It occurred to her later that the marriage would have been doomed anyway. He would soon have been unfaithful, “because that’s what he did. That’s the Swingin’ Guy.” When she had been Bogart’s wife, by contrast, she had been “married to a grown-up.” She saw Frank as having been “incredibly juvenile and insecure.” Had she married Frank, Bacall told the director Peter Bogdanovich in 2002, she “couldn’t have lived with that fucking mercurial personality.”
Swifty Lazar, who was close to both Sinatra and Bacall, thought Frank “a cross between the most generous man on earth and an absolute shit heel.”
22
Leader of the Pack
AS FRANK SINATRA STOOD again at the pinnacle of popular music, rock ’n’ roll was exploding around him. In June 1956, Time magazine had noted a seismic upheaval: “An electric guitar turned up so loud that its sound shatters and splits . . . a vocal group that shudders and exercises violently to the beat while roughly chanting either a near-nonsense phrase or a moronic lyric in hillbilly idiom.”
The children of Sinatra’s bobbysoxers, themselves teenagers, cared little what Time thought. They now bought almost half the records sold in the United States and had their own idols. The first rock ’n’ roll hit, a song called “Sh-Boom” by a group called the Crew Cuts, had gone to number one as early as 1954. The following year, Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” had made number one. In 1956 “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Hound Dog,” and “Don’t Be Cruel,” pumped out by a former truck driver named Elvis Presley, changed pop music history.
With his pouting lips and bucking hips, Presley in performance was to some lechery personified, so much so that for a while television would not show his gyrations below the waist. He was an affront to middle-class America, which was part of what brought him teenage adulation.
Ironically, Presley was introduced to the nation on television, during a CBS variety show, by Tommy Dorsey. Fifty by then, the man who had been instrumental in Frank’s phenomenal rise looked worn and outdated beside twenty-one-year-old Presley. Dorsey died soon after, choking to death in his sleep after eating a huge dinner followed by sleeping pills. After a further TV appearance on Ed Sullivan’s show, Presley records were reported to be bringing in $75,000 a day ($500,000 today).
As Presley triumphed, Frank watched, listened, and brooded. An era had died with Dorsey, as he put it in a letter, and he felt threatened. He “hated Elvis so much,” George Jacobs recalled, “that he’d sit in the den by himself at the music console and listen to every new track over and over. . . . He was trying to figure out just what the hell this new stuff was, both artistically (though he’d never concede it was art) and culturally (though he’d never concede it was culture). Why was the public digging this stuff? What did it have? . . . These questions got the better of Mr. S.”
In a 1957 magazine article Frank declared rock ’n’ roll “the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear. . . . It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people. It smells phony and false. It is sung, played and written for the most part by cretinous goons and by means of its almost imbecilic reiterations and sly, lewd—in plain fact dirty—lyrics.”
Frank worried that the rock ’n’ roll craze would ruin the market for his music. For a while, anxious about his income, he compromised and recorded some songs that rocked a little. It was doing what he did best, though, in new and spellbinding ways, that won him fabulous new success.
In 1957 and 1958 came the release of “All the Way,” “I Couldn’t Sleep a Wink Last Night,” “Come Fly with Me,” “Let’s Get Away from It All,” “It’s Nice to Go Trav’ling,” “Moonlight in Vermont,” “Only the Lonely,” “Angel Eyes,” and “One for My Baby.” The album Only the Lonely went to number one and stayed on the charts for two and a half years. Only the Lonely and Come Fly with Me were the two best-selling albums of 1958. Nineteen-fifty-nine saw the release of more songs of lasting resonance: “Come Dance with Me,” “Dancing in the Dark,” “Cheek to Cheek,” “Baubles, Bangles and Beads,” “When No One Cares,” “I Can’t Get Started,” and “A Cottage for Sale.”
In those three years Frank recorded 124 songs, the majority of them for the first time, in thirty-seven recording sessions. He appeared on television more than forty times and performed in Texas, Utah, California, Washington state, Canada, London, Monaco, and Australia. He made eleven charity appearances. He starred in six movies, as a Spanish freedom fighter in The Pride and the Passion, nightclub comic in The Joker Is Wild, hustler and womanizer in Pal Joey, World War II soldier in Kings Go Forth, would-be writer in Some Came Running, and failed businessman in A Hole in the Head. All but one of the movies succeeded.
To the editor of Metronome, Frank was “the most fantastic symbol of American maleness yet discovered.” To the New York Post ’s Sidney Skolsky he was “the love voice of America.” He was deemed cool—the word was “in” by now—but his private life was increasingly defined by unhappiness. There was a brief relationship with Lady Adelle Beatty, a sometime model from Oklahoma recently divorced from a British war hero. This was “a very important relationship,” Shirley MacLaine recalled Frank telling her, “but he didn’t know how to deal with her jealousy.” With the exception of a relationship with Juliet Prowse that began during the shooting of Can-Can, Frank’s sex life for years to come seems to have consisted of one-night stands and assignations with hookers.
In the wings, as always, was Ava. Frank performed in 1959 in Australia, she said, only because she was working there at the time. “We wanted to talk,” she recalled, “to be together.” They had two nights together. A few months later, Frank beseeched her to “Come home again.” He sent her a gold key inscribed: “For when you want to come home.” The inscription on the gold watch she soon gave him—it read “To Frank and desert nights”—suggests that she did soon come visiting. “I’d fall for it,” Ava said, “and it would last twenty-four hours.”
“One for My Baby,” the lament of a drunk who has loved and lost and has no one to talk to but the barman, was rapidly becoming Frank’s signature song.
It’s quarter to three, there’s no one in the place
Except you and me.
So set ’em up Joe, I got a little story
I think you ought to know . . .
. . . this torch that I found, it’s gotta be drowned
Or it’s gonna explode.
Make it one for my baby,
And one more for the road.
The song was especially meaningful for him, Frank was to say, because “I’ve experienced just that scene many times.” He was fond of a story circulating at that time about a group of lonesome drinkers talking with each other as his “One for My Baby” played on the jukebox. “I wonder,” one of them slurred, “who he listens to.”
Frank’s public profile continued to camouflage the private unhappiness. The annual Down Beat polls showed he had firmly reclaimed the position of Top Male Singer. Any concerns Frank had had about money were a thing of the past. A 1957 TV deal alone, sponsored by Chesterfield cigarettes and Bulova watches, was said to have guaranteed him $7 million ($46 million today) over three years. Movie deals brought still more. His gross income over the same three years, it was predicted, would amount to $4 million a year. The Hollywood correspondent of the New York Times figured Frank had become “the highest-paid performer in the history of show business.” By early 1959 Down Beat would rate him “the hottest property in the business.” Bing Crosby said he thought Frank would come to be seen as “the world’s greatest entertainer.”
As rock ’n’ roll mounted its frontal assault on the old values, Frank had become a Pied Piper for “cool” grown-ups, bewitching millions. He was also creating a new Rat Pack, the one that would be remembered.
IN FEBRUARY 1957, just a month after Humphrey Bogart’s death, Frank had performed in Los Angeles alongside a suave, seemingly imperturbable singer and comic named Dean Martin.
They appeared together again three times that year. In January 1958 a diminutive black dancer named Sammy Davis Jr. was featured on Frank’s TV show. Others now linked increasingly with Frank were Joey Bishop, a forty-year-old nightclub veteran with a dour humor, and Peter Lawford, thirty-four, an English actor who could dance a little. Soon, too, there would be Shirley MacLaine, just twenty-four, already a talented actress and dancer. These were the five members of Sinatra’s pack.
Martin was a mystery even to those closest to him. As his second wife, Jeanne, said: “There is something in him that is unreachable.” The Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci came away from an interview declaring Martin a walking “dilemma.” Americans who thought him “simple, easy . . . a very fine person touched by a few glamorous faults,” she wrote, were mistaken.
Eighteen months Frank’s junior, Martin was the son of an Italian immigrant barber in Steubenville, Ohio. His real name was Dino Crocetti and he spoke nothing but Italian, a regional dialect at that, until he was five. Steubenville was a tough steel town, and Martin grew up rough-cut. He quit high school, and his early jobs included shining shoes and pumping gas. He did a little prizefighting, which left him with a somewhat battered face, then worked as a mill hand. Illegal gambling thrived in Steubenville—Las Vegas and Atlantic City would one day teem with dealers who had learned their trade there—and Martin dabbled in gambling even as a schoolboy. In 1936, at nineteen, he was dealing blackjack and working a craps table. “Your son’s gonna be a gangster,” he remembered relatives warning his parents. “He’s gonna die in the electric chair.”
Martin and the Mafia were no strangers to each other. As a teenager he helped run bootleg whiskey across the state border to Pennsylvania. As a dealer he met the local Mafia boss. His record remained clean, though, and his singing ability offered an escape route from Steubenville. He took voice lessons from the mayor’s wife, listened to Bing Crosby at the movies, and began performing with a band. Nights, after finishing work as a dealer, he sang at a local bar.
He became Dino Martini, singing for a while at joints run by the mob, and eventually Dean Martin. When war came, his double hernia saved him from the draft. In 1944, at twenty-six, he was asked to fill in in New York for a singer who had canceled at the Riobamba—Frank Sinatra. Martin became “The Tall, Dark and Handsome Voice,” was even compared to Frank, but the big time still eluded him. Then, at a nightspot called the Glass Hat, he met Jerry Lewis.
Lewis, billed at the time for his “Satirical Impressions in Pantomimicry,” teamed up with Martin—described as “a mike-romanticist”—and for a decade they would be one of the most successful acts in show business history. Lewis, playing the lovable dope, was paired with Martin, the indulgent straight man who could sing. They performed across the nation, made funny movies, and commanded huge fees.
“I’m no singer,” Martin told Variety, “but we crooners get by because we’re fairly painless.” His records “That’s Amore” and “Memories Are Made of This” each sold more than a million copies in the 1950s. He took a risk by breaking with Lewis in 1956, but flourished. His first venture into serious acting, as a draft-dodging playboy in the war movie The Young Lions, was much praised. Martin thought movies were fun, not real work.
Frank had first met Martin in the late 1940s at the Copacabana. Both were Italians from humble beginnings, school dropouts who had made it. They had intersecting Mafia connections. Martin knew the Fischetti brothers, and he had performed with Lewis at the wedding of one of Willie Moretti’s daughters. Unlike Frank, Martin was careful not to flaunt these associations.
Both men had sown more than their share of wild oats, but Martin now exercised self-control. He rarely lost his temper. He had previously been a heavy drinker and would play the drunk on stage, but he had moderated his drinking. As the 1950s ended, his marriage was surviving. Unlike Frank, who came alive at night and slept late, Martin preferred to get to bed before midnight and rise early to play golf.
Though not part of the Bogart Rat Pack, Martin had been welcomed to Bogart’s social circle and had become Frank’s friend, too; he was “Uncle Dean” to Frank’s children. It was not Martin’s way, however, to permit real closeness.
“Theirs was an uneven relationship,” his second wife, Jeanne, said. “Dean loved to play with Frank—I say ‘play,’ because they were like children—though later Dean would eventually grow up and stop playing. He had great admiration for Frank as a singer, but didn’t respect him as a man.”
FRANK’S RELATIONS with Sammy Davis Jr. seemed simple enough—a story of generosity rewarded by undying gratitude. “Those who entered Sinatra’s private circle,” wrote Wil Haygood, author of a recent Davis biography, “were either the dazzlingly talented or those whose ridiculous fawning he simply tolerated. Sammy was rare: he met both requirements.”
Ten years Frank’s junior, Davis was the son of a black from the South who had fled to New York fearing a racist attack, and then become lead dancer in a traveling vaudeville revue. Davis’s mother, a chorus girl with Cuban blood, went back on the road soon after giving birth. His paternal grandmother in Harlem cared for him until he was three, and then his father took him on the road.
The child watched from the wings, mimicked the performers, even walked on stage and capered around. During the Depression, while still a child, he became part of a trio with his father and his partner, vaudevillian Will Mastin. At seven he won the title role in a movie about a black boy who dreamed of becoming president. By his mid-teens he was already a dancer, singer, and drummer. He did a stint in the army toward the end of World War II, then rejoined his father and Mastin on the stage. He specialized, now, in doing brilliant impersonations of the famous—Frank Sinatra included.
The two men had met before America entered the war. Later, when Davis greeted him outside a radio studio in Hollywood, Frank made sure he got tickets to the show. In 1947, when Frank was arranging an appearance at a New York theater, he asked that the trio join him on the bill. At his insistence, they were paid more than three times their usual pay.
As Davis said: “All the great things happened after that.” Many months of struggle later, he began to be accepted at the Hollywood clubs that white stars patronized. Frank stayed in touch, sent supportive telegrams, continued to urge Davis to break down the race barrier. “Sammy might never have made it if it wasn’t for him,” said Marilyn Sinatra, a cousin whose father worked as a gofer for Frank on the West Coast. “Later, when he and Frank were together, they wouldn’t let Sammy into some hotel. Frank said, ‘If he doesn’t come in, I don’t,’ and that was the end of that.”
In 1954, after a car crash that nearly killed Davis and destroyed his left eye, Frank visited him at the hospital. He had Davis stay at his Palm Springs home to recuperate, took him to his parents’ home in New Jersey for Christmas, found him a new place to live, and encouraged him to perform again. From then on, Peggy Connelly thought, Davis’s feeling for Frank verged on idolatry.
Davis began imitating Sinatra off stage as well as on. When Frank started sporting white raincoats, so did Davis. He wore hats similar to Frank’s, even affected Frank’s gait, and took endless photographs of his hero. Frank, meanwhile, spoke publicly of Davis’s “staggering talents,” and emulated aspects of Davis’s performing style—clipping notes, snapping his fingers.
There seemed no limit to Davis’s devotion. Peggy King, a band singer who was for a while his girlfriend, witnessed one moment of camaraderie. “Frank just beat up a couple of hookers,” Davis exclaimed one night after taking a phone call. “I have to go.”
As a highly visible black man, Davis was forever attracting controversy. He did so when he began wearing a Star of David on a necklace and declared he was embracing Judaism. Like Frank he was hugely promiscuous, and attracted attention by constantly pursuing white women. This was a virtual obsession, and it put him in harm’s way. Harry Cohn became apoplectic when, in 1957, Davis became involved with Columbia’s rising star Kim Novak. The studio boss
saw the potential scandal as a threat to the bottom line, and called in the mob to frighten Davis off. Davis’s press agent, Jess Rand, recalled arriving at a hotel room in Chicago to find his client confronting a hoodlum with a gun. The gunman was threatening to put out Davis’s remaining eye.
Then suddenly, as rumors of his trouble surfaced in the press, Davis astonished everyone by marrying Loray White, an obscure black singer with whom he was not involved at all. It was a phony union, and would be dissolved a year later. Long afterward, Davis revealed that an unnamed “well-connected friend” had warned him in frightening detail that the Mafia threat was serious. The friend, he said, passed on the warning in a Las Vegas dressing room. He told too of contacts with a Chicago Mafia boss that ended, once it was known he was going to marry White, with the message: “Relax . . . the pressure’s off.”
The photographer Billy Woodfield, who knew Davis and traveled extensively with Frank, offered a firsthand insight. He recalled Davis arriving, highly agitated, at Frank’s dressing room in Las Vegas. “Sammy said, ‘Is Frank here?’ and I said ‘Not yet.’ About that moment Frank walked in and took a look at him and said ‘What’s wrong?’ Sammy said, ‘I gotta talk to you,’ and Frank gave me a little nod. I went and sat outside. There was some yelling and screaming and then Sammy came out and paced around. I heard Frank saying ‘Get me Fischetti.’ ”
Frank spoke on the phone—almost certainly to Joe Fischetti—then talked with Davis again. Davis left looking “really distraught.” On the train between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, Woodfield said, quoting Frank, Davis had been accosted by two gangsters. They had told him: “You’re now a one-eyed nigger Jew. You ever see this blonde again, you’re gonna be a blind nigger Jew. You’re getting married this weekend—go figure out who you’re marrying.” Chicago, Frank told Woodfield, had returned a favor to Harry Cohn. Frank was being used as intermediary, to ensure Davis understood what he needed to do.