Frank: The Voice (107 page)

SINATRA ADMITS HURTING WRIST BUT LAUGHS OFF SUICIDE RUMOR, ran the wire-service headline.

Still feverishly plotting how he might win her back, he went into the Capitol studios again on two late nights in early December. For the first session, on the eighth, he recorded three swingers, trying to pick up the mood from the meditative note he’d ended on in November—and perhaps pick up his own mood as well. Most of all, though, he was trying to notch his first big hit for the label. But while Riddle’s writing for the horns had all the wonderful lightness and sass of “World on a String,” the songs themselves (“Take a Chance,” “Ya Better Stop,” and “Why Should I Cry over You?”) were strictly grade-B stuff—a reminder
to keepers of the pieties that Sinatra plus Riddle does not always equal magic.

The next night, though, singer and arranger returned to the studio with a string section and laid down three ballads, the second of which would turn into pure gold.

According to Nelson Riddle, Carolyn Leigh and Johnny Richards’s “Young at Heart” had been floating around various record companies for a while without attracting a vocalist. Nat Cole had passed on it. “
I think it’s a good song,” Riddle told Sinatra, “but nobody wants to do it.”

“Let’s do it,” Frank said—according to legend (his), not even asking to hear it first. In fact, he had asked Jimmy Van Heusen for his opinion, and Chester had responded in his most clinical fashion that he thought “Young at Heart” could be a hit for Frank.

And so, on the night of December 9, Frank recorded it.

Sinatra, Riddle, and Gilmore convened at the KHJ studios at 8:30 p.m. They wrapped up at 1:00 in the morning—ninety minutes overtime, by the rules of Local 47 of the American Federation of Musicians. This meant that the costs for the studio time and the fees for the twenty-five players—costs that came out of Frank’s pocket—doubled from $1,072.50 to $2,145 (some $17,000 today).

Clearly, Sinatra felt it was worth his while.

A great vocal recording of a popular song is an inseparable weave of words and melody, of the singer’s work and the arranger’s, and—of course—the musicians’. But also to be taken into account is the
meaning
of the song, which is not always what the lyrics say. “Young at Heart” was a paean to rebirth, the ideal soundtrack to Frank Sinatra’s matchless comeback: “
Fairy tales can come true; it could happen to you” was the perfect rejoinder to Swifty Lazar’s “Even Jesus couldn’t get resurrected in this town.”

And everything about this recording was perfect. New high-fidelity recording tape and microphones brilliantly brought out Sinatra’s diction, phrasing, and pitch-perfect tone, not to mention the gorgeousness of the musical background and Nelson Riddle’s arrangement. From the opening fillip—a string passage announcing the melody in a
quizzical, slightly off-kilter way that draws the listener in irresistibly—it was clear that a genius was at work. Riddle had brought impressionist sonorities to the American popular song for the first time, as well as a complexity of sexual longing that would infuse the 1950s and provide an antidote to the conventional pieties of the Eisenhower years.

And most to the point, he had brought a new level of art to Frank Sinatra. Once the singer began, it was apparent that Riddle had completely understood Sinatra’s lecture about overbusy orchestrations: the flutes and strings shimmer over the gorgeous glide of Frank’s ever-deepening baritone; underneath lies the deep woof of the trumpetless brass section (featuring, for the first time, the bass trombonist George Roberts). It was vintage Riddle—only the vintage had just ripened.

All at once, Sinatra and Riddle were a team. Frank had never sung this way, and Nelson had never written this way. (The arrangements he’d done for Nat Cole, while superb, were colorless by comparison.) And what he and Frank were doing was inimitable: “Young at Heart” is a wonderful number, but it’s more a great moment than a great song per se—it’s difficult to imagine any other singer, no matter how skilled, ever bringing as much to it as Sinatra brought to it that night, three days from his thirty-eighth birthday.

As with Frank’s acting in
From Here to Eternity
, his singing on “Young at Heart” told the world that he truly had returned from the dead. But as would be the case with the movie, the real fruits of the recording would be delayed until the new year.

The last song of the night, recorded in the wee small hours of December 10, never became nearly as well-known as “Young at Heart,” but the Jimmy Van Heusen number, with lyrics by Carl Sigman, was ravishing all the same—and, as with all Sinatra’s great ballads, a little too close to home for comfort:

Spain, May 1950. Jimmy Van Heusen shows Ava how to use his camera while Frank and an expatriate couple named Frank and Doreen Grant look on. Ava would take shelter with the Grants over the hard Christmas of 1953, as Sinatra futilely tried to win her back.
(photo credit 38.1)

T
he press was omnipresent in Sinatra’s life: a third party in his marriage, a constant kibitzer on every aspect of his career. He could never completely tune it out, because the reporters and columnists were always checking in. Besides, he needed them as much as they needed him.

Yet even if he’d turned a corner in his professional life, even if he was behaving a little better than he used to, there were still those
journalists who felt honor-bound to attack him. Like Maggio, he was an uppity wop, proud even when he’d been beaten to a pulp. It didn’t sit well with much of America—especially Middle America. An early-November editorial in Michigan’s
Holland Evening Sentinel
read:

On the other hand, Edith Gwynn, in her Hollywood column, apostrophized rather feelingly:

That was certainly the way Frank felt. Christmas was coming and he wanted to spend it with his wife, but there was little evidence that his wife wanted to spend it with him. When he had talked to her in
Rome over the fucking transatlantic phone line, she’d been infuriatingly breezy, chattering on about the magic of the Eternal City, her wonderful new apartment, and her funny Italian maid …

The moment he told her he loved her, the connection was mysteriously severed.

The holiday blues descended on him early and heavily. And so, as Van Heusen had demanded, Frank began seeing a psychiatrist: Dr. Ralph Greenson, whose sister happened to be married to Sinatra’s new lawyer, Milton “Mickey” Rudin. Like so many pilgrims to the Golden State, Ralph Greenson was a reinvented character: born Romeo Greenschpoon in Brooklyn forty-two years before, he had gravitated to Los Angeles after serving as an Army doctor in the war and quickly built a practice composed of movie stars and Beverly Hills housewives. Appropriately to the territory and to his great benefit, the darkly handsome doctor looked the part: with his square jaw and ironic (though sympathetic) Jewish (but not too Jewish) features, his black mustache and closely cropped graying hair, Greenson could have played a psychiatrist in a movie. Funnily enough, he almost had: a close friend, the writer Leo Rosten, had based the title character in
Captain Newman, M.D
., his novel about an Army psychiatrist—eventually adapted for the screen, with Gregory Peck in the title role—directly on Greenson.

Ralph Greenson, who was to become Marilyn Monroe’s psychoanalyst, would later gain notoriety in the therapeutic community for violating doctor-patient boundaries: he treated Monroe in his home, where she became virtually a part of his family, and eventually more or less took control of her life. Sinatra was no Monroe, but there is evidence that Greenson may have overstepped the bounds with him in a similar way. Since Frank would certainly have attracted unwanted notice by going to Greenson’s Beverly Hills office, the psychiatrist offered to see him in his Spanish Mission–style house a stone’s throw from the Brentwood Country Club.

The psychiatrist was titillated to be treating the most famous entertainer in the world. “
Of all Greenson’s interests,” wrote Marilyn Monroe’s biographer Donald Spoto, “it was the nature and burden of
fame that seems to have most intrigued him and celebrities to whom he was most attracted. This was a recurring theme in his life’s work.” In a paper titled “
Special Problems in Psychotherapy with the Rich and Famous,” Greenson wrote: “I have found the impatience of the budding star and the fading film stars to be the most difficult with whom I have tried to work.”