Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  “Anyway, it’s now Monday night. Nobody went home. The secretaries all stayed. It was on at nine o’clock. At about two minutes to nine, this limo pulls up, and out comes Sinatra. We had little stairs to walk on. It was a very beautiful radio station. He walks up the stairs, and everybody’s standing there, and he goes, ‘Who’s Larry King?’ I go, ‘Me.’ He says, ‘Okay, let’s go.’

  “I never was nervous on the air except my first day and that day,” King said. “We sit down, and—my truism in life was, ‘Never lie to your audience, and it ain’t brain surgery, so go to the moment.’ So all I said was, ‘Why are you here?’ I didn’t go through ‘my friend Frank Sinatra’ and a lot of baloney. He said, ‘Five or six years ago, I was singing at Ben Maksik’s Town and Country in Brooklyn, and I had laryngitis, it was closing night, and I called Jackie. I said, ‘Jackie, could you come over and do a show?’ And Jackie came over and did an hour. I walked him out to his car, and I leaned in, and I said, ‘I owe you one.’

  “Now in Miami, I get a message to call Jackie, and I call Jackie, and all he says is, ‘This is the one.’

  “A lot about Gleason was ego,” King recalled. “It was an enormous thing that he was able to do this. So from Jackie’s standpoint, it was a favor and a great thing to do, but it also extolled Jackie.”

  It was the first of several Sinatra interviews King would conduct over the next quarter century. “It turned into a wonderful interview,” he said. “There was a PR guy who came along with him, who said, ‘I don’t know how you got this, but do not mention the kidnapping, because he doesn’t want to talk about that, and he’ll walk off.’ But what happened was, the interview went so well that in the course of it, all I said was, ‘The thing between you and the press—have you been bum-rapped or is it overblown?’ And he said, ‘It’s probably overblown, but I’ve been bum-rapped, too. Take the kidnapping.’ And he went through the whole thing. He hated the press, and he hated tabloids. He gave me a great quote. He said, ‘These people live off the real or imagined fortunes or misfortunes of those with much greater talent than them.’ ”

  —

  Thanks in large part to an active campaign of disinformation and squelching by Frank’s publicist, Jim Mahoney, and 20th Century Fox—where, in the days when it was still possible to do such a thing, studio executives ordered a “kill” on all photographs taken of Sinatra and Farrow together—America was slow to react to the Frank-Mia story. Newspapers from early 1965 show a surprising paucity of dish about the pair. A February column by the syndicated television writer Alex Freeman leads with an item about Sinatra and Natalie Wood being turned away from “New York’s swinging Ondine Club.” (The place was filled to its legal limit; the doorman apologized.) Later in the column, Freeman hammers home the point: “Indicative of the unimportance of Frank Sinatra’s much-publicized romance with teen-ager Mia Farrow, they bumped into each other at a party at New York’s El Morocco restaurant, Mia with a date and Frank escorting Jean Kennedy Smith, sister of RFK and wife of Steven [sic] Smith, and barely exchanged hellos.”

  Sinatra wasn’t quite ready to spring Farrow on his new New York crowd, the East Coast equivalent of the Late Show. It wasn’t all Jilly and Toots Shor when Frank was in Manhattan; sometimes it was the Leland Haywards and the Bill Paleys and the Bennett Cerfs. Sinatra and Cerf, the gregarious publisher, columnist, and television personality (What’s My Line?), had met at a Manhattan party in the 1950s, and it had been love at first sight for both of them. Frank, the class-aholic and autodidact, was instantly drawn to the witty and glittering milieu through which the co-founder of Random House moved with effortless command: a cross section of literature (Sinclair Lewis and William Faulkner were both regular visitors at the Cerfs’), the theater, and assimilated New York Jewish society. For his part, Cerf, who was unashamedly fascinated by Hollywood and celebrity, could hardly resist the allure of the biggest star in show business.

  “I think they had a mutual excitement in being from different worlds,” Bennett Cerf’s son Christopher said. “My dad loved to be part of everything. He was endlessly curious, and he thought Sinatra was really glamorous and exciting. I think Sinatra liked the idea that he had a connection with the literary world and publishing. But beyond that, they really genuinely had a great time together. Frank kidded my dad a lot, which my dad loved. He called him Bennett the Bookie.”

  Cerf and his wife, the former movie actress Phyllis Fraser (a cousin of Ginger Rogers’s), had a grand estate in Mount Kisco, the Columns, and entertained lavishly there and in their Upper East Side town house. Sinatra would often visit the Cerfs when he was in town and mingle with the likes of Moss Hart and his wife, Kitty Carlisle Hart (after Hart’s untimely death in 1961, Frank attended the playwright’s funeral, a big gesture for him); Bennett Cerf’s fellow What’s My Line? panelist Arlene Francis and her husband, the actor Martin Gabel; the movie producer Arthur Hornblow and his wife, Leonora, nicknamed Bubbles; the industrialist William Green and his wife, Judy, a dazzling, sharp-witted brunette with blue-green eyes who now and then wrote novels and whom men universally found enchanting. The women in the Cerfs’ set were smart and dynamic (Frank’s nickname for the formidable Phyllis Cerf, who tended to take command of social occasions and her friends’ lives, was the General) and attractive, and Sinatra, in more than one case, followed his time-honored custom of befriending the man and sleeping with the wife.

  The Cerfs’ world was the East Coast equivalent of Bill and Edie Goetz’s world in Hollywood: rich and intelligent and exclusive and delighted to lay claim to Frank. There was (and would continue to be) a certain amount of interlock between the two milieus: both Bennett Cerf and Bill Goetz were also at Moss Hart’s funeral, as was Zeppo Marx, whose wife would one day marry Frank Sinatra, and the Broadway lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, formerly married to the actress Nancy Olson, who was soon to marry Capitol Records’ Alan Livingston.

  Frank navigated both worlds with a combination of ease and unease, some hidden part of him always feeling like the high-school dropout from Hoboken, the tension expressing itself in his dominating and unavoidable charisma. Christopher Cerf’s main memory about Sinatra’s presence in his family’s household (besides the incomparable thrill of Frank’s now and then standing by the family piano and singing a few tunes) was the room-filling sound of that big speaking voice. “He was loud,” Cerf recalled. “Not obnoxiously so. But he projected. He would get excited; suddenly it would be, ‘GET DOWN HERE!’

  “He was never offstage. He would ask really meaningful questions and listen to the answers, but he didn’t just go sit by himself while other people talked. He was certainly the central presence in any room that I can remember his being in.”

  Being friends with Sinatra was never boring. Once, in the summer of 1964, Cerf remembered, he and a date, along with his parents and Frank, attended a party at the Westchester house of the newlyweds Bill and Judy Green. After the party, the five of them drove back to Mount Kisco, with Bennett Cerf at the wheel. “I’m sure we’d all had a bit to drink, it having been a long night,” Christopher Cerf said. “Just before we passed Arlene Francis and Martin Gabel’s house, which was a quarter of a mile before our house on the same road, Frank suddenly said, ‘Stop the car, Bennett. I want to go up and see Marty.’ My dad said, ‘No, they’re not home.’ Sinatra said, ‘How do you know that?’ My father said, ‘I know. They’re not even in Mount Kisco.’

  “Frank got angry,” Cerf said. “My dad kept saying he wouldn’t stop, and Frank kept saying, ‘Goddamn it, I’m going to get out. You stop the car and I’ll walk up there if you won’t drive me up the driveway.’ My dad said, ‘This is really stupid. It’s a long, dark driveway; I’m not going to stop.’ And he didn’t. He drove all the way to our house. By the time we got there, Frank was fuming. As I recall, he walked back and went up to Arlene and Martin’s house and found out they weren’t there. But he was still furious when he came back, because my dad wouldn’t do what he wanted.

  “He started s
creaming, and my dad held his ground, and my mom, who would I think in many cases have defended Sinatra, said, ‘Don’t yell at my husband!’ I remember her shaking her fist at him. My friend Helene was just sitting there saying, ‘I can’t believe that this is my weekend with you.’ It was like the most exciting thing she had ever seen. Frank actually called for a helicopter to come and land on our lawn. He spent the night, but the next morning, very early, maybe eight o’clock or so, a helicopter lands on the back lawn of our house, and Sinatra got in and left. Everybody was very worried that this would be the end of the friendship, but it wasn’t at all. I think within a week or so, it was all forgotten—or, if not forgotten, laughed at.”

  But this had been before Mia, with the salt spray of Kauai still in his nostrils and no young girl by his side to guarantee him eternal life.

  —

  Sinatra and Basie in Vegas were one thing; Sinatra directing a movie was something else. None but the Brave premiered in February, and while some reviews were respectful (“Provocative and engrossing,” the Los Angeles Times’s Kevin Thomas wrote; though he also dismissed Tommy Sands’s performance as “hopelessly hammy”), some were rough. Bosley Crowther, in his now familiar fashion, was particularly harsh. “If the threat of Frank Sinatra as a film director is judged by his first try on ‘None But the Brave,’ it is clear that there need be no apprehension among the members of the Screen Directors Guild,” he began, going on to cite “a minimum show of creative invention and a maximum use of cinema clichés.”

  In putting it all together in a joint production with two Japanese companies, Mr. Sinatra, as producer and director, as well as actor of the secondary role of the booze-guzzling medical corpsman, displays distinction only in the latter job. Being his own director, he has no trouble stealing scenes, especially the one in which he burbles boozy wisecracks while preparing to saw off [a] shivering Japanese’s leg. Mr. Sinatra is crashingly casual when it comes to keeping the Japanese in their place.

  He has a good deal more trouble with the American fellows. Clint Walker as the captain of the plane, Tommy Sands as the cocky lieutenant, Brad Dexter as a sergeant and Tony Bill as the radioman make over-acting—phony acting—the trademark of the film. What with incredible color and the incredible screenplay of Katsuya Susaki and John Twist, this adds up to quite a fake concoction.

  They used to make better war films at Monogram.

  It has to be said in retrospect that Crowther had a point. The core concept of None but the Brave might have been provocative and engrossing at a time when triumphalism about World War II was still gospel, but seen today, the movie looks merely comic-bookish: as cinema, it’s pretty thin stuff. Nor did it excite a mass audience. Box office—$2.5 million, about half of Ocean’s 11’s receipts—was pretty good, but nothing to make Jack Warner kick his heels.

  Yet far worse was to come. In early March, Frank began his thirty-eighth film, a comedy for Warner Bros. ominously titled Marriage on the Rocks.

  —

  The title was a not-so-clever pun, but at least it was better than the deadly original, Community Property. This was the project in which Mia was supposedly to have played Sinatra’s daughter. It would have made a lot more interesting casting than the real one, which unfortunately put Frank’s real daughter Nancy, a very nervous fledgling actress, into the role.

  Misbegotten from the get-go, the movie cast Sinatra as a proto–Don Draper named Dan Edwards, an overworked ad executive with a bored wife and a couple of kids at home. Frank could play many things—a soldier, a heroin addict, a swinging bachelor—but he was always best, or at least most interesting to watch, when he portrayed a rebellious outsider, a role that fit his perpetually uneasy personality. Portraying a Serious Executive in horn-rimmed glasses and a three-piece suit, no matter how successful, was very far from his wheelhouse. Moreover, he lobbied hard to get Deborah Kerr, his From Here to Eternity co-star and an actress of great skill and dignity (and a smoldering, repressed sexuality)—but with absolutely no visible gift for comedy—to play Dan’s wife, Valerie. Dean Martin, less interested than ever in being an Actor and preparing to take his smoothly polished, wisecracking image to his own NBC variety show, didn’t need a lot of persuading to sign on as Dan’s associate and best friend, Ernie, this film’s happy-go-lucky bachelor (and proto–Roger Sterling), the man Valerie had passed over for Dan eighteen years earlier.

  The gag writer Cy Howard, a veteran of Martin and Lewis (My Friend Irma; The Colgate Comedy Hour), was responsible for the sub-sitcom plot: Dan and Valerie are accidentally divorced, Val marries Ernie to make Dan jealous, daughter Tracy rebels. Frank (Sinatra Enterprises was co-producing with Warner Bros.) tapped Jack Donohue, a former choreographer (he’d worked with Sinatra on 1946’s It Happened in Brooklyn) turned TV director (The Frank Sinatra Show, The Lucy Show), to helm the picture.

  “I’m well aware of the shortcomings of some of my recent pictures,” Frank told the New York Times’s Peter Bart in April. “I guess the trouble has been that at the time I did these pictures nothing better seemed to be available. It all boils down to material.”

  But in his fiftieth year, with a changing face and physique and ever-accumulating power, Sinatra was shifting into a different gear as a movie actor: he seemed more interested in product than material. He was still a commanding screen presence—no matter how bad the material—but he could no longer disappear, or even partially disappear, into a role: he might be playing Chief Pharmacist’s Mate Maloney or Colonel Ryan or Dan Evans, but who he really was was Frank Sinatra, ruler of worlds. The Chairman. It happened, it happens, to a lot of stars; rather than disappear into a role, they disappear into themselves. It can work for a while, until it doesn’t.

  He ruled worlds. He might have been out of the casino business, but he was into the movie production and commercial real estate businesses; he ran a private airline with half a dozen planes; he had an interest in a metal parts company and even owned a share in a corporation that manufactured missile parts.

  He had called it, more or less on the nose, in the 1961 Show Business Illustrated interview. “Four years from now I’ll be 50 years old,” he’d said. “By then I’ll have had it as an actor and singer. Not really had it, but…What the hell, when I get around that age there’s not much I’ll want to play or could play.

  “When I think of myself five years hence,” he continued, “I see myself not so much an entertainer as a high-level executive, interested in business, perhaps in directing and producing films. My eventual goal is to broaden in the administrative sense.”

  It was not incidental that he had also broadened in the physical sense.

  But he was wrong in predicting his time as a singer would be up. Even as he commuted to Burbank to shoot this dreadful farce (he livened up the proceedings by trying to break up Dino on set: one of his favorite tricks was a fake mustache made of black electrical tape, stuck onto his upper lip just before the camera rolled), he returned to United Recording to start a new album with Gordon Jenkins, and it would be not only beautiful but mature in the finest sense.

  —

  With fifty looming up fast, Mia was making him feel young and old at the same time. Early in the year, Frank had put out the word that he was looking for September songs for an autumn-of-his-years-themed new LP, and inventory began to accumulate at once. Three of the songs he chose were numbers he’d recorded previously: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Hello, Young Lovers,” Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg’s “Last Night When We Were Young,” and, naturally, Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson’s “September Song.”

  The rest of the tunes were a mixed bag, including two new ones by Cahn and Van Heusen, “It Gets Lonely Early” and the heartfelt if plodding number that would give the album its title, “The September of My Years”:

  As a man who has always had the wandering ways,

  Now I’m reaching back for yesterdays.

  It was Sammy at his most didactic, Chester at his most grandiose.

  But
there was another, much better song, by the writer of “Good Morning Heartache,” Ervin Drake.

  The tune, which used the metaphor of wine vintages to chart the progress of a middle-aged man’s life, had originally been recorded by the Kingston Trio at the height of the folk-music craze in 1961. Backed by soulful Spanish-flavored guitar and sincerely sung by the trio’s Bob Shane (then in his mid-twenties), “It Was a Very Good Year” had an earnest, low-grade charisma, and the album it appeared on, Goin’ Places, peaked at number 3 on the charts.

  Then Frank heard it on his car radio one day and decided he could show the kids a thing or two.

  —

  Over the Easter holiday, Nancy Sinatra’s husband, the world’s unluckiest son-in-law, walked out on her. She writes that she was blindsided: she’d thought that her marriage to Tommy Sands was happy. But suddenly, she says, he told her that his fear of commitment, and with it his disinclination to be a family man, would never go away. Telling her she should get a divorce, he left and never returned.

  Fear of family mainly meant fear of Frank. Having failed to get Sands into Come Blow Your Horn, Nancy had pushed her father to cast her husband in None but the Brave, and this Sinatra did, to almost everybody’s immediate regret. Cast as the militantly by-the-book lieutenant Blair, the small, tragically unmagnetic Sands proceeded to stick out his chin and growl every line at the top of his lungs, turning in a performance that would’ve been embarrassing in a high-school production. “He chewed up scenery that hadn’t even been built,” his co-star Tony Bill said. “It was a career ender for him.”