Why Sinatra Matters (15 page)

Sinatra got up.

T
HE HEAD HE TURNED TOWARD ME WORE A FACE LIKE MINE.

—W. S. M
ERWIN

A
FTER THE
F
ALL
, the Comeback.

For two long and terrible years, Sinatra was a mess. He continued working, making records, appearing on television, performing
in small clubs. But in 1952 and 1953 he had no records at all on the
Billboard
singles charts; he had made those lists every previous year since 1940. His three-year television contract with CBS was canceled
after thirteen weeks because he wouldn’t take the time to rehearse and was abusive to too many people. A 1952 movie called
Meet Danny Wilson
contained many semi-autobiographical touches, including a racketeer who takes 50 percent of the earnings of a singer played
by Sinatra. The movie has many fine songs, including “All of Me,” “I’ve Got a Crush on You,” “That Old Black Magic,” and “She’s
Funny That Way.” But it was poorly directed and shabbily produced. Sinatra did a live engagement to help the movie when it
opened at the Paramount in New York in 1952. That year I was sixteen, and I went to see him, for the first time, in the theater
that only eight years earlier was loud with hysterical adoration. He was as good as everybody said he was: in command, singing
with energy and feeling. But the theater was half empty. In other parts of the United States the movie opened and closed.
That seemed to be the end of Frank Sinatra’s Hollywood career.

Sinatra was drinking hard and smoking too much, and then drinking again. Failure stoked the fires of his rage and increased
his need for alcohol; both increased his sense of personal dissolution. His artistic energies were also being exhausted by
the fierce entanglement with Ava Gardner. Any love affair is a creative act, part imagination, part practice; often, it can
lift an artist to new levels of exalted energy. But a doomed and tumultuous love affair, on the model of the Sinatra and Gardner
coupling, can destroy creativity. For months their affair and marriage seemed to obliterate the basic optimism required by
the romantic impulse, so essential to Sinatra’s art. The vision of earthly happiness, that elusive goal that calls forth so
much lyricism, was being maimed by a corrosive cynicism.

While Sinatra’s career declined, Ava’s star shone more brightly. He began to resemble an adjunct to her career, following
her to movie locations in Spain, England, Africa, and Mexico. They drank hard. They quarreled. They reconciled. Sometimes
Sinatra did his drinking in the empty time when she was away making movies and he was trying to make an impact on television.
But distance didn’t help him regain clarity or a sense of perspective. Instead, jealousy ate at his guts. In Clarke’s or Toots
Shor’s in New York, in the haunts of a fading Hollywood, or in his own apartment (since he and Ava never did establish a home),
he seemed to bounce off the walls, like a drunk who had stayed too long at a party.

But then, slowly, there was a shift. He tried, and failed, to get the part of Johnny Romano in the film of Willard Motley’s
Knock on Any Door;
the role went to young John Derek, whose impossibly perfect looks resembled an illustration from
Cosmopolitan
magazine. Sinatra, at thirty-four, was too old, but Johnny Romano’s motto was one that Sinatra might have felt deeply: “Live
fast, die young, and have a good-looking corpse.”

After he was dropped by MCA, Sinatra moved to the William Morris agency and began focusing his attention on a novel by James
Jones called
From Here to Eternity.
The book was a huge bestseller, a densely detailed story about soldiers based in Schofield Barracks in Pearl Harbor on the
eve of the Japanese attack. All the characters, in one form or another, had been shaped by Prohibition and the Depression,
but Sinatra focused on the role of a tough little Italian American named Angelo Maggio. “I knew Maggio,” Sinatra said. “I
grew up with him in Hoboken.” Unlike
Meet Danny Wilson,
this was to be a major film, with a healthy budget; it would have what Sinatra liked to call “class.” It was to be made by
Columbia Pictures, whose boss was the tough, vulgar Harry Cohn. The director was to be Fred Zinnemann. His
High Noon
the year before was a parable about McCarthyism that simultaneously breathed new life into the western and into the career
of Gary Cooper, who won an Academy Award as best actor. Sinatra began to plead for a chance to play Maggio.

He had a little help from his friends. There is neither proof nor logic to Mario Puzo’s fictional version in
The Godfather,
where the Mob cuts off the head of a racehorse owned by the studio boss and deposits it in his bed, thus persuading the studio
to give the part to a character based loosely on Sinatra. To be sure, Cohn knew Longie Zwillman, who had an affair with Columbia
star Jean Harlow in the 1930s, and probably took loans from Zwillman in the lean days of the Depression. But Maggio was a
minor part in a movie starring Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, and Deborah Kerr. If the Mob had occult powers, why not get
him the starring role? The myth endures. As Mario Puzo himself once said, fiction is the art of “retrospective falsification.”

The facts were more banal. Sinatra’s new agents were working hard behind the scenes. Sinatra himself pleaded with producer
Buddy Adler for a chance to do a screen test. He also called Adler’s boss, Harry Cohn, who owed him a favor. More important,
Ava interceded with Cohn’s wife, Joan, who put in a good word with her husband. Ava also met with Cohn himself, offering to
make a movie at Columbia for nothing, if only he’d give Sinatra the part of Maggio. The studio moved cautiously, primarily
because the success of
High Noon
had given director Zinnemann some power; they could suggest Sinatra but couldn’t order him into the movie. Most of the key
players at the studio, including Zinnemann, believed that Sinatra was primarily a singer, not an actor, and would add nothing
to the movie’s box-office appeal. Everybody in Hollywood knew that Sinatra was a troubled man, increasingly viewed by the
public as Mr. Ava Gardner. It would be better to just get a good actor. A fine, but then unknown, New York actor named Eli
Wallach was the favorite.

In November 1952 Sinatra was in Kenya with Ava as she worked with Clark Gable and Grace Kelly in John Ford’s
Mogambo.
At this point, he seemed to have given up any realistic hope of getting the part. Then, suddenly, the call came from Columbia,
asking him to fly home for a screen test. Sinatra was elated. So was Ava. Sinatra took the next plane out. Without Frank’s
knowledge, Ava flew to London for her second abortion of the year.

Sinatra’s screen test was splendid. When it was over, Zinnemann called Adler and said, “You’d better come down here. You’ll
see something unbelievable.” At the same time, Sinatra’s luck began to return. The men who made such decisions agreed that
Wallach’s screen test was even better than Sinatra’s. But then Wallach got the opportunity to work with director Elia Kazan
on
Camino Real,
the new play by Tennessee Williams. Kazan and Williams were at the peak of their artistic success; Wallach chose the theater
over the movies. And Sinatra agreed to play Maggio for a mere $8,000. Shooting would begin in March of 1953. Nobody yet knew
it, not even Sinatra, but the Comeback had begun.

III
. Musically, Sinatra was also getting up off the floor. In March 1952, in a studio in New York, he made one of his last great
records for Columbia, a song called “I’m a Fool to Want You.” For many people, including Sinatra, as I saw almost twenty years
later in P. J. Clarke’s, it became the abridged version of his relationship with Ava. He is supposed to have done it in one
take, before walking out into the night alone. He had again merged his life with his art. But the song did not sell; it was,
in fact, released as the flip side of the infamous single with Dagmar. By the end of the year he knew that his career at Columbia
Records was over, that his contract would not be renewed. On September 17, 1952, he made an elegant recording of Cy Coleman’s
“Why Try to Change Me Now?” And that tortured part of his professional life was over.

The musical part of the Comeback took place at Capitol Records. The only major record company then based in Los Angeles, it
was producing many hits for Nat Cole, Kay Starr, and the team of Les Paul and Mary Ford. Among its founders were songwriters
Johnny Mercer and Buddy DeSylva. They respected the music of the big bands and recorded Stan Kenton and Woody Herman, along
with older stars such as Benny Goodman, Charlie Barnet, and Duke Ellington. They obviously believed that instant hits were
not the only music that could make money; in the long run, excellence would pay off too. The technology of the Capitol studios
was top of the line. Sinatra was at such a low point in his career (and facing serious doubts among some Capitol executives)
that he was given only a one-year contract, with options for another six, and had to pay for his own recording sessions. Still,
after the long misery at Columbia, he once more had a musical home.

At first, he did more of what he had been doing. His first Capitol recording session took place on April 2, 1953, after his
return from eight exhilarating weeks of work on
From Here to Eternity.
Once again, he used Axel Stordahl as his arranger and recorded “Lean Baby” (words set to a riff-driven Billy May instrumental),
“Don’t Make a Beggar Out of Me,” “Day In, Day Out,” and “I’m Walking Behind You” (which would be a huge hit for Eddie Fisher).
There was a renewed confidence in Sinatra’s voice, as if he knew just how good he had been in the movie and was anticipating
what was coming. But he was not yet the great Sinatra; there was a feeling in the songs that we had been there before. They
were released as singles and did not sell. Then there was another moment of good luck. Stordahl was signed as musical director
of Eddie Fisher’s new television show. Sinatra had two more studio sessions scheduled before leaving on a long summer tour
of Europe. He needed a new arranger in a hurry.

Alan Livingston, then a vice-president in charge of artists and repertoire at Capitol Records, had already brought up a name.

“Do me one favor, and do yourself a favor,” Livingston told Sinatra. “Work with Nelson Riddle.”

And so he did.

III
. Nelson Smock Riddle Jr. was born in Hackensack, New Jersey, on June 1, 1921, about a half an hour from where Frank Sinatra
was growing up in a much different way. Riddle’s father, of Anglo-Irish and Dutch descent, was a commercial artist who loved
popular music and played a little trombone. His mother had Alsatian and Spanish roots and loved the literary and musical classics.
Both parents encouraged their son’s musical ambitions. Riddle started taking piano lessons when he was eight, and when he
was fourteen, he turned to the trombone, using his father’s instrument. That was 1935, and again we see the effects of the
Depression. He began taking trombone lessons from a Professor Dittamo in Paterson.

“After eight lessons,” Riddle wrote, in an autobiographical sketch published in 1985, “the professor told me not to come again,
since my dad had not paid him anything so far. It seems his fee was one dollar a lesson, and this being 1935,
dimes
, much less
dollars
, were difficult to come by for anything more esoteric than a loaf of bread.”

The piano lessons stopped; the music didn’t. Riddle joined the Ridgewood High School band and, after his junior year, started
playing with “kid bands” around the town of Rumson, getting permission from his parents to stay alone in a summer bungalow
without electricity. Just before his senior year, he met Bill Finegan, who was older than Riddle and already arranging for
bands out of his home in Rumson. “We would sit up all night listening to classical music, especially that of Shostakovich,
whose First Symphony, premiered in 1937, captured Bill’s interest and imagination.” Finegan began teaching Riddle the basics
of arranging for dance bands, giving him assignments, correcting his work. Those lessons ended when Finegan went off to work
for Glenn Miller. But he had set some high standards for young Riddle.

“Bill Finegan taught me to enjoy and appreciate the classics as the prime source of musical richness,” Riddle remembered later.
“He also, by example, showed me that much effort is required to produce one’s best work and that it is unwise and unfair to
settle for any less. I remember showing up for a lesson one afternoon and being confronted by a very exhausted Finegan, up
all the previous night, unshaven, red-eyed, and standing in the midst of a small pile of score pages, representing no less
than
twenty-six
possible introductions for the same arrangement, as yet unfinished.”

During this period one of Riddle’s aunts gave him one of those wind-up Victrolas that were changing Frank Sinatra’s Hoboken,
along with the rest of the country. She also presented him with a 78 rpm recording of Debussy performed by Paderewski. He
remembered playing it over and over again, trying to understand its components. In the bungalow in Rumson, however, he had
no radio. On weekends Riddle’s father would drive down from his studio in Ridgewood, and the young musician would sit in his
father’s car, listening to classical and popular music on the car radio. Often the car battery would go dead. “In contrast,
however, my personal musical battery was always ‘super-charged’ by the time the weekend was over.”