by James Kaplan
—Warner-Reprise ad in Billboard, December 1965
This is what it was like for a man whose private and public lives were as one to turn fifty.
His record label had every reason to crow: Sinatra and Jenkins had each earned a Grammy for “It Was a Very Good Year,” as had September of My Years. Two compilation albums—Sinatra ’65, consisting of singles and other sessions and released in July, and My Kind of Broadway, an LP of show tunes released in November—jumped quickly onto the charts, as did A Man and His Music, a two-LP career retrospective.
In honor of the grand birthday, the mother of his children, along with his two daughters, made an extraordinary gesture: on Sunday night, December 12, fifty years to the day after Frank Sinatra had made his perilous entrance into the world in the cold-water flat on Monroe Street in Hoboken, the two Nancys and Tina threw him a black-tie party in the Beverly Wilshire hotel’s palatial Trianon ballroom. “All of Hollywood show biz was there—and most of New York,” Nancy junior recalled. Milton Berle emceed; Jack Benny and George Burns performed. Tony Bennett sang with a full orchestra—as did Sammy Davis, who flew in from New York for the occasion and popped out of a six-foot-tall cardboard birthday cake, belting out a Sammy Cahn parody, “My Kind of Man, Sinatra Is.”
Little Nancy sang another Cahn takeoff, to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Tit-Willow”:
Who in the forties was knocking them dead?
My daddy, my daddy, my daddy.
The rug he once cut he now wears on his head.
My daddy, my daddy, my daddy.
“If Frank Sinatra had been five instead of 50 he couldn’t have been more excited,” wrote Dorothy Manners, who had now taken over Louella Parsons’s column.
Frank got a kick out of every little detail, including the way his dinner table was marked with a photograph of him in a little Lord Fauntleroy suit superimposed on a sheet of music, “Oh, Look at Me Now!”…
Hilarious highlight of the evening was a screened Walter Cronkite–type interview with [the Screen World editor] John Willis doing the questioning to “answers” clipped from Frank’s old movies. It’s funny enough for a TV fling on its own.
But here I would like to say that the star of the evening was Nancy Sinatra Sr., beautiful, glowing and gracious, who worked for weeks to make this an unforgettable night for Frank.
The only person missing was Mia.
A certain amount of chaos underlay the smiles and stage scenery in the Trianon ballroom. According to George Jacobs, Big Nancy had put her foot down when it came to the question of inviting Frank’s new girl. “Mia threw a fit, Big Nancy threw a fit, Mr. S threw a fit,” the valet recalled. “That the party ever came off at all is a miracle…At one point, however, Little Nancy prevailed on Big. Let’s make Dad happy, was her plea, and Big Nancy, ever the good sport and blessed peacemaker, relented.”
After thanking his first wife, Frank told Mia she could accompany him to his party. Overjoyed, she bought a blue chiffon gown for the occasion at a pricey Beverly Hills shop.
Then Frank junior weighed in.
Earlier in the week, Frankie had had his own big moment, opening at New York’s Basin Street East as the star of the newly christened Frank Sinatra Jr. Show, Sam Donahue having turned Tommy Dorsey’s name back to the estate. On opening night, he informed Earl Wilson he’d be flying west on Sunday, his night off, to attend his dad’s big celebration.
But having heard that Frank had relented and invited Mia, Frankie called his father in a fury, asking how he could embarrass his mother that way. Father slammed down the phone on son, Frankie stayed in New York, and Frank told Mia she’d better not come after all. Dorothy Manners’s happy talk notwithstanding, Jacobs remembered that Sammy’s popping out of the fake birthday cake gave Frank his only real smile of the evening.
—
Mia made Frank’s birthday unforgettable in her own way: when he went to her apartment after the party, he found, amid the reek of marijuana, that she had cut her flowing, waist-long ash-blond hair to less than an inch in length. In her memoir, Farrow claims she did the deed one morning before work, out of a “horror of vanity,” in her dressing room on the Peyton Place set. Putting the shorn locks in a Glad bag, she said, she turned to her dressing-room mirror. She liked the way she looked, but the hairdresser was horrified, as were the show’s producers. Mia was fitted with a wig and lectured sternly; she apologized profusely but didn’t mean any of it.
The story hit the news and blew up. Speculation was rife: Had she done it to spite Frank? Salvador Dali, from New York, called it “mythical suicide.” Farrow insists that there was no drama with Sinatra, that he loved her new look immediately.
Yet Ryan O’Neal, her co-star on the show, later insisted, “She didn’t cut it at the studio. She came in with it already cut.” And according to George Jacobs, there was drama aplenty when Frank saw Mia’s shorn scalp. “Now I really will look like a fag,” he moaned.
That would show him to disinvite her.
And who was the real center of attention.
* * *
*1 The great singer Jo Stafford, one of Dorsey’s Pied Pipers along with Frank, told me she felt Sinatra, like her, also had an innate anatomical advantage when it came to breath control: a congenitally broad rib cage.
*2 Frank went way back with Lena’s husband, the (white) conductor and former MGM music director Lennie Hayton, and had heard Horne put Hayton down in front of audiences.
*3 The founder of Dismas House, Father Charles Dismas Clark, was known as the Hoodlum Priest.
*4 Because Kilgallen had been an outspoken critic of the Warren Commission’s findings on the assassination of John F. Kennedy and had reportedly told friends that she was “about to blow the JFK case sky high,” rumors later arose that she had been murdered.
23
Here’s a song that I cannot stand. I just cannot stand this song. But what the hell.
—FRANK SINATRA, INTRODUCING “STRANGERS IN THE NIGHT,” AT A NOVEMBER 1975 CONCERT IN JERUSALEM
Time had shifted by a halftone: a difficult modulation.
The New Year began auspiciously enough. On the seventh, Sinatra returned to the Sands with the Basie Orchestra, the Count and Bill Miller on twin pianos, Quincy Jones conducting. Variety waxed ecstatic about the star-studded first night. “The showmanship vibrations of Frank Sinatra seem to mesmerize Sands by at least 99%,” its reviewer wrote, giddily if incoherently, “and it’s possible that figure was passed at his celeb-heavy preem. Even a lukewarm fan would have to admit that at his current outing he hits a new peak of personal magnetism which is superb entertainment.”
The Basie band continued to thrill Frank and audiences alike. Lacking a string section for the Riddle and Jenkins charts of such numbers as “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” and “It Was a Very Good Year,” Jones came up with a brilliant fake, bucket muting the brass section and doubling the lead trumpet melody with three flutes playing in unison. Frank smiled. There were also several new arrangements by Quincy’s old associate the trombonist and orchestrator Billy Byers: a quiet and lovely version of Johnny Mandel’s new ballad “The Shadow of Your Smile,” a polyrhythmic “Get Me to the Church on Time,” and a swinging but intimate “Where or When” that became Sinatra’s default version. The glorious show would stay on throughout January, and it was all the more glorious because Reprise was recording the concerts for Sinatra’s first live album.
Mia was with him in Vegas, in body if not quite in spirit. On their first Christmas together, the previous year, he had disappointed her with a gift of a diamond koala bear pin instead of the puppy she’d been hinting about—a cold, expensive, artificial thing instead of a warm, real one. This year his present to her was a solid-gold cigarette case, inscribed “Mia, Mia, With Love, From Francis.” She kept marijuana joints in it.
An item in Hedda Hopper’s column (one of her last; she would die in February) mentioned a Sands sighting: “At 5 a.m. you could see Mia Farrow in the dining room w
ith her sister[-in-law] and brother eating ham and eggs. With her haircut nobody recognized her.” Frank was presumably with more riotous company. Mia wrote of her alienation at seeing her proto-hippie brother and sister-in-law, in Vegas as Sinatra’s guests, their pure faces in stark contrast to the tawdry surroundings of the casino, as Frank blew twenty thousand dollars at the roulette table.
He was excess personified: What did she expect? Their sexual bond persisted; their spiritual connection had begun to fray. The age difference was mammoth enough, but there was also a sociological gulf between them. A pampered child of Hollywood artistes, she could afford to look down on the shiny things that meant so much to a parvenu Italian-American from blue-collar Hoboken.
And he continued to counter intimacy with society. Frank’s love of hosting was such, she writes, that he soon added a two-bedroom bungalow and a four-bedroom, New England-style cottage to the two octagonal outbuildings already existing on his Palm Springs property, raising the compound’s capacity to 22 guests at a time. Sinatra’s friends called him the Innkeeper.
And he ran the place like a four-star inn, with meticulously stocked bathrooms, cars on call for those who wished to go shopping, evening movie screenings. All the minute attention to detail gave her a migraine, she recalled.
That wasn’t the only thing that alienated her. In the first week of February, she obligingly played hostess at several parties Frank threw for his Palm Springs friends and pro golfers during the Bob Hope Desert Classic golf tournament: it was a nonpareil culture clash, white shoes and plaid pants versus granny glasses and love beads. Dorothy Manners (who’d now officially taken over for the eighty-four-year-old Louella Parsons) was present at one of the parties, where she observed Farrow sitting in a corner, working on her needlepoint rather than mingling. “Now and then she looks up and smiles at one of the regulars,” the columnist wrote.
She’s a quiet girl who suddenly looks like a young boy with her sheared haircut and her slacks.
It’s time for dinner, and the group follows Frank into the dining room.
Mia decides to finish the row she’s working on before putting down her hoops.
Everyone must be seated by now. And suddenly, there’s Frank.
There’s no anger in his face. Just sort of blank patience, as if he had played this scene many times.
“Are you going to join us?” he asks, “or are you going to eat that stool?”
By way of reciprocating, Frank threw her a twenty-first-birthday party at Chasen’s on the eleventh—which was really just a culture clash in a different location.
The thirty-year-old West Hollywood restaurant, with its dark-wood walls and red-leather banquettes, was old-line Hollywood at its fustiest. Sinatra hired two bands for the occasion and was the only partygoer who never danced: the first sign that something was off.
Ten days later, the couple appeared to be a couple no longer. “Don’t get a headache trying to figure out what broke up Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow,” Dorothy Manners wrote on the twenty-first.
They never were headed for marriage, at least, he wasn’t. The worlds of a 21-year-old girl and a 50-year-old man are far apart.
There was no big blow-up or argument. In fact, the whole thing was over and done with before Frank hosted the party for Mia’s 21st birthday at Chasen’s. They both carried the evening off so well, none of the guests suspected.
There were just a few things in the wind: Mia did not sit at Frank’s table. She left with Roddy McDowall. And the gift Frank gave her was a “friendship” ring that never could have been mistaken for an engagement sparkler.
In fact, there had been a blowup. At her apartment shortly before the party, Mia had suggested to Frank that they live together before they marry. He dismissed the idea out of hand, saying he could never embarrass his family that way. She had had it with his family, she told him. According to a friend of Farrow’s, she then threw a lamp at Sinatra, narrowly missing his head, and he grabbed her by the throat, raising a hand as if to strike her. She told Frank to leave, and he walked out.
In her memoir she writes that the particulars of their first breakup “were absurdly insignificant, even then”—a statement more revealing about her wish not to discuss the particulars than about the event itself. She attributes the split to a mutual “chasm of insecurities” and an inability to talk about their differences. There was no animosity, she insists, just a familiar numbness and resignation.
And a flying lamp, and a grabbed throat.
She began to see another man, she writes. He was “delightful” and “not at all frightening.” And young and brilliant and funny, just like the rest of his set. She was particularly struck by how little everybody drank. On her Easter break from Peyton Place, Mia and her new friend went to Rome and Venice.
Her new friend was Mike Nichols. At thirty-four, Nichols had recently put aside a thriving stand-up comedy career with Elaine May to become the hottest young director around, first on Broadway (Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple) and now in the movies, with the recently completed Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. With his quiet, dry wit and courtly ironic manner, the Berlin-born Nichols could not have been more different from Frank Sinatra, except in one respect: he was a powerful show-business star to whom the twenty-one-year-old Farrow deemed it worthy to hitch her wagon, even if temporarily.
“With a week’s vacation from ‘Peyton Place,’ where do you think Mia Farrow went?” Harrison Carroll wrote in mid-April.
To Rome, where she saw a lot of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. I hear she was their house guest, but am not positive of that.
Furthermore, and this is even more intriguing, Mia did the town with famed director Mike Nichols, whom she met several weeks ago in Hollywood…
Important days are coming up in Mia’s life. It hasn’t been confirmed yet, but I am assured she is quitting ‘Peyton Place’ in June, and will substitute a deal where she does one picture a year for 20th Century–Fox.
Frank had had her hanging out with Bob Hope and Dinah Shore in Palm Springs; with Nichols, she got to spend time around Liz and even more thrillingly, Dick, who could spout Shakespeare or Dylan Thomas (and match Sinatra drink for drink). She was heading for a movie contract, moving up in the world, Frank or no Frank.
—
While she was away (and as Talese’s Esquire piece came out), he recorded a monster hit.
The German orchestra leader, songwriter, and record producer Bert Kaempfert is credited with composing the lilting, demonically catchy tune, for the score of a James Garner spy movie called A Man Could Get Killed. Kaempfert was a supreme operator in the European music business, a giant of easy listening with a sure ear for an infectious melody: he was not only the first man to record the Beatles (backing the singer Tony Sheridan on a rockin’ cover of the old chestnut “My Bonnie”) but the composer of Nat King Cole’s lamentable but chart-topping final hit, “L-O-V-E.”
When Reprise’s Jimmy Bowen first heard Kaempfert’s new tune, he sat up and took notice. “I said, ‘Man, get me the lyric on that, and I’ll do it with Sinatra.’ I’d never said that to anybody because, obviously, nobody knows what Frank is going to do till he says what he’s going to do. [But] I knew that melody [would be a hit]. So they sent me a couple of lyrics I didn’t like, but then finally they got me one that I thought was right. And we went in and did that song.”
The song was “Strangers in the Night,” and Sinatra hated it the minute he heard it.
“I don’t want to sing this,” he told Sarge Weiss, who first brought him the sheet music. “It’s a piece of shit.”
But he was conflicted. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Frank had been a more reliable seller of albums than of singles: where the latter were concerned, he hadn’t even scratched the stratosphere since 1956, with “Hey! Jealous Lover,” a number 6. (His last number 1 single had been “Five Minutes More” in 1946.) He wanted back.
And Jimmy Bowen knew how
to make hit singles; Bowen and the arranger Ernie Freeman had put Frank back on the Billboard singles charts, in a modest way, with “Softly, as I Leave You,” then Bowen and Freeman had given Dean a number 1 with “Everybody Loves Somebody.” And as much as Frank loved Dean (and as much as he loved Nancy junior, who was kicking ass worldwide with “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ ”), Frank badly wanted to be back atop the pops.
He decided to record the thing.
Freeman wrote an arrangement, and the date was set at United Recording for April 11. Between the month with Basie at the Sands and a subsequent gig at the Fontainebleau, Sinatra hadn’t set foot in the studios for four months.
On Sunday night, April 10, Jimmy Bowen went to dinner at Martoni’s, a Hollywood pasta restaurant popular in the music industry, and ran into the singer Jack Jones—the guy Frank had touted, in his Life piece, as having real breakout potential. Jones told Bowen how excited he was about a single he’d just recorded: “Strangers in the Night.” Copies had already been mailed out to all the leading radio stations. “I must have turned white,” Bowen recalled. “My heart started pounding. I mumbled something like, ‘Yeah, well, great. Good luck with it.’ ”
He phoned Sinatra.
“I don’t give a damn if God recorded it, we’re gonna do it!” Frank said.
He did it. With one hitch: two-thirds of the way through, there was a difficult modulation—a halftone-up key change that Frank couldn’t quite (or didn’t really want to) get the hang of. Bowen suggested an ingenious solution: “Frank, sing it right up to the key change and cut. Then we’ll give you a bell tone and we’ll go from there in the new key to the end.”
It worked. Bowen then “set up an all-night mastering session to follow Sinatra’s recording,” Stan Cornyn writes. The producer then made a couple dozen quick dubs—acetates—of the single. In the meantime,
