Image courtesy of Doubleday Books
Fifty-three years ago this week, Frank Sinatra was supposed to be ending a run of shows at St. Louis’ Chase Hotel. But he never appeared. Instead, he was found lying on the floor of a pal’s New York apartment just before Thanksgiving, having slit one of his wrists. The wound wasn’t deep enough to be life-threatening, but, as James Kaplan shows in his grand new biography Frank: The Voice (Doubleday, $35), it did indicate Sinatra’s seemingly bottomless ability to feel sorry for himself.
Sinatra’s career had been at a low point when he took the Chase gig. And he’d been jilted by his wife, the movie star Ava Gardner, who was sleeping with the great matador Dominguín—although “jilted” might be too strong a term to describe abandonment in a couple in which each partner seems to have and fulfill sexual appetites so ravenous they bespeak a spooky inner emptiness. One of the fascinations of Kaplan’s book is watching Sinatra and Gardner, two hugely famous, selfish people with low self-esteem, come together like bumper cars.
Sinatra was a lower-middle-class kid from Hoboken, New Jersey, the only child of Italian immigrants, a domineering mother and wisp of a dad. He became a bit of a wise guy and a sissy, shooting to fame as an extremely skinny teen idol when he was in his mid-20s. Gardner—the most beautiful woman anyone had ever seen, Kaplan frequently reminds us—was the youngest child of poor North Carolina cotton farmers. She was discovered by MGM when she was 18 and brought to Hollywood, where they tried to unravel her thick accent. By her mid-20s, she had already married and divorced Mickey Rooney and bandleader Artie Shaw and dallied with Howard Hughes. Then, in California, she ran into Sinatra, who had labored to get the Hoboken and the craps-shooting out of his voice. Together they’d soon epitomize transcontinental cool.
Sinatra left his first wife for Gardner, whose star rose as his fell. Neither liked to be alone; they both slept around and drank prodigious amounts, clawed and scratched, and had, Kaplan informs us, incredible make-up sex—all while gossip columnists feasted on their romance. Surprisingly, Sinatra only sang to her once. “I know people must think that he did that sort of thing all the time,” she recalled, “but the man was a professional and the voice was saved for the right occasions”—meaning for money, not love.
Here’s Gardner, who is delightfully uninhibited, watching Sinatra perform at an Adlai Stevenson rally at the Hollywood Palladium in 1952:
“She stood in the wings staring at him as he sang, head over heels all over again. He was just f----ing magic, she thought. The reporters gathered backstage kept tossing questions at her as she watched and listened, but Ava just gazed at Frank, smiling.
“Some guy from a Chicago paper, greasy hair and thick glasses, tried to cut through the clutter. ‘Hey Ava—come on!’ he called. ‘What do you see in this guy? He’s just a 119-pound has-been!’
“Not even blinking, she said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you—19 pounds is...’
“The reporter stood frozen, his mouth open, his pencil poised over his notebook amid heavy masculine laughter. Ava smiled serenely…”
For such a towering and meticulous biography, Frank is frequently profane if not vulgar. Some of it is gratuitous but much is a corrective of sorts, the rejoinder to every mother of the Greatest Generation who told a son or daughter that people didn’t act that way in her day, or who even believed the greater canard that morals could be in decline.
There are other pleasures in Frank. Sinatra has been much documented, but Kaplan’s book, which follows the singer from his birth in 1915 to his resurgence in 1954, is the most comprehensive account we’ve yet had. Sinatra was the forerunner and mold for the last true pop culture phenomena, Elvis Presley and The Beatles. Watching him try to cope with sudden fame on a scale unknown before, and the envy of his fellow celebrities, is riveting. Some of the spite and schadenfreude he brings on himself, in Kaplan’s telling. No one ever seems to have thought The Voice was a dependably nice guy. Still, when Sinatra pushed the teen girls of the ’40s into sexual frenzies, called “Sinatramania,” he seemed almost innocent in intent, as Presley would later. Almost… Yet the cognoscenti blamed the girls then, where later they’d blame Elvis.
Readers who come to this first installment of what Kaplan projects will be a two-volume biography might hope for something as piercingly grand as Peter Guralnick’s Last Train to Memphis, the first volume of a two-part life of Presley. There’s no shame in saying Frank falls a bit short of that mark. Kaplan doesn’t have Guralnick’s dispassionate eye. Still, he’s crafted a sturdy and often compelling study.
Sinatra’s reputation has gone on developing, long after the body departed. Somewhere there’s a regular radio program airing right now devoted to the man’s music interspersed with talk of his life. In Sinatra’s case, the life has always nearly rivaled the art, which makes Frank so welcome. At last we have an account that encompasses the chitchat and rises above it, even if Kaplan’s psychologizing can seem facile at times. Handsome and intelligent book-length appreciations of Sinatra’s artistry seem to be published at least once a season, but Kaplan has wisely taken the process of recording seriously, showing us Sinatra in the studio like Picasso at an easel, with the important difference that this kind of art-making, as Kaplan knows, is a collaborative act.
Picasso, unlike Sinatra, showed early signs of talent, if not genius. Listen to Sinatra’s earliest recordings and you realize that, more than having raw ability, he made himself through will, desperation, and inspiration. In 1953 he’d been quietly dropped by his first recording label, the New York-based Columbia, and signed by Capitol, on the West Coast. Throughout Sinatra’s life there’s this essentially American theme of movement from east to west and concurrent reinvention, along with a gambler’s chutzpah, and a mechanic’s thoroughness. He liked to hedge his bets. At Capitol, he began to work with the arranger Nelson Riddle, another refugee from Jersey. Together they’d cut Sinatra’s greatest sides, but first Sinatra had to make the arranger see how to use him.
Sinatra interrupted one of their first sessions and took Riddle, alone, into another studio. Trombonist Milt Bernhart watched them through the glass: “Sinatra’s hands were moving, but he was not angry,” Bernhart recalled. Sinatra seemed to be telling Riddle “something of great importance. He was gesticulating, his hands going up and down and sideways. He was describing music, and singing! …
“And I was positive that I knew what Frank was telling him,” Bernhart continued, “it was about the arrangement! I could tell it was very busy. Too busy. There was no room for the singer. … Frank was giving him a lesson: a lesson in writing for a singer. A lesson in writing for Frank Sinatra.”
Perhaps we keep hearing about Sinatra because there are still two Sinatras. There’s the voice—The Voice, as he was known from his first stirring of fame as a singer with Tommy Dorsey’s band in 1940—and there’s the reputation. On the one hand, you have, as Kaplan details, a unique and uniquely intimate instrument. No one can say objectively why Sinatra was a better singer than onetime rivals like Perry Como and Eddie Fisher, yet few, hearing them side-by-side now, mid-career, would argue otherwise. On the other, you have the tawdry aura of mobsters, of Aqua Velva dispensers in the men’s room and two guys in cheap suits taking turns kicking someone in the alley out back. Sinatra’s oft-rumored mob connections seem to be at best conjectural, but you can’t help but feel that Sinatra didn’t do more to dispel them because he liked the tang of brutality they gave.
Sinatra was a brutal man in many ways, at least when he wasn’t singing. He was a figure made for the world he grew old in, with its proliferation of neon and then polyester, air-conditioning, jet travel, TV. He still summons for us the clink of ice cubes in scotch, although he was a Jack Daniel’s man; “Luck Be a Lady” and the corona of smoke in a nightclub. A man shooting his cuffs. A man shooting dice.
He treasured the house he built in Palm Springs in part because he must have liked the idea of reinventing himself out west in the blank spaces of a desert. He was made for Las Vegas before there was a Vegas, and he was in on its ground floor, at the Sands Hotel & Casino. “In a very real way, Sinatra built Vegas,” Kaplan writes. He was its first real draw, its signature draw.
Gardner died of emphysema at 67, in 1990. When Sinatra got the news, his daughter Tina found him slumped in his room, speechless, crying. When Sinatra died eight years later, felled by a heart attack at 82, it was fitting that the lights on the Vegas strip were dimmed in his honor for precisely 10 minutes. And then the whirl resumed, and kept going to this day, just as though he were still headlining at the Sands. As in a way he is.
