Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  “I said, ‘I’m not talking about organized crime,’ ” Talese recalled. “ ‘I’m not interested in the Mafia. I’m out here, and I’d love to do this piece.’ ”

  Mahoney then told Talese that Sinatra would only consent to an interview if Frank or Mickey Rudin could see the piece when it was done. Sinatra and his lawyer wouldn’t change anything, the publicist assured Talese; they just needed to see it before it was published.

  Talese told Jim Mahoney that this was impossible, and Mahoney told Talese that in that case Sinatra would not be available.

  The rest, of course, is history. God, the common cold, and CBS News had given Gay Talese the greatest gift a journalist could possibly receive: a central but surmountable obstacle. On Esquire’s considerable dime (Talese would remain at the Beverly Wilshire, on and off but mostly on, for six weeks; his expenses would run to some $5,000, twice as much as his contract paid him per article), he proceeded to construct the greatest write-around in the history of magazine journalism, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.” Deprived of access to his subject (although, according to a source who wished to remain anonymous, the journalist did eventually interview Sinatra briefly), Talese doggedly sought out anyone and everyone in Frank’s ambit who would speak to him—including Mahoney—and, in much the same manner as the Life photographer John Dominis stalking lions in Africa, placed himself in proximity to the big cat whenever possible. The journalist also benefited from the kind of good luck that results from hard work: because he had previously written about Jack Hanson, the owner of the private Rodeo Drive discotheque the Daisy, Talese was able to gain admission to the club; because he started spending time there, he happened to be present on a night when Frank, out of sorts and in his cups, had a memorable run-in with the young novelist and screenwriter Harlan Ellison. He turned the encounter into his piece’s most vivid and disturbing scene.

  Dressed as conservatively as a banker, Frank sits for an interview with Walter Cronkite in late 1965. On camera, butter wouldn’t have melted in Sinatra’s mouth; off, he exploded after an inconvenient question was raised. (Credit 22.3)

  “Watching him at recording sessions, on a movie set, at the gambling tables in Las Vegas,” Talese later wrote,

  I was able to perceive his changing moods, his irritation and suspicion when he thought that I was getting too close, his pleasure and courtesy and charm when he was able to relax among those whom he trusted. I gained more by watching him, overhearing him, and watching the reactions of those around him than if I had actually been able to sit down and talk to him.

  It is a self-serving argument, of course, but—especially in Sinatra’s case—it is also a cogent one. Frank was not an un-self-knowing man: in fact, he knew too much about his inner chaos for comfort. Accordingly, he feared solitude, reflection, and probing inquiries by would-be intimates or others. Cornered into an actual interview, he was likely to recite banalities or give clues that might or might not be metaphorical (“I am a symmetrical man, almost to a fault”) or merely dazzle an interlocutor, as he had dazzled Tommy Thompson, with a wide but shallow show of knowledge. In any case, dazzling was always easy: few, if any, could resist him when he turned it on. Like death and the sun in La Rochefoucauld’s famous maxim, Sinatra was best observed not head-on but from a perspective slightly to the side.

  —

  On Monday, November 8, Frank showed up at NBC Studios in Burbank to begin taping A Man and His Music, a celebration in song of his career as a vocalist. (This year also officially marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of his start in show business, though in reality he had begun singing with Harry James in April 1939.) Nelson Riddle and forty-three musicians were waiting eagerly, along with production staff, “security guards, Budweiser ad men…[and] a dozen or so ladies who worked as secretaries in other parts of the building but had sneaked away so they could watch this,” Talese wrote. “[Sinatra’s] face was pale, his blue eyes seemed a bit watery,” he continued.

  He had been unable to rid himself of the cold, but he was going to try to sing anyway because the schedule was tight and thousands of dollars were involved at this moment in the assembling of the orchestra and crews and the rental of the studio. But when Sinatra, on his way to his small rehearsal room to warm up his voice, looked into the studio and saw that the stage and orchestra’s platform were not close together, as he had specifically requested, his lips tightened and he was obviously very upset. A few moments later, from his rehearsal room, could be heard the pounding of his fist against the top of the piano and the voice of his accompanist, Bill Miller, saying, softly, “Try not to upset yourself, Frank.”

  The next day would be the one-year anniversary of the death of Miller’s wife in the Burbank mudslide, and he was the one comforting Frank.

  —

  Jim Mahoney arrived a while later, and he and Sinatra discussed the death of Frank’s old nemesis Dorothy Kilgallen. The body of the fifty-two-year-old columnist had been found that morning in her New York apartment, her demise apparently due to a fatal combination of alcohol and barbiturates.*4 “Dorothy Kilgallen’s dead,” Sinatra said as he walked into the studio. “Well, guess I got to change my whole act.”

  —

  The dreaded CBS documentary aired on November 16, and it proved to be an utter anticlimax. To the sound of Walter Cronkite’s sonorous voice-over, footage of Sinatra’s past and present life and career flickered across the screen, now and then cutting away to a one-shot of Frank sitting in his Palm Springs living room, dressed like an investment banker or corporate lawyer (or the ad agency head in Marriage on the Rocks) in a dark three-piece suit with French cuffs and a collar pin. He wrinkled his forehead thoughtfully and more or less answered Cronkite’s questions—the screaming tantrum having of course gone unrecorded—and generally appeared as sober as a judge.

  Edward Sorel’s cover illustration for the issue of Esquire containing Gay Talese’s great profile, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.” Sinatra wouldn’t sit for a photograph or an interview; Talese turned Frank’s evasiveness into journalistic gold. (Credit 22.4)

  This was the problem with questioning Sinatra directly. What you got were vague, well-chewed-over formulations: “What I do with my life is of my own doing. I live it the best way I can. I’ve been criticized on many, many occasions, because of—acquaintances, and what have you. But I don’t do these things to have anybody follow me in doing that same thing, is what I mean.”

  Or, in the case of the casus belli, the time-honored question (people still ask it today, long after his death; people will never stop asking) about his associations with those…acquaintances, elaborate nonanswers:

  The fact that I used to be involved was a legitimate business reason. We built a hotel in Las Vegas and finally, I just—there was so much work to be done of my own natural—vocation—pictures, singing, recording—that I just dropped all of the fringes of business.

  But I do meet all kinds of people in the world because of the natural habitat from day to day in theatrical work and night club work, in concerts, wherever I might be, in restaurants, you meet all kinds of people. So that there’s really not much to be said about that, and I think the less said the better, because it’s—there is no—there’s no answer. When I say no, it’s no; but for some reason it keeps persisting, you see. And consequently, I just said I just refuse to discuss it, because you can’t make a dent anywhere.

  Or, if you were probing into his psychology, wishful happy talk.

  CRONKITE: Do you think your boiling point is low?

  SINATRA: Not anymore. It used to be. I think that comes with a normal growing up, and the—way of living, friends, people with whom you become acquainted. I’ve always admired people who are gentle, and who have great patience, and apparently, what I’ve done is, without knowing it, is I’ve aped these people, and begun to follow that kind of line. When I say I had a low boiling point, it doesn’t mean I went around kicking dogs and old ladies, and people.

  “This is the great age o
f candor,” Paul Newman told Playboy in 1983. “Fuck candor.” Frank Sinatra felt the same way, but still they kept coming, these reporters demanding he explain himself. Voicing the same sentiment as Newman, only in 1965, prime-time television terms, he said to Cronkite, “Bogart, when he was alive, once told me…the only thing you owe the public is a good performance.”

  This he gave, playing himself (his greatest role, after all) in several of the special’s contemporary film clips. Viewers saw him as the anxious perfectionist in magnificent voice, recording “A Very Good Year”; as the man of good works, entertaining convicts at a prison outside Washington, D.C., with a loose, easy “Fly Me to the Moon”; as il padrone, jovially holding court in the back room of Jilly’s. To the apparent delight of everyone at the long table—among others, Big and Little Nancy, Tina, Sammy Davis, and Alan King—Frank recalled Sammy being blindsided by a pie in the face when the two of them guested on The Soupy Sales Show in September. It wasn’t really a very funny story: Davis was, after all, blind on one side. It was sadistic humor, Dolly Sinatra humor. Frank looked transported with joy.

  At the end of this last clip came a strikingly plaintive sound bite from a baby-voiced Nancy junior: “When you have a daddy, you kind of want him to be a daddy all the time. And sometimes, when he’s with his friends, they carry on like a bunch of kids. And it’s great they’re having a marvelous time, but that bothers me a little.”

  —

  The critics were united in their disdain for what the Associated Press’s Cynthia Lowry called “a nice little pussycat of a show.” “CBS and the public [have] been had,” wrote the Herald Tribune’s John Horn. “Tough it wasn’t. Searching it certainly wasn’t either,” the New York Post’s Bob Williams said. Variety called the broadcast “an unmitigated rave for Frankie Goodfellow, star performer, tycoon with heart of gold, family man (yet), and all-around ball-haver.”

  The Daily News’s Kay Gardella felt that Cronkite’s tough questions “were edited down to appease the temperamental star,” and the Journal American’s Jack O’Brian (New York had a lot of papers in those days) opined that the newsman’s queries “seemed gentlemanly and restrained in areas from romance (not a question about Mia Farrow) to hoodlums…CBS didn’t pinpoint the names of gangsters and others whose personalities, characters or lack of same have touched the life of this gifted, superb-singing sorehead.”

  The New York Times’s Jack Gould summarized: “Sinatra wasn’t authorized but it could have been.”

  Perhaps their pique stemmed from the vague feeling that they’d been had. “Although it seemed at first that Sinatra was genuinely concerned about the [show’s] contents,” biographer Arnold Shaw wrote, “it later appeared that he had once again given the country’s publicists a lesson in how to build audience through controversy.”

  Nearly all the reviewers mentioned Nancy junior’s wistful quotation. “His daughter Nancy’s low-keyed whimper seemed somewhat embarrassing, plaintive, even poignant,” Jack O’Brian said.

  Frank’s grand year had been a rough one for his devoted older daughter: Tommy Sands’s walkout, her breakdown and meek performance in Marriage on the Rocks, and now this. But then Little Nancy turned around and showed them all.

  —

  She had originally been signed to Reprise on the condition that she not record any rock ’n’ roll. Obediently, she cut a few novelty songs with the former Mouseketeer Annette Funicello’s producer, a man named Tutti Camarata. Nancy Sinatra “struck marinara,” in her words, with her second single, a heavily echoed, bubblegummy thing called “Like I Do,” which went to number 1 in Italy and Japan but got zero play in the United States. The record brought a few dollars in to the failing label: enough to make her papa proud, not enough to make a difference to the company or her singing career.

  By the end of 1965, though, Warner-Reprise was a hit-making machine, Nancy hadn’t panned out, and Reprise president Mo Ostin, who was beginning to acquire enough clout in the record industry that he could contemplate such a move, was about to cut her loose. Enter Duane Eddy’s producer Lee Hazlewood, a friend of Jimmy Bowen’s and a man convinced he could make a hit single with Nancy Sinatra.

  He wrote the song, a pounding rockabilly strut, and had an instrumental track made. On Friday, November 19, three nights after her little-girlish plaint was heard in the CBS documentary, Nancy went to United Recording Studio B and laid down the vocal.

  When she asked Hazlewood how she should sing the number, he said, “Like a fourteen-year-old girl in love with a forty-year-old man.” She didn’t know what he was talking about. After a polite first take, Sinatra recalled, the producer hit the talk-back button in the control booth and gave her both barrels. She’d been a married woman, he told her; she wasn’t a virgin anymore. According to some sources, he then ordered her to sing the tune as if she were “a sixteen-year-old girl who fucks truck drivers.”

  She complied. Three weeks later, “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ ” was a number 1 song. And very soon, though in real life she was still Daddy’s Little Girl, a publicity makeover had turned her into an international sex symbol, complete with blond bouffant, frosted lipstick, low-cut blouses, miniskirts, and, of course, those high white boots. Soon she would travel to Vietnam to entertain American troops, who listened to “Boots” over and over in places like Da Nang and Pleiku, counting the days and dreaming of raunchy fun with Nancy Sinatra.

  —

  Frank Sinatra: A Man and His Music—no guest stars; minimal script; just Frank, head cold and all, singing through a chronological roster of some of his greatest hits before a live audience—aired on NBC the night before Thanksgiving. The critics loved it (“An hour of consummate artistry,” wrote UPI’s Rick DuBrow) and the ratings were sky-high. All he had to do was that in which he had no equal, and nothing stood in his way.

  —

  At the end of November, Frank was back in the studio to record a new album, an LP full of songs about the moon: it would be called, obviously but affectingly, Moonlight Sinatra. Riddle wrote the charts and stood at the podium in United Recording Studio A. Frank’s cold was now just a bad memory, and Talese—who had now gotten closer than ever to his quarry—recorded his high spirits on the eve of the big birthday. “When Frank Sinatra drives to the studio, he seems to dance out of the car across the sidewalk into the front door,” the journalist wrote.

  Then, snapping his fingers, he is standing in front of the orchestra in an intimate, airtight room, and soon he is dominating every man, every instrument, every sound wave…

  When his voice is on, as it was tonight, Sinatra is in ecstasy, the room becomes electric, there is an excitement that spreads through the orchestra and is felt in the control booth where a dozen men, Sinatra’s friends, wave at him from behind the glass…

  After he is finished, the record is played back on tape, and Nancy Sinatra, who has just walked in, joins her father near the front of the orchestra to hear the playback. They listen silently, all eyes on them, the king, the princess; and when the music ends there is applause from the control booth, Nancy smiles, and her father snaps his fingers and says, kicking a foot, “Ooba-deeba-boobe-do!”

  At the end of the recording session, as the musicians filed by Sinatra to say good night, Frank—who knew them all by name and seemed to have a phenomenal recall of every detail of their personal lives—stopped the French horn player, Vince DeRosa. DeRosa had accompanied him since the Lucky Strike Your Hit Parade days on the radio.

  “Vicenzo,” Sinatra said, “how’s your little girl?”

  “She’s fine, Frank.”

  “Oh, she’s not a little girl anymore,” Sinatra corrected himself, “she’s a big girl now.”

  “Yes, she goes to college now. U.S.C.”

  “That’s great.”

  “She’s also got a little talent, I think, Frank, as a singer.”

  Sinatra was silent for a moment, then said, “Yes, but it’s very good for her to get her education first, Vicenzo.”

>   Vincent DeRosa nodded.

  “Yes, Frank,” he said, and then he said, “Well, good-night, Frank.”

  “Good-night, Vicenzo.”

  When the musicians had left, Frank met Don Drysdale, the golfer Bo Wininger, and some others in the hallway to head out for a night of drinking. First, though, he walked to the other end of the hall to say good night to Nancy, who was about to drive home in her own car.

  “After Sinatra had kissed her on the cheek, he hurried to join his friends at the door,” Talese wrote.

  Daddy’s little girl, all grown up: Lee Hazlewood, the writer of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” reportedly told Nancy Sinatra to sing the tune as if she were “a sixteen-year-old girl who fucks truck drivers.” (Credit 22.5)

  But before Nancy could leave the studio, one of Sinatra’s men, Al Silvani, a former prizefight manager, joined her.

  “Are you ready to leave yet, Nancy?”

  “Oh, thanks, Al,” she said, “but I’ll be all right.”

  “Pope’s orders,” Silvani said, holding his hands up, palms out.

  Only after Nancy had pointed to two of her friends who would escort her home, and only after Silvani recognized them as friends, would he leave.

  —

  Moonlight Sinatra was a fitting bookend to Frank’s golden year, a luminescent counterpoint to the earlier, darker albums of romantic songs. Riddle, who hadn’t arranged a full Sinatra LP since Academy Award Winners, was back in full fettle, showing that while Gordon Jenkins could tug at the heart with strings, only Nelson could make them sound like Debussy. On the edge of a new age, Sinatra was singing in a different key, walking in a different light. Clair de lune.

  —

  This is the Month of Sinatra…a sledgehammer trade and consumer promotional effort of unprecedented intensity to highlight—and sell—the most memorable anniversary in music history.