Frank had gone from “extra added attraction” to King of the Universe in a couple of years; then, in about the same time span, he couldn’t get a job—and not a few people in the business were glad of it. With his ambition, quick temper, and iconoclasm, he’d done a lot of pissing off in his decade on the scene. His reputation was poison: When Capitol Records president Alan Livingston told his staff that he’d signed Sinatra at terms very favorable to the company, they groaned as one.
Presaging all of this calamity, turning the bobby-soxers against him and making him look like some pathetic pussy-whipped Milquetoast, was his wanton affair with Ava Gardner. Frank had never been faithful to Nancy in even a loose sense of the word, but, like many showbiz wives, she seemed willing to put up with peccadilloes even with such hot numbers as Marilyn Maxwell and Lana Turner. But this thing with Ava was more passionate and public than any of his other dalliances; it might have begun as a meaningless Hollywood fling, but they carried on all over the country throughout 1949, and Frank’s cardboard marriage finally became untenable. In the spring of 1950, he left the pretty Italian girl and the three cute kids that were his P.R. chastity belt. George Evans, enervated and skinny to begin with, bald from defending him, up and died one night after arguing with a columnist about Frank and Ava; he was forty-eight, and his heart had given out.
The affair and subsequent marriage were absurdly tempestuous and about as private as a presidential campaign; Ava was a lioness and Frank was her plaything. She was as promiscuous, lustful, hard-drinking, and profane as he was, and she had the hooks into him but good. She busted his balls mercilessly, running off with bullfighters and making him look like an ass in front of the world. He threatened suicide several times and took two stabs at it—once in Lake Tahoe with pills, once in New York with a razor. His disgrace and comeuppance were complete: Not only was he a has-been as a singer, an actor, and a performer, he was a flop as a cocksman. He was a joke: last year’s punch line.
When he finally managed to crawl out of his hole, then, it was all the more resoundingly triumphant. He achieved it in part through a movie role—Maggio, the pip-squeak private who died horribly at the hands of a bullying sergeant in From Here to Eternity. Throughout the latter half of 1952, Frank campaigned actively with Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn to get the part, and Cohn’s relationship with the Chicago Outfit’s West Coast point man, Johnny Rosselli, assured Frank at least a hearing. He got the job, he did really good in it, he got the Oscar, poof: He was all better. Once considered an overweening interloper in Hollywood, he was suddenly in the spring of ’54 a resilient, dues-paying member of the acting club. He had done the good thing; he had died for his fame and resurrected himself. He made more movies and he had hit after hit; he was even good in some of them.
At the same time, he took a new turn musically. No longer was he the reed-thin, warbling young crooner with a voice like a viola and a closet full of floppy bow ties. Now working for Capitol Records, he was more propulsive and dynamic, his voice richer and deeper—a cello. He was wearing fedoras and stylish suits; he was singing up-tempo about swinging and in dramatic, elegiac tempi about loss.
As in the movies, he seemed to have earned the right to his station; what’s more, as a singer, he expanded the very art form. He cut whole albums of songs built on the same musical ideas—saloon songs, swing numbers, waltzes—and even lyrical ideas: flying, dancing, the moon. Through the decade, he made the greatest pop records in history—one after another, sometimes as many as four a year.
Come 1959, he could look back twenty years and see a punk kid with nothing but ambition to his credit, he could look back a decade and see a big star dumped by the world, or he could look into the mirror and see the most influential and talented popular entertainer of the century.
Now what?
Frank was to become such a colossus of American popular culture that it would’ve been crazy in his heyday to think of him as needy. But his heroic Last Honest Man posture always had as a counterpart a little boy’s thirst for camaraderie and love. “I don’t think Frank’s an adult emotionally,” his friend Humphrey Bogart sniffed. Shirley MacLaine was more clinical, calling Sinatra “a perpetual performing child who wants to please the mother audience.”
Never mind all the gruff stuff offstage: The evidence of what was in his heart was in his art. Here was a man who lived amid an entourage that could expand, if he wished it to, to infinity, a man who had virtually every woman he ever desired, a man for whom no material comfort was unattainable; yet his music was at its richest and most intense when he sang piteously about loneliness. His familiar swinging cockiness would be overwhelmed by a gray, anguished fog hovering over a profound, hollow core—the achy soul of the Tender Tough. “I’ll Be Seeing You,” “These Foolish Things,” “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears out to Dry,” “In the Wee Small Hours,” “Angel Eyes,” “What’s New?,” “One for My Baby”—a world of crushed dreams, blasted hopes, distant, impossible romance. People called it suicide music and couldn’t understand why he slowed down every show to perform it—sometimes exclusively. But loneliness was the most vibrant color in his musical palette, and it obviously came from someplace very deep inside of him.
Indeed, he was born to it. He was, of course, an only child—try to name another Italo-American only child of his generation!—and grew up with a yearning for the companionship that his friends, neighbors, and cousins all enjoyed in their homes. The cash and clothing that his mother lavished on him were his first means of acquiring a society: He handed down suits to kids whose friendship he courted; he bought burgers and candy and comic books, cultivating early on a habit of “gifting”—treating the house to drinks or meals or clothes or women or more. The assets Dolly spotted him as a teenager—his wardrobe, his car, his sheet music arrangements, his portable sound system—they were a way for him to get a leg up in show business, true, but they were also a means of being part of a bigger group.
Which is what made it so perfect that Sinatra came into his own as a performer during the big band era, when a singer was by necessity a piece of a large, vibrant whole. The Harry James and Tommy Dorsey bands were like big clubs of chums for him—and he didn’t have to buy his way in, either. He gorged himself on the grand bonhomie that the bands instantly provided him—the card games, hazing, drinking, dreaming, and bonding that he and his fellow musicians engaged in during endless bus rides. He was like a congenital junkie who became addicted with his very first hit. As soon as he’d begun life in that dazzling musical fraternity, he wanted to live no other way.
Witness his recollection of the day on which he left James for Dorsey: January 1940, Buffalo; the James band was headed to Hartford; Frank would briefly visit New York, then join Dorsey in Rockford, Illinois; it was the single big break of his career, and he’d yearned for it and schemed to make it so; still, he struggled through the separation from his bandmates of a mere six months: “The bus pulled out with the rest of the boys at about half-past midnight. I’d said good-bye to them all, and it was snowing, I remember. There was nobody around and I stood alone with my suitcase in the snow and watched the taillights disappear. Then the tears started and I tried to run after the bus.” (This was, keep in mind, a married man with a child on the way.)
Of course, the Dorsey band was to offer Frank the same sort of companionship he enjoyed with James. Moreover, Dorsey himself would come to serve as a hero and model for his young singer; Frank dressed and spoke like him, he studied his famous breathing technique, he even took up his hobby of model railroading. Still, even with the prospect of a new gang of buddies assured him, he arrived in Illinois with the beginnings of his own coterie, a safeguard against ever finding himself staring longingly at the receding taillights of a bus again: Nick Sevano, a Hoboken haberdasher who dressed him, did his errands, and even lived with him and his family when they weren’t on the road, and Hank Sanicola, accompanist, business manager, and, as his girth suggested, sometime thumbbreaker.
Two years later, when the allure of profits and aesthetic freedom drove Sinatra to seek his release from the Dorsey band, he was, once again, bereft of bandmates, so he gathered to his bony bosom a band, of sorts, of his own. He expanded his entourage to include such semiregulars as Mannie Sachs, a Columbia Records executive;