Why Sinatra Matters

  The odd thing was that Sinatra didn’t seem to know much about the thirty-one-year-old Riddle when they did their first session together on April 30, 1953. Perhaps he was too absorbed in the melodrama of the Fall to notice the huge success of “Mona Lisa” and “Too Young”; perhaps he just didn’t want to know about it. But according to Will Friedwald, in his exhaustive (and excellent) book Sinatra! The Song Is You, Sinatra thought he was cutting four sides by bandleader-arranger Billy May. In fact, Riddle, with May’s agreement, had arranged two tunes in May’s style and two in his own. When Sinatra saw Riddle in the studio, his first question was “Who’s he?”

  Assured that Riddle was only conducting, because May was on the road with his own band, Sinatra recorded “South of the Border” and “I Love You.” Both had some of the slurping saxophone mannerisms of Billy May, and Sinatra sounded better than he had in years. Then they turned their attention to “I’ve Got the World on a String,” written in 1932 by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler for a Cotton Club revue. Sinatra had sung it in clubs and a few larger venues, using an arrangement from an old radio show. But he had never done it this way. With its wonderful decrescendo opening and the passionate trombone playing of Milt Bernhart, the recording was their first masterpiece.

  Years later, Alan Dell, then a Capitol executive, gave Friedwald an account of the session. When it was over, Sinatra said, “Hey, who wrote that?” Dell replied, “This guy, Nelson Riddle.” Sinatra said, “Beautiful!” Dell added, “And from that the partnership started.”

  That partnership would include 318 recordings made over the next quarter of a century. Sinatra recorded with many other arrangers, including Billy May, but Riddle brought a special sound to the work that became the mature sound of Frank Sinatra, the sound of the Comeback, the sound of the years when Sinatra always wore a hat and truly seemed to have the world on a string. The relationship wasn’t always easy; according to Riddle, Sinatra was one of those men incapable of paying compliments to the people he truly admired. He expressed approval with silence; if he thought something wasn’t working, he said so. Each had taken from Tommy Dorsey a sense of discipline and excellence.

  “Frank and I both have, I think, the same musical aim,” Riddle said in 1961. “We know what we’re each doing with a song, what we want the song to say. The way we’d work is this: he’d pick out all the songs for an album and then call me over to go through them. He’d have very definite ideas about the general treatment, particularly about the pace of the record and which areas should be soft or loud, happy or sad. He’d sketch out something brief, like, ‘Start with a bass figure, build up second time through and then fade out at the end.’ That’s possibly all he would say. Sometimes he’d follow up with a phone call at three in the morning with some other extra little idea. But after that he wouldn’t hear my arrangement until the recording session.”

  Sinatra also admired Riddle’s care for details: “Nothing ever ruffles him. There’s a great depth somehow to the music he creates. And he’s got a sort of stenographer’s brain. If I say to him at a planning meeting, ‘Make the eighth bar sound like Brahms,’ he’ll make a cryptic little note on the side of some crappy music sheet and, sure enough, when we come to the session the eighth bar will be Brahms. If I say, ‘Make like Puccini,’ Nelson will make exactly the same little note and that eighth bar will be Puccini all right, and the roof will lift off.”

  There were a number of components to the Sinatra-Riddle collaboration. Friedwald emphasizes one of them: “Lightness shines as the primary ingredient of the Riddle style. Whether he has ten brass swinging heavily or an acre of strings, Riddle always manages to make everything sound light; that way, the weightiest ballad doesn’t become oversentimental and insincere, and the fastest swinger doesn’t come off as forced.”

  The many records Sinatra made with Gordon Jenkins don’t have this quality; the strings are heavy, gloppy, like musical cream cheese, and Sinatra’s own ironical readings often sound more sentimental than they really are, because they are overwhelmed by the heaviness of the arrangements. Riddle was always too hip to clog the music with a lot of sugar.

  “A lot of musicians and writers don’t get the full value out of a tune,” Miles Davis said in 1958. “[Art] Tatum does and Frank Sinatra always does. Listen to the way Nelson Riddle writes for Sinatra, the way he gives him enough room and doesn’t clutter it up. Can you imagine how it would sound if Mingus were writing for Sinatra? But I think Mingus will settle down; he can write good music. But about Riddle, his backgrounds are so right that sometimes you can’t tell if they’re conducted.”

  Riddle’s own distinctive sound almost always included flutes; a muted, commenting trumpet played by Harry (Sweets) Edison, who provided accents and emphases; trombones, of course; and a solid rhythm section. But he experimented with the combinations, always hoping to keep the sound fresh, while serving the needs of Sinatra as a singer. On the Only the Lonely album, for example, he used for the first time a full woodwind section, made up of two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, and two bassoons. He would use that combination again and again, sometimes playing into and against sheets of strings, all of them united by harmonies he had absorbed from listening to Ravel, Debussy, and other impressionist composers.

  “I loved how Nelson used Ravel’s approach to polytonality,” said Quincy Jones, who has written arrangements for everyone from Count Basie and Ray Charles to Michael Jackson. “Nelson was smart because he put the electricity up above Frank. He put it way upstairs and gave Frank the room downstairs for his voice to shine, rather than building big, lush parts that were in the same register as his voice.”

  Sinatra, the musician, was always involved in the actual execution of the complete piece of music.

  “Frank accentuated my awareness of dynamics by exhibiting his own sensitivity in that direction,” Riddle would later write. “It is one thing to indicate by dynamic markings … how you want to have the orchestra play your music. It is quite another to induce a group of blase, battle-scarred musicians to observe those markings and to play accordingly. I would try, by word or gesture, to get them to play correctly, but if after a couple of times through, the orchestra still had not effectively observed the dynamics, Frank would suddenly turn and draw from them the most exquisite shadings, using the most effective means yet discovered, sheer intimidation.”

  Within a year they would combine on “Young at Heart,” and Sinatra would have his first single to make the top five since 1947. The amazing comeback would be complete.

  IV. While Sinatra was practicing his art with renewed vitality, he was still struggling to make sense of his private life. The relationship with Ava Gardner remained jagged and self-destructive. They were together, fought, split, reconciled: a familiar pattern of obsession. The squalid little drama was in horrid counterpoint to the rise in his fortunes in other areas. In August From Here to Eternity was released, and Sinatra received rave reviews. The movie also shifted the way he was viewed by large numbers of men. Many seemed to merge Sinatra with Maggio, and when the thin, brave character of the movie is beaten to death by the character played by Ernest Borgnine, it was a kind of symbolic expiation. Sinatra had shown an aspect of his character that many had never witnessed before in a Sinatra movie or heard singing from jukeboxes. Sinatra/Maggio had lost. But in death, he had won.

  Before the movie opened, Sinatra had been booked into Bill Miller’s Riviera, on the New Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge. Only a year before, he had played that room to many empty tables. Now, suddenly, the place was packed, celebrities were using pull to get in, the parking lot was jammed, and even the gangsters had problems getting tables. Sinatra was exultant.

  At the same time, in the fall of 1953, Ava Gardner decided to end the marriage. Her account of the decision in her autobiography has a kind of hard-boiled poignancy:

  “I don’t think I ever sat down and made a conscious decision about leaving Frank; as usual I simply acted on impulse and allowed events to
sweep me along. But I remember exactly when I made the decision to seek a divorce. It was the day the phone rang and Frank was on the other end, announcing that he was in bed with another woman. And he made it plain that if he was going to be constantly accused of infidelity when he was innocent, there had to come a time when he’d decide he might as well be guilty. But for me, it was a chilling moment. I was deeply hurt. I knew then that we had reached a crossroads. Not because we had fallen out of love, but because our love had so battered and bruised us that we couldn’t stand it anymore.”

  Sinatra went on to win the Academy Award for best supporting actor. His records began selling. He appeared before large crowds in New York, Miami, and Las Vegas. Offers arrived every day for television shows and movie roles. But it took him a long time to get over Ava Gardner. She had decided to live in Europe, and he followed her to London and Spain, sometimes begging for a reconciliation that never happened. Back at home, without hope, the wounds slowly healing, he transformed himself into the Sinatra who wore a hat. The swinger whose best friends were men. The man with a lot of women, which was, of course, like having no woman at all. The message was there in the music, the attitude, even the hat: he had come through a hard, dark time, and he wasn’t ever going back to the darkness.

  But some of the hardest times in life never completely end. The only time I ever met Ava Gardner was in 1974. A mutual friend took me to see her. She had been drinking and kept whacking a small dog with a rolled-up tabloid newspaper. She was staying at Frank Sinatra’s apartment in the Waldorf-Astoria.

  V. By the mid-1950s Sinatra was expressing the feelings and yearnings of men. And they were listening. Most Americans love stories of redemption, of course, but men identify more often with the tale of the return of the hero, the man who comes back wearing the scars of battle, harder and wiser than he was when he left. Looking at, or listening to, Sinatra, particularly after the release of the masterful album called In the Wee Small Hours, men changed their attitude about Frank Sinatra. They identified with the personal drama of the Fall, with the cliché of the hero led astray by the vixen and his eventual release from her wiles. Or they embraced another cliché he had paid his dues. At last. Such men once believed that everything had been too easy for Frank Sinatra. But now he had paid for his good luck and his endless hubris in the ways they had paid: with anguish and suffering and loss.

  Even some of the old soldiers forgave him. The Korean War had confused all notions of the nobility of serving your country; it was an undeclared “police action,” without a Pearl Harbor, and deepened the cynicism of many men. The fighting was ended in 1953 by the new president, Dwight Eisenhower, who knew as a general that it was folly to fight a land war in Asia. The men seemed to say, Don’t trust history, trust only the personal. And for many men, the personal involved a merging of reality and fiction. In war or peace, they all knew men like Maggio.

  On the records, the voice was deeper, richer, with more timbre, the voice of a man. But it also had a newer attitude. In the ballads, most of them torch songs, he was protected now with the armor of the stoic. The songs from In the Wee Small Hours said that in spite of loss, abandonment, defeat, he — and you — could get through the night. You could still get hurt, but it was worth the risk because you knew that no defeat was permanent. There would be another day, a new woman, another chance to roll the dice. There was rue in some of the songs. There was regret. There was no self-pity.

  “Ava taught him how to sing a torch song,” said Nelson Riddle many years later. “She taught him the hard way.”

  Everything that flowed from the comeback — the Rat Pack, the swagger, the arrogance, the growing fortune, the courtiers — is, in the end, of little relevance. It has as much to do with Sinatra’s art as Hemingway’s big-game hunting had to do with his. For a while Sinatra appeared to be the only man in America who could not be hurt again. Not ever. Onstage he exuded power and confidence; even the shadow of the Mob helped his image because it added a dangerous glamour to the performance and a dark resonance to his art. He made some good movies after the comeback: The Man with the Golden Arm, Pal Joey, Some Came Running, High Society, and The Manchurian Candidate. He also made some appalling, self-indulgent junk. But he simply didn’t take acting seriously enough to become a great actor. Too often he settled for the first, most superficial take, avoiding the effort that would force him to stretch his talent, acting as if he were double parked. Too often, in too many movies, he cheated the audience and cheated himself. He never cheated in the music.

  In the end, his most durable expression lies in that music. While living his life, Sinatra had learned something about human pain and found a way, through his music, to turn that hard-won knowledge into a form of human consolation. As the country changed, and the music along with it, as rock and roll took over and the baby boomers sneered at the children of Prohibition and the Depression, he was often baffled about the world and his role in it. But he continued practicing his own consoling art until the words and music could no longer rise from him into the trembling air.

  Before leaving the stage, Sinatra had come to realize that life was not one long string of triumphs. As he grew older, he sometimes even floundered in the music (he made an entire album of songs based on Rod McKuen’s ninth-rate poetry). But even his slumps did not last long. He could always find his way home to the music that had lasted him a lifetime, and almost until the end, he was capable of surprise. To be sure, much of what he did in life was also predictable. Watching the disorder and chaos of the sixties, his politics changed. But then, he was not the only old New Dealer who moved to the right, where he embraced Richard Nixon, a man he detested, and Ronald Reagan, a man he enjoyed. During that period of disorder he married and divorced Mia Farrow, who was thirty years his junior, and came away baffled at himself. “I still don’t know what that was all about,” he said to me a dozen years after it had ended. With his fourth wife, Barbara Marx, he retreated deeper into the bright, ritualized fortress he had erected in the California desert, far from the places that had hurt him into art. And I remember now a night I spent with him in 1974, driving around New York in a limousine, just talking.

  “It’s sure changed, this town,” he said. “When I first came across that river, this was the greatest city in the whole goddamned world. It was like a big, beautiful lady. It’s like a busted-down hooker now.”

  “Ah, well,” I said. “Babe Ruth doesn’t play for the Yankees anymore.”

  “And the Paramount’s an office building,” he said. “Stop. I’m gonna cry.”

  He laughed and settled back. We were crossing Eighty-sixth Street, heading for Central Park.

  “You think some people are smart, and they turn out dumb,” he said. “You think they’re straight, they turn out crooked.” This was the Watergate winter. The year before, Sinatra, the old Democrat, sat in an honored place at the second inauguration of Richard Nixon; the Watergate tapes would reveal a Nixon who retailed crude anti-Italian slurs. “You like people,” Sinatra said softly, “and they die on you. I go to too many goddamned funerals these days. And women,” he said, exhaling, and chuckling again. “I don’t know what the hell to make of them. Do you?”

  I said that every day I knew less.

  “Maybe that’s what it’s all about,” he said. “Maybe all that happens is, you get older and you know less.”

  I liked the man who talked that way on a chilly night in New York. I liked his doubt and his uncertainty. He had enriched my life with his music since I was a boy. He had confronted bigotry and changed the way many people thought about the children of immigrants. He had made many of us wiser about love and human loneliness. And he was still trying to understand what it was all about. His imperfections were upsetting. His cruelties were unforgivable. But Frank Sinatra was a genuine artist, and his work will endure as long as men and women can hear, and ponder, and feel. In the end, that’s all that truly matters.

  THE BACK OF THIS BOOK

  OVER THE YEARS I
’ve learned much about Frank Sinatra and his music from a number of people, ranging from my old neighborhood friend, Bill Powers, to the great producer, Jerry Wexler. Nelson Riddle, while making his albums with Linda Ronstadt in the 1980s, also gave me insights into the man and his work. But across the years much of my instruction has come from Jonathan Schwartz. He is a fine writer, a musician, and a disc jockey at WQEW in New York. Sinatra once said of him: “He knows more about me than I do.” Jonathan was generous in reading an early draft of this book and I am, again, in his debt. He is not, of course, responsible for errors that might have eluded both of us nor for my interpretations of the man and his music.

  The Sinatra music has been scrambled and repackaged by various companies into a confusing mess. This was compounded by Sinatra himself, who for reasons of contractual argument, artistic dissatisfaction, or sheer laziness repeatedly went back to certain songs. But these albums are my own favorites: In the Wee Small Hours, Songs for Swingin’ Lovers, Only the Lonely, Come Fly with Me, A Swingin’ Affair, Songs for Young Lovers, Come Dance with Me, Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim, September of My Years, Sinatra at the Sands (in spite of the wretched monologue), Nice ’n’ Easy, and Swing Along with Me. There are a variety of boxed sets of his work at Columbia and earlier music with Tommy Dorsey and Harry James. All are rewarding, even the dumb novelties of the moment. I like the two-CD set from Columbia called Portrait of Sinatra and the five-CD package from RCA Victor called The Song Is You, which contains virtually all the Tommy Dorsey recordings. It is particularly interesting as a means of tracing the musical lessons learned by Sinatra from Dorsey. Needless to say, reactions to anyone’s music are always subjective, but for me, the above albums offer many pleasures.