Sinatra
Page 103
And I started, metaphorically, “And now the end is near.” I read a lot of periodicals, and I noticed everything was “my this” and “my that.” We were in the “me generation,” and Frank became the guy for me to use to say that. I used words I would never use: “I ate it up and spit it out.” But that’s the way he talked.
At least it was the way he talked when he was trying to sound tough. The words of the songs he sang, so carefully studied and taken to heart, were where he expressed his higher self. But Anka, thinking the new lyric was “all him,” phoned Frank at Caesars and said, “I’ve got something really special for you.”
Sinatra had misgivings. The song “really had nothing to do with my life whatsoever,” he would later say. “I know it’s a very big hit—and I love having big hits—but every time I get up to sing that song I grit my teeth, because no matter what the image may seem to be, I hate boastfulness in others. I hate immodesty, and that’s how I feel every time I sing the song.”
Still, his inner circle convinced him it could make a good single, and in a rare afternoon session on the second-to-last day of the year, with Bill Miller conducting a forty-piece orchestra, Frank recorded “My Way” in one take.
Ending a year that had begun in pain and sorrow with a cry from someone else’s heart.
* * *
*1 Reportedly, the inscription Mrs. Kennedy had placed on the mantelpiece read, “In this room lived John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, during the two years, 10 months and two days he was President of the United States.” Chicago Tribune, May 22, 1994.
*2 In his 2003 memoir, co-written with William Stadiem, Jacobs asserts that it was the Candy Store where he wound up, after first stopping by the Luau and the Daisy. But because Jacobs spoke to Kitty Kelley in the early 1980s, when his memory was fresher, I’ve stuck with his first story.
26
Out in the garden munching on the green green grass was Frank’s adorable Christmas present, twin Sicilian donkeys, which he named Cosa and Nostra.
—SUZY KNICKERBOCKER, IN HER COLUMN OF JANUARY 10, 1969
The desert was his home now; life had changed. If Frank Sinatra’s life was a continual process of shedding intimates, a periodic molting, the company he gathered around him that Christmas spoke volumes about who he was becoming and who he wished to be.
For their part, Frank’s glittering coterie of society friends, all of them wealthy and well along in years, were thrilled to be with him—he was Sinatra, for God’s sake. The raffish charge he carried was also an important part of his aura. The society columnist Suzy Knickerbocker chronicled the meeting of the two worlds. “Just before Christmas when the snow flies in the East and the smog smogs in the West,” she wrote, archly, in early January, “a brilliant, tightly interlaced little group from both coasts, carrying baskets filled with goodies, beats its way through the woods to Grandmother Frank Sinatra’s Palm Springs house to spend the jolly holiday season.”
Suzy, a.k.a. Aileen Mehle, was a petite, attractive blonde of a certain age—forty-four, to be exact—who affected a plummy, sardonic tone in her chronicles of the wealthy and celebrated but softened her pitch considerably when the subject was Frank Sinatra, whom she had now and then dated. This closeness to the subject gave her a big leg up over Earl Wilson, whose fortunes with Frank had faded fast after his unfortunate attack of candor in the Fontainebleau episode. In return for Mehle’s kindnesses, Frank not only afforded her most-favored-columnist status but brought her right into the fold. It was a standing that allowed her to be both observer and participant during that season’s festivities on Wonder Palms Road—a fatally conflicted perspective on the face of it, but then the papers weren’t paying her for journalistic objectivity.
It was an era when society still seemed to matter, before mere coarse celebrity had become the coin of the realm. Mehle described the sparkling company, and Sinatra’s five-house desert pleasure dome, and his hospitality, in lavish, loving detail, and the effect was (and is) not just envy inducing but queasy making, like being force-fed foie gras or caviar. You see and feel Frank’s environment but search in vain for the messy humanity in it. “Sinatra is much much more than a superlative, totally charming host; he is an incredible innkeeper who never misses a trick,” the columnist gushed.
The Sinatra compound radiates around the main house, where the master lives, tends bar, and presides at the cocktail hour and where the group lunches and dines in the beautiful new dining room lined with paintings…
To the left of the main house, which faces a backdrop of mountains looking as though they were placed there especially for the occasion, is the great hall, an enormous room with a roaring fireplace, a roaring bar and a tinkling piano. Here you can see a movie every night or listen to records on the Discomatic that Mrs. Loel Guinness gave to Frank last year.
Hooked onto the great hall and marked with a bronze nameplate is the Yul Brynner room.
Yul couldn’t make it this year, Suzy wrote, nor could the Guinnesses, who were entertaining their grandchildren in Palm Beach, nor the Leland Haywards, who were producing a play in New York. Truman Capote had been expected but had motored across the country instead of flying and arrived “just in time to miss everything.”
Fortunately, Mehle wrote, everyone else turned up: the Bennett Cerfs, who shared Cerf Cottage, their home away from home, with the Armand Deutsches “of Beverly Hills and the Sears, Roebuck fortune. Mr. and Mrs. Freddie Brisson (Rosalind Russell) were tucked away in Christmas Tree House, as were Mr. and Mrs. William Goetz, the czar and czarina of Beverly Hills society.”
And the Joe Mankiewiczes and the Mike Romanoffs, in Christmas Tree House; and Claudette Colbert, in Hayward House; and Arthur and Bubbles Hornblow, in solitary splendor, in the house that bore their name.
Had Capote made it, he would have had a lot to write about. He also would have been the only guest besides Mehle under fifty.
“Out in the garden munching on the green green grass,” the columnist concluded, “was Frank’s adorable Christmas present”—she didn’t say from whom—“twin Sicilian donkeys, which he named Cosa and Nostra. They are so identical, northbound or southbound, that sometimes they can’t tell each other apart.”
And they beat the hell out of a London taxicab.
—
Back in the East, the Old World intruded wrenchingly. In New York a few days after New Year’s, Nancy Sinatra was taping a Kraft Music Hall special when Frank and Jilly showed up at NBC’s Studio 8H. Pleasantly surprised to see her father, she hugged and kissed him—then suddenly saw that Frank wasn’t smiling; his eyes looked bloodshot and tired. “Please call your grandfather,” he told her.
Marty Sinatra, seventy-six, had been hospitalized with heart trouble—an aneurysm of the aorta. When his condition worsened, Frank had his father rushed to Methodist Hospital in Houston, home to the famed heart-transplant surgeon Dr. Michael DeBakey. But the elder Sinatra, a lifelong asthmatic, soon developed emphysema, and there was little DeBakey could do for him. Frank could do little, either, but sit by the old man’s bed, powerless for all his power, holding his father’s hand as he gasped for air.
Anthony Martin Sinatra, born Saverio Antonino Martino Sinatra in Lercara Friddi, Sicily, in 1894,*1 died on January 26. Small (three or four inches shorter than Frank), gruff, taciturn, and illiterate, his arms covered in tattoos from his days as a bantamweight prizefighter, the former Hoboken fire captain had been a model of masculinity, but Frank Sinatra was in almost every way his mother’s son: impatient, irascible to the point of explosiveness, brilliantly verbal. In his sixties, he would recall listening to his parents through the bedroom wall as a child. “Sometimes I’d be lying awake in the dark and I’d hear them talking,” he said. “Or rather, I’d hear her talking and him listening. Mostly it was politics or some worthless neighbor. I remember her ranting about how Sacco and Vanzetti were framed. Because they were Italians. Which was probably true. All I’d hear from my father was like a grunt…He’d jus
t say, Eh. Eh.”
Marty Sinatra, who had once kicked the teenage Frank out of the house for being a layabout, had taken a long time to approve of the strange profession his son had chosen. He kept himself to himself. But he had come to be proud of his only child; and a father was a father, and one more hedge against mortality was gone.
Her grandfather’s funeral was nightmarish, Nancy remembered; a large crowd descended upon Holy Name Cemetery in Jersey City, where the scene was “pure bedlam.” The chaos was Dolly’s doing, a boyhood friend of Frank’s felt. “Frank was pissed at his ma,” Joey D’Orazio said. “She had told too many people too many things about the details of the funeral, made too many announcements, and so the scene was madness. There were cops and firemen everywhere, and it was a circus, something I know Frank would never have wanted.”
There were celebrities, of course. Sammy Davis, in a Nehru jacket and fur coat. Twenty-five limousines, ten of them just carrying the floral arrangements sent from Vegas and L.A. Bodyguards with walkie-talkies, TV cameras and reporters with microphones. At the center of it all was Dolly, grieving without restraint. Frank and Jilly had to hold her back when she tried to throw herself on the casket; Frank grew visibly annoyed as she screamed, “Marty, Marty, please don’t leave me!”
“Hurry up, Bob. Hurry up,” he told the priest, Father Robert Perrella. The priest rushed through what was left of the service; the family managed to hustle Dolly into a car.
Back at her grandmother’s house, Nancy Sinatra recalled, the man she knew as Uncle Vincent*2 served food to around sixty mourners in Marty’s beloved basement bar, amid many framed family photographs. Her father had been quietly strong through many crises, Nancy writes; “But when his father died, something snapped.”
Frank began to lobby Dolly to move to Palm Springs. He would build her a house next to his, he told her. She resisted. It was too hot there in the summertime, she said. He told her he would also buy her a condo in La Jolla or Del Mar, near the racetrack. Still she balked. She didn’t like Frank’s friends, she told an acquaintance. “I don’t want to move out there with all those big shots,” she said. And what about her friends? How could she leave them behind? Frank told her he would fly any of them out, anytime she wanted.
Then the most serious objection of all: How could she leave Marty’s grave untended? Who would take him flowers? Frank said he would have his father’s remains moved to Desert Memorial Park Cemetery in Cathedral City, just down the road from Wonder Palms Road, if she would reconsider.
It would take more than a year, but in the end she would give in.
—
In the wake of his father’s death, Sinatra felt intensely vulnerable. “He became a little more quiet, a little less ebullient,” Tina remembered. “It was as though a piece of him had been chipped away.” “In his down periods,” Earl Wilson wrote, “he feared that he’d ‘had it’ professionally and physically, as well as politically…He confided to one friend that his voice now got tired after three straight nights of singing. Were the pipes going? The pain in his right hand—the hand that held the microphone—actually scared him.”
The pain stemmed from the tissue disorder Dupuytren’s contracture, a memento from karate chopping a table in The Manchurian Candidate, and just one more thing that would keep him from making movies for the next two years.
But to counteract the gloom that followed his father’s death—and perhaps the gloom of the new Nixonian era—Sinatra consoled himself with his favorite occupation. Between early February and late March, he recorded as though his life depended on it, laying down thirty-four new tracks in the course of ten studio sessions. And he began on a high note, bringing back his beloved friend and fellow genius Antonio Carlos Jobim.
Claus Ogerman had moved on to composing and conducting symphonic music; in his stead, Jobim brought in the twenty-six-year-old Brazilian composer and arranger Eumir Deodato. Morris Stoloff, a veteran of many movie-soundtrack sessions, conducted. The change from Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim was small but discernible: the ten songs Frank recorded on the nights of February 11, 12, and 13 (all of them, this time, Jobim compositions) were slightly more propulsive than the tunes on the earlier album but no less rapturously beautiful. From “One Note Samba,” with accompanying guitar and vocal (and a clever English lyric) by the composer; to the gorgeous “Wave,” on which Sinatra several times hits a spectacularly low E-flat, a full octave below the tonic; to “Drinking Water (Aqua de Beber),” in which Frank sings a couple of lines in Brazilian Portuguese; to the haunting and brilliantly strange “Song of the Sabia,” the three sessions produced a bouquet of small masterpieces, a collection to stand proudly beside Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim.
Except that Reprise—whose suits went as far as having an album cover made—never released the LP, which was to have been titled Sinatra-Jobim.
No one can say just why. As Will Friedwald points out, the earlier Sinatra-Jobim set “had charted quite respectably at number 19—and this in the face of formidable competition” from rock LPs on the pop-music charts. What was wrong with this beautiful new album? “Perhaps Sinatra wasn’t happy with the cover,” Friedwald writes, “which depicted him leaning against a Greyhound bus (what were they thinking?), or perhaps he wanted to remake ‘Desafinado.’ ”
“Desafinado”—“Out of Tune” in English; English lyric by Gene Lees—was a duet, with Frank and Tom (Jobim’s nickname) singing successive lines, addressed to a disapproving, elusive lover:
If you say my singing is off-key, my love,
You will hurt my feelings, don’t you see, my love.
It’s a thoroughly charming take, with Sinatra at his vocal best and Jobim—whose singing was imbued with a composer’s passion for his own music, yet could never be described as polished—winsomely illustrating the concept of out-of-tune-ness. Yet once the recording was in the can, the idea of two men singing love lyrics in the same song alarmed someone: quite conceivably Frank, though no one knows. “Somebody didn’t like the implication that there was some homosexuality or something, because of the way they were singing the lyrics to each other,” recalled the engineer Lee Herschberg, who worked on the session. “It was a wonderful take, too.”
Two years later, in 1971, Reprise would put seven of the sessions’ ten numbers—all except for “Desafinado,” “Bonita,” and “The Song of the Sabia”—on the A-side of an album called Sinatra & Company. The B-side, unfortunately, consisted of seven of Sinatra and Don Costa’s lowlights: the kind of soft-pop tunes that would give 1970s music the bad name it mostly deserved.
—
Five days after bidding farewell to his friend Tom, Frank reconvened with Don Costa to start building an album around “My Way,” which was now getting airplay as a single. Thanks in no small part to the arranger’s pliability, the LP would be a decidedly mixed bag. On the plus side, Sinatra’s tender reading of the Brazilian composer Luiz Bonfá’s “Day in the Life of a Fool” (given an English lyric by Carl Sigman but best known as “Manhã de Carnaval,” the theme to the movie Black Orpheus) was as fine as anything he’d done with Jobim. Cahn and Van Heusen’s pretty ballad “All My Tomorrows” was a number Frank had recorded for the 1959 film A Hole in the Head: while he’d sung it more beautifully then, the 1969 version was deeper and darker, sadder but wiser. And his version of Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday” was a feeling and respectful cover of the historic song, if not historic itself.
It was when the album moved up-tempo that things got problematic. Sinatra took Michel Legrand’s “Watch What Happens,” in most hands a hushed and sensitive ballad, at a lope—the dreaded businessman’s bounce—and, on top of Costa’s undistinguished chart, managed to drain all the meaning from the song. (In the bargain, he was persistently flat.) His “For Once in My Life,” which made you long for Stevie Wonder, had exactly the same problem. And his bluesy-growly “Hallelujah, I Love Her So” was better, but nothing to make Ray Charles quake in his shoes.
(And Paul Simon didn’t, at first, appreciate the joke. “Paul told me many years later that he was quite upset that Sinatra had changed his lyrics,” the producer Phil Ramone recalled, “and that he had every intention of suing him over it. And when he told me the story, he was kind of saying, ‘Boy, was that naïve, or what?’ ”)
—
“Putnam will publish ‘The Godfather,’ by Mario Puzo, ‘The story of a Cosa Nostra “Family’ ” with an internationally known male singer as a prominent fictionalized character,” the columnist Jack O’Brian had written the previous September. “The last novel to drag The Voice even deeper through the muck, ‘The King,’ was a fictional bore and a disgrace.”
The Godfather, of course, was neither, and Frank Sinatra was sufficiently concerned about the novel’s portrayal of a Mafia-linked singer named Johnny Fontane that in the fall of 1968, soon after Paramount optioned the movie rights to the book—still in manuscript at the time—he had Mickey Rudin demand to see pages. Putnam refused.