Why Sinatra Matters

  Much more dangerous to Sinatra was his abandonment by female fans. This almost certainly was the result of his brutal public humiliation of his wife. It was one thing to have discreet affairs, but flaunting Ava Gardner during a January 1950 gig at the Shamrock Hotel in Houston, while still married to Nancy — that was cruel. His third child, daughter Tina, was only a year and a half old. The boy, Frank Jr., was five. But little Nancy was eight. She was going to school. She could hear the taunts. Her mother, a beautiful, normal woman, was being tossed aside for an actress who was once married to Mickey Rooney! This was outrageous. Or so believed many of the women who in 1944 and 1945 had bought millions of Sinatra’s records or had waited in the rain to see him at the Paramount. So they left. Many never came back. They identified too strongly with Nancy Barbato Sinatra, who soon settled into the role she would play for the rest of Sinatra’s life: the Woman Who Would Wait. Asked once why she had never remarried, she answered, “After Sinatra?”

  The loss of that core audience was a source of pervasive, contaminating anguish for Sinatra. He was only ten years removed from the Rustic Cabin; now his nights were haunted by the dread of losing everything, of a forced return to the maiming obscurity of his youth. More than many other performers, he needed the audience. He needed to feel a connection with all those strangers, needed them to ratify his existence and his value, needed to feed on their emotions, as they sometimes were nourished by his. And now they were gone. Or so it seemed. And without the audience, he was just the boy who was applauded for knowing the words. Or worse: an older man singing to an empty room.

  It was the aftermath of the Fall that changed the audience and changed Sinatra. Right out there in public, Sinatra had been flattened. And men often saw the world in sports terms. One thing they knew about prizefighters, for example, was that you never knew what a fighter was made of until he had been knocked down. Second-raters stayed down and took the count. The great ones always got up.

  Sinatra got up.

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

  —W. S. MERWIN

  6

  ALL OF ME

  AFTER THE FALL, 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 Columbi
a, 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.”

  On his nineteenth birthday, in 1940, Riddle landed his first professional job, playing trombone and doing some minor arranging for an Artie Shaw carbon copy named Tommy Reynolds, and then moved up to the Charlie Spivak orchestra. This was a good swing band, ranking just below the top level, and it was a great place to serve an apprenticeship. Riddle spent two years with Spivak, learning something every day, as Sinatra had with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey. But now the war was on, and Riddle was facing the draft. To avoid the army, he left Spivak for the Merchant Marine band, based in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, where he first arranged for strings. He was there for eighteen months, playing at concerts, dances, and parades, having fun. Then he was abruptly declared 1-A; he reported for induction but was put into a bureaucratic limbo and told to wait. He then got the dream job: working in the Tommy Dorsey orchestra. Sinatra was gone, but Riddle was able to dig into the glorious library of Dorsey arrangements done by his friend Finegan, Eddie Sauter, and Hugo Winterhalter, along with earlier works by Sy Oliver and others. As a trombone player, Riddle admired Dorsey; he also liked him, which was not as easy.

  “Tommy was pleasant to me in his own particular gruff way and quite supportive of my budding career as an arranger,” Riddle said. “He was, and always will be, one of my heroes.”

  In April 1945 the army finally demanded the immediate services of Nelson Riddle. The war was almost over, and Riddle n
ever left the United States. For “fifteen fun-packed months” he worked in an army band, and was discharged in June 1946. But during his army service, his teeth were knocked out in an accident; he was never able to play trombone effectively again and was forced to commit to arranging and, he hoped, composing. He free-lanced around New York for a few months and then left for the West Coast, where he thought he had a job with the Bob Crosby orchestra; that gig evaporated almost as soon as he arrived, and he cobbled together a living as a freelancer. Like millions of other young men, he also took advantage of the educational benefits of the GI Bill, which for Riddle meant studying with an Italian composer named Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. “His method of teaching orchestration was to have his young pupils study a piece written for piano and assign the voices, or lines, in the piano solo to various sections or solo instruments of the orchestra. I found this process to be a most instructive and broadening experience, since many of his pianistic examples were works of such brilliant and diversified composers as Albéniz, Schubert, Brahms, Debussy and many more.”

  Riddle always credited Castelnuovo-Tedesco with giving him “skill and fluency” in handling large groups of instruments and later regretted that his commercial success forced him to cut short his studying after two years. At the same time, Riddle was studying with a Russian named Victor Bay, who taught him the rudiments of conducting. Through this period his family was growing; to support his wife and three children, he arranged music for NBC Radio and freelanced for film composer Victor Young. He took whatever other work he could get, as Sinatra would say later, to put food on the table; some members of the Depression generation never had the psychological luxury of turning down jobs. But in 1950 and 1951 he broke through. He had arranged, without credit, two tunes for the singer and jazz pianist Nat Cole. One was “Mona Lisa.” The other was “Too Young.” Each was a gigantic hit. Cole insisted that he wanted Riddle for his future work, and Riddle soon joined the staff at Capitol Records. He was there when Frank Sinatra arrived in the spring of 1953.