Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  With Nelson Riddle conducting the U.S. Marine Band, Frank performed ten numbers, beginning with “You Make Me Feel So Young” and ending with “The House I Live In.” Outside Agnew rallies, it was the most he’d sung in public in almost two years. The voice was not what it had been, but the president, who dabbled at the piano himself, liked what he heard. At the end of the night, Nancy Sinatra wrote, Nixon took Frank aside and told him that he must get out of retirement. “Mr. President,” Sinatra replied, “after tonight, I’ll have to think about it.”

  In truth, he’d had to think about it for quite a while. The previous Fourth of July, aboard a chartered yacht off the Riviera, Spiro Agnew’s aide Peter Malatesta had found Frank beset with a hacking cough and in a rotten mood. Sinatra “hinted that he might be coming out of retirement, but it wasn’t spoken with excitement or anticipation,” Malatesta recalled.

  The year before…Frank was estimated to have spent approximately $10,000 a day, a figure which his attorney, Mickey Rudin, mentioned to me during the course of a conversation. I was told Sinatra had an allowance of $2 million a year. Thanks to his savings and investments, Frank could have spent more, but $3.6 million was pushing things. As Mickey told me, “If he’s going to spend that kind of money, he’s going to have to go to work again.”

  Sinatra and Nixon, August 1972. The world’s upheavals, and Frank’s everlasting attraction to power, made it easier to embrace a politician he’d once detested. (Credit bm1.1)

  Quintuple the amount to get a rough approximation of today’s dollars. The spending rate is quite staggering by any measure—it is heroic, really; or, more properly, Sinatra-esque. The chartered yachts, the five-star hotel suites, the four-star restaurant meals for a crowd, the high-stakes gambling in Monte Carlo, the pricey baubles for the ladies; the jets and the jet fuel; the exquisitely outfitted compound in Palm Springs; the paintings by Monet, Pissarro, Utrillo, Hopper; the staff of dozens. It added up. If he didn’t want to start eating into principal, he would have to sing for his supper again.

  —

  Three days after the White House concert, Frank announced that he would come out of retirement by taping a TV special for NBC to be aired in the fall. Ten days later—the very day Nixon’s chief aides, including Haldeman, resigned in the mushrooming Watergate scandal—Frank walked into a recording studio (Samuel Goldwyn) for the first time in almost two and a half years and began making a new album.

  It was a rough start. On that first day, he tried laying down a couple of tunes—Don Costa arrangements of Kris Kristofferson’s “Nobody Wins” and Joe Raposo’s “Noah”—and was so unhappy with what he heard that he had the masters destroyed. But a month later, he was back, for two nights in a row, with Gordon Jenkins this time, and by the end of August he had an LP. Reprise’s art director, Ed Thrasher, who’d done album covers for Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, and the Grateful Dead, as well as for Sinatra’s My Way, came up with the cover image—a simple, sepia-toned black-and-white image of Frank behind a music stand, smiling in an open-collared white shirt—and the title: Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back.

  Sinatra loved it. His daughter Nancy hated it. “I said, ‘You’re kidding. That’s awful,’ ” she remembered. “His choice prevailed.”

  Unsurprisingly. No one had ever called him Ol’ Blue Eyes before; it didn’t matter. It was the purest self-mythology, but he was sufficiently in sync with his own myth to know it would stick. It stuck.

  —

  He rousted Gene Kelly out of his own retirement to co-star in the TV special; he even got some voice coaching from the fifty-six-year-old opera singer Robert Merrill, who knew a thing or two about coaxing dramatic effect from aging lungs. The show was taped in mid-September; three weeks later, Spiro Agnew resigned in disgrace, having been charged with committing extortion, tax fraud, bribery, and conspiracy during his terms as Baltimore County executive, governor of Maryland, and vice president of the United States. He was allowed to plead no contest to a single count of tax evasion; he was never convicted.

  In some ways, it was a bummer of a fall. Along with Watergate and the Agnew scandal, there were the so-so ratings for Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back, the TV special, which lost in its time slot to The Hospital, a 1971 movie starring Ava’s old boyfriend George C. Scott, on ABC. On the other hand, Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back, the album, was released two weeks later amid a lavish publicity campaign and—in a landscape of fresh offerings by Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Elton John, Paul McCartney, and others—charted at a respectable number 13. An optimistic Reprise press release accompanying the new LP said that Sinatra would “record an album every six months and make a few personal appearances,” yet subsequent albums of the 1970s would do nowhere near as well. The record-buying public, largely young, was sending Sinatra a clear message. Now and for the rest of his career, Frank would have to earn his real money—the money he needed to live in the style to which he’d long since become accustomed—playing concerts in the largest venues possible.

  In his first official public appearance since the retirement, he returned in triumph to the state he’d said he would never set foot in again: in January 1974, with Caesars Palace under new management and Sanford Waterman under indictment, Sinatra opened in the Circus Maximus. The minimum was a hefty $30; each guest received a medallion engraved with “Hail Sinatra: The Noblest Roman Has Returned.” The Noblest Roman looked a little jowly: he’d put on a few pounds during his off time. Along with “Come Fly with Me,” “I Get a Kick out of You,” and “You Make Me Feel So Young,” Frank sang a track from the new LP, Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns,” a theatrical masterpiece he didn’t truly connect with, and—displaying a pronounced new ability to whipsaw between the sublime and the far less than sublime—a song from his upcoming album, Some Nice Things I’ve Missed, the infinitely regrettable “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.”

  —

  And so out on the road, like a restless spirit condemned to wandering the big showrooms and stadiums of America: San Jose. The Fontainebleau. Carnegie Hall. Nassau Coliseum. Atlanta. Providence. Detroit. Philadelphia. Washington. Chicago. Back to Vegas. And that was just the first half of 1974. During the midpoint of each concert, he paused to sip some tea, or something stronger, and make a few remarks, often unfavorable remarks about journalists, especially female journalists. He directed special contempt toward Rona Barrett, who’d recently published a memoir in which she claimed that Frank junior had staged his own kidnapping to get Frank’s attention. “Congress should give Rona Barrett’s husband a medal just for waking up beside her and having to look at her,” Frank told audiences. “She’s so ugly that her mother had to tie a pork chop around her neck just to get the dog to play with her.” Other reporters, many of them writers Sinatra might have wanted to keep on his side, like Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times, took notice.

  In October 1974, he did a series of concerts, billed as the Main Event, beginning in Boston and proceeding to Buffalo, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh, then pausing at Madison Square Garden for a big live broadcast on ABC-TV before continuing on to the heartland for five more stops. The New York show was staged in the round with prizefight trappings: the brash young promoter Jerry Weintraub had come up with the concept. “You’re the heavyweight champion of the world, Frank,” he’d told Sinatra. “The number-one singer in the world. No challengers, no one even close. So let’s do it in a ring, and make it like a heavyweight title fight, and invite all the people who go to heavyweight title fights, because they’re your fans. And let’s get Howard Cosell to be the announcer.” The cover of the live album would depict Frank in a black trench coat, white scarf, tux, and leather gloves, looking like the round-faced middle-aged pugilist he had become. The audience loved him.

  “We will now do the national anthem, but you needn’t rise,” Sinatra announced before beginning “My Way.”

  “Ah, Frankie everlovin’,” Martha Weinman Lear, who’d been a bobby-soxer at the Paramount thirty years earlier, wrote in the New York Times, �
�here we are at the Garden dancing cheek to cheek, and the lights are low and it’s oh so sweet…It’s Ol’ Blue Eyes now, with the paunch and the jowl and the wig, and the hell with them. The blue eyes still burn, the cuffs are still incomparably shot, the style, the style, is still all there, and what’s left of the voice still gets to me like no other voice, and it always will.”

  But the influential jazz and pop critic Ralph J. Gleason, covering the Event for Rolling Stone, begged to differ. “That style he set was big enough and broad enough to carry the careers of half a dozen others, but Ol’ Blue Eyes is a drag that Frankie never was,” he wrote.

  The Main Event, Madison Square Garden, October 13, 1974. “We will now do the national anthem, but you needn’t rise,” Sinatra announced before beginning “My Way.” (Credit bm1.2)

  It is simply weird now to see him all glossed up like a wax dummy, with that rug on his head looking silly, and the onstage movement, which used to be panther-tense, now a self-conscious hoodlum bustle.

  His possible appearance is the occasion for bodyguards and hush-hush phone calls and big security plans and a blanket of secrecy…I don’t think anyone but those clowns on his payroll really think any of this panoply of power is necessary…For Frank Sinatra, whose voice made him the friend of millions of Americans, to carry on like a Caribbean dictator holding back history with bodyguards and a secret police is simply obscene…I think he went somewhere that makes him alien now to me in a way he never was before.

  This was the postretirement Frank in a nutshell: embattled, secure and insecure behind a guarded gate. Tougher than ever on the outside, still a molten puddle within.

  —

  As Sinatra turned sixty, he grew less interested than ever in the chase. “There’s nothing worse than being an old swinger,” he once told a writer. At the same time, the realities of monogamy and marriage bored and terrified him. He had done it three times (the marriage part, anyway), and it hadn’t worked out. And he had proposed to any number of women, always meaning it in the moment—as he meant the songs he sang—but quickly going on to the next thing once the moment had passed.

  Moreover, two of the women he’d married, and any number of the ones he’d proposed to, had insisted, annoyingly, on having other jobs than taking care of him. He needed someone who would happily take him on as a full-time occupation. He was a major project, and as more and more women fell away or were pared away from his life, there were fewer and fewer who looked able to do it. One stuck around, though.

  Even by Barbara Marx’s own account, reeling in Frank Sinatra was no mean trick. Her idealized account, in the memoir titled, unfortunately and unforgettably, Lady Blue Eyes, lists many breakups and makeups and even a prolonged separation after the Madison Square Garden concert during which they both saw other people: remarkably, Frank dated Jacqueline Onassis, who while Jack Kennedy was alive had regarded Sinatra as a lowlife. Now he had gained stature in her eyes, but less romantically than literarily: apparently—she’d started working as a book editor—she just wanted him to write his memoirs.

  In the spring of 1976, Tina Sinatra writes, her father surprised his children by conducting an extended liaison with their mother. It was at precisely the same time that Barbara Marx gave Frank an ultimatum: “Marry me or lose me.”

  “My dad’s inner life was a maze with no exit,” Tina wrote. “What could you tell a man in such turmoil that he hadn’t told himself a thousand times over?” In the end, he listened to his own fears, which told him that he was getting old, and so was Big Nancy. Barbara, on the other hand, somehow seemed to be aging in reverse. In June, she showed up with Frank at the christening of Nancy junior’s daughter Amanda with “a brand-new profile and look[ing] ten years younger,” according to Tina. She was also wearing a diamond the size of a quail’s egg on the fourth finger of her left hand.

  Barbara writes that after her ultimatum Frank invited her to Chicago, where he was spending time with an old pal, and presented her with “an enormous pear-shaped diamond that I later learned was twenty-two carats” and an even larger stone, a perfect green emerald. “You can have them set any way you want,” he told her.

  “Praying that I was doing the right thing,” she writes, “I asked [a jeweler] to set the diamond in an engagement ring setting. Once the enormous solitaire was ready, I had the jeweler return it to Frank, not me, so that he could present it to me whichever way he wanted.”

  It was determinism masquerading as free will.

  At dinner a couple of nights later, she found the ring in her champagne glass. “Is this for me?” she asked.

  “Yes, beautiful,” Frank said. “Why don’t you put it on?”

  “Those were still not the words I wanted to hear,” she recalled. So she handed him the ring and said, “Here, Frank, you put it on. Put it anyplace you want.” She held out both her hands.

  Shaking his head in defeat, he put the ring on the fourth finger of her left hand, and that was that.

  They married on July 11, 1976, at Sunnylands, the three-thousand-acre Walter Annenberg estate in Rancho Mirage. Ronnie and Nancy Reagan, Sammy and Altovise Davis, the Gregory Pecks and the Kirk Douglases and the Ted Agnews were all in attendance. There had been a brief hiccup earlier in the day when Barbara balked at the prenuptial agreement Mickey Rudin handed her—it stipulated that none of his premarriage assets or future earnings would be hers—but in the end, over a barrel for the time being, she signed.

  “When the judge asked Barbara, ‘Do you take this man for richer or poorer?’ my father interjected, ‘Richer, richer,’ ” Tina recalled. “Everyone laughed, but Dad’s face stayed straight. As he completed his vows, he sounded to me like a man who knew the terms of a deal and was determined to see it through. He would try like hell to make this marriage work.”

  His new wife, too, understood the terms of the deal, but that didn’t mean the deal couldn’t be sweetened somewhere down the line.

  Barbara Marx and Frank in early June 1976, a month before their wedding. Reeling Sinatra in was difficult, but Barbara was tough, determined, and resourceful. (Credit bm1.3)

  —

  Frank’s previous two wives had harbored lofty cultural aspirations, reflecting a side of him that hankered in the same direction. Barbara Sinatra was interested in glittering things and people, jewels and celebrities rather than ideas. With his marriage to Barbara, Frank shifted definitively westward and rightward, toward the sunstruck and unreflective life of Palm Springs. His contacts with the larger world now narrowed, in keeping with his fourth wife’s overwhelming fascination with the shiny international rich who moved in elegant herds from one luxurious port of call to the next. A door in him closed, what he had thought and felt most deeply shut firmly behind it, and the person who shared his bed seemed to betray no interest in what was really inside.

  —

  In the year of his fourth marriage, he often opened shows with a number that Barry Manilow had recently made popular, “I Write the Songs.” Sinatra added his own fillip to the tune by changing the key phrase:

  I sing the songs that make the whole world sing,

  I sing the songs of love and special things.

  It didn’t help much. The number was still irretrievably saccharine, as was much of the new material that now marbled his repertoire, special things like Neil Diamond’s “Stargazer,” John Denver’s “Like a Sad Song,” and Eric Carmen’s “Never Gonna Fall in Love Again.” Frank was straining for relevance, trying to gather in younger audiences, hoping to sell records. The records didn’t sell much, but the concertgoers kept coming anyway: he was the event.

  —

  Sam Giancana was gone now, rubbed out in his Chicago basement while he cooked sausages, capped seven times in the head by someone the old man had been foolish enough to trust. The following year, 1976, Frank had his last close dance with the friends of the friends, at the Westchester Premier Theater, in Tarrytown, New York, a $7 million, thirty-six-hundred-seat Potemkin venue, erected by the Mob wit
h the sole purpose of milking it dry. Diana Ross performed there, and Dean Martin and Tom Jones and Liza Minnelli and Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, and the Band and Harry Chapin, but Sinatra was the beacon, the lead attraction: he played the Westchester twenty-seven times in 1976 and 1977, making sure to be paid under the table and in cash and seeing to it that Jilly and Mickey Rudin were also able to wet their beaks.

  On the night of April 11, 1976, Frank received a group of distinguished visitors in his dressing room and posed, grinning, for a photograph with eight of them. They were, as it turned out, a virtual Mafia directorate, including Carlo Gambino himself and his anointed successor, Paul Castellano, as well as Gambino capo Gregory DePalma, Los Angeles organized-crime chief (and later FBI informant) Jimmy “the Weasel” Fratianno, and a couple of ancillaries named Salvatore Spatola and Richard “Nerves” Fusco.

  In 1981, when Sinatra reapplied for his Nevada gaming license, the Nevada Gaming Control Board took a keen interest in the photograph. Frank claimed that while he had met a couple of men in the picture in passing, he was meeting most of them for the first time, including Gambino, and had no idea what they did for a living. The members of the board also asked Sinatra whether he, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. had done the 1962 Villa Venice concerts for free as payback to Sam Giancana for the mobster’s help in getting John F. Kennedy elected: Frank denied it. “He lied,” Tina Sinatra told the 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft in a 2000 interview. Sinatra got his license.

  The Westchester Premier Theater, having gone bankrupt in the late 1970s, was razed in 1982.