Sinatra

by James Kaplan

—

  Three days later, Frank was in New York City, celebrating the premiere of Von Ryan’s Express at Toots Shor’s with Dean, Joey Bishop, and Count Basie. (Critics and audiences alike would enjoy the movie, which would become Sinatra’s highest-grossing picture of the decade.) He’d come east in his new Lear Jet, the Christina II. The plane, he told Earl Wilson, allowed him to make lightning publicity runs “to Detroit or Chicago or Washington any evening, and be back here at Jilly’s by 2 a.m.”

  In the meantime, Mia was in Los Angeles, working hard on Peyton Place, which had become such a runaway hit that ABC planned to hike its schedule from two shows a week to three in the fall. The pressure was relentless: as the key character Allison MacKenzie, Farrow was in every episode, and production would continue through the summer.

  She didn’t seem to mind. Sounding like the seasoned pro she had quickly become, she told Bob Thomas in a spring interview, “We now have two companies shooting simultaneously, instead of one. And we’re not even into the summer’s product yet.”

  The spring and summer also brought another product: a steady drumbeat of rumors about Farrow’s relationship with Sinatra. “I’ve read that Mia Farrow of Peyton Place is married to Frank Sinatra. What are their ages?” Mrs. M. Jones, of Portsmouth, Virginia, wrote to the syndicated TV Scout column in April. (The answer incorrectly gave Frank’s age as forty-seven and Mia’s as nineteen: he was forty-nine and counting, of course; she had just turned twenty.) In May, the usually gimlet-eyed Dorothy Kilgallen signaled her belief in the tales, managing to get in a dig anyway:

  When Mia Farrow first confided her love for Frank Sinatra, it was regarded by most of the show business wiseacres as a “phony romance” or a publicity ploy he permitted “to help the kid”—as he helped Juliet Prowse make the front pages by giving her a big diamond that was never followed by a wedding ring. But now some of the toughest cynics are beginning to believe Frank adores Mia, chiefly because someone very very close to him thinks they’re going to be married—and is embarrassed by the possibility, because Mia is younger than Frank’s daughter Nancy.

  Kilgallen might well have been referring to the reliably outspoken Dolly Sinatra. “My son is just helping this girl become a star,” Frank’s mother proclaimed.

  How many times has Frank helped somebody to the top? This is what he is doing now…This Mia, she’s a nice little girl, but that’s all. Remember, Frank’s children are older than this girl. I’m going to spend the next two days in New York City with my son in his apartment. I’m sure I have some influence left with him. If there is any truth to these rumors—which I personally know there is not—I will use my influence to discourage any marriage.

  But Dolly had no idea whom she was up against. “She is not as fragile as she looks,” Bob Thomas noted. “In some matters she can be iron-willed.”

  He was referring to her new policy of not speaking about her personal life, a sensible stance that nevertheless communicated much by omission. As for Frank, “The La Rue crowd, [the West Hollywood restaurant] where Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow dine often, say they never saw him so smitten,” Walter Winchell wrote in early June.

  “Never” was going a long way. But it had certainly been a few years.

  —

  Frank put a lot of miles on the Christina II that summer, hopping over to Israel in late June to do a three-day cameo on a Kirk Douglas movie, Cast a Giant Shadow, then jumping back to the States to make a dramatic Fourth of July appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival.

  The festival, started in 1954 by jazz promoter George Wein, had generated a certain amount of social and artistic controversy over the years, stirring up the wealthy locals who were disturbed by the traffic jams the event produced, not to mention the annual influx of African-American musicians and scruffy young fans. In 1960, the National Guard actually had to be called in to quell a riot that began when a large crowd of boisterous fans who hadn’t been able to gain admission stormed the venue. That same year, Charles Mingus and Max Roach staged a rival jazz festival across town, in protest against Wein’s payment policies, which favored mainstream (mostly white) artists. The promoter had first run the event on a not-for-profit basis, but by 1965 it had been a business for several years, and as jazz’s record sales dropped, so had attendance at Newport. (The hullabaloos of the past hadn’t helped either.) Asking Count Basie to ask Frank Sinatra to play there on the event’s final night was a canny commercial move on Wein’s part, and deciding to take the impresario up on his offer was a smart choice by Frank.

  Loving Basie’s band and cherishing the charts, conducting, and friendship of Quincy Jones, Sinatra had decided to take the whole aggregation out on a six-city tour—the first time he’d gone on the road with a big band since his 1957 western swing with Riddle. The Dismas House benefit was, in effect, the dress rehearsal for the new tour. And though it had come off beautifully, Newport in 1965 was “the only time I’ve ever seen Frank nervous,” as Jones recalled. His performance would be climaxing four days of concerts by some of the greatest names in jazz: Dizzy Gillespie, Joe Williams, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Art Blakey, Lee Morgan, Carmen McRae, Duke Ellington, Herbie Mann, Dave Brubeck, Earl Hines, and Frank’s old Dorsey-days roommate, nemesis, and friend Buddy Rich.

  Could he have felt intimidated? He tended to keep his fears to himself; it is a mark of his intimacy with Jones that he let down his guard. What might have been nibbling at Frank’s nerves was the tiresome old question of whether or not he really was a jazz singer. The silly subject wouldn’t go away, despite what should have been the final word, Lester Young’s wholehearted 1956 validation. Certain carpers and purists would forever deride Sinatra as white and square, the chief exponent of the so-called businessman’s bounce: a great pop singer, to be sure, but just that. Even Frank declined the mantle of jazz vocalist—probably, in all truth, because he found it limiting. With a combination of sly machismo and slightly spurious modesty, he preferred to call himself a saloon singer.

  In his July 17 piece on the Newport Festival, The New Yorker’s imperiously tradition-minded and blazingly articulate jazz writer Whitney Balliett could hardly contain his scorn for the event in general (“bland, banal, occasionally professional, occasionally original, never exciting”) and for Sinatra in particular, whom he dubbed “the celebrated New Jersey Meadows jazz singer”—this at a time when the area’s sole associations were with industrial pollution and marshy stink.

  “Sunday evening was a circus,” Balliett wrote.

  Sinatra’s stint was carried out with Commando precision. Late Sunday afternoon, during a Stan Getz bossa-nova number, a couple of helicopters scouting the area…touched down briefly just behind the bandstand. At exactly seven-forty-five, they returned, carrying Sinatra and his entourage, and at nine, after half a dozen desultory Count Basie numbers, Sinatra paraded onstage with his own drummer [Sonny Payne], his own trumpet player—Harry (One-Note) Edison—and his own arrangements. Basie put on a pair of businessman’s glasses and started reading his part, and Sinatra sang “Get Me to the Church on Time.” Seven or eight vocals later, Sinatra paused, got himself a cup of tea from the piano, and, sipping it stage center, delivered a monologue made up of Bob Hope gags larded with plugs for a Las Vegas hotel that Sinatra has an interest in…Then he replaced his teacup, sang ten more songs, and waved goodbye. He was airborne before the Basie band, struggling to regain its soul, had finished a concluding “One O’Clock Jump.” The tab was reportedly thirty-five thousand dollars.

  It was the Eustace Tilley treatment. All the fleering code words were there: New Jersey Meadows; businessman; “Get Me to the Church on Time” (distinctly middlebrow material); Bob Hope; Las Vegas; and the capper, thirty-five thousand dollars. A very large sum in 1965, enough to buy a substantial suburban house in Short Hills or Shaker Heights. In fact, $35,000 was only Frank’s guarantee: including his percentage of the gate, his total fee was closer to $40,000.

  Yet Balliett somehow failed to m
ention the quality of Sinatra’s singing, or the other songs he sang, or the considerable commercial value he lent to the festival: whereas in past years the Sunday-night concert had always been the worst attended, Frank’s show was a sellout, helping to raise Newport’s overall attendance to forty thousand, an increase of six thousand over the previous year. In his memoirs, George Wein described the unforgettable scene as two helicopters bearing Frank, his retinue, and Quincy Jones arrived. “When the dual aircraft landed at 7:45 p.m. there was a mild ruckus,” he wrote.

  No one was performing at the time, since the concert was scheduled for 8 o’clock. The hatch opened, and Sinatra emerged. There could be no better way to describe it than this: He became, for that moment, the festival’s deus ex machina. A god stepping out of the machine. Frank walked from the landing pad to his trailer by way of a lane that had been fashioned out of double rows of snow fencing flanked by bodyguards.

  As for the set itself, Wein called it “a glorious performance,” expressing the minor regret that “his program was heavy on swing and short on ballads.” Among the numbers Frank sang that night, besides “Get Me to the Church on Time,” were “Fly Me to the Moon,” “Street of Dreams,” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “You Make Me Feel So Young,” and “Where or When,” all either Quincy Jones arrangements or reorchestrations by Jones to capture the spirit of the Riddle originals. As the jazz critic Arnold Jay Smith wrote, “Many believe [Jones’s] were the heartiest, most satisfyingly comfortable charts Sinatra had ever worked with. Even when he revisited the Riddle, May, and Don Costa arrangements, there was now a looser suave, bravura feeling that suited the elder statesman Sinatra. Thanks to the Jones arrangements, Sinatra could play around more with the lyrics, punctuate with vocal rhythmic interpolations, and elongate musical phrases crossing bar lines.”

  Sinatra biographer Arnold Shaw, who had attended every Newport Jazz Festival since the beginning, wrote, “There have been many memorable moments, like the ‘discovery’ of trumpeter Miles Davis in 1955 and the first appearance of Dave Brubeck in 1958. No one individual so electrified and literally possessed the Festival as did Sinatra in 1965.”

  Variety agreed, calling Newport 1965 “Sinatra’s festival” and his set an “overpowering, hour-long vocal assault.” He “added a new dimension to the festival,” the show-business weekly’s David B. Bittan wrote, supplying “glamour showmanship—his own brand of casual hipness. The jazz purists may have been unhappy about his appearance, since Sinatra is technically not a ‘jazz singer.’ But he brought something to Newport that no other artist could have.” Frank’s $40,000 fee, Bittan wrote, “was worth every penny to Wein and the festival.”

  At 10:25 p.m., Sinatra waved good night, to the biggest ovation of the four-day event. “As he left the stage, he said: ‘Thank you, Father O’Connor [the Paulist priest and jazz fan who had emceed the festival], and thank you, George,’ and walked straight toward one of the helicopters,” Wein recalled.

  Two minutes later, he was airborne. Both choppers lifted out of the park as suddenly as they had arrived; their landing lights blinked a wistful farewell. Sinatra was off to New York where he wanted to be in Jilly’s restaurant by midnight and tell everyone what had happened at Newport. It was the most dramatic exit he could possibly have made. Even as the birds disappeared into the night, thousands of people just stood silently and watched, transfixed. Frank had literally come down from the heavens to bestow his gift, and now he was making his ascension.

  The religious imagery would be embarrassing were it not so apt. In the middle of his fiftieth year, he had become a kind of demigod, not just by virtue of his presence—any movie star had presence—but through his incomparable ability to manipulate human emotion with the sheer power of his voice.

  —

  Four days later, Frank fulfilled his Life magazine promise to return to the big town, playing three sellout nights at the West Side Tennis Club stadium in Forest Hills, Queens. “The audience was made up mostly of middle-aged matrons, whose reactions were almost as voluble as their teen-age daughters’ at a Beatles concert,” Arnold Shaw wrote. “The three performances hit a record gross of $271,886.”

  In his Life essay, Sinatra had discussed the Fab Four, who had played their own sold-out show at Forest Hills the previous August and had now become undismissable. “I get a kick out of reading what the kids today are doing to the Beatles,” he wrote. “They seem a little more aggressive than they were a hundred years ago at the Paramount Theater when the kids liked me. I’ll never forget the first time I heard that strange sound in the audience—the old swooning business. I didn’t know what was happening. This moaning just started, then it began to build.”

  If Frank’s characterization was mildly condescending, he could hardly be blamed. The Liverpool quartet weren’t just upending the music business; they were dividing the world of pop godhood with him and taking the lion’s share. Queens, New York, was the site of another memorable musical event a month after Sinatra’s Forest Hills stand: the Beatles’ Shea Stadium concert on August 15. More than fifty-five thousand fans attended the unprecedented show, screaming so loud from beginning until end that the music was inaudible to everyone present, the musicians included. Gross ticket sales for the evening were $304,000, more than Frank had made over three nights at the West Side Tennis Club.

  But more important to the British group than the money was this vivid demonstration, at the start of their third American visit, that touring was quickly becoming irrelevant for them. Inaudibility was a strong deterrent to playing live, and the exhausting grind of the road militated against composing the new material they needed to feel vital as artists. Having begun smoking marijuana (to which Bob Dylan had introduced them the previous year) and experimenting with LSD, they were turning inward and would soon abandon the road altogether to become purely studio musicians.

  In the meantime, Dylan, their model and idol, was also transforming, and transforming the world as he did so. At the Newport Folk Festival, just twenty-one days after Sinatra’s Newport theophany, the groundbreaking singer-songwriter born Robert Allen Zimmerman had been roundly booed for playing an electrified version of his soon-to-be-released anthem “Like a Rolling Stone.” Logging in at an unparalleled six minutes and thirteen seconds, the single quickly came to dominate American airwaves that summer, despite the initial reluctance of Dylan’s record label, Columbia, to release it and the early unwillingness of DJs to play such a long track. It was a new kind of popular music: you couldn’t dance to it; you certainly wouldn’t make love to it or listen to it raptly in a coffeehouse. It was pure rebellion, jagged poetry for a jagged time, and for ears young enough to hear it, it was purely thrilling.

  —

  But if you couldn’t dance to it or make love to it, and if other singers wouldn’t cover it—not many, anyway; it was such a personal statement—what was it? Would it be sung and cherished decades hence, like “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” or “Where or When,” both of them already almost three decades old in 1965? Was what many called the Great American Songbook closing for good? Was a new book opening? It was impossible to tell, easier simply to note that a great schism had split the landscape, with youth and tradition fulminating at each other across the divide.

  —

  They were a strange hybrid, this May-September pair, holding hands over a chasm, trying to stay together in spite of everything.

  In her memoir, Farrow wrote of the three distinct worlds into which Sinatra’s life was divided. The first was the private time they shared, an increasingly imperiled quantity now that they had gone public. The second was the social world of the Beverly Hills/Manhattan establishment, on the West Coast the Goetzes and the Deutsches and the Billy Wilders and the Jack Bennys and the Kirk Douglases and Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin and Roz Russell and her husband, Freddie Brisson; on the East, the Cerfs and the Paleys and the Haywards and the Arthur Hornblows and Claudette Colbert and her husband, Joel Pressman. The A-group, as Farrow cal
led them, adored Frank, and he behaved around them—though, as we have seen, not always.

  At the Goetzes’ in Beverly Hills, she recalled, the walls were lined with Renoirs, Cézannes, Gauguins, Bonnards, and Picassos. The Friday-night dinners were cooked by a French chef. After dinner, as if by magic, paintings rose, a movie screen descended, and the invitees were treated to an advance showing of one of Hollywood’s latest films. The guests, Farrow writes, were mostly friends of her parents; they’d known her since she was a little girl, “which was strange in one way and nice in another.” When they came to visit Frank in Palm Springs, they sometimes brought their adult children, who at meals would sit together at “the kids’ table” while Mia sat with the grownups.

  It was all more than a little surreal.

  Equally strange was Frank’s third world, in late-night Las Vegas or Miami or Palm Springs, or in what Farrow calls “that other New York”: the hard-drinking, tough-talking milieu of Jilly Rizzo and Toots Shor. The moment Sinatra arrived at a Las Vegas or Miami hotel or a New York restaurant, Mia remembered, men—and women—she didn’t know would appear out of nowhere. She had no idea, she writes, how it was all pulled together.

  But he didn’t really care to pull it together: compartmentalization was the name of the game. Often, Farrow found herself inside a compartment all by herself.

  —

  In August, the triumphant Basie tour was over, and Frank was between albums and movies, so he decided to take her on a cruise: “a boat trip,” as Farrow called it. The boat in question was a 168-foot motor yacht, the Southern Breeze, chartered for $2,000 a day. Frank had carefully planned an itinerary stopping at ports along the New England coast. Her television series seemed an obstacle at first, Farrow wrote, but such obstacles were child’s play when Sinatra had made up his mind: thanks to his influence at 20th Century Fox (and everywhere else), the writers on Peyton Place conveniently had Allison MacKenzie get into an auto accident that left her in a coma. “If Mia decided to marry,” the Associated Press noted, “the script may call for Allison to die.”