Nellis thought Frank “an appealing guy with a very convenient memory . . . an awful liar. He tried desperately to cover up those relationships. If he had appeared in public before the Committee and lied as much as he did, I would have been the first to recommend that he be sent up to the U.S. Attorney on perjury charges.” Thus briefed by Nellis, and at a time when the committee was already swamped by publicity, Kefauver let the matter drop. From 1954 on Frank would simply deny his Mafia connection or parry difficult questions with contemptuous replies. He appeared to admire the criminals. “I’ve always felt Sinatra was frustrated,” Broadway press agent Eddie Jaffe said. “He would rather have been a made member of the Mafia than the great singer he was.” “Sinatra is a paradoxical cuss,” said Bing Crosby. “I think secretly he’s always nurtured a childish desire to be a hood.” “I remember him saying,” Eddie Fisher recalled, “ ‘I’d rather be a don for the Mafia than President of the United States.’ And that’s the way he acted.”
Frank pursued Mafia roles in movies. In the late 1950s, he lobbied for the part of a Mafia bookkeeper in The Brothers Rico, an adaptation of a Georges Simenon novella. Years later, angry though he was about the similarity between himself and the Fontane character in The Godfather, he told Francis Ford Coppola he wanted to play Don Corleone. That role went to Brando, of course, but Coppola offered Frank the role of a senior mafioso in Godfather III. He turned it down only because he was in his mid-seventies by then and it would have involved a three-month shoot.
Frank came on like a mafioso, saxophonist Don Raffell remembered. “The double doors at Capitol [recording studios] open up and there’s Sinatra. He’s got on a black hat with a white band, black suit, black shirt, black shoes, white necktie—gangster. He doesn’t say anything to anybody, walks into the recording booth and says, ‘You’ve had plenty of time to get the balance on this thing. I don’t want any fooling around or it’ll be your ass!’ . . . He says that like a hoodlum. . . . He was an evil mother!”
Frank liked to talk gangster-style, in a patter that, taken literally, suggested he had the power to order up terrible retribution. One of his favorite lines was: “If anybody hits you, call me.” Variations included: “Sometimes I wish someone would really hurt you so I could kill them” and “I could have put him in the hospital, you know.” Not everyone was sure Frank was joking.
“When he said to me one day, ‘Just let me know if anyone bothers you and I’ll take care of it,’ ” Shirley MacLaine recalled, “an electrical shudder went through me. On the one hand I basked in his protection; on the other—what would he do to someone who ‘bothered’ me? . . . And was it the dangerous mystery of it all that made it attractive?”
“I don’t think Frank Sinatra ever murdered anybody,” Sonny King said with alarming casualness, “although I think he smacked a few around.”
Most of the time, Frank just talked the tough talk.
Others read Frank in much the same way. Earl Wilson noted that Frank’s father taught him that “Sicilians were proud and unbeatable fighters . . . unforgiving.” “Sinatra,” thought his biographer Arnold Shaw, “wanted, like Il Padrone of old, to be a Man of Respect.” Gay Talese, who wrote a classic piece on Frank for Esquire in the 1960s, saw this in the way he treated his friends. “If they remain loyal, then there is nothing Sinatra will not do in turn. They are wise to remember, however, one thing. He is Sinatra. The boss. Il Padrone.” Mario Puzo thought Frank “very obviously modeled his personal behavior on the great Mafia chiefs who lived in Sicily.”
If Frank felt an affinity for the mafiosi, by 1953 he also felt indebted. “These are the guys who gave me a job when nobody else would,” the Sinatra character says in the 1992 television dramatization of Frank’s life, a show for which he provided factual background. “The Boys were the only people who would hire him when his voice gave out,” said John Smith, a Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist who has often written on organized crime. “They stuck by him, and he was loyal to them after that.”
It seems not to have troubled Frank that the amici who helped in his resurrection were murderers and extortionists. He had no qualms when Las Vegas bosses plied him with princely payments, kept his name in lights, treated him like royalty. The mobsters were giving Frank his throne back and promising long-term tenure.
From 1951 to 1954, federal agencies received reports that the mobsters were “the owners of Sinatra,” that he was “a participating member of the Luciano mob . . . they still ‘own’ him.” “It was a symbiotic relationship,” John Smith said. “Las Vegas helped him make his comeback, and he helped to make Las Vegas. Las Vegas is a factory town. The factory is gambling, and you feed the factory by making it sexy.
“Gambling works to the advantage of the house when the house wins and the player loses. If you sit in your seat long enough you will go home penniless. So how do you persuade people to gamble? You have to give customers a reason to come to Las Vegas. Frank Sinatra gave several generations a reason to come to Las Vegas. A guy like that is important to the mob because he’s an earner.”
It cut both ways. For entertainers, the financial lure was huge. “There’s something you have to understand,” said Herman Hover, who became an executive at the Frontier Hotel. “Big attractions in those days were not much interested in their salary. What they were interested in was money under the table. . . . Cash, off the books . . . on which they didn’t pay an agent’s commission or income tax. It was very easy to get money under the table, because [the casinos] had all that gambling money, which they didn’t declare anyway.”
Frank’s drawing power was his bargaining chip, but it did not ensure his safety. Frank’s contemporary Jerry Lewis explained his own experience at the Copacabana. “Sunday nights at the Copa at ringside,” he recalled, “was the galaxy of the heads of the families . . . and after the show, when you were summoned to the table, you went so that they could introduce you to their children and their wives. Everything was very, very lovely and aboveboard. The next day, the same guy introducing you to his two lovely daughters pumps six shells into some poor sonofabitch in the Bowery, like nothin’.”
Lewis felt the danger when he talked back to a heckler one night, only to discover his abuser was Luciano’s acolyte Albert Anastasia. “Tell the little bastard he’s lucky I’ve got a sense of humor,” Anastasia said afterward.
Balancing his patrons’ benevolence with their demands, Lewis discovered, was a delicate game. “The good things these guys did didn’t necessarily outweigh the bad things. If you’re gonna have them in your life, there’s nothing wrong with having them in your life correctly . . . having them incorrectly, it ain’t gonna be a long haul. It wouldn’t take long.”
Max Block, a union boss of the day, knew both the mafiosi and the entertainers they controlled. He saw how apprehensive Lewis was, and sympathized. “Jerry got nervous because of the mob,” he recalled. “He didn’t want to bow to the big boys, for them to stay on the payroll. Jerry was lucky they didn’t shoot him.”
Mario Lanza’s mob visitors, in 1955, showed their true nature when he resisted their blandishments. “You don’t know who you’re talking to,” said Tommy Lucchese, a close associate of Lucky Luciano. “Keep your big mouth shut or I’ll shut it permanently.” Later, in Italy, Luciano himself got Lanza to agree to do a concert. Should he renege on his promise, two mob emissaries warned him, he would “never appear in public again.” Lanza failed to show up, and died the following day at the age of thirty-eight. Lanza had medical problems and was undergoing weight reduction treatments, but his death was totally unexpected and the precise cause of death was never established. Relevant witnesses vanished soon afterward, according to the singer’s widow, Betty, and she believed the Mafia had followed through on its threat. Whatever the truth, the rumors fueled fear of what the Mafia might do to entertainers.
Tommy Lucchese would later be Frank’s guest in Atlantic City, and have an interest in a racetrack of which Frank was a director. Questioned about Lucches
e by the House Select Committee on Crime, Frank said only that he had met the gangster “once or twice, a long time ago.”
Frank took risks. He angered Boston mob bosses by failing to keep a promise to sing in their clubs. They did not take reprisals, but he knew he walked a fine line. After a spat over something trivial with Philadelphia’s Angelo Bruno, Bruno’s daughter Jean remembered, Frank was in a state of panic for hours.
In the 1970s, he briefly considered collaborating with Pete Hamill on a book about his life. “I told him,” Hamill recalled, “I’d have to discuss three subjects with him: his politics, his women, and the mob. He shrugged and said the first two were no problem. ‘But if I talk about those other guys, someone might come knocking at my fucking door.’ ”
Frank more than once crossed the Mafia in ways that could have proved fatal.
“He was always in trouble, you know, with the Boys,” said Jimmy Alo. “I had to step in.”
18
A Triumph of Talent
ONE EVENING IN EARLY APRIL 1953, well into the From Here to Eternity shoot, Frank had begun work at Capitol Records on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood. Stepping up to a studio microphone for the first time in more than six months, he recorded four songs. None would cause any excitement, and for years two would not even be released. Later that month, however, when Frank started working with the arranger Nelson Riddle, his singing career entered a new and brilliant phase.
The Sinatra-Riddle breakthrough came early the following year, with Frank’s most successful release in seven years. “Young at Heart”— “Fairytales can come true. It can happen to you”—shot to number two on the Billboard singles chart. By March 1954, when Frank picked up his Oscar for Eternity, his Songs for Young Lovers album was on the charts, and rose to number three. At year’s end, a poll of disc jockeys voted Frank top male vocalist. He was Metronome’s Singer of the Year, Down Beat’s Most Popular Male Vocalist. Because of the success of Eternity, he was deluged with film offers.
Dozens of Sinatra singles and sixteen more Sinatra albums were to be hits during Frank’s time with Capitol. Three albums would reach number one, and five number two. In late summer 1955, with his fortieth birthday approaching, Frank made the cover of Time magazine. The magazine said he was “well away on a second career that promises to be if anything more brilliant than the first.” His most glittering period had begun.
It was not easy for Frank to admit how far he had fallen before climbing back. “I was never finished!” he blustered to a friend. In a more honest moment, he admitted to Los Angeles Times critic Roger Beck that he had been “absolutely right in putting the knock on my records for a while . . . I stunk. My voice was shot. I knew it and you knew it and everybody knew it.” Just as Martin Jurow had seen despair in Sinatra before Eternity, so Capitol vice president Alan Livingston recalled the beaten man he met before signing Frank, a man who seemed “meek, a pussycat, humble . . . broke, in debt . . . at the lowest ebb of his life.”
Yet Livingston and Dave Dexter, another Capitol executive, thought Frank could make a comeback. For a pittance—the initial payment was reportedly just $1,000—Livingston offered him a contract that tied him to Capitol for seven years. Frank was required to pay his own studio expenses. He signed the deal in a curtained booth at Lucy’s Restaurant in Hollywood.
Capitol’s salesmen, local managers, and promotion men did not react well when Livingston announced the deal at the company convention. “There must have been a couple of hundred guys there,” he remembered, “and the whole room went, ‘Unnhhoooo. . . .’ The whole staff was so totally underwhelmed that they groaned en masse.”
This was the time in America that William Manchester called “the Eisenhower Siesta,” an era of national self-confidence to be remembered as an “uncomplicated, golden time . . . cloudless.” Yet American society was changing in numerous ways. People were asserting their independence as individuals, not least where sex was concerned. Nude photographs of Marilyn Monroe appeared in a new magazine called Playboy. Hemingway was about to win the Nobel Prize for literature. J. D. Salinger’s 1951 novel Catcher in the Rye had been a sensation and the loner against the world had become a cult figure. In the movies, Bogart had made his mark as the good guy with a cynical edge. The month after Frank won his Oscar, Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” began its climb to number one. Crucially, though, the time bomb that was rock ’n’ roll had yet to explode.
At this cultural turning point, Frank Sinatra reached a new generation. To Barbara Grizzuti, who turned nineteen in 1953, he was a “sweet survivor.” “In the fifties, failures, if they were flamboyant enough, endeared themselves to us. . . . He bucked the crowd, as heroes are meant to do. He was the Outsider who fought back and made it. He had no ideology but he was True to Himself. In the fifties, that was good enough.”
The writer David Halberstam was also nineteen that year. The Sinatra of the bobbysoxer days, he thought, “had produced music that was quite pleasant to listen to and comfortable to dance to but seemed to hold no mysteries, no genuine emotion.” Frank’s 1950s sound changed Halberstam’s mind. He now sang “so well and so privately that he achieved a musical conversation with his audience. He seemed to understand better than anyone the conundrum of love—how hard it is for two people to be at the same emotional place at the same time.
“In a few years, with the coming of the women’s movement, those of us who constituted Sinatra’s core audience would be viewed as an empowered male elite who dominated and determined the lives of the women of our generation. But we hardly felt empowered when we were young. More often than not we felt some form of rejection or heartbreak, and certainly a great deal of awkwardness. Sinatra’s attraction was that he seemed to feel the same pain.
“His arrival at a particularly poignant moment in his life, his work in the early and mid-fifties constitutes the best—and almost surely the most lasting—shelf ever performed by a popular singer in this country’s history.”
The literary editor of The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier, put it another way. Frank’s years at Capitol, he wrote, were a time “when a vocalist became a singer, when an everymanish baritone with a genius for phrasing and an interest in rejection suddenly came forth,” producing records that “will forever mark a high point in American music.”
If there was genius, it was shared. For its midwife was Nelson Riddle, the one man in the business Frank came to call “Maestro.”
RIDDLE HAD BEEN CAPITOL’S in-house arranger for a couple of years. His career choice had been made for him after the war, when a collision with a door destroyed his front teeth and put an end to his potential as a trombonist. He had done arrangements for Bing Crosby’s brother Bob, Nat “King” Cole, Mel Tormé, and Billy Eckstine. Even so, and even after giving Cole a hit with “Mona Lisa,” he remained, at thirty-one, a fairly obscure figure in the industry.
“Do yourself a favor. Work with Nelson Riddle,” Alan Livingston told Frank before the first recording session at Capitol. Frank resisted, preferring Axel Stordahl, with whom he had worked since the glory days began. At the second session, Riddle was waiting on the podium. When Frank asked who he was, a Capitol producer said the arranger was “just conducting the band.” Only after he had recorded the exhilarating “I’ve Got the World on a String,” and enthused, was he told the arranger was Riddle.
The Riddle sound was upbeat, a blast of fresh air, and everyone present seemed to sense it. A photographer there that day, Sid Avery, remembered how excited Frank became as he listened to the playback. “Jesus Christ!” Frank exclaimed, “I’m back, baby, I’m back!” There would be other arrangers in the years that followed, but it was Riddle, combining his talents with those of songwriters Cahn and Van Heusen, who provided the magic of the Sinatra renaissance.
The two men had a good deal in common. Riddle had been born in New Jersey only twenty miles from Hoboken. Six years Frank’s junior, he, too, grew up in a household where the mother ruled the roost. Though his first marria
ge lasted far longer than Frank’s, it was badly damaged by his philandering. He wound up drinking too much. Riddle’s life was suffused with instability, personal disappointment, and emotional loneliness.
The two men’s musical pedigrees intersected. Riddle, too, was steeped in the classics. As a teenager he had listened again and again to a record of the pianist Paderewski playing Debussy. He had sat up all night listening to Shostakovich. Riddle had produced some of his early arrangements while playing trombone in the Dorsey band.
Having discovered Riddle’s talents, Frank enforced his own musical will. Milt Bernhart, a trombonist who worked for Frank on and off for years, recalled a night early on when Frank called a break, crooked a finger at Riddle, and walked him out of the studio. “I watched them from the hallway,” he said. “Nelson was standing frozen, and Frank was doing all the talking . . . but he was not angry. . . . He was gesticulating, his hands going up and down and sideways. . . . He was describing music, and singing.”
Frank rejected only about eight of Riddle’s arrangements in as many years. He showed himself, as Riddle put it, to be “a perfectionist who drove himself and everybody around him relentlessly. . . .” “He’d have very definite ideas, 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 this up with a phone call at three in the morning.”