Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  —

  That summer, Gay Talese and his wife went to a party for Rod McKuen at Phyllis and Bennett Cerf’s country house in Mount Kisco. Nan Talese was McKuen’s editor at Random House and Bennett Cerf was her boss, and the occasion was celebratory. “McKuen was a star, because he was making a lot of money for Random House,” Gay Talese recalled. “I was invited because of Nan. It was just a little summertime party—dinner was under a tent, near the pool house. I don’t think there were more than eight people there.”

  To the writer’s complete surprise, Frank Sinatra was one of the guests.

  “He never said hello to me, never looked at me,” Talese said. “It was the middle of the afternoon, he had a radio, and he was listening to a baseball game, turned up very loud.”

  Talese believed that Sinatra’s rudeness had less to do with any annoyance about the Esquire piece than something else. “He probably felt awkward, because he was in the home of a person whose friendship he courted,” he said. “Sinatra and I had a lot in common. We’re the sons of immigrants, and Sinatra was a bit of a social climber. And the people he didn’t need to climb, he paid no attention to.”

  —

  It was a spooky summer, the last of the age of Aquarius, dense with event: the moon landing, Woodstock, Chappaquiddick, Abbey Road, the Manson murders. Frank’s barber, Jay Sebring, would be one of the four people butchered along with Sharon Tate over the terrible midnight of August 8–9.

  From June through mid-August, Frank took one of his longest breaks, cruising up and down the East Coast on his new eighty-five-foot yacht, the Roma, this time with a mystery blonde instead of Mia. He watched the Apollo 11 takeoff at Cape Kennedy; he took the Cerfs along to drop in on the William Styrons in Martha’s Vineyard; he sailed back down to Vero Beach, Florida, with entourage and the comedian Phil Harris. While relaxing off Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, he was served with yet another subpoena, this time to appear before a committee investigating organized crime in the Garden State. He had Mickey Rudin put the pests off.

  On August 16, he jetted to Houston to emcee a giant tribute to the Apollo 11 astronauts at the Astrodome. (To Frank’s delight, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins had listened to the Basie-Sinatra “Fly Me to the Moon” on a live feed from space while the whole world tuned in.) Two days later, he was back at Western Recorders for the first time since March, laying down a couple of Teddy Randazzo songs, the forgettable “Forget to Remember” and the catchy “Goin’ Out of My Head,” a big hit for Little Anthony and the Imperials in 1964 and soon to be a moneymaker, albeit of the bottom-of-the-chart variety (number 79 on Billboard), for Sinatra.

  His rendition, with a pleasant enough Don Costa arrangement, was competent but bland. “Goin’ Out of My Head” was a sound more than a song: meaning was not part of its essence. He had sought meaning his whole life—in fame, in love, in the words of the songs he sang. Of the three, the third had been the most reliable; no longer.

  He was drifting, seeking. “For the second time in his life, his career had reached a crossroads,” Tina wrote. “The Beatles were outselling him in the record stores. The nightclub era—his era—stood in eclipse, and he’d yet to plot his next move.”

  And the next week, he was back in New York to begin an album that would show how far he was willing to reach for something new.

  —

  The first meeting between Frank Sinatra and Frankie Valli, the pint-size, helium-voiced lead singer of the Four Seasons, occurred at Jilly’s in the mid-1960s, when, according to one source, Valli simply had the temerity to go up and introduce himself. Dinner, drinks, and friendship ensued. When Frank expressed curiosity about the group’s monumental success, Valli attributed much of it to the skills of the Seasons’ co-founder Bob Gaudio. “He told Sinatra they had all these hit records because Bob Gaudio wrote and produced all their songs,” recalled the producer-arranger Charles Calello, who had done most of the charts on the group’s hits. “And Sinatra said, ‘Well, could he write some songs for me?’ ”

  Frank would have done well to inquire more closely. Bob Gaudio had co-written some of the Four Seasons’ biggest hits—songs like “Walk like a Man,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” and the million-seller “Can’t Take My Eyes off You”—with the prolific songwriter Bob Crewe. In the late ’60s, though, Gaudio began working with a talented but quirky lyricist named Jake Holmes. Together, Gaudio and Holmes created the Four Seasons’ 1969 concept album, The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette, which eschewed love songs to take on heavy subjects like war and racial tensions in tracks that ran as long as six minutes plus. The LP was a resounding flop.

  Gaudio and Holmes got to work writing some of their new songs for Sinatra. When Frank heard four of them, he was pleased. “And then,” Calello said, “Gaudio laid on him the concept of doing it as the Watertown album.”

  Another concept album, that is, a song cycle revolving around a fictional character with a problem (the singer) and set in a fictional small town (and not, as has often been written, in Watertown, New York). “Jake and I discussed what would be an interesting thing to do for Sinatra,” Bob Gaudio recalled. “What we could do that he hadn’t done before. We just hit on putting him in a small town. Having a small-town approach and taking it down as much as we could to basic life in middle America. We tried to strip all of the gloss and sheen off of it.”

  It was a radical departure for Frank. “In a series of soliloquies, the nameless narrator tells us his heartbreaking story of personal loss and unrealized redemption,” the Sinatra archivist Ed O’Brien wrote in the album’s liner notes.

  His wife has left him and their two boys for the lure of the big city, and her absence hangs palpably in the air. While it is altogether understandable why someone would flee the stark and dreary landscape of Watertown, our empathy rests with the eloquent everyman left behind. He is a desperate man, the personification of all that is pedestrian in a small town, a solitary figure who suffers unbearable torment and despair. But, in expressing timeless sentiments to a love that is hopelessly lost, he finds salvation in the written word and an extraordinary transformation takes place. In his grief, he achieves a deeper understanding of himself, and a transcendent awareness of what he has lost and why. There is a terrible beauty in all of this.

  But there were a number of problems. The first was that Sinatra was initially not aware that it was a concept album; he thought that Gaudio and Holmes had just written him ten new—downbeat and literary—songs. “I don’t think he was expecting it to be what it was, which was a story,” Gaudio said. “He fell in love with something. We never really discussed it in detail, Frank and I. I don’t know what turned him on to wanting to do it; I don’t think he looked at it as being contemporary commercial. It was pretty obvious that it wasn’t one hit song after another. I think he fell in love with the concept, the love story.”

  It was an admirable concept on the face of it. The problem was that Gaudio and Holmes were skillful tunesmiths, but that was it. (Gaudio’s zenith had been the terrific pop tunes he’d written with Bob Crewe; going deep was a wrong turn.) In the hands of great songwriters like Rodgers and Hammerstein, a musical soliloquy could become a transcendent work of art. And in the late 1960s, important contemporary writers such as Lennon and McCartney (“She’s Leaving Home”), Jimmy Webb (“Wichita Lineman”), and Joni Mitchell (anything in her oeuvre) were turning biographical or autobiographical narratives into great popular music.

  But the overarching problem was Sinatra’s failure to identify completely with the material. He was looking for something new, but his artistic sensibility probably told him, deep down, that he was barking up the wrong tree.

  Problems cropped up early. Calello and an arranger named Joe Scott wrote the charts for the album, and Frank did three New York sessions at the end of August, but they didn’t sit well with him. “He felt he could do better in terms of his singing,” Friedwald writes, “and not wanting to hang around the East Coast (Calello remembers so
mebody was trying to serve him with some papers at the time), he decided to overdub new vocal tracks in Los Angeles.”

  In fact, he had already been served with the New Jersey subpoena, and Rudin had had his appearance postponed until August 19. But that day had come and gone, and the East was suddenly beginning to feel hot. Frank was annoyed and distracted, whether it was the fault of the organized-crime investigation or Watertown itself. Still, overdubbing was an extreme measure, one he’d resorted to very seldom in his career, and with good reason. Standing in the midst of his fellow musicians while he recorded was one of his greatest pleasures in life; standing alone in a studio and singing with headphones on ran a very distant second.

  “The only album we ever did that he overdubbed altogether was Watertown, because those parts were done in New York and they shipped the tapes over here,” said Lee Herschberg, who engineered the LP. “He did not enjoy having to do that. I don’t think he liked that project anyway. Those were not the best songs in the world for him to sing. They were difficult songs to sing. It felt like he never really connected with that project.”

  “He didn’t know the songs well enough,” Calello insisted. “One of the things I found out about working with him is that it took him a long time to learn a song. But I had spoken to Sammy Cahn about that. I asked him, ‘How long does it take you to teach a song to Sinatra?’ He said, ‘Well, Frank doesn’t like to speed-learn a song. He takes his time so he can really get it, to appreciate the value of the song. Sometimes it takes him a good week before he gets it under his belt.’ So for him to learn all originals for a new album was a major task.”

  But learning the songs wasn’t the problem; feeling them was. In the end, the first-person singer, the I, of Watertown—unlike the I of “Soliloquy” or even “Ol’ Man River”—wasn’t Frank Sinatra or anyone like him. The LP was a worthy try, and an interesting anomaly in his career, but, as Reprise neared its tenth anniversary, hardly an ornament to the label: Sinatra’s latest album sold far worse than any he’d ever made—thirty-five thousand units. “That was unheard-of,” Mo Ostin said. But there was a reason for it.

  From mid-September through early October he played Caesars, then headed back out to sea—the Caribbean—aboard the Roma. It was an interesting time to be taking an ocean voyage, because there was a warrant out for his arrest in New Jersey.

  Lawmakers in Frank’s native state were annoyed at him. After they’d ordered him to appear at a private hearing of the State Commission of Investigation on August 19, Mickey Rudin had obtained a month’s delay. But on September 19, instead of gracing the hushed halls of Trenton with his presence, Sinatra was opening at Caesars’ Circus Maximus. The superior court judge Frank J. Kingfield issued the warrant—enforceable only in New Jersey—on October 14, charging him with contempt. It was a cut-and-dried legal term, but in Frank’s case it had real meaning.

  That same day, in Beverly Hills, Jim Mahoney said, “Mr. Sinatra left New York City this morning for the Caribbean and at present is unaware of the situation. We are trying to locate him now and I am certain that when he is advised of the matter he will have some comment.”

  Amid a collective throat clearing, the Associated Press managed to locate him in Freeport, Bahamas, where Frank and his retinue had taken up residence in an eight-room suite at the Lucayan Beach Hotel. “He went yachting Wednesday aboard a chartered boat, then gambled at several casinos,” the AP reported. “Newsmen who tried to talk with Sinatra about the New Jersey subpoena were brushed aside. A bodyguard warned a photographer for the Nassau Tribune not to take any pictures.”

  While Frank relaxed in Freeport, his lawyers went into overdrive, filing suit in federal court to have the New Jersey State Commission of Investigation itself declared unconstitutional and asking for a temporary restraining order to keep the commission from taking any action. They also requested a permanent injunction to block any appearance by Sinatra before the body in the future.

  The commission rattled its saber back, threatening to have Frank indicted for contempt and extradited to New Jersey.

  A week later, back in Los Angeles, Sinatra issued a statement that was by turns passionate, sympathetic, and disingenuous. “For many years every time some Italian names are involved in any inquiry I get a subpoena,” he said. “I appear. I am asked questions about scores of persons unknown to me. I am asked questions based on rumors and events which have never happened. I am subjected to the type of publicity I do not desire and do not seek.”

  He was willing, he said, to answer “any and all appropriate questions” by deposition or personal interview. But, he continued, “I am not willing to become part of any three-ring circus which will necessarily take place if I appear before the state commission of investigation in New Jersey, whether the hearings be public or private.

  “Notwithstanding the fact that I am of Italian descent, I do not have any knowledge of the extent or the manner in which ‘organized crime’ functions in the State of New Jersey or whether there is such a thing as ‘organized crime.’ ”

  The wrangling would go on for the next four months; the case would eventually go to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Frank would lose on appeal.

  —

  There was much Sinatra-family togetherness that season. In Vegas, August 29 had been designated, with grand hyperbole, “The Night of the Thousand Sinatras.” Actually it was only three, though that was plenty: Frank was booked at Caesars Palace; Frank Jr., at the Frontier; and Nancy was making her first nightclub appearance, at the newly opened International. The largest hotel in the world, it was the brainchild of Howard Hughes’s fellow mogul and archrival Kirk Kerkorian; the corporatization of Las Vegas was accelerating.

  On October 19, as Frank’s legal war with the State of New Jersey raged, he appeared with Frankie on a CBS television special, Frank Sinatra Jr. with Family and Friends. (Around the same time, newspapers carried the story that Mia Farrow was expecting a child with André Previn; the two would marry the following September.) On December 12, Nancy junior threw her father a fifty-fourth-birthday party, and over the Christmas holidays the entire family—Frank, Frankie, Nancy senior and Nancy junior, Tina, and Dolly—went to Hawaii together. “But don’t get your hopes up,” wrote Hollywood columnist Norma Lee Browning. “It’s just a family affair and not a rekindling of the old flame—between Frank and Nancy Sr.”

  Nevertheless, it was the first time in a long time that he hadn’t spent the holiday with a wife or steady girl. One might almost think that he was growing staid.

  * * *

  *1 In their book Sinatra: The Life, Summers and Swan speculate that Frank’s father was born two years after another son by the same name who died soon after birth—hence the birth date of 1892 sometimes assigned to Marty. To compound the confusion, his gravestone lists his birth date as 1893.

  *2 Martin Sinatra’s cousin from the Old Country Vincent Mazzola, a shell-shocked World War I veteran mysteriously nicknamed Chit-U, had moved in with Dolly and Marty in around 1926.

  27

  HE’S HERE

  —MARQUEE AT CAESARS PALACE, 1970

  Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had fallen a long way since Frank Sinatra had sung and danced in its movie musicals of the 1940s. After the studio dropped him as damaged goods, it bumped through the television age, battling the encroachments of the small screen by producing big-budget epics, some of which, like Ben-Hur and Doctor Zhivago, succeeded, while others, like Mutiny on the Bounty and King of Kings, did not. Then came the corporate raiders. In 1966, Seagram’s Edgar M. Bronfman bought a controlling interest in MGM, and in late 1968 he appointed a thirty-eight-year-old studio chief named Louis Polk, a Harvard MBA and a former top executive at General Mills.

  Louis Polk knew a lot more about the cereal business than he did about the motion-picture business, a fact evidenced by the laudable but clearly misguided high-mindedness he displayed on his brief watch. In 1969, the studio commissioned adaptations of Saul Bellow’s novel The Adventures of Augie March
, Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, André Malraux’s Man’s Fate, and the experimental novelist David Markson’s “anti-Western,” The Ballad of Dingus Magee. Not long afterward—around the same time the tycoon Kirk Kerkorian purchased a 40 percent stake in MGM and began jockeying for power with Bronfman—MGM’s accountants realized the studio was about to record a loss of $19 million. In the midst of this corporate ferment, the studio cut loose a number of projects, but The Ballad of Dingus Magee was not one of them.

  Markson’s novel, subtitled Being the Immortal True Saga of the Most Notorious and Desperate Bad Man of the Olden Days, His Blood-Shedding, His Ruination of Poor Helpless Females, & Cetera, was a postmodern picaresque, with a scabrous, surrealistic comic sensibility—a tone appropriate to the Vietnam era, the age of antiheroism and psychedelia. A screen adaptation would, of necessity, focus on the novel’s broad comedy rather than the pleasures of the text. Toward that end, in late 1969, MGM signed the director Burt Kennedy—a specialist in Westerns who’d recently helmed a comedic entry in the genre, the James Garner vehicle Support Your Local Sheriff—and a writing team consisting of the brothers Tom and Frank Waldman, who had penned the screenplay for the 1968 Blake Edwards farce The Party, as well as episodes of I Dream of Jeannie, Gilligan’s Island, and McHale’s Navy. Joining the Waldmans was the novelist Joseph Heller, who’d written Catch-22 and should have known better.

  Frank Sinatra, too, should have known better. Instead, a few days before his fifty-fourth birthday, he signed on to play Dingus Magee (who in the novel was nineteen) and in a rare lapse of business judgment forewent his usual $1 million fee in exchange for a larger percentage of the box-office gross.

  —

  As the daughter of MGM’s founder and the closest thing to a crown princess the movie capital had, Edith Mayer Goetz was imbued with a hauteur that could only accrue to one who had grown up, along with the movies, as motion-picture royalty. After her husband, Bill, had broken free from Louis B. Mayer’s gravity and established himself as one of Hollywood’s biggest producers, the Goetzes had become immensely wealthy: they owned racehorses and a legendary art collection; they gave the most glittering parties in the movie capital. They had been friends with Frank Sinatra for almost fifteen years when Bill Goetz died of cancer in August 1969. And after a discreet interval, Frank had begun courting Edie Goetz.