Night Beat (73 page)

THE 1940S WERE an era full of big hopes and bigger perils. The nation had recovered from the long, devastating Depression of the 1930s, but it was now enmeshed in a high-stakes world war in Europe and Asia. In the midst of these years of risk—in this time of possible ruin or rebirth—America found its favorite voice in a fragile-looking romantic balladeer. No doubt part of what Frank Sinatra offered to his audience was the allure of a pleasant diversion during dark nights of uncertainty. But there was also something about the perceived vulnerability in the young singer’s voice and manner, and how it mixed with his clear longing, that spoke to and for many of those who elected him to his early popularity. Sinatra was a sign that America had a promising outlook: There were still great songs and exhilarating nights to come, and the last dance was a long way off. Or at least Sinatra’s own future looked fine. In 1943, he signed with Columbia Records. With the help of arranger Axel Stordahl, he recorded a remarkable series of graceful and inspiriting hits, including “All or Nothing at All,” “Where or When,” “These Foolish Things,” “Put Your Dreams Away,” “I’ll Never Smile Again,” “Day by Day,” “Someone to Watch Over Me,” “You Go to My Head,” “Try a Little Tenderness,” “(I Don’t Stand) A Ghost of a Chance,” “Nancy (With the Laughing Face),” and “That Old Black Magic.” Sinatra also appeared with Gene Kelly in a pair of key 1940s song-and-dance musicals,
Anchors Aweigh
and
On the Town,
and gave his first dramatic performance in the 1948 film
The Miracle of the Bells
. In 1944, Sinatra was a guest at President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s White House, and, in 1945, he won a special Academy Award for
The House I Live In
, a short film about racial bigotry and tolerance. At that time, nearly a decade before the civil rights movement would inflame and transfigure America, such a progressive stance from a popular entertainer was still uncommon, and the film’s message was among the reasons that several members of the press, various congressmen, and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI termed Sinatra a communist.

Then, toward the decade’s end, Sinatra fell from grace—fast and hard. In part, the decline simply had to do with shifting musical tastes: In the exhilaration of the postwar period, a new audience wanted more verve than the light-voiced Sinatra now seemed capable of. In addition, Sinatra alienated many of his remaining supporters in a matter of personal conduct. In 1939, Sinatra had married his longtime girlfriend, Nancy Barbato, and the couple would have three children: Nancy Jr., Frank Jr., and Christina (Tina). But Sinatra had an eager eye, and there were rumors that he had seen numerous women during his road shows. When Sinatra began a steamy public affair with actress Ava Gardner, the press was outraged, and so were many of his fans. Sinatra divorced Nancy, and, in 1951, married Gardner. But within a few years, Sinatra’s relationship with both Columbia Records and his wife turned stormy, and in the seasons that followed, the singer lost everything—including his record and film contracts, his marriage with Gardner, and, perhaps most devastatingly of all, he lost his voice during a performance. After that, no record companies would take a chance on Sinatra. He was back to the club circuit, playing to meager audiences and trying to recapture the voice and confidence that had once come so readily.

In 1953, Capitol Records agreed to venture a one-year contract with Sinatra—if the artist was willing to pay his own studio costs. It was a somewhat degrading offer, but Sinatra took it—and by doing so, turned his life around. With his first few sessions for the label, Sinatra surprised both critics and former fans by flaunting a new voice that seemed to carry more depth, more worldly insight, and more rhythmic invention than the half-fragile tone that he had brandished in the 1940s. In addition, Sinatra became one of the first pop artists to take advantage of the possibilities offered by the new medium of long-playing records. LPs could hold over forty-five minutes of music in near-continuous play, which meant that a performer could sustain a mood, dwelling on it until that mood could give up no other revelations. Or, if the artist chose, he might even use the extended format to construct a character study or share an ongoing story. Sinatra brought these prospects to bear on his first full-fledged album for Capitol,
In the Wee Small Hours,
a deep-blue, hardbitten collection of soliloquies, portraying a man who rarely leaves his own aching memories, much less his room, unless it’s to find a 3 A.M. drink. In his Capitol years, Sinatra became, as vocalist and critic Mike Campbell later said, “the first true storyteller outside the blues singers. . . . The first guy to take those great standards and turn them into emotional experiences.”

With
Wee Small Hours
—which was conducted by Nelson Riddle, Nat “King” Cole’s up-and-coming arranger, who would become Sinatra’s greatest collaborator—Sinatra staked out the vocal sensibility that would become the hallmark of his mature style and that would establish him as the most gifted interpretive vocalist to emerge in pop or jazz since Billie Holiday. On the surface, Sinatra’s new style seemed almost more colloquial than musical. That is, he took supremely mellifluent material, like the title track, and sang it as if it were a hushed yet vital communication: a rueful confession shared with an understanding friend over a late-night shot of whiskey, or more likely, a painful rumination that the singer needed to proclaim to himself in order to work his way free of a bitter memory. In other words, Sinatra was now singing songs of romantic despair as if he were living inside the experience of those songs and as if each tune’s lyrics were his and his alone to sing. “It was Ava who did that, who taught him how to sing a torch song,” Nelson Riddle later told biographer Kitty Kelley. “That’s how he learned. She was the greatest love of his life, and he lost her.”

In effect, Sinatra’s stay at Capitol—along with the credibility he gained as an actor from his Oscar-winning performance in
From Here to Eternity
—proved to be the redemption of his career. Over the next ten years, he would record twenty-plus top-selling LPs for the label—alternating between sexy, uptempo, big band-style dance affairs and regretful musings on romantic despair and sexual betrayal—and he would also become one of the most consistently popular Top 40 singles artists of the 1950s. It was one of the richest and most successful growth periods that any pop artist has ever managed.

FRANK SINATRA WAS BACK on top and in better form than ever before. His new albums sold well and steadily, despite the rise of Elvis Presley and rock & roll. (Sinatra’s
Only the Lonely
stayed on
Billboard
’s charts for over two years, and his rave-up hard-swing triumph
Come Dance with Me
remained on the charts for nearly three years). Also, his complex dramatic work in
Suddenly, The Man with the Golden Arm, Some Came Running,
and
Young at Heart
—a surprisingly self-referential role as a bad-news depressive saloon singer—showed that Sinatra’s acting could be as dark and mesmerizing as his more serious musical efforts.

But Sinatra’s new success didn’t always bring out the best in him. He had long been known for a quick temper, and, like his mother, he didn’t easily relinquish grudges. In the late 1940s, when his career was on the skids, Sinatra insulted several high-placed columnists who he believed had been unfair in their coverage of him. He was particularly incensed by the writers who had made loud news about a misguided trip he made to Havana in 1947 to visit organized crime figure Lucky Luciano. Sinatra railed at several columnists, calling them whores; made veiled threats against others; and even sent one of the most influential gossip writers a tombstone with her name engraved on it. In one infamous episode, Sinatra punched a male columnist alongside the head for printing an innuendo that the singer was a communist. Sinatra was orded to pay a $25,000 fine for the incident. Sometime later, after the columnist died, Frank visited the writer’s grave and pissed on it.

Sinatra might have attributed some of this notorious behavior to the fury of youth or to the injury he felt as he watched his career plummet in the early 1950s and as he went through his intense, wrenching relationship with Ava Gardner. But the ill-famed bouts of wrath and boorishness continued after Sinatra’s rejuvenation in the early 1950s. There are numerous (and credible) stories of Sinatra flying into rages at friends and lovers, attacking parking lot attendants who didn’t place his car in a favored space, and even threatening to ruin Capitol Records—the label that helped place him back on top—when the company wouldn’t accommodate his plans for his own label. But perhaps the ugliest stories came from a close friend of Sinatra’s, actor Peter Lawford, who said he once saw Frank Sinatra hurl a young woman through a plate-glass window at a party. “[T]he girl’s arm was nearly severed from her body,” Lawford told biographer Kitty Kelley. (In one of Nancy Sinatra’s biographies of her father, she writes that Frank told her that the woman was extremely drunk and that she reeled back and fell into a window while being escorted from a party at his house. Sinatra, Nancy said, drove the woman to the hospital and covered her medical bills.) Lawford also claimed he saw Sinatra punch women on various occasions and once witnessed, in the Beverly Hills Hotel’s Polo Lounge, one of Sinatra’s sidekicks club a man with a heavy glass ashtray because Sinatra believed the man had said something disparaging about him. It was as if Sinatra, despite the beauty of his artistry and the brilliance of his commercial resurgence, felt he had to fight anew for every inch of his own domain—and that domain was wherever the singer allowed himself or his desires to roam.

In the late 1950s, Sinatra began to hold sway over a court of friends, singers, and actors who shared his tastes, views, and humor and who respected his luster. The group—which included Dean Martin, Judy Garland, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Peter Lawford (and which later included Joey Bishop and Shirley MacLaine)—had originally been an irreverent, anti-Hollywood enclave that gathered around Humphrey Bogart and his wife, Lauren Bacall. After Bogart’s death in 1957 (and following a brief failed affair between Sinatra and Bacall), Sinatra became the acknowledged center of the assembly. Under Sinatra’s custody, the Rat Pack turned into more than a celebrity clique—it became a demonstration of Sinatra’s new, well-protected way of life: high flying, hard living, and frequently unforgiving of those who crossed his will or temper.

But the Rat Pack’s most notable associate (in fact, something of a hidden member) was the one friend of Sinatra’s who would soon eclipse the singer’s fame and power: Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy. Kennedy had been a fan of Sinatra’s, and the two men met around 1959 as the senator was preparing for his 1960 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Sinatra and Kennedy recognized that they shared a certain kindred sensibility: Both were fortunate descendents of aspiring immigrants, and both had a sense of personal entitlement, counterbalanced by social liberalism. Kennedy attended shows by Sinatra and the Rat Pack in Las Vegas, and Sinatra participated in Kennedy’s history in mixed but significant ways. Sinatra reputedly introduced Kennedy to Judith Campbell Exner, a woman who later claimed to be both Sinatra and Kennedy’s lover—though around the same time Sinatra was alleged to have introduced her to the mob boss Sam Giancana. (If true, this means that a major American politician and a major crime boss were sharing the same lover—and that Sinatra had orchestrated the nexus.) Sinatra also went to work for Kennedy’s presidential campaign and brought not only members of the Rat Pack into the cause but also a high-profile Hollywood contingent. But most important, according to some writers, Sinatra persuaded mob forces to turn out the vote for Kennedy in crucial districts of Chicago during the senator’s incredibly tight race against the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon. In other words, Frank Sinatra won John Kennedy the presidency and helped secure his lasting place in the country’s history.

Sinatra hosted one of Kennedy’s Inaugural Balls and escorted Jacqueline Kennedy to the event, and for a time he had a favored access to the most powerful and illustrious figure in America. This proved useful when Sinatra wanted to make a film out of the novel
The Manchurian Candidate,
the theme of which was a plot to assassinate a presidential candidate. The studio, United Artists, was squeamish about the content. At Sinatra’s request, Kennedy—who had enjoyed the novel—intervened, and the film went into production. (After Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, Sinatra forbade the film’s rerelease. As a result, one of America’s greatest postwar movies—and Sinatra’s last meaningful acting work—stayed out of circulation for twenty-five years.)

The good times between Sinatra and Kennedy didn’t last long. In 1962, Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s investigation of organized crime turned up more reports of Sinatra’s affiliation with known racketeers. In particular, Robert Kennedy was disturbed by Sinatra’s friendship with mob leader Sam Giancana and advised Sinatra to break off any such ties (the attorney general didn’t know about Exner’s tie to Giancana and the president). Sinatra declined the advice. A short time later, John Kennedy canceled a planned visit to Sinatra’s Palm Springs home and stayed instead at the home of Bing Crosby. After hearing the news, Sinatra took a heavy hammer to the airplane tarmac he had installed for the president’s arrival. He was hurt and enraged and reportedly felt he had been shunted aside and betrayed by a man he had befriended and helped. Although Kennedy and Sinatra continued communications on a less frequent and more discreet basis, Sinatra never again placed himself in such an unprotected and mortifying position.