saw,” Collins said.
The names they called each other! She called him a bastard and said he was nothing but a stupid frigging Wop. Even though we were all feeling real good and half drunk by then, everyone looked at one another when she said this and then looked at her, but she just kept on like none of us were there…Frank kept telling her to shut up…Then they stormed out and the rest of us went to Phyllis’s apartment on Park Avenue. A little while later Sinatra showed up with Sammy Cahn. It was raining to beat the devil, and so Sinatra started bending everyone’s umbrella, thinking that was real funny. Or else he was still mad at Ava.
Of course he was. They were off to the races once more, back on their endless cycle of jealousy (Frank, being Frank, found time that week to slip in a visit with Jill St. John, which made the papers) and furious fighting and mad makeup sex. Frank strove to please Ava in other ways, too, enlisting Jilly Rizzo to fetch her special littleneck clams from Mulberry Street and to recommend out-of-the-way restaurants where the two of them could nestle unbothered.
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Sinatra quite naturally wanted all his favorite people to like each other, and Jilly and Momo got along famously, but where Ava and Giancana were concerned, the hating was mutual. The gangster could charm many women, but these were women who were vulnerable or simply not that bright. Mooney “never liked women who were smart enough to ask intelligent questions,” Giancana’s brother Chuck once said. Ava didn’t think much of her own intelligence, but she had a sharp intellect. And she had made up her mind about Sam Giancana, so he made up his mind back. “Sam didn’t like her at all,” Collins said. “He always said that she was a crazy bitch.”
Let us keep in mind that this was a man nicknamed Mooney talking.
Push came to shove. One night that same week, Frank and Ava were sitting with a group at Jilly’s when Giancana came over, and Frank eagerly asked him to join them. As a member of Sinatra’s entourage recalled, after Momo had sat for a minute, Ava got up. “Excuse me, gentlemen,” she said. “There’s a fellow over there I simply must see.”
“Who the hell’s that?” Frank asked.
Ava ignored him. She crossed the room and sat next to a man who was at a table alone. She began to flirt outrageously with him, touching his arm, rubbing the back of his neck, and, finally, climbing onto his lap and giggling. She stared over at Frank to make sure he was taking it all in. “This was more than Frank could bear,” writes J. Randy Taraborrelli.
Frank got up, and when he did, he pushed his chair back with such force it fell over, and he went over to the stranger’s table. According to three witnesses, he pushed Ava off the interloper’s lap. She nearly fell to the floor. Then he pulled the stranger up by his collar, looked him straight in the eye, and in a voice loud enough to be heard over the music said, “You’re lucky I don’t kill you with my bare hands, you idiot. Who the fuck do you think you are? Are you crazy? You want to die? Because I’m the guy to make that happen, you chump.” When Frank finally released his grip, Ava’s new friend fell to the floor.
