Why Sinatra Matters (16 page)

On his nineteenth birthday, in 1940, Riddle landed his first professional job, playing trombone and doing some minor arranging
for an Artie Shaw carbon copy named Tommy Reynolds, and then moved up to the Charlie Spivak orchestra. This was a good swing
band, ranking just below the top level, and it was a great place to serve an apprenticeship. Riddle spent two years with Spivak,
learning something every day, as Sinatra had with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey. But now the war was on, and Riddle was facing
the draft. To avoid the army, he left Spivak for the Merchant Marine band, based in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, where he first
arranged for strings. He was there for eighteen months, playing at concerts, dances, and parades, having fun. Then he was
abruptly declared 1-A; he reported for induction but was put into a bureaucratic limbo and told to wait. He then got the dream
job: working in the Tommy Dorsey orchestra. Sinatra was gone, but Riddle was able to dig into the glorious library of Dorsey
arrangements done by his friend Finegan, Eddie Sauter, and Hugo Winterhalter, along with earlier works by Sy Oliver and others.
As a trombone player, Riddle admired Dorsey; he also liked him, which was not as easy.

“Tommy was pleasant to me in his own particular gruff way and quite supportive of my budding career as an arranger,” Riddle
said. “He was, and always will be, one of my heroes.”

In April 1945 the army finally demanded the immediate services of Nelson Riddle. The war was almost over, and Riddle never
left the United States. For “fifteen fun-packed months” he worked in an army band, and was discharged in June 1946. But during
his army service, his teeth were knocked out in an accident; he was never able to play trombone effectively again and was
forced to commit to arranging and, he hoped, composing. He free-lanced around New York for a few months and then left for
the West Coast, where he thought he had a job with the Bob Crosby orchestra; that gig evaporated almost as soon as he arrived,
and he cobbled together a living as a freelancer. Like millions of other young men, he also took advantage of the educational
benefits of the GI Bill, which for Riddle meant studying with an Italian composer named Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. “His method
of teaching orchestration was to have his young pupils study a piece written for piano and assign the voices, or lines, in
the piano solo to various sections or solo instruments of the orchestra. I found this process to be a most instructive and
broadening experience, since many of his pianistic examples were works of such brilliant and diversified composers as Albéniz,
Schubert, Brahms, Debussy and many more.”

Riddle always credited Castelnuovo-Tedesco with giving him “skill and fluency” in handling large groups of instruments and
later regretted that his commercial success forced him to cut short his studying after two years. At the same time, Riddle
was studying with a Russian named Victor Bay, who taught him the rudiments of conducting. Through this period his family was
growing; to support his wife and three children, he arranged music for NBC Radio and freelanced for film composer Victor Young.
He took whatever other work he could get, as Sinatra would say later, to put food on the table; some members of the Depression
generation never had the psychological luxury of turning down jobs. But in 1950 and 1951 he broke through. He had arranged,
without credit, two tunes for the singer and jazz pianist Nat Cole. One was “Mona Lisa.” The other was “Too Young.” Each was
a gigantic hit. Cole insisted that he wanted Riddle for his future work, and Riddle soon joined the staff at Capitol Records.
He was there when Frank Sinatra arrived in the spring of 1953.

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.