Sinatra

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  After the show, Nancy Sr. would take the children backstage to see Frank. It was always a wild scene back there, so Nancy didn’t like to linger.

  “For me, backstage as much as onstage made a great impression,” Frank Jr. would recall. “I loved it back there, the camaraderie, the slaps on the back, the feeling of belonging. It was like the best locker room in the world, with stars all over the place. Sammy Davis might be there, or maybe Kirk Douglas or Judy Garland or Dean Martin. You never knew who you were going to meet in that dressing room. My heart would be pounding as we walked the long hallways to my dad’s dressing room wondering what I would see once I got there. As I’d get closer, I would start hearing the laughter and start smelling the cigarette smoke. Finally, we’d get to the dressing room and it would be packed with happy people. It was like the parting of the Red Sea when they would see us, everyone making a way for us to get to our dad, who would be seated on a couch in his white shirt and undone tie, his jacket hanging nearby, smoke in one hand, shot glass in the other. The way he would light up when he realized we were there would make me want to cry with joy. He’d bolt up and take us all in his arms. He’d introduce us to people and there would always be photographers back there. We would all pose for pictures with him. It was a big deal, for sure. I started to get it at an early age that my dad had a whole world going on that had virtually nothing to do with me. I would think, ‘Wow, this goes on all the time, not just when I’m here to see it. He’s got this whole . . . life that has absolutely nothing to do with us.’

  “There was also something about seeing the response to my dad, the way people smiled when they got to meet him,” Frank Jr. continued. “They admired and loved him so much, as a kid you couldn’t help but be affected by it. If he signed a piece of paper for someone, you knew that person would treasure that damn slip of paper for life. I would think, ‘Heck, I got about a million pieces of paper at home with his writing on them, and it don’t mean a thing me. But these strangers, they would sell their souls for his signature on a friggin’ napkin!’

  “You sort of place your dad on a pedestal when you see others do it,” he added. “I would think to myself of the times my dad might take a slice of bread and brown it in olive oil. Then he’d cut a hole in it and fry an egg in the hole. He’d slide the whole thing on a plate and hand it to me. ‘Here ya go, Frankie,’ he’d say with pride. I would eat it and stare at him and think, ‘Wow, I sure wish this guy was around more.’ But in those moments backstage I would wonder, ‘Was that my real dad, the guy in the kitchen making me breakfast? Or is this guy backstage, the one being treated like a king, is this my real dad?’ You start to live in this weird parallel universe when it hits you that both of them are your real dad.”

  After about twenty minutes, Nancy Sr. would gather the children and tell them it was time to go. “Every great moment seemed always to be a prelude to a great goodbye,” is how Tina would put it years later. Indeed, after big hugs and kisses for Daddy, Nancy and the children would all be on their way with yet another memory, one that would mean the world to them, one they would hang on to when Frank wasn’t around.

  With the passing of time, if Daddy showed up, the children were thrilled to see him and would spend as much time with him as possible. If he didn’t, they could adapt. They actually didn’t expect much from him. They had their own friends and had created a fun-filled world in which they sometimes had a daddy present and accounted for, and sometimes didn’t.

  Tina, the youngest, was more sensitive to Frank’s absenteeism. “I sensed that my father had a big life of his own out there,” she recalled. “But I couldn’t accept that whatever he did was more important than seeing me. I personally felt that Mom was being too flexible, too quick to make excuses. I’d be thinking, ‘No, you get him back on the phone and tell him that he should be here.’ ”

  In her own way, Tina would always expect more from her father than her two siblings did. Therefore, she would always feel much more let down by him as well. When Frank would visit and fall asleep in the den, she would curl up in his lap and just hope he would never awaken. As she took in his lavender soap, she knew that as long as he was asleep on that chair, he would be there for her. As soon as he awakened, she knew that he’d look at his watch and say, “Okay, kid, walk me to the door.” After a hug and kiss, Tina would run up to her bedroom. She would watch sadly as Frank drove away. “These are my saddest memories,” she would say. “Each of Dad’s visits was an emotional parabola: the eager anticipation of his arrival; the giddy joy of his company; a swelling apprehension as his departure grew near; the dull, aching void he left in his wake.”

  Nancy Sr. never criticized Frank in front of the children, nor did she fight with him in their presence. Of course, his visits to the house were sometimes very difficult for her; she still loved him, after all. However, she would gladly endure the sorrow for the sake of her children. When he didn’t show up as planned, she would reference her ready-made list of excuses to get him off the hook. They weren’t too surprised, then, when they learned that Frank wouldn’t be home for Christmas.

  “He has to work in Europe,” Nancy told the children over breakfast. “You know, he can’t be in two places at the same time. I’ll tell you what,” she offered, “we’ll all have Christmas together when Daddy gets back.”

  “Okay, sure, Mommy,” the children said as they pulled away from the table and ran outside to play tag.

  It was then that it hit Nancy: It meant more to her than it did them. She couldn’t help but sit at the kitchen table and cry.

  1957–58

  It’s astonishing to note just how busy and productive Frank Sinatra was in the mid- to late 1950s with another barrage of memorable record albums and movies. In the 1950s, his output—four or five, sometimes more, albums a year—was not unusual. In 1957 alone, he recorded fifty-seven new songs—but likely none are more significant than “All the Way” and “Witchcraft.” “All the Way,” with lyrics by Sammy Cahn and written for the film The Joker Is Wild, would be one of Frank’s bestselling singles. On the charts for thirty weeks, it went on to win the 1957 Academy Award for Best Original Song. “Witchcraft” would become a hit for Frank in 1958 and receive a Grammy nomination.

  This was also the year of Frank’s classic concept albums, A Swingin’ Affair and Come Fly with Me (his first recording with arranger Billy May, which would soar to number one on the charts). Sinatra also issued Where Are You?, an album of romantic ballads in a musical collaboration with the multitalented Gordon Jenkins. Also released that year would be his premiere Christmas album, A Jolly Christmas with Frank Sinatra. For sheer artistry, taste, sense of pacing, and atmosphere, A Jolly Christmas is untouchable.

  Also, in 1957, Frank made Pal Joey, a film with Kim Novak and Rita Hayworth. He plays the title role of the tenderhearted singer Joey Evans, who ends up in a romantic triangle with Hayworth and Novak. The soundtrack included Rodgers and Hart songs such as “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” and “The Lady Is a Tramp.”

  The year 1958 is best remembered by Sinatra aficionados as the year he released Frank Sinatra Sings Only the Lonely, an album of torch songs that he considered his best work. Arranged by Nelson Riddle, the album contains some of Frank’s finest saloon songs, such as “Angel Eyes” (the quintessential story of a loser at the game of love) and “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry.” This album, which Frank Jr. has called “the greatest blues album ever made”—remained at number one for many months.

  Also noteworthy in 1958 was Come Dance with Me, a swing album arranged by Billy May. (It won Grammy Awards in 1959 for Album of the Year and Best Male Vocal.)

  The next year, 1959, saw the release of the albums Look to Your Heart and No One Cares (arranged by Gordon Jenkins). Again, both soared to the Top Ten.

  Besides Pal Joey, there were many other films released during this two-year period. For instance, Frank plays a crippled World War II infantry lieutenant, costarring with Tony Curtis and Natalie Wood, in Kin
gs Go Forth; a disillusioned war veteran with Dean Martin and Shirley MacLaine in Some Came Running; a careless dreamer and widower trying to raise his ten-year-old son with Eleanor Parker and Edward G. Robinson in Frank Capra’s comedy with dramatic overtones A Hole in the Head; and an army captain fighting the Japanese in World War II Burma with Gina Lollobrigida in Never So Few.

  The year was capped by Frank’s memorable recording of the optimistic “High Hopes” for the movie A Hole in the Head. The song would go on to win the Academy Award for Best Song.

  Betty’s Heartbreak

  By early 1958, Lauren Bacall, who was now thirty-three, was very much in love with Frank Sinatra and thinking about marriage. “My friends were worried I’d be hurt,” she later recalled, “that he wasn’t good enough, couldn’t be counted on for a lifetime. But it was going so smoothly, I felt I was the center of his life, and he was the center of mine.” Frank began to allow himself to bask in the warmth of her devotion and attention. Still on the rebound from Ava, he tried to convince himself that he wanted to be with Betty, that Ava no longer mattered. He was drinking heavily, as usual, and his moods at this time vacillated between being extremely elated to be with Betty and morosely sad to no longer be with Ava—typical of a manic-depressive.

  He also had some apprehensions about being a father to Betty’s two children. Still, despite any reservations, he wanted to move forward with his life. He knew he couldn’t stay stuck in a rut, lamenting his lost love. His very good friend Manie Sacks, who had been influential in the lives of many recording artists and was very beloved in the record industry, had just died on February 9 of leukemia at the age of fifty-six.

  Manie, whose most recent job had been as vice president in charge of programming at NBC, had been suffering for two years before he told Frank about it. “We gotta do something about this thing, pallie,” Frank, who always felt he could handle other people’s problems, if not his own, told his friend. “What I got, we can’t do nothing about,” Manie said. When he died, Frank was overwhelmed with grief. Manie had lived a full, wonderful life even though he’d never married. “I look around me and people are happy,” Frank told Dinah Shore; Manie had also charted much of Dinah’s career. “I have my career, which is fine. But I want more than just my shitty life. I want to be happy. Is there anything wrong with that?”

  Dinah wasn’t surprised to hear such a heartfelt observation from Frank. She and Frank weren’t always very close, but as friends of Manie’s they often had soulful conversations. “If you live your life like Manie, you can’t lose,” she told him, according to her memory. “Manie would want you to be happy. If that’s to be with Betty, fine. Or if it’s being alone, that’s fine, too. You don’t have to be with someone, Frank. You know, you can be alone.”

  “No,” Frank said, shaking his head. “I don’t think I can be alone.”

  “Then ask Betty to marry you,” Dinah suggested. “If that will make you happy and make her happy, too, Frank, do it.”

  “Think that’s what Manie would want?” Frank asked, his eyes misting over.

  “I know it’s what he’d want,” Dinah said. (Frank and Dinah would later sing a delightful medley together on a television special dedicated to Manie Sacks for NBC, called Some of Manie’s Friends.)

  On March 11, 1958, Frank proposed marriage to Betty. She immediately accepted. The night of their engagement, they went to the Imperial Gardens restaurant on the Sunset Strip. They asked the agent Swifty Lazar to join them in their private celebration. The next day, Frank departed for Miami. Before he left, he told Betty to be absolutely sure to keep their engagement top secret. He didn’t want the news to leak out until after he returned from Miami, mostly because he didn’t want to have to deal with the avalanche of press attention it would generate while he was trying to work a club date.

  “I was giddy with joy,” Betty would recall, “and felt like laughing every time I opened my mouth. I said nothing to anyone, but now I knew my life would go on. The children would have a father, I would have a husband, we’d have a home again. It was a hard secret to keep—I was about to burst—but I kept my mouth shut.”

  That night, Betty went to the Huntington Hartford Theater with Swifty Lazar to see the Welsh actor Emlyn Williams perform in a Dickens play. At intermission, she went to the ladies’ room, and on her way, Louella Parsons stopped her and Swifty to ask if it was true that she was going to marry Frank. “Why don’t you ask him?” Betty snapped back and kept moving, lest the reporter follow up with more questions. Inside, though, she was shaking. How in the world did Parsons know?

  When Betty came out of the ladies’ room, she saw Swifty deep in conversation with Louella. This wasn’t good.

  The next morning, Betty woke up to a newspaper headline with Parsons’s byline, which almost stopped her heart: “Sinatra to Marry Bacall.” Parsons reported that Betty had “finally admitted that [Sinatra] had asked her to marry him. She was beaming with happiness.” Of course, that wasn’t true at all. Betty had told her no such thing, and when she read it she was filled with panic. She would have to explain it all to Frank, and the sooner the better.

  First, she had it out with Swifty. “My God! You told her? Are you crazy?” she asked him later that morning, according to her memory.

  “Of course I told her,” said Swifty. “I didn’t know she would go write about it, though.”

  “She’s a gossip columnist,” Betty exclaimed. “What did you think she would do? Keep it a secret?”

  “Well, so what?” Swifty asked, not at all connecting to the gravity of what had just happened. “It’s true, isn’t it?”

  “But it wasn’t your secret to tell,” Betty said, dismayed. “We have to call Frank right now. You have to tell him what you did!”

  “Why are you so nervous?” Swifty asked.

  “Have you met Frank Sinatra?” Betty asked sarcastically. “Have you met him?”

  They made the call. Swifty told Frank that the news was out—“the cat’s out of the bag,” he said, trying to make light of it—but was a little vague about how it had happened. In other words, he didn’t exactly cop to it.

  Finally, Betty got on the line. “I’m so sorry about this,” she told Frank. “I hope it’s all okay.”

  Frank was noncommittal. He didn’t chastise her, but he also didn’t let her off the hook. She felt a little fearful about his demeanor, but hoped he was just tired. She knew he hadn’t had a chance to tell Nancy about the engagement, and she figured maybe that was what bothered him the most.

  Though her friends immediately started calling to congratulate her, Betty did what she could to dampen their enthusiasm. She didn’t want there to be any more excitement about the engagement, not until Frank returned and she could see his face to know that everything was all right.

  Frank didn’t call for a few days. “So, then, the operative word was . . . apprehensive,” she would recall years later.

  After almost a week without word from him, Betty went from “apprehensive” to frantic. What was he thinking? How was he feeling? What was going to happen? Though she didn’t know it—but later would admit that she at least suspected—Frank was having second thoughts.

  It was Mickey Rudin who helped Frank make up his mind about Betty. Mickey, who was thirty-seven—born in New York City on November 16, 1920—would go on to become a pivotal person in Frank’s life. Educated at UCLA, where he received his bachelor of arts degree in 1941, he went on from there to graduate from Harvard Law. A short and stout tough guy, he was married to Elizabeth Greenschpoon, a talented cellist whose brother, Ralph, became both Marilyn Monroe’s and Frank Sinatra’s psychiatrist. Frank had just retained Mickey, and already the two were on their way to a great friendship and working relationship. “He was an utterly brilliant lawyer and unforgettable character,” recalled Bruce Ramer, a partner in the Beverly Hills law firm of Gang, Tyre, Ramer & Brown; Mickey was a partner there from 1946 to 1966.

  Frank told Mickey he had certain apprehensions ab
out being a stepfather to Betty’s two little children. He already had three children by Nancy and sometimes had a tough time doing right by them, as much as he tried. Also, he believed that what he and Betty shared was more mutual grief over losing Bogie than it was true love for one another. He explained that Manie Sacks’s death had hit him hard and made him want to marry Betty.

  Mickey laid it on the line, as he would do for Frank for the next thirty years. “Divorce at your level of income is a pain in the ass,” he reportedly said. “If you’re not sure about this thing, for God’s sake, Frank, don’t do it. Manie wouldn’t want you to have an expensive divorce, that much I know for sure.”

  When he finally called her, Frank acted as if he was very angry with Betty. “Why did you do it?” he demanded to know.

  “Do what?” she asked. She thought something else had happened.

  “Tell that reporter about our engagement,” Frank said.

  “But I didn’t do it, Frank,” Betty said in her defense. “Swifty did it. Not me.”

  “Damn it, Betty, I haven’t been able to leave my room for days; the press are everywhere,” Frank said, really lighting into her. “Now we’ll have to lay low for a while, not see each other.” He lacked the courage to be honest with her and admit he’d had a change of heart.

  They were to go to Chicago on March 25 to attend a Sugar Ray Robinson fight. That date would have to be canceled, Frank told Betty. They were also scheduled to go to New York on the twenty-sixth, where Betty was to be at his side when he received the Boys’ Town of Italy Award. Now that trip would have to be canceled as well. On the twenty-seventh they had plans to attend a policemen’s benefit in Palm Springs. “That’s out too,” Frank said, laying down the law.

  Her heart sinking, Betty didn’t quite know how to respond. “Well, what are we going to do?” she asked.