by James Kaplan
—
Two days earlier, the Sands—the site of so many revels and outrages, the essence of Las Vegas’s golden age, the birthplace and playground of the Rat Pack—had been reduced, in a controlled implosion, to a thirty-foot pile of rubble. “It’s sad to see it gone, but life goes on,” the hotel’s owner, Sheldon Adelson, declared briskly. “We’re anxious to get on to the next level.”
The next level, due in 1999, was the thirty-six-story, $1.8 billion, six-thousand-room Venetian resort-hotel-casino, the new pride of the Strip and the slick, towering embodiment of the town’s faceless corporate era.
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The bad days became more frequent. More and more, when he wasn’t being rushed back to the hospital—the pneumonia lingered, and he had another heart attack—he was staying in his room. Tony Oppedisano was Frank’s frequent companion during these long days. One night, Sinatra called him into his room and whispered, “I don’t know how you are going to do this, but could you get my mother out of here?”
“I don’t see her, Mr. S.,” Oppedisano said.
“She’s right over there in the chair,” Frank said. “I’m trying to get some rest, but she keeps hanging around.”
—
Not surprisingly, Tina Sinatra and Barbara Sinatra offer differing versions of the events of May 14, 1998. Tina had had a good visit with her father the previous Saturday—he’d been rested and lucid and had told her he planned to live until the turn of the century—and so she kept regular hours at work over the week of the eleventh, calling Foothill daily for updates and being told Frank was eating well, sleeping well, doing fine. She planned to return for the weekend on Friday the fifteenth, when Barbara was to begin a spa retreat at the Malibu beach house she and Frank owned.
Tony Oppedisano later told Tina that he’d visited her father every day from Monday through Thursday. On Monday night, he said, Frank asked him to order a pizza; they drank a couple of O’Doul’s nonalcoholic beers and had a good time. But on Tuesday, Frank’s spirits sagged. “I don’t want to live like this anymore,” he told Tony. “This is not a life.”
Sinatra awoke agitated on Wednesday morning; when Oppedisano arrived later in the day, he found him withdrawn and unresponsive. “He perked up only when Barbara came down, on her way out to dinner,” Tina writes. “He took one look at her and said, ‘Oh, you still live here?’ ”
It was a line he used when she’d been out more than usual.
“On Thursday afternoon, feeling negligent, I rang Foothill,” Tina continues.
Vine [his longtime maid and majordomo, Elvina Joubert] said that Dad was tired and unsettled. She was trying to get him to calm down and rest; it wasn’t a good time to visit. I meant to call back again, but I let the day get away from me. I was banking on our weekend to come…
And no one called to tell me that Barbara would be dining out for the fourth consecutive night.
Barbara Sinatra, on the other hand, portrays herself as attentive and consistently present for her husband. On Thursday the fourteenth, though, her friends Armand and Harriet Deutsch “insisted I take a break from Frank’s constant care” and join them and some friends for dinner at Morton’s in Beverly Hills. That afternoon, Barbara recalled, she and Frank had lunch in the sun by the pool. “He was in his wheelchair, and he didn’t finish his favorite food, a grilled cheese sandwich,” she writes, “but he was in good spirits and seemed fine.”
On her way out for dinner, though, she stopped by his bedroom and found him sleepy and a little breathless. She made a mental note to call his doctors in the morning to see if the dosage of his heart medication could be altered. She turned down his blaring TV and kissed him on the forehead. Squeezing his shoulder, she said, “Good night, darling. Sleep warm.” And then, leaving her husband in the care of Vine and the nurse on duty, she went out to dinner.
As Armand Deutsch drove his wife and Barbara Sinatra down Sunset toward the restaurant, Barbara writes, she “couldn’t help but notice the moon…low and huge in the western sky like a peeled orange.”
But they were driving east, not west, and the moon wouldn’t rise until after eleven that night.
—
Tina came home late from the office, put her dinner on a tray, and got in bed to watch television. It was the night of the Seinfeld finale. A while later, she had one arm in her nightgown when the phone rang, at exactly 11:10 p.m. It was Frank’s doctor, Rex Kennamer. “I have bad news,” he said. “We lost him.”
—
Vine Joubert had called Barbara Sinatra at Morton’s—it was around 9:30 p.m.—and said, “You’d better come right away. The paramedics are here. They’re going to take Mr. S. to the hospital.”
“What happened?” Barbara asked her.
Vine hesitated a moment, then said, “They can’t find a pulse.”
Armand Deutsch drove her at an old man’s snail’s pace back to Foothill, where she discovered Frank had already been taken to Cedars-Sinai. A member of the household staff drove her to the hospital at top speed, she ran through the door of the emergency room, and here accounts diverge again.
In Barbara Sinatra’s writing, she sat by her husband’s side alone, gripping his hand, as three doctors worked on him. “You have to fight, Frank!” she said she told him.
“He really tried to,” she writes.
He did. He must have clung to life for twenty minutes or more, although it seemed like considerably longer. I didn’t leave him for a second, his hand like a bag of bones in mine. Briefly, his eyes flickered open. They were watery but still the same dazzling blue as when he’d first pulled me into his arms and kissed me all those years earlier, stealing my heart. He looked at me for just a moment and opened his mouth to speak. Leaning closer, turning my head to hear, I heard him whisper the words “I can’t.”
Then his eyes closed forever, and that was it.
Yet according to another source, Barbara was not alone with Frank; Tony Oppedisano was also present in the ER, and Barbara’s publicist, Susan Reynolds, stood outside the room manning the phones in preparation for the massive media event that was about to occur. According to this source, Frank’s wife grew dizzy and nauseated and had to leave the room for an extended period as the doctors did what they could for her husband.
We attach inordinate importance to the last words of great men and women. Nancy Sinatra wrote on her Web site that her father’s final words were not “I can’t” but “I’m losing.” This phrase, so much more eloquent than a simple plea of inability, seemed to sum up the grand battle that was Frank Sinatra’s whole life. It would take hold in the popular imagination.
Yet Nancy wasn’t present when her father died, and it’s possible that Barbara Sinatra was not in the room either. Every human being has last words, but they are not always uttered just before death and are not always eloquent or memorable. Frank Sinatra’s vast legacy spoke for itself.
—
Tina had thrown her clothes back on and rushed out of the house to pick up her sister and go to the hospital. If it was too late to see her father while he was still alive—and this idea hadn’t entirely sunk in—she had to see him before his body was taken away. As she sped down the street, she saw the moon, huge and waning gibbous, low in the east. It was orange, Frank’s favorite color.
—
It was late, Sinatra’s time of night just dawning, but too late for much of the world to hear the news. Yet he made the headlines black for one last time the next morning, and the world, stunned but not surprised, did what it could. Radio stations around the world played his records, the ones he’d loved and the ones he’d hated. Marquees along the Vegas Strip—the new Strip, the hedge of faceless glass towers—went dark; lights inside the casinos were dimmed for a minute. At Yankee Stadium, there was a moment of silence in his memory before Friday night’s game.
And in honor of the eyes that had transfixed the world for sixty years, the Empire State Building was bathed in blue lights that night and the next. The great phallic
tower of limestone and steel, symbol of America’s resilience in the face of the Great Depression, had originally topped out in early 1931, when fifteen-year-old Frankie No-Name, soon to drop out of A. J. Demarest High and cast his fate to the wind, could stand on the Hoboken waterfront and stare at the end of construction, looking long and hard across the wide gray river as he dreamed his incomprehensible dreams and listened to the music of the spheres.
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Ramon Road runs west to east from downtown Palm Springs toward Cathedral City and Thousand Palms, crossing Gene Autry Trail and Bob Hope Drive along the way: a long, straight shot lined with strip malls and gas stations and fast food—little tan and white buildings, bleached and insignificant under the enormous sky. Drive east, and there isn’t much ahead but flat emptiness and shimmering heat. As the roadside commerce begins to peter out at the edge of Cathedral City, you might be excused for feeling a twinge of fear at the rim of the void, a fear that the sight of one more stray tire outlet or medical center does nothing to allay. This is the desert, and the desert wants to kill you.
Then comes the left turn, at Da Vall Drive, and another quick left, between gates, into the green expanse of Desert Memorial Park. The soothing sight of grass, trees, and shade is deceptive: the air is oven hot. A quick stop in the office, a low white structure, refreshingly air-conditioned, gets you a three-page pamphlet, stapled at the corner, whose cover sheet reads,
PALM SPRINGS CEMETERY DISTRICT
INFORMATION
_______________
Sonny Bono
Frank Sinatra
And
Other Interments of Interest
We respectfully present to you, information regarding interments in our cemeteries. If you need additional information or further assistance, we ask you make your inquiries at the office. For your SAFETY, we ask you, PLEASE do not approach the grounds employees while they are at work.
Kathleen Jurasky
Manager
After puzzling over that last sentence—are they armed?—not to mention the backward interments-of-interest billing, you look at the second page, a map of the cemetery. Desert Memorial Park is a hundred-acre rectangle perhaps a third of a mile wide on Ramon Drive and half a mile deep on Da Vall, a verdant tract divided into eighty-seven sections, with a gracefully looping, French-curve-shaped drive at the center. Besides the office and a maintenance shed, the map shows two artificial waterfalls and a chapel on the grounds. The locations of several notable grave sites are also marked. Toward the top of the map, which is the rear of the cemetery, near the Fountain Court Waterfall, is the simple notation, in bold type and emphasized with chartreuse highlighter, Bono B-35. Only one other location is highlighted, at the bottom of the map, very near the front of the grounds: Sinatra B-8. No first name needed.
And so it’s back out into the unbelievable heat. You can proceed on foot from here—section B-8 is surprisingly close to the administration building, just a few yards away. The grass, thick and spongy, exudes a pleasant, loamy, golf-course smell. Then come the stones.
For aesthetic reasons, one guesses, the grave markers in Desert Memorial Park are not upright headstones but black or gray slabs set flush with the turf. This way, one guesses, the tract looks, at a glance, more like a park than a necropolis, a City of the Dead. And because the stones face the sky and the merciless sun, and because almost none of them are shaded—the cemetery is sparsely planted with piñon oaks—the stones are fading, some of them into near illegibility. In ten or twenty or fifty years, the sun will have done its work, and the grave markers here today will be, effectively, blank.
Which would seem to be a problem. The purpose of a memorial park, after all, is memorialization. Who wants to look at a blank stone? Who’s going to come visit a blank stone?
The stone you’re here to see today, though, is surely another matter. After wading through dozens of volumes about Frank Sinatra; after negotiating dozens of Web sites dedicated to him; after getting a taste of the widespread, quasi-religious dedication to the man and his music that lives on almost a decade after his death; after experiencing the vast seas of Sinatra expertise and encountering the myriad authoritative gatekeepers and ultra-possessive guardians of the flame—after all this, one half expects to find a traffic jam at the gates of Desert Memorial Park: a slowly moving procession of rental cars and sedans with out-of-state plates, of RVs and SUVs, all filled with solemn, wispy-haired, chubby-faced fans wearing nostalgic expressions. Surely there will be parking problems, frayed tempers, marshals, officious attendants, long lines. Take a number.
Instead, there is nothing, and nobody. The park, all hundred acres of it, looks utterly deserted…not even any sign of those dangerous grounds employees. You tiptoe as delicately as possible over the spongy sod, with that strange heightened guilty awareness of walking over people, heading, with a tightening heart, toward B-8. That you’re alone feels both incredibly fortunate and wrong somehow; it’s reminiscent (if the over-fraught parallel can be forgiven) of that dark and strange moment in The Godfather when Michael Corleone discovers that his gravely wounded father, Don Vito, is lying comatose and unprotected in his hospital bed, his police cordon having mysteriously taken a powder.
Then here it is.
Near a little stand of trees, a mini-neighborhood of flat, fading grave slabs, four in a row:
BELOVED HUSBAND AND FATHER
ANTHONY MARTIN SINATRA
1893 † 1969
then,
NATALIE SINATRA
BELOVED WIFE MOTHER
GRANDMOTHER AND GREAT GRANDMOTHER
1894 † 1977
and then,
VINCENT MAZZOLA
1894 † 1973
It’s Cousin Vincent, the shell-shocked World War I vet who lived with Dolly and Marty, and then just Dolly, for fifty years.
And then and only then,
THE BEST IS YET TO COME
FRANCIS ALBERT SINATRA
1915 † 1998
BELOVED HUSBAND & FATHER
And quite unanticipatedly, the little hairs rise on the back of your neck.
The only decorations around the interment of greatest interest are a little American flag stuck in the ground in back of the grave, a couple of small vases of flowers in front. Period. No giant bouquets, teddy bears, CDs, panties, shot glasses. No scrawled verse or sorrowful mash notes. Just the flag, the flowers, the sun. And the stone, with its faded inscription.
And there you are, all alone with him…in a sense. Standing on the spongy turf six feet above the casket containing not just the blue-suited remains, the thing that’s always too terrible to think about, but also—legend has it—several items of iconic (and personal, the boundary between the two always having been porous where Sinatra was concerned) significance: A roll of dimes, like the one he carried for pay phones when Junior was kidnapped. A bottle of Jack Daniel’s. A pack of Camels. Items meant to commemorate but also, unavoidably, meant for a metaphorical and—human hope being what it is—perhaps actual trip to the afterlife. The best is yet to come. The ancient Egyptians did this too, sent along useful objects and food for the next world. In the case of the pharaohs, human retainers were (and were presumably honored to be) sacrificed, mummified, and placed in the royal vault so that they might help out in the heavenly household. It could be making too much of not enough to point out that Frank Sinatra’s two best friends, songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen and restaurateur Jilly Rizzo—who predeceased him by eight and six years, respectively—are buried just yards away. Then again, there they are. If there is an afterlife, and if there are great-looking ladies and ambrosial beverages there—and gate-crashers, nuisances, and phonies, too—then surely Chester and Jilly are standing close by the man whose soul they loved.
And feared.
The gravestone, Desert Memorial Park, Cathedral City, California. “The Best Is Yet to Come,” the inscription promises; the fierce sun that Frank loved has faded the letters. (Credit bm1.5)
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* In 2015, Tina Sinatra also maintained that her father had had a vasectomy several years prior to 1987.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Back amid the swirling mists of time—September 2004, to be exact—I had a lovely, boozy, fateful dinner at a Santa Monica restaurant called Guido’s with a lively, accomplished, and well-seasoned bunch of professional musicians. These half dozen men of a certain age were all working for Jerry Lewis on the Muscular Dystrophy Association Labor Day telethon; I was working with Jerry, finishing my work on his memoir Dean & Me: A Love Story. Sometime late in the evening, the subject of Frank Sinatra came up. Both surprisingly and unsurprisingly, it turned out that all these musicians had worked with Sinatra at one point or another.
I began to listen carefully. Tongues had been loosened throughout the evening; I was surely about to hear some choice dirt about the Mob, the women, the fistfights. But instead, to a man, these musicians spoke, their voices lowered by awe, about what an absolute musical genius Frank Sinatra had been.
I have told this story before. I repeat it now to remind the reader (and myself) how and why I set out on what would become a ten-year odyssey, a first-time biographer’s quixotic—read laughably presumptuous—quest to chronicle in full measure the life and work of a man who was not only a genius—the greatest interpretive musician of all time, in the opinion of many, including myself—but also a man whose life touched almost every aspect of American life in the twentieth century.
My editor, the great Phyllis Grann—herself a historic figure in book publishing—took to my project at once, encouraged me at every timorous step of the journey, and, quite astonishingly, failed to blink when after five years (this was early 2010) I handed her an 800-page manuscript that covered Sinatra’s life to not quite the halfway point—the night in March 1954 when he won the Oscar for From Here to Eternity, marking the start of the greatest comeback in entertainment history—and told her, “This is the book.”
