Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  But the real career ender was disrespecting Frank Sinatra’s daughter. According to Quincy Jones, Sands had begun living the Hollywood nightlife and being not so discreet about it. “PJ’s and all those clubs were opening up then, and Tommy got to playing around a little,” Jones recalled. “I said, ‘Tommy, you’re playing with fire, man. I’m telling you. Wrong family.’ He said, ‘Oh, Quincy, it’ll be okay. Francis will understand.’ I said, ‘Okay, I’m glad you think so.’ And he goes and tells Frank that he and Nancy had been going through [some troubles]. He said, ‘Francis, we’re going to try a light separation for a while. I know you’ll understand.’ ”

  Sinatra understood all too well. He was enraged, all Hollywood knew it, and—whether Frank had anything to do with it or not—Sands’s show-business career ended at roughly the same time as his marriage.

  —

  Tommy and Nancy had a little house in the Hollywood Hills; now she left it and went to her mother’s place in Bel Air. “I remember coming home from school on a Monday and finding Nancy in Frankie’s old room, with Dad sitting at her bedside and holding her,” Tina Sinatra writes. “They were shooting a movie together…and Dad came by after work each day for the next week or so, until Nancy felt strong enough to rejoin him on the set. He was there as much as she needed him; he was a rock whenever one of us felt forlorn. No one understood emotional breaching better than Dad.”

  No one.

  —

  In the evenings, he made the album. He had chosen Gordon Jenkins to arrange it, rather than Nelson Riddle, for a compelling reason: he was feeling pensive about mortality, and Jenkins was able to create string passages of such wholehearted and unapologetic sentimentality that listeners caught unawares might find themselves reaching for a tissue before they knew what was happening. Riddle got to your heart through your head, via the medium of high art; Jenkins took those high, singing strings and went right for the emotional jugular.

  His detractors are vociferous, if not legion. “He’s awful,” Jonathan Schwartz says, simply. The genius Riddle, of course, being the shining exemplar. And Riddle was a genius. But comparing the two is unfair to both. Musicians understand Jenkins’s lack of subtlety but appreciate his effectiveness. “Gordon had his identity and his sound,” said the pianist Lou Levy, an occasional substitute for Bill Miller on Sinatra dates. “Everything was sort of a wail and a moan. He had a way of getting that kind of sound. I could take only so much of it, but with Sinatra, it worked. And I know Frank liked it. How can you knock an arrangement like ‘Very Good Year’? That’s really sort of a masterpiece.”

  It is. The song is the peak of Sinatra and Jenkins’s collaboration. Thanks to the presence of a CBS camera crew—Frank had just agreed to an interview with Walter Cronkite, to be aired in the fall—we can watch it being recorded: the studio clock reading 8:35; the solemn spectators, men and women alike dressed as if for the theater; the white-shirted, steel-haired Jenkins conducting the musicians in his unique left-handed style, sweeping his arms back and forth, up and down, as though he were scrubbing floors, washing windows. Frank, dressed to the nines in a dark suit and light vest, tie carefully loosened, toup perfectly groomed, performing the song—it is a performance, to this audience—in a voice like the ocean. And then, between takes, listening thoughtfully while he smokes, his endlessly expressive face registering the scintillas of emotion in every bar.

  And if the rest of the album doesn’t quite meet the quality of this one great number, it provides a similarly autumnal, and similarly moving, experience. “Jenkins relied on the most uniform textures of any Sinatra arranger,” Friedwald writes, “and as with All Alone, not only do all the orchestrations seem to be cut from the same cloth but so do the songs themselves. And despite the eventual predictability of the recurring images—the falling leaves, graying hairs, Technicolor breezes, a preoccupation with gazing forlornly at children…the concept itself almost never seems forced.”

  What elevates it all, even as it skirts kitsch and at times veers straight into it, is the majestic voice singing it: meaning it, believing it. A poet, Stan Cornyn called Sinatra in the liner notes he eventually wrote for the album. But a poet of a very specific kind: an alchemist, one who could turn what other artists might leave as dross into gold.

  Cornyn, who began in the record business churning out liner notes by the dozen for Capitol, then Warner, could have proceeded similarly mechanically with September. “I could have stayed back in my office and written, ‘The ages of man are measured in months, and September…’ That kind of stuff,” he recalled. Instead, he attended the sessions—mainly because it was Sinatra, and he just wanted to. He took along some scratch paper, a pencil, and a pen and jotted down what he saw. The resulting notes give a crystalline picture of the occasion and have a wry poetry of their own:

  Tonight will not swing. Tonight is for serious.

  Inside, the musicians, led by coatless, posture-free Gordon Jenkins, rehearse their voice-empty arrangements. Waiting for his arrival.

  Outside, in the hall, the uniformed guards wait and wonder what to do with their hands…

  He arrives. Tie loosened, collar loosened. The guards at the studio door edge out of the way.

  “Good morning, sir,” he says. “Who’s got the ball game on.”

  Thirty orchestra wives wish they had the late scores memorized. Four men look around for a transistor radio.

  “Hello, Sidney, how are ya. What’s happening in the music business?”

  He strolls up behind Gordon Jenkins, who is rehearsing his strings. Sinatra listens for 32 bars, then turns to Mike Romanoff. “The way this guy writes strings, if he were Jewish, he’d be unbearable.”

  The Prince wakes up a bit.

  “You ready, Gordie?”

  “I’m ready,” replies Jenkins. “I’m always ready. I was ready in 1939.”

  “I was ready when I was nine.”

  He walks to his music stand, clearing his throat. “Think I swallowed a shot glass.”

  Jenkins starts a song, conducting with arms waist high, sweeping them side to side. Not leading his orchestra: being the orchestra.

  Sinatra begins to sing his September’s reflections. Jenkins, on the podium two feet above, turns from his orchestra to face his singer. He beams down attentively, his face that of a father after his son’s first no-hitter.

  The wives in their black beaded sweaters muffle their charm bracelets.

  As the CBS camera crew got it all on film. Many years later, the producer Don Hewitt recalled how he’d persuaded Sinatra to sit for the Cronkite interview: Frank would, Hewitt said, be occupying “the same seat Dwight Eisenhower, Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson sat in.” And then the masterstroke: the producer told Sinatra to pass on doing the show if he didn’t feel up to it. The cameras were in the recording studio the next night.

  —

  The drumbeat began. The April 23 issue of Life carried a big cover story on Sinatra—in the world of 1965, a major cultural event. In the world of 1965, Life magazine was as important as television: it went to Park Avenue and Chicago’s Gold Coast and San Francisco’s Nob Hill; it went to Kansas farms and Wyoming ranches and Arkansas shotgun shacks; it sat in every doctor’s and dentist’s waiting room in the country. The color photograph on the front of the magazine showed Frank looking snappy in a houndstooth fedora, white turtleneck, and orange cardigan; his expression was vaguely amused, his mouth was opened in song. “SINATRA OPENS UP,” the headline read. The eighteen-page feature, which Life called “an intimate picture essay–interview” (“The Private World and Thoughts of Frank Sinatra”), comprised a lengthy piece by associate editor Tommy Thompson, a series of posed and candid shots by staff photographer John Dominis, and an essay (“Me and My Music”) by Frank himself.

  Thompson was a former stage actor, a tall, handsome, quietly charming Texan; “Tommy was the kind of person that everyone was drawn to,” the former Life publicity director Fifi Booth recalled. He’d first approached Sinatra abou
t doing a story the previous November, over drinks in New York, only to find him typically distractible: “He kept hopping up to talk to Jackie Gleason in Miami or Dean Martin in Hollywood and finally just muttered, ‘Come see me on the coast.’ ” Thompson did so, buttonholing Frank on the set of Von Ryan’s Express and proving his charm by getting him to agree to sit for an interview.

  But when Thompson and Dominis caught up with Sinatra during the February Eden Roc stand, they found all they had gained was a foot in the door. Over the next two weeks, they shadowed Frank as he worked and played, gradually accustoming him to their presence. Dominis, who had photographed lions at close range in Africa, found working around Sinatra a similar experience: no sudden moves; many hours of quiet waiting to get the perfect shot, only when the flow of the moment allowed it.

  The moment was invariably in the wee small hours, as Dominis wearily recalled, more than forty years later. Thompson remembered pleading exhaustion and turning in at 2:00 a.m. one night, only to be awakened at 5:00 by a phone call from Frank’s suite. “He was having an all-night party with Joe E. Lewis,” the writer said, “and they couldn’t stand my being asleep.”

  In all, Thompson and Dominis spent seven weeks on the Sinatra beat, in Miami, Vegas, Hollywood, and Palm Springs. “I became fascinated with the depth of the man,” Thompson wrote. “You could see that people watching us thought we were talking about girls and such. But he is a whiz at the stock market and can go on for hours about finance. He has a love for opera, and thinks Callas sings off key. He really wants to try conducting a symphony some day, if he can do it without it being a stunt. And he knows every boxing statistic there is in the file.”

  All this was no doubt true, but it also failed to take into account actual depth, not to mention the Heisenbergian principle of the observer’s effect on the observed. If Tommy Thompson was a charming man, Frank Sinatra, never one to be outdone, was going to go him one better. Aggressively. (Though in all likelihood, it was probably minutes rather than hours that he could go on about finance.) Like all of us, Sinatra was a chameleon to a degree, but if the company was impressive—or seemed to require impressing—he could take mutability to extremes. And he was never above putting on a show.

  Thompson took note of Frank’s contradictions. “He is a man who will angrily throw an over-cooked hamburger at his valet or an ashtray at an inept assistant—and yet never fires anyone from his huge staff of aides and hangers-on,” he wrote. (True; he let others do the dirty work for him.)

  He will spend 10 minutes of his nightclub act attacking a woman columnist [Kilgallen] so venomously that the audience gasps—and will send $100,000 to a Los Angeles college with the strict instruction that the gift not be made public. He sneers “Charley brown shoes” at people he thinks are squares and always says “thank you” when someone asks for his autograph. He is the legendary ladies’ man—and he says he has flunked out with women.

  All true, but true on the surface only. His ugly fury and his grand (and atoning) acts of generosity; his arrogant disdain and his exquisite manners; his ravening sexuality and his inability to maintain an intimate relationship—all these came from what were the real depths of the man, depths unplumbed by Tommy Thompson and legions to follow, all mesmerized by what was, for nearly sixty years, the real greatest show on earth.

  A preface to the piece mentioned the upcoming big birthday, though the subject was then dropped, its possible effects on Frank’s psyche left unexamined. Instead, Thompson began with a topic guaranteed to fascinate Americans: Frank’s wealth. “Sinatra is rich and has weight to throw around—and he throws it,” he wrote, enticingly. One photograph showed the Chairman sitting in one of his two helicopters, about to take off for Palm Springs (“He owns three other planes, including a new eight-seat Lear jet”). Another showed him lunching (on “prosciutto and melon, fruit salad, cheese and chilled red wine”) with Jack Warner. “I guess I’m now financially secure,” he coyly told Thompson.

  Life begins the countdown to the great event: at the end of the year, Sinatra will turn fifty. Frank’s portion of the eighteen-page feature, an essay called “Me and My Music” (note billing), is extraordinarily authoritative and smart. (Credit 22.1)

  Less than accurately, the writer called Sinatra “a hard-eyed businessman,” rather than the impatient and mercurial artist, given to delegating responsibility instead of grappling with it, that he really was. Yes, he nominally ran Sinatra Enterprises and Artanis Productions; true, he was an executive at Warner Bros. and a director of Warner-Reprise. But the personal staff of seventy-five admiringly mentioned in the piece, “ranging from girls who answer his fan mail to pilots and bodyguards,” also included men like Howard Koch and Mickey Rudin and Mo Ostin, who did most of the heavy lifting where business matters were concerned. The real Frank Sinatra was the man pictured in the cockpit of his helicopter, always on his way to someplace else.

  But the pictures in the piece told the story more acutely than Thompson. This was Life’s great strength. For decades, the magazine, a great American institution, existed in a meta-realm of popular culture, between the visual world of newsreels and television and the still-respected sphere of print. Life was first and foremost a picture magazine; the text was commentary. The big Sinatra piece was most notable for its many impressive black-and-white images: Frank standing moodily in smoke-wreathed chiaroscuro as he rehearsed a band; looking authoritative in a three-piece suit and eyeglasses on the set of Marriage on the Rocks; reading a script in an Eames chair in Palm Springs amid Oriental sculptures and state-of-the-art audio equipment, a loyal Australian sheep dog (named Ringo!) by his side and a bowlful of cigarette packs on the table by his feet. There were touching shots of his immediate family: Marty and Dolly, looking old, outside the Sands; sixteen-year-old Tina getting a kiss on the cheek from her doting father. And then there was a more ambiguous image: twenty-four-year-old Nancy Sandra, décolleté and in pearls, leaning against Daddy on a restaurant banquette, her arms encircling him with slightly discomfiting amorousness, her cheek resting in his hair. Frank, his hands holding hers, looks well pleased. Poor Tommy never had a chance.

  Symbolically, the one photo of Frank junior showed him not with his father but watching in awe from backstage while he performed.

  But some of the most arresting pictures within were a series of late-night shots taken by Dominis in Frank’s Eden Roc suite: in one sequence, Sinatra, crisply tuxed and amid riotous company, performs (semi-successfully) his old trick of snapping a tablecloth from a table without breaking the crockery; in another, he lies on the floor, helpless with laughter, after Joe E. Lewis has apparently told a howler. In still another photograph, he and the baggy-faced old comic, “at dawn after an all-night party,” as the caption tells us, stand in a closet looking pie-eyed and swapping old jokes. Dominis even captured Frank in the steam room the morning after, a half-naked pasha, pudgy and looking distinctly the worse for wear with a towel wrapped around his head.

  The text, reflecting the boozy pictures, described a night after the second show at the Eden Roc: beginning at around 1:30 a.m., Sinatra had a drink in the hotel lounge, signed autographs, then decamped to another nightclub, where he drank Jack Daniel’s (he would down half a bottle in all: “But he didn’t seem to be drunk—he never does,” Thompson wrote) and reminisced with Lewis. His entourage, which had begun with just three or four, increased to eight to ten, then more. Inevitably, Frank grew restless again. As his motorcade headed back to the hotel, he spotted a hot dog stand, still open at 5:30 a.m. “Let’s get some franks,” he said, and everybody piled out.

  It was 6 a.m. before the party got to Frank’s hotel suite. But the evening was not over because Frank hadn’t said it was over. “Everybody have a little more gasoline,” he ordered. Everybody did. They threw darts at a target set up on the wall.

  And then the king of this court, the man who had murdered sleep, finally decided to call it quits.

  The sun was up at 7 a.m. when Frank announced
he was going to bed. The room cleared suddenly. Frank put on orange pajamas, turned on some music and read a while. It took him a long time to drop off to sleep.

  The women in these hotel-suite photographs are, to put it diplomatically, not lookers. One wonders whether they were friends, friends of friends, or perhaps ad hoc company. “Women are constantly around Sinatra,” Thompson wrote. “When he is in a hotel they send notes to him, call him up, try to sneak past the guard at his door. Although he is often seen with famous women, Sinatra also takes out cigaret girls or chorus girls.”

  By way of illustration, the piece includes a photograph of Frank, backstage at a Broadway show, lighting a cigarette for a fur-coated and seductive-looking Natalie Wood (her deep cleavage, visible in a similar shot in Nancy Sinatra’s book, is airbrushed), and another shot of him holding a cup with a straw for what the caption identifies as “a date in Miami, a cigaret girl named Yumi Akutsu, who works in the hotel where he was singing.”

  Mia Farrow is mentioned nowhere in the piece.

  “Women often find him a puzzling escort,” Thompson wrote.

  “Frank is a very attentive man,” says an actress, “but I don’t understand him. He takes me out, then seems to spend most of the evening talking to the guys.”

  “I’m supposed to have a Ph.D. on the subject of women,” Frank says ruefully, “but the truth is I’ve flunked more often than not. I’m very fond of women; I admire them. But, like all men, I don’t understand them…

  “I like a woman’s clothes to be tasteful and subtle. I don’t like excessive make-up. I know that a woman must have a little, but I think that women—generally—have enough beauty without doing the circus tent type make-up. And women who smoke from the moment they open their eyes until they put out the light at night—that drives me batty. It’s unfeminine and dangerous—burn up the whole damn house, you know.”