Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  “Will you write that book?”

  He shook his head, doubtfully. “I’m not that much of a talkative guy,” he said. “I probably won’t do a book.”

  Five years earlier, Thompson wrote, Frank had told him he would quit when he felt his voice was going, “when the vibrato starts to widen, when the breath starts to give out.” Had that time come? Sinatra denied it vigorously.

  “Physically, the voice is a long way from going,” he said. “Hell, I just quit, that’s all. I don’t want to put any more makeup on. I don’t want to perform anymore. I’m not going to stop living. Maybe I’m going to start living.”

  —

  It was after midnight when Barbra Streisand finished her set: Sinatra time. Frank picked up his tuxedo jacket. Rickles, who had reappeared in the dressing room, perked up. “Somebody help the old man on with his coat!” the comic yelled. “Make way! Make way for the old-timer. Help him go out in a blaze of glory. Remember, Frank. Pity!”

  Rosalind Russell stood center stage, struggling with her emotions. “This assignment is not a happy one for me,” she began. “Our friend has made a decision,” she said, then she had to stop. After a moment she started again. “A decision we don’t particularly like, but one which we must honor. He’s worked long and hard for thirty years with his head and his voice and especially his heart—”

  Her voice broke, and she paused once more.

  “But it’s time to put back the Kleenex and stifle the sob,” she finally said, “for we still have the man, we still have the blue eyes, those wonderful blue eyes, that smile—for one last time we have the man, the greatest entertainer of the Twentieth Century—”

  Frank came out to relieve poor Roz of her misery, and the audience—which, besides his family and the cream of Hollywood included Princess Grace, Governor and Nancy Reagan, the Agnews, and Sinatra’s new friend Henry Kissinger—leaped to its feet, clapping, stomping, yelling, refusing to stop. Frank embraced Russell, then quieted the crowd down. He looked around the auditorium and smiled a little. When he’d first started out, he said, he had worked some jobs for nothing but a pack of cigarettes. “So I figure if that’s the way to begin, tonight’s the way to end,” he said.

  He looked toward the orchestra podium and smiled: Nelson Riddle had returned for the final curtain. The dour, professorial, supremely brilliant arranger, Sinatra’s greatest muse besides Ava, stood holding his baton expectantly.

  “Might as well begin at the beginning,” Frank said, and Riddle gave the downbeat: the song was “All or Nothing at All.”

  He sang for just half an hour, cycling through some of the high points, decade by decade: “I’ll Never Smile Again,” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “Ol’ Man River,” “The Lady Is a Tramp,” “Try a Little Tenderness,” “Nancy,” “Fly Me to the Moon.” The audience jumped to its feet again and again. He sang with seemingly effortless grace and power and deep emotion, closing his eyes during the ballads and, for the up-tempo numbers, snapping the fingers of his left hand and commanding the orchestra, “Jump on it—strings too!”

  Finally, he came to the closer that was customary these days, the song he didn’t like but the people always demanded. The silly words made a terrible kind of sense now:

  And now the end is near.

  But of course no one wanted any of it to end. The applause was deafening, as were the calls for an encore. Frank gave a signal to Nelson, and the band went into Riddle’s hard-hitting rearrangement of “That’s Life,” which ended on the same kind of valedictory note:

  But if there’s nothing shakin’ come this here July,

  I’m gonna roll myself up in a big ball and die—my, my!

  It was a game now: shouting and stamping, the audience refused to let him go. But he held the upper hand; he always did. He waved for silence and spoke softly into the microphone. He had built his career on saloon songs, he said; it made sense for him to end on one. And as the stage went dramatically dark, a pin spot picking out Frank’s head, the band began to play “Angel Eyes.”

  Matt Dennis and Earl Brent had written the song in 1946; the great Duke Ellington vocalist Herb Jeffries made the first recording the following year. Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole recorded it in 1952 and 1953, respectively, and their versions were as beautiful as could be expected. Sinatra didn’t get around to it until Only the Lonely in 1958, but it was worth the wait: as he’d done and would continue to do, he wrested a song away from the greats and made it even greater, lifting the number beyond sheer beauty into sheer, gorgeously aching autobiography. The lyric wound up with the singer striking out to find his ever-elusive love—

  I gotta find who’s now the number one,

  And why my angel eyes ain’t here

  —and ended with the haunting sign-off: “ ’Scuse me while I disappear.”

  Frank had been singing “Angel Eyes” in concert for years and had devised a dependable bit of business to close it: with the stage dark and the pin spot on his face, he lit a cigarette halfway through the song and then, on the last phrase—“ ’scuse me while I disappear”—gave a final puff of smoke as the spotlight irised down to darkness and disappeared himself. It was a killer; audiences loved it.

  And it was a brilliant idea to close with “Angel Eyes” tonight—not just once, as myth would have it, but twice, first in the big early show at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and now at the second, late one in the Ahmanson. Disappearance was the theme, but disappearance on Frank’s terms, the power still in his hands even as he left the stage. The audience would be—was—predictably floored, struck dumb by one of the greatest vanishing acts in stage history.

  The retirement that wasn’t: disappearing was one thing; staying invisible, quite another. (Credit 28.3)

  But disappearing was one thing; staying invisible, quite another.

  —

  The limousine sped through the dark streets of Beverly Hills, the same streets he had walked alone as a young man, holding his Oscar, seventeen years earlier. Now he was no longer young, and he wasn’t alone; he was with his good friends Roz Russell and Freddie Brisson and a couple of others on his way to Russell and Brisson’s house for an after-party.

  “I’m tired,” Frank said. “It’s been a hell of a thirty-five years. I always sang a tough book, you know. Not a lot of phony talk. It used to wring me out.”

  He grew nostalgic. “I used to do five full shows a night at the Jersey shore,” he said. “From eight-fifteen p.m. to four a.m. I’d see the sun come out as I’d walk home. And then, at the Paramount in New York, we did ten shows a day—eleven on Saturdays.”

  Tommy Thompson was also in the car. “The radio came on, a Spanish-language station sending out a south-of-the-border lament,” he later wrote. “Frank made up some quick lyrics about a cowboy and his horse. He sang a few bars. He stopped.”

  “And that, ladies and gentlemen,” Frank said, sinking back in his seat and closing his eyes, “is the last time Frank Sinatra will open his mouth.”

  Fat chance.

  CODA

  Well, it seemed like a good idea…to loaf and play golf. After several years, I have a 17 handicap. And the other day, I made an overseas call and the operator asked me how to spell my name. I told her…and she asked my first name. Then she said, “Junior or Senior?”

  —FRANK SINATRA, AT THE TAPING OF HIS NBC COMEBACK SPECIAL, OL’ BLUE EYES IS BACK, SEPTEMBER 1973

  He couldn’t stand it. He had lived with that adulation, that spontaneous reaction from people that was almost like food to him. He couldn’t live without it.

  —SINATRA’S LONGTIME MUSIC COPYIST VERN YOCUM

  Frank Sinatra’s abortive 1971 retirement was by no means the end of his story, but his life after he returned to the spotlight—and of course he returned to the spotlight—was a very different story.

  In the period between March 26, 1954, the day after he won the Oscar for From Here to Eternity, and June 13, 1971, the date of his retirement concert in Los Angeles, Sina
tra made forty-six albums, many of them great. In the period between his second comeback, in 1973, and the end of his career—he performed his final concert in 1995—he made seven albums, a couple of them very good.

  Between 1954 and 1971, he starred in thirty-two movies; after 1973, he starred in two, one of them made for television.

  Between 1954 and 1971, he played innumerable engagements in nightclubs—rooms seating, at a maximum, three or four hundred people, and at a minimum many fewer than that—in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Chicago, Miami, Atlantic City, and New York, among other places, thus justifying his claim to have been, first, last, and always, a saloon singer. After 1973, he became almost exclusively a concert artist, playing to crowds of a thousand or more—sometimes many more. These were, by and large, aging audiences that wanted Sinatra, and wanted his trademark numbers, a few of them new but most from the American Songbook. He had fought an ambivalent battle against the new music, sometimes trying to make it his own, almost always with heart-sinking results. Now, at last, he could be—exclusively and profitably—himself.

  And between 1954 and 1971, despite brief marriages to Ava Gardner and Mia Farrow, he conducted an incomparably prolific love life, one that would have humbled Casanova himself, all the while, as his daughter Tina wrote, failing to make a truly intimate connection with any of the hundreds, if not thousands, of women he bedded. After 1973, due to the inevitable depredations of age, not to mention the effects of four decades of heavy smoking and drinking, his love life slowly, then suddenly, ground to a halt. After his 1976 marriage to Barbara Marx, he became, for all intents and purposes, and for the first time in his life, monogamous.

  A far different story.

  In the immediate aftermath of the retirement concert, he behaved—to a certain extent—like a good retiree: painting, taking pictures, playing golf. On the other hand, he was still Frank Sinatra. And so the relationships with Hope Lange and Lois Nettleton continued for the time being; the twenty-one-year-old actress Victoria Principal also came on the scene around that time, as did the fifty-two-year-old Eva Gabor. Frank even proposed to the beautiful, flirtatious, and much-traveled Pamela Churchill Hayward after the death of Leland Hayward in 1971; she opted instead for W. Averell Harriman.

  And then there was the forty-three-year-old Barbara Marx, ever less married to Zeppo and increasingly present in his life. Tina Sinatra, visiting the Riviera with Robert Wagner soon after Frank’s farewell performance at the Ahmanson Theatre, saw her father and Marx together in Monte Carlo, looking a lot like a couple.

  It was the youngest Sinatra’s first extended encounter with the woman Marx’s friends had dubbed, for her unrelenting cheeriness, “Sunshine Girl.” Through the dark lens of hindsight—Tina and Barbara would become bitter enemies over money and other matters—Frank’s younger daughter claimed to have been both charmed and underwhelmed at first. On the one hand, she wrote, “Barbara had a fetching energy about her, an ability to enjoy herself that is invaluable when you’re with someone in close quarters.” When Jilly messed up the rental of a yacht for a harbor cruise—instead of a Sinatra-worthy vessel, he got a measly, fishy-smelling cabin cruiser—Barbara encouraged everyone to just roll with it and enjoy the boat ride.

  On the other hand, “I sensed no real affection between them,” Tina recalled. “Though constantly smiling and eager to please, Barbara was also quite demure. She and Dad stayed at arm’s length from each other. They behaved like casual companions; they just didn’t seem smitten to me. On instinct, I didn’t trust the type.”

  Frank’s younger daughter soon came to see Marx, with a certain grudging admiration, as a “relentless strategist, a professional survivor.” Frank’s mother took a more jaundiced view. As the relationship turned serious, Dolly, much to her son’s chagrin, began proclaiming her disaffection in the only way she knew: loudly and without varnish. “I don’t want no whore coming into this family!” she declared, giving the key word—whoo-er—a Hudson County punch.

  She might as well have been spitting into the wind.

  It wasn’t a smooth courtship; in many ways, it wasn’t a courtship at all. “From Jilly came a story that worried me,” Tina Sinatra wrote.

  Late one night in 1973, Dad and Barbara joined a bunch of his pals at Jilly’s after-hours spot in New York. Barbara could drink with the best of them; she’d keep right up with my father, shot for shot. The men began talking politics, and then Barbara jumped in to voice her opinion. In slow motion, the whole table turned and gaped at her, as if she’d said the dumbest thing they’d heard that night.

  My father laid into her: “What the hell do you know about anything? When I want to hear something from you, I’ll ask you a question. Until then, you just sit there.” And Barbara sat there. Perhaps her tenure in Las Vegas had hardened her to men’s contempt.

  Why was Dad acting out like that? I wondered. And why would she tolerate it?

  But the answers were simple. He was acting out like that because she had had the nerve to act as though she were an equal, in effect questioning his authority. With his posse looking on, it was an implicit humiliation, and humiliation was his hottest hot button.

  And as for why she would tolerate his abuse: she would hold on tight for as long as it took, no matter how rough the ride, until the prize was hers.

  —

  The idea of his own mortality began to impinge on Sinatra’s consciousness; losing old friends didn’t help. Mike Romanoff and Bennett Cerf died within days of each other in the late summer of 1971, and Frank looked so stricken at Cerf’s funeral that an FBI memo noted that he “appeared to be in extremely poor health,” going on to speculate wildly “that FRANK SINATRA has been diagnosed as having terminal cancer, and estimates of life expectancy vary to as little as two months.”

  It was just wishful thinking on the FBI’s part. However, another bureau communiqué shortly afterward noted more accurately that Sinatra had recently given Martha Mitchell, the wife of Richard Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, a ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles on one of his jets. “It is apparent,” the memo concluded, “that Frank Sinatra is becoming quite active in politics on behalf of the campaign to reelect President Nixon.”

  If he could accept Reagan and Agnew, why not Nixon too? By 1972, Frank was writing mash notes to the politician he had once detested most of all. When the president returned from a summit in Moscow, Sinatra sent him a letter saying “Bravo” for a job “well done.” Nixon replied in kind:

  Dear Frank:

  After any long journey, the best part is always coming home, and your warm words of greeting made this occasion especially happy.

  That same year, Sinatra rented an opulent house on Embassy Row in Washington, D.C., the better to be close to the political action he’d been missing since the Kennedy years. He got a little more action than he wanted, though, when he was served with a summons to appear before the House Select Committee on Organized Crime, which was investigating the Mob’s influence on professional sports and wanted to talk to Frank about his investment in the mobbed-up Massachusetts racetrack Berkshire Downs. Loftily, Frank informed the congressional committee that he would testify “by invitation, not demand,” and that he preferred to testify in closed session. The committee accommodated him on the former but not the latter, and Sinatra sailed into the hearing with a full head of steam. “I am not a second-class citizen,” he told the committee counsel for starters. “Let’s get that straightened out.”

  He gave a masterful performance, denying, stonewalling, and challenging. By the end of the hearing, Frank had a roomful of congressmen eating out of his hand. “You’re still the chairman of the board,” Representative Charles Rangel of New York told him as he left the chamber.

  Delighted at the (largely Democratic) committee’s public humiliation, Nixon personally phoned Sinatra to congratulate him on his performance. Touched, Frank decided to throw his official support behind the president’s reelection. Many of his friends were appalled; Tina S
inatra was ballistic. “My hair was on fire,” she recalled. “I called him at the Compound and vented my spleen: ‘Damn it, Dad, I’ve been killing myself for McGovern, and now you come out for Nixon?’ ”

  “That’s the way it goes, kid—it’s a free country,” he told her.

  In the end, “I decided to forgive him his appalling lapse in judgment, and we agreed to disagree,” she wrote.

  —

  There were further appalling lapses to come. In January 1973, Frank—along with the freshly divorced Barbara Marx—attended Richard Nixon’s second inauguration. Sinatra was scheduled to emcee the American Music Concert at the Kennedy Center, but when the Secret Service was unable to clear the comedian Pat Henry in time, Frank was left without an opening act. Furious, he bailed on the concert. And still furious, and with several drinks under his belt, he walked into the lobby of the Fairfax hotel a couple of hours later, Marx by his side, only to spot the Washington Post gossip columnist Maxine Cheshire, who had embarrassed him in person and in print with references to his Mafia associations.

  He gave it to her as only Sinatra could. “You know Miss Cheshire, don’t you?” he asked passersby. “That stench you smell is from her.” Then he turned to Cheshire. “You’re nothing but a two-dollar broad, you know that? You’re a cunt! That’s spelled C-U-N-T!” He took two dollar bills out of his pocket and stuffed them in the empty glass Cheshire was holding. “Here’s two dollars, baby,” he said. “That’s what you’re used to.”

  The incident, of course, made the papers: that was it for Sinatra and the inauguration.

  But now the Nixon White House was in a bind; the president had already invited Frank to sing at a state dinner for the Italian prime minister, Giulio Andreotti, in April. Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, lobbied his boss hard to rescind the invitation, yet in the end Nixon was too thrilled at the prospect of having Sinatra in the fold to cancel.