Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  —

  On January 6, 1977, Dolly was to fly with Frank and Barbara on one of Frank’s jets to Las Vegas, where Frank was set to open at Caesars Palace. At the last minute, for reasons she never explained, she changed her mind and chose to go—along with a friend visiting from New Jersey, Anna Carbone—later in the day. Though Barbara Sinatra wrote in her memoir that she and Dolly had made their peace and even become friends, it has been suggested that Dolly didn’t want to travel on the same plane with her daughter-in-law.

  Late that afternoon, the chartered Lear Jet on which Frank’s mother and Mrs. Carbone flew took off from Palm Springs, entered a snow squall, and vanished from air-traffic controllers’ radar screens. Frank was quickly notified and assumed the worst: he somehow did the first show, then canceled the second and flew back to Palm Springs, where, Barbara writes, he “barely said a word for two days. He sat on a couch in a corner by the bar and stared into space.” On the third day, the wreckage of the plane was found near the summit of nearby San Gorgonio Mountain. There were no survivors.

  Barbara Sinatra and Tina Sinatra both write of the aftermath of the crash, each in character. “Life went on after Dolly’s death, just as it always had,” Barbara says. “Frank canceled two weeks of performances and we flew to Barbados to spend some time at the place we loved, but performing was Frank’s therapy and he needed to get back on the stage. It was also what his mother would have expected, for there had surely never been a woman more proud of her son.”

  It was also what his wife needed him to do.

  Frank’s younger daughter tells of her and her sister’s outrage at discovering that their stepmother had stripped their grandmother’s house of china, silver, crystal, and jewelry. “It turned out that Barbara, who’d been in the family for ten minutes, had appointed herself custodian of Dolly’s valuables,” she writes. Eventually, Barbara returned most of the valuables, minus a number of things: “furs and jewelry, and several of Grandma’s finer handbags.”

  Sinatra’s last dance with the friends of the friends: On April 11, 1976, Frank posed backstage at the Westchester Premier Theater with a virtual Mafia directorate, including Carlo Gambino himself, second from right, and his capo Gregory DePalma, on Sinatra’s right. The singer’s lifelong attraction to the Mob was deep, genuine, and unfortunate. (Credit bm1.4)

  Strikingly, neither Barbara nor Tina speaks of Frank’s state after this sudden and unimaginable subtraction. His father’s death had been a tragedy; his mother’s death was a calamity. They had been a pair, Frankie and Dolly, for over sixty years: she had been his tormentor and his champion, but mainly she had been his mirror. Now he was that strangest of all things, a mirror reflecting nobody.

  —

  In March 1978, Frank was to present an award to Nelson Riddle at a testimonial dinner in the arranger’s honor in Los Angeles. Sinatra was performing at a theater in Fort Lauderdale but had agreed to fly west for the event. At the last minute, though, he came down with a bad cold and flew home from Florida. The testimonial was postponed to Sunday, April 16.

  On Thursday, April 13, Frank returned to the Sunrise Musical Theatre in Fort Lauderdale to make up the engagements he had missed. On the sixteenth, the night of the Riddle dinner, he performed his full closing show in Florida. Someone in his office—possibly Mickey Rudin—sent Gregory Peck to present Riddle with the award in Frank’s stead. It has never been determined whose decision this was (though ultimately the buck stopped with Sinatra) or why he failed to attend the testimonial.

  The following year, Frank’s longtime producer Sonny Burke came up with a concept for a new album, a three-disc LP that would examine Sinatra’s musical past, present, and future. The album would be called Trilogy. The plan was for its three parts to be arranged, respectively, by Nelson Riddle, Billy May, and Gordon Jenkins.

  One night during the album’s early planning stages, “Sinatra and I were in the dressing room in the suite at Caesars, and we were talking about Nelson, and I was shouting his praises,” recalled Vincent Falcone, who started as Frank’s pianist in the late 1970s, then later became his conductor.

  Frank turned to me, and said, “Call him on the phone, and ask him if he’ll write a chart for me.” And I said, “Wow, man—this is like history!” So I picked up the phone and called Nelson. I said, “Nelson, Mr. Sinatra asked me to call you. He would like to know if you would write an arrangement on…” And there was just dead silence on the other end of the phone for a good ten or fifteen seconds, and then Nelson said, “Tell him I’m busy,” and hung up.

  Frank’s response, according to Falcone, was “Fuck him.” Billy May wound up arranging the Past section of Trilogy, and Don Costa the Present.

  On the night of September 19, 1979, the longtime Sinatra observer Rob Fentress—he had attended many of Frank’s recording sessions and was a close friend of Sonny Burke’s—was at Western Recorders in Hollywood when Frank laid down two tracks for Trilogy. The first, a new version of Irving Berlin’s “Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” was arranged and conducted by May. The second, a recent composition by the Broadway songwriters John Kander and Fred Ebb, was the theme from a 1977 Martin Scorsese movie, New York, New York. Don Costa had written the chart; Vincent Falcone conducted. Barbara Sinatra writes that at first her husband hadn’t wanted to record the song, feeling it was the property of Liza Minnelli, who’d sung it in the film; he changed his mind after performing it at Radio City Music Hall in October 1978 and bringing down the house.

  After the final take that night, Fentress stood in the control room amid a crowd of people, including Jilly Rizzo, as Sinatra listened to the playback of the session. The atmosphere was boisterous. “They were playing back ‘New York, New York,’ and Frank was sitting in the engineer’s chair, and he was just oblivious to all the noise,” Fentress remembered. “He was just focusing on the song. And you could see how pleased he was. He wasn’t laughing; he was just smiling slightly. I’d seen that focused look before.”

  It was a good sign.

  —

  By 1979, after Barbara failed in an attempt to have Frank adopt her twenty-six-year-old son, Bobby—Sinatra’s children resisted her furiously—a chill had settled on the marriage. “They were averaging one nasty fight a week and sleeping in separate bedrooms, a development that owed to more than Dad’s chronic sleep disorder,” Tina wrote.

  I know that my father was a handful to live with. I doubt that he could have been happy with anyone at that point in his life. But if he showed unkindness, I am sure that it was in kind. Barbara could extract the deep, dark anger out of Dad. She had a street fighter’s résumé, and Dad was a withering counterpuncher. They hit each other below the belt and didn’t stop when the bell rang.

  Frank was quick to forgive, his younger daughter remembered; Barbara, less so. She knew the most effective weapon against her husband and wielded it expertly: the silent treatment. She could hold out for days, while Frank grew more miserable by the hour.

  Yet the ultimate punishment for Frank was something worse than silence: it was solitude. And now his wife began to pare away his friends.

  Not the Late Show, the glittering Old Hollywood crowd who suited her social ambitions; not the Kirk Douglases or the Gregory Pecks or the Jimmy Stewarts or Cary Grant. She fixed on the closer, rougher-hewn ones, the ones who would never move in the circles to which she’d risen. She began with Jilly.

  They had never liked each other much; by his own choice or Barbara’s, Rizzo fell out of Frank’s life for a couple of years at the beginning of the 1980s. Nancy junior often toured with her father then and witnessed the further decline of his marriage. Always a sensitive observer of his moods, she saw him acting like his old self, drinking and laughing through the night when Charlie Callas or other pals dropped by after the show, then losing his smile when Barbara showed up to cut the fun short.

  By mid-1983, Sinatra and his wife were spending more and more time apart. As distinctly different from the past, infidelity on Frank�
��s part does not seem to have been an issue: those days appeared to be more or less over for him. He had been complaining, seriously and humorously, of impotence for a long time; at some point, he was reportedly fitted with a penile implant. According to talk in urological circles, the device failed because Frank tried to use it too soon.

  Not long after Sinatra produced Ronald Reagan’s inaugural gala, rumors about him and Nancy Reagan sprang up: in her biography of the First Lady, Kitty Kelley writes insinuatingly of three-hour White House “lunches” between Nancy and Frank while the president was out of town. But no one who knew Sinatra well felt anything besides lunch was really going on. Tina Sinatra writes of an emotional bond between her father and Mrs. Reagan, saying that the two spoke on the phone every night at an appointed hour and that he poured his heart out to her about his marital problems. Barbara Sinatra writes that it was the First Lady who did the pouring: “During long-distance telephone calls and their lunches together whenever they were in the same town, I think he became Nancy’s therapist more than her friend.” Though there appeared to be little love lost between the two women, Barbara, perhaps armed with intimate knowledge, seems not to have considered the First Lady a sexual threat.

  Still, according to Tina, it was Nancy Reagan, during one of her long phone conversations with Frank, who advised him to leave his marriage. “Francis, this woman is not for you,” she allegedly said. “She’s not going to make you happy. You’ve got one foot out the door—keep going!”

  Ironically, Rizzo was the one who talked Sinatra into reconciling with Barbara. “If I would have left it alone the way it was,” Frank’s longtime shadow told a friend, “I would have ended up being Mrs. Frank Sinatra, and I wasn’t ready for that.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Sinatra got back together—not for love, his daughters believed, but because Frank had nowhere else to go.

  —

  The road was his home. Vegas and Denver and L.A. Pittsburgh and Providence and Buffalo. Atlantic City and San Francisco; Portland, Maine, and Clarkston, Michigan. In Egypt, he sang before the Pyramids of Giza; in Rio de Janeiro, in front of 275,000 people; at Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera. Wherever he went, “New York, New York” became his closer; he liked it so much better than “My Way.” In Monte Carlo and London; in Devon, Pennsylvania, and Boston; in Sun City, Bophuthatswana.

  He did more than a thousand concerts between 1976 and 1990, and his wife accompanied him to almost all of them. (Except in Atlantic City. Vegas had formed her; A.C., a cut-rate Vegas with salt air, didn’t appeal to her.) “I travel with him, that’s really our life,” Barbara said soon after their separation ended.

  We’re really on the road most of the time, and a plane is almost our home, or a hotel or whatever. He starts out each year with a small schedule and somehow it just seems to get filled up.

  I think he’s really happier working. I think it keeps his juices going and he likes it. I think he’d be very unhappy if he really retired totally.

  So in order to make some kind of normalcy out of it, out of that crazy kind of life, I travel with him and try to make it as comfortable as possible.

  She made sure it was comfortable for herself as well. One musician who toured in Europe with Sinatra in this period remembered Barbara making a beeline for the hotel jewelry store at every stop along the way.

  —

  “I vocalize an hour a day whether we’re working or not,” Frank said in a 1979 interview. “Sometimes two hours a day if I feel I haven’t had enough. So if I’m called upon, it’s there. The muscles are all there and everything is fine, except if you go on a long hiatus, then it’s murder to come back. Oh, it’s murder to get there. It’s like lifting weights. You can’t get up there right away.”

  He had always worked hard on his singing, harder than anyone knew. But in his sixties, through the combined effects of age and unfiltered Camels and Jack Daniel’s and late nights and guilt germs, the great voice began to alter and deteriorate. The cave-of-winds depths were still there, but the phenomenal breath control, the nearly freakish ability to sustain long notes, was not. The intonation, so glorious for so much of his career, now wavered.

  What he retained, what would stay with him almost until the very end, was his unparalleled feeling for lyrics, his way around a song’s story. Like that of his idol Mabel Mercer, who in the twilight of her career sat in an armchair onstage and recited the lyrics rather than really sang them, his sense of a song’s essence was absolute. He proved it on his last album for Reprise, 1981’s She Shot Me Down.

  Doubtless inspired by the troubles in his marriage, and (as always) still thinking about Ava, he gave torch songs one last try and scored an artistic—if not a commercial—triumph. He was deservedly proud of this minor but affecting LP. “I was with him in Palm Springs when he played that album for friends the first time,” Peter Bogdanovich remembered. “It was very touching how excited he still was—like a kid.”

  From an emotional standpoint, the album’s first number, Stephen Sondheim’s “Good Thing Going,” from the musical Merrily We Roll Along, is one of the finest things Sinatra ever did. It’s the unabashedly raw story of a shipwrecked relationship—

  We had a good thing going—

  Going, gone

  —and he tells it masterfully, quite simply as no one else on earth could tell it, the ruined cathedral of his voice an objective correlative for the infinite sadness of a couple’s sundering. He might not have known how to hold an intimate relationship together, but he understood deeply what it felt like when it fell apart.

  —

  Ava turned sixty in December 1982. Frank sent her an enormous bouquet, as he did every year on her birthday: she would let the flowers sit in their vase until they died and then keep them there, long dead, for the rest of the year until the next bouquet arrived. She didn’t mind sixty so much, she said: fifty had been much harder. Nor did she particularly care any longer if people knew how old she was. “I’m one hell of an old broad,” she’d say. “It’s undignified to lie about it.”

  She wasn’t making movies anymore, but in the mid-1980s, for the first time, she elected to work in the medium she had long disdained. In 1985, she did a seven-episode turn as a scheming widow in a Southern California spin-off of Dallas called Knots Landing. That February, while Gardner was in New York doing press for the show, Peter W. Kaplan, then a TV reporter for the New York Times, interviewed her in her suite at the Waldorf Towers. She wore a cherry-colored sweatshirt with a sequined letter A over one breast, tight watermelon-pink toreador pants, and rubber thongs. “With her green eyes and shaken-out auburn coif,” he wrote, “Miss Gardner did not look so very different from the way she looked in ‘The Barefoot Contessa,’ ‘On the Beach’ and ‘Mogambo.’ ”

  As she swigged from a bottle of spring water and chain-smoked, Ava talked of many things, including her third husband, Frank Sinatra. She called him “a great artist” but denied that their doomed love affair had led to the anguished resonance of his classic albums of the 1950s. “Oh, no, no,” she said. “He had just done a film he was proud of—‘From Here to Eternity’—he had his strength back and all of his talent.”

  Forgetting that the one thing he didn’t have was her.

  Gardner’s monumental sex appeal was still very much in place that afternoon, Kaplan later remembered. Yet a year later, her health began to decline rapidly. She was run down and losing weight; she had developed a hacking cough that wouldn’t go away. Despite the cough, she continued to smoke heavily. In October 1986, her London doctor, fearing the worst, ordered her tested for lung cancer. She flew to California and checked into St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, where tests showed no cancer. Instead, she was diagnosed with pneumonia.

  She rallied briefly, but on her eleventh day in the hospital, she suffered a stroke. The left side of her body was partially paralyzed; her face was twisted, her mouth contorted. Though her cognitive faculties appeared undamaged, she had great difficulty speaking understandably
.

  “Frank would call, and the nurses would hold the phone to her ear,” Ava’s biographer Lee Server writes. “She tried to speak, but it was hard to make herself understood, and so she just listened to his voice.

  “ ‘I love you, baby,’ he told her. ‘It stinks getting old.’ ”

  Days later, as Ava still lay in her hospital bed, Frank himself collapsed while performing in Atlantic City and was rushed to the Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage with acute diverticulitis, an excruciating intestinal inflammation. His upset about Kitty Kelley’s recently released biography His Way might have aggravated the condition. In an emergency surgery that lasted two hours, doctors removed a length of intestine and attached a colostomy bag, which he had to wear for months afterward. He unhappily showed the bag to Paul Anka backstage at Caesars. “He was utterly humiliated by this,” Anka recalled.

  He was threescore and ten, and he hated it.

  In spite of it, though, he went to Hawaii to do a guest shot on a TV show he loved, Tom Selleck’s Magnum P.I. In what turned out to be his final major acting job, Sinatra played a role that fit him like an old glove, a retired New York cop on the trail of his granddaughter’s murderer. He did almost all his own stunts, Barbara notes admiringly: “Frank refused to let that darn bag beat him.”

  Uncomfortable and unhappy nonetheless, he spent the first three months of 1987 in Hawaii and Palm Springs. Sometime in March, Mia Farrow, then living in New York and in the midst of her thirteen-year relationship with Woody Allen, conceived a child; on December 19, she gave birth to a son, whom she and Allen named Satchel Ronan O’Sullivan Farrow. Years later, long after her acrimonious breakup with Woody Allen (whose legs Frank sweetly offered to have broken), Mia Farrow claimed that this son, now known as Ronan Farrow—who with his penetrating, deep-set, hooded blue eyes and bee-stung lips bears a strong resemblance to both her and her father, the director John Farrow—might “possibly” have been sired by Frank Sinatra.