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<text>
<title>
(1950s) The Kid from Hoboken:Frank Sinatra
</title>
<history>Time-The Weekly Magazine-1950s Highlights</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
TIME Magazine
August 29, 1955
The Kid from Hoboken
</hdr>
<body>
<p> In Hoboken, a Jersey waterfront town that does not shrink
from comparison with Port Said, the old folks on the front steps
tell the tale of a pretty little boy with rosy cheeks and light
brown ringlets who went skipping along the sidewalk in one of
the nation's hairiest neighborhoods--all dressed up in a
Little Lord Fauntleroy suit. "Hey!" said one little denizen of
the neighborhood. "Lookit mamma's dolling!" It was the work of
a moment for the roughneck and his pal to redecorate the object
of their interest with a barrage of rotten fruit. Then they
opened their mouths to laugh, but no sound came. When last seen,
the two boys were disappearing rapidly in the direction of the
Erie Railroad tracks, followed hard by Little Lord Fauntleroy
himself, who was spouting profanity in a highly experienced
manner and carving the breeze with a jagged chunk of broken
bottle.
</p>
<p> Thirty-odd years have passed over Hoboken since that day,
but what was true then still holds true. Francis Albert Sinatra,
long grown out of his Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, is one of
the most charming children in everyman's neighborhood; yet it
is well to remember the jagged weapon. The one he carries
nowadays is of the mind, and called ambition, but it takes an
ever more exciting edge. With charm and sharp edges and a snake-
slick gift of song, he has dazzled and slashed and coiled his
way through a career unparalleled in extravagance by any other
entertainer of his generation. And last week, still four months
shy of 40, he was well away on a second career that promises to
be if anything more brilliant than the first.
</p>
<p> Out of the Boudoir. "Frank Sinatra," says an agent who
wishes he had Frank's account, "is just about the hottest item
in show business today." Sinatra, who in Who's Who lists himself
as "baritone" by occupation, has offers of more work than he
could do in 20 years, and seems pleasantly certain to pay income
tax for 1955 on something close to $1,000,000. Moreover, his new
success spreads like a Hoboken cargo net across almost every
area of show business.
</p>
<p>-- In the movies. Frank Sinatra is currently in more demand
than any other performer. His portrayal of Private Maggio in
From Here to Eternity, which won him an Academy Award last year,
burst on the public a new and fiercely burning star. To the
amazement of millions, the boudoir johnny with the lotion tones
stood revealed as a naturalistic actor of narrow but deep-
cutting talents. He played what he is. The Kid from Hoboken, but
he played him with rage and tenderness and grace, and he glinted
in the barrel of human trash as poetically as an empty tin can
in the light of a hobo's match.
</p>
<p> Last week Sinatra was on public view in a musical, Young
at Heart, and in a retread of a bestseller, Not As a Stranger,
that was cashing in big. He also had two major movies in the can
(The Tender Trap, a comedy, and Guys and Dolls, a musical in
which he portrays Nathan Detroit, proprietor the "The world's
oldest permanent floating crap game"), and had signed contracts
for Carousel and three more. Probable total: five movies in
twelve months. Probable personal income from pictures in that
period: $800,000.
</p>
<p>-- In records, according to his worst enemy is show business,
Frankie is "the biggest thing...so far this year." Whereas
three years ago his best record (Good Night Irene) sold only
150,000 pressings, he has one on the market now (Learnin' the
Blues) that is pushing 800,000 and another (Young at Heart) that
is over the million mark. Furthermore, he is "the only pop
singer who is a smash success in the album market." His three
recent albums (Songs for Young Lovers, Swing Easy, and In the
Wee Small Hours of the Morning) have reportedly sold 250,000
copies at $4.98 apiece.
</p>
<p>-- In television, Sinatra is about to star in a Spectacular-
type musical version of Our Town, and last week NBC was chasing
him hard with a five-year contract to do seven shows a year. The
proposed nut: about $3,000,000.
</p>
<p>-- On the nightclub and variety circuit, Frank has a rating
that stands second to none in pull or payoff (he can make up to
$50,000 a week at Las Vegas).
</p>
<p> Said Frank Sinatra last week, as he sat cockily in his
ebony-furnished, "agency modern" offices in Los Angeles' William
Morris Agency and tilted a white-banded black panama off his
forehead: "Man. I'm buoyant. I feel about eight feet tall." Said
a friend: "He's got it made. He's come all the way back and he's
gone still further. He's made the transition from the bobby-sox
to the Serutan set, and if he keeps on going like he's going,
he'll step right in when Bing steps out as the greatest all-
around entertainer in the business."
</p>
<p> Clean Hands, Empty Ashtrays. Can Frank Sinatra keep on
going? If it were only a question of public appeal, there would
be no question. But it is also a matter of character, and Frank
Sinatra is one of the most delightful, violent, dramatic, sad
and sometimes downright terrifying personalities now on public
view. The key to comprehension, if comprehension is possible,
lies perhaps in one of the rare remarks that Baritone Sinatra
has made about himself. "If it hadn't been for my interest in
music," he once wrote, "I'd probably have ended in a life of
crime."
</p>
<p> The man looks, in fact, like the popular conception of a
gangster, model 1929. He has bright, wild eyes, and his
movements suggest spring steel; he talks out of the corner of
his mouth. He dresses is a glaring George Raft kind of
snazziness--rich, dark shirts and white figured ties, with
ring and cufflinks that almost always match. He had, at last
count, roughly $30,000 worth of cufflinks. "He has the Polo
Grounds for a closet," says a friend. In one compartment hang
more than 100 suits. In another there are 50 pairs of shoes,
each shoe set on a separate tree that spouts out of the wall.
In another, 20 hats. Frank is almost obsessively clean. He
washes his hands with great frequency, takes two or three
showers a day, and often gets apparently uncontrollable impulses
to empty ashtrays. He hates to be photographed or seen in public
without a hat or hairpiece to cover his retreating hairline.
</p>
<p> Frankie has his gang. He is rarely to be seen without a
few, and sometimes as many as ten of "the boys" around him, and
some look indeed like unfortunate passport photographs. A few
of the Sinatra staff--Manager Hank Sanicola, Writer Don
McGuire, Makeup-man "Beans" Ponedel--have established and
important functions, but most of the others are classified as
"beards and hunkers" (A "beard" in Hollywood parlance, is a man
employed by a male star to accompany him when he appears in
public with a woman not his wife. Sometimes female stars use
them too. The custom is usually successful in averting trouble
with the wife or husband, the gossip columnists and the public.
"If Hollywood ever took off its beard," a comedian once
remarked, "the public would not recognize it." A "hunker" is
somebody kept on the payroll to know baseball scores, send out
for coffee, and strike matches on.), and as they march in
bristling phalanx along Sunset Strip, Frank walks lordly at the
head of them.
</p>
<p> "I hate cops and reporters," Frank was once heard to say.
He is an admitted friend of Joe Fishetti, who is prominent in
what is left of the Capone mob, and he once made himself a lot
of trouble by buddying up to Lucky Luciano in Havana--all of
which is not to say that he mixes his pleasure with their
business; Frankie is too smart for that. On occasion Sinatra,
who was trained as a flyweight by his fighter father, has also
gone in for slapping people around. He throws pretty frequent
crying fits and temper tantrums too, and has even been seen to
weep in his secretary's lap. His prodigality with the big green
is legend from Hoboken to Hollywood. "Perhaps," says one friend,
"Frank is the wildest spender of modern times. He throws it
around like a drunken admiral." A member of his family reports
that he usually carries nothing smaller than $100 bills and
"peels them off like toilet paper." He once financed a $5,000
wedding for a friend. Another got a Cadillac, just because
Sinatra liked him. To a third, Frank flung a grand piano one
Christmas. In 1948 alone he spent more than $30,000 on last-
minute Christmas presents.
</p>
<p> Scratch, Bite, Claw. The penny has its obverse, and the
other side of Frankie can be a shining thing. He has a
Janizary's loyalty for his few close friends. Says one: "It's
sort of wonderful but frightening, like having a pet cheetah."
Says Don Maguire: "You can call him any hour of the night and
tell him you've got the flu, and he will bring you minestrone."
When Judy Garland was in a Boston sanitarium, Sinatra sent her
flowers every day for a year, and once sent a chartered plane
full of her friends from Hollywood to Boston for a visit.
</p>
<p> Says Actor Robert Mitchum, cinema's No. 1 problem child:
"Frank is a tiger--afraid of nothing, ready for anything.
He'll fight anything. Here's a frail, undersized little fellow
with a scarred-up face who isn't afraid of the whole world."
</p>
<p> Sinatra's courage, even his enemies agree, is the courage
of burning convictions, however crudely they may be expressed.
Many of his worst passages of public hooliganism have proceeded
from instances of racial discrimination. He once slugged a
waiter who refused to serve a Negro, and another time went
haywire at an anti-Semitic remark. Baritone Sinatra, riding the
road to success, is no underdog. "But he bleeds for the
underdog," say one of his friends, "because he feels like one.
Don't ask me why."
</p>
<p> By a similar token, Sinatra is doggedly independent. "Don't
tell me!" he often tells friends, eyes blazing, as he jabs them
with a forefinger, "Suggest. But don't tell me." "Why, he might
even vote Republican," one friend surmised, "if I told him to
vote Democrat." A friend tells how Frankie walked out on the
christening of his son because the priest would not let him have
the godfather Frankie wanted, who happened to be a Jew.
</p>
<p> Is there an essential Sinatra hidden somewhere in this bony
bundle of contradictions? One of his best friends thinks not.
"There isn't any `real' Sinatra. There's only what you see. You
might as well try to analyze electricity. It is what it does.
There's nothing inside him. He puts out so terrifically that
nothing can accumulate inside. Frank is the absolutely genuine
article, the diamond in the rough. If you want to understand a
diamond, you ask about the pressures that made it. And if you
want to understand Frank, you ask about Hoboken."
</p>
<p> Another Slice of Pizza. In Hoboken, in a coldwater flat
("one can to four families") Frank was born on Dec. 12, 1915.
He weighed 13 1/2 lbs. at birth, and in the delivery his head
was badly ripped by the forceps, and one of his earlobes was
torn away; he carries the scars to this day. The doctor laid
the unbreathing baby on the bed, thinking him stillborn, and
turned to save the mother. Frank survived because his
grandmother snatched him up and put him under the cold-water
faucet.
</p>
<p> Frankie's father, Martin Sinatra, was a run-of-the-gym
boxer who fought under the name of "Marty O'Brien," a quiet
little man who could stand up to a beer and mind his own
business. Frankie's mother, "Dolly" Sinatra, was another slice
of pizza altogether. That sturdy little woman could stand up to
anything, come Hague or firewater, and minded everybody else's
business along with plenty of her own. Dolly, who started out
as a practical nurse, was soon helping Marty run a little
barroom at the corner of Jefferson and Fourth. She sang at
church socials ("Dolly was a barrel of fun"), faithfully turned
up at the Democratic political meetings, and assisted at a lot
of neighborhood births. In a few years she was a power in her
part of town, and in 1909 Mayor Griffen made her district
leader. In 1926 Mayor Bernard L. McFeeley, the political boss
of Hoboken for 30 years, appointed her husband to a captaincy
in the fire department.
</p>
<p> When Frankie came along, mother Dolly had little time to
be a mother. She was off, day and night, in the political swim,
and if sometimes the water was polluted, Dolly always insisted
that she kept her chin above it. Frank was sent to live with his
grandmother, Dolly's mother. He also spent a lot of time with
his Aunt Josie and with a motherly Jewish lady named Mrs.
Golden.
</p>
<p> Bikes, Cars. If Dolly could not spend time on Frankie, she
could and she did spend money. So did his uncles, two ex-
fighters engaged vaguely in "the promotion business." All agree:
"We spoiled the kid." In a street where all the other kids had
nothing, Frankie had plenty. Almost every day he wore a
different suit, by the time he got to high school he had 14
sport coats, and when he was married, says his mother, there
were no fewer than 30 suits in his closets. As a kid, he ran
through more than half a dozen bikes before he was twelve.
During his teens, he owned five cars.
</p>
<p> Being a well-fixed boy in a poor neighborhood had its
disadvantages, but Frankie made the least of them. When the
green-eyed little mobsters mobbed him, Frankie fought foot and
fang, and won their respect. Moreover, those he could not beat
he could buy. In short, Frankie soon found himself with a gang
at his back, and a gang in Hoboken had to be kept busy.
</p>
<p> "We started hooking candy from the corner store," Frankie
recalls. "Then little things from the five-and-dime, then change
from cash registers, and finally, we were up to stealing
bicycles." Pretty soon Frank was involved in some rough gang
wars. He got so good at planning jobs that his awe-struck gang
called him "Angles" and he had plenty of bad examples to follow,
pretty close to him. The streets he played in were full of
bootleggers and triggermen; there were even a couple of
neighborhood gang killings.
</p>
<p> At length Dolly saw what was happening and decided to put
an end to it. ("I wanted Frank to have it better than I did,"
she says.) She moved to a house on Park Street, in a nicer
neighborhood. After that, Frank's errancy consisted mostly of
pranks--he released a couple of pigeons in the school
auditorium during assembly, sometimes took a cat into a movie
house and shot it in the hindquarters with a BB pistol to make
a commotion. "School was very uninteresting," he remembers,
"Homework...we never bothered with..." in his last year
in high school he was expelled, he says, on grounds of general
rowdiness.
</p>
<p> Frankie could not have cared less. He had already decided
what he wanted to do with his life, and it didn't require a
high-school diploma. At the age of 16, he had seen Bing Crosby
on the stage. Cried Sinatra, in a voice that broke in his mouth
like raw spaghetti: "I can do that!" Dolly and Marty had a good
laugh. "G'wan, ya bum," his father used to twit him, "Why'n't
ya go to work?" Frankie would burst into tears of rage and
frustration, but his ambition held firm and sure. The next thing
Dolly and Marty knew, he had won an amateur contest at the State
Theater in Jersey City.
</p>
<p> Boy Gets Break. Dolly gave it to him straight. "Listen
Frank, you're going to be something nice, like an engineer, and
I don't want no more argument." But Frankie talked her out of $65
for a public-address system with a rhinestone studded case and
started hiring out as a single at lodge dances for $3 a night. He
worked over his technique meticulously, tirelessly. "My theory
was to learn by trial and error," says Sinatra. "Not sing in the
shower, but really operate. Execute!"
</p>
<p> Pretty soon he won a Major Bowes contest and landed a 39-
week contract as lead singer in a quartet called "The Hoboken
Four." Six months later, Sinatra was back in Hoboken, airing his
talents on 18 local sustaining programs every week for only 70
cents a week carfare. He also sang in the Rustic Cabin, a
roadhouse not far from Hoboken where he waited table, too, and
"practically swept the floor," for $15 a week. And there it was,
in 1939, that Frank Sinatra got his break.
</p>
<p> Bandleader Harry James heard Frank sing, and took him on
as a featured vocalist. Six months later the great Tommy Dorsey
himself bought Frank away from Harry at the princely price of
$110 a week. Two years with the Dorsey band smoothed a lot of
rough edges off the kid from Hoboken, and raised at the same
time some alarmingly sensual yet sensationally effective bumps
on his singing style.
</p>
<p> Sinatra would appear on stage, looking, as one contemporary
described him, "like a terrified boy of 15 in the presence of
his first major opportunity." He would hang for a moment on the
microphone, holding it itchily, as if it were a snake. "His face
was like a wet rag." His chest caved in, as if from the weight
of the enormous zoot shoulders it bore, and a huge, floppy bow
tie hung down like the ears of a spaniel. For a moment he would
look among his audience, pleadingly, as if searching for his
mother and then he would begin, timidly and with trembling lips,
to sing.
</p>
<p> Worn Velveteen. The Voice was worth all the buildup. It
sang slowly, more slowly than most popular singers dared to
sing, but it kept a heavy, heartbeat rhythm. Says one critic:
"He never let go of that of Balaban & Katz beat." Other critics
compared the sound of his voice to "worn velveteen," or said it
was "like being stroked by a hand covered with cold cream." One
listener wondered if Frank tucked his voice under his armpit
between numbers, and another said he sounded as if he had musk
glands where his tonsils ought to be.
</p>
<p> Whatever the sound was, it was most consciously contrived.
From Bing, of course, Frank borrowed the intense care for the
lyrics, and a few of those bathtub sonorities the microphone
takes so well. From Tommy Dorsey's trombone he learned to bend
and smear his notes a little, and to slush-pump his rhythms in
the long dull level places. From Billie Holliday he caught the
trick of scooping his attacks, braking the orchestra, and of
working the "hot acciaccatura"--the "N'awlins" grace note that
most white singers flub.
</p>
<p> Yet through all these carefully acquired characteristics
ran a vital streak of Sinatra. He was the first popular singer
to use breathing for dramatic effect. He actually learned to
breathe in the middle of a note without breaking it (an old
trick of the American Indian singers), and so was able "to tie
one phrase to another and sound like I never took a breath." He
carried diction to a point of passion. But what made Sinatra
Sinatra, when all came to all, was his naive urgency and belief
in what he was saying. As one bandleader put it: "Why, that dear
little jerk. He really believes those silly words!"
</p>
<p> Scrawny Piper. He believed them and suddenly large numbers
of young girls began to believe Sinatra. They began to make
little ecstatic moans when Frankie sang. The boys in the band
laughed and moaned right back, but Frankie took it all in
ferocious earnest. He knew his hour had struck, and he asked
Dorsey for a release of contract. Tommy refused, but in the end,
for a fat piece of Frankie's future, let him go, and Frank was
booked into the Paramount.
</p>
<p> Sunday, Dec. 31, 1942, dawned bright. After Frank's first
performance, the stage door was congested by some squealing
young things who wanted his autograph. The crowds grew, until
after some weeks, traffic in Times Square was stopped cold by
the massed oblation of thousands of wriggling female children.
Out came the riot squad, up went the headlines: Five Thousand
Girls Fight to Get View of Frank Sinatra. A scrawny, wistful
little piper had come to town, and the younger generation was
following him in far greater numbers and enthusiasm than ever
it had shown for the Hamelin original--or for Rudolph
Valentino himself. Wherever he went, fans mobbed him. Even at
home, Sinatra was not safe. His house in Hasbrouck Heights,
N.J., was ringed all day and half the night by gazing girldom.
Originally white, its sides were soon smeared with lipstick.
Sometimes the girls made human ladders and peered into his
bedroom, and when he got a haircut, the clippings were claimed.
When Sumatra was bombed, bobby-soxer panicked.
</p>
<p> Worse still, they started to swoon. It began at the
Paramount when a teen-aged girl, who had stood all night outside
the theater and then sat through seven shows without food, quite
naturally passed out in her seat. The tabloids screamlined the
story. After that they were dropping like flies. At the height
of the swoon syndrome, Frankie Boy got around 250,000 letter a
year.
</p>
<p> He Reached the Body. What was the cause of it all? Nobody
is sure. "Frank was the first great bedroom singer of modern
times," says a nightclub columnist. "He was the first singer to
reach the--er--great body of American women." Frank
disagrees. "I really don't think it was sex," he says, and many
psychiatrists agree. "Mammary hyperesthesia," muttered one.
Sinatra's voice, said another doctor, was in the early days "an
authentic cry of starvation." Far from least, there was the late
George Evans, Sinatra's press agent, who more than any man
helped to pull Frank up by his bobby-sox. He organized all the
excitement into the pigtail platoon that pushed Frank over the
top.
</p>
<p> The whole world was a war, but there in the headlines was
The Voice, The Verce, The Larynx, The Tonsil, the Bony Baritone,
The Sultan of Swoon--"none other" (as Jimmy Durante expressed
it) "than Moonlight Sinatra." Radio comics gnawed ecstatically
on the famous skinnybones, "The pipestem Caruso." "He has to
pass a place twice before he casts a shadow." "I know the food
here is lousy," cracked Phil Silvers as Frank walked onstage in
their Army show, "but this is ridiculous!"
</p>
<p> Frank's income whooshed up from $750 to $3,500 a week, and
kept on going. In 1943, he made more money than $1,500,000. In
1944, while Governor Dewey, the Republican candidate for the
presidency, was greeting a crowd gathered in front of the
Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Democrat Sinatra made a point of passing
by. Two minutes later the governor was facing a handful of hard-
core Republicans, while almost everybody else was following
Frankie Boy down Park Avenue.
</p>
<p> And what did Frankie do while the wine of fame was flowing
free? He bought a $250,000 home in Holmsby HIlls, then a place
in Palm Springs, for $162,000. He gave away gold Dunhill
lighters ($250 apiece) by the gross. He threw champagne parties
day after day. And night after night, there were the women. When
Frankie came back to his hotel he almost always found some
mixed-up youngster hiding under his bed or in the closet;
sometimes it was not a girl but a grown-up woman. One night a
well-known society belle walked up and asked him for his
autograph--on her brassiere. On another occasion a woman
walked into his room wearing a mink coat--and nothing
underneath. Frank Sinatra coped with each situation as best he
could.
</p>
<p> What did he have? Frankie's name was linked with a
succession of famous women: Lana Turner, Judy Garland, Marilyn
Maxwell, Gloria Vanderbilt, Anita Eckberg. One movie queen was
said to have flown thousands of miles on several occasions,
just to spend a couple of hours with Frankie. On another actress
he is said to have rained at least $100,000 worth of gifts in
only six months.
</p>
<p> All these goings-on were naturally not calculated to please
Mrs. Nancy Sinatra, the pretty girl from Hoboken whom Frank had
married back in the Rustic Cabin days and with whom he has three
children--Nancy, 15, Frankie, 11, and Christina, 7. But
somehow the Sinatras managed to keep the home fires sputtering
along--until Frank one day met up with Ava Gardner.
</p>
<p> Below the Salt. The barefoot Venus of Smithfield, N.C. was
in some respects an excellent match for the Little Lord
Fauntleroy of Hoboken. They had come from well below the salt,
and they loved the high life at the head of the table. Ava, who
had been chastened in two marriages and on the analytic couch
as well, saw through her martini glass more darkly than did
Frank. "If I were a man," she told him. "I wouldn't like me."
But Frank liked her very much indeed, left home to keep her
stormy, full-time company, finally persuaded Nancy, a steadfast
Roman Catholic, to give him a divorce, and married Ava on Nov.
7, 1951.
</p>
<p> Even before the wedding, Frank was worn down pretty fine.
One night, in Reno, he had taken an overdose of sleeping pills.
And after two years of Ava he was admitted to a New York
hospital one night with several scratches on his lower arm. The
decisive moment, however, came one night in 1952 when Frank
threw her out of his house in Palm Springs. Since then, Ava has
flirted with both Frankie and a divorce, but gotten together
with neither of them.
</p>
<p> Angles Again. After the Avalanche, there wasn't much left
of Frank Sinatra. He was down from 132 to 118 lbs., his voice
was shot, his record sales had practically stopped. His
relations with the press were in shreds. Church groups were
fighting him because of all the scandal. The Government was
after him for $110,000 in back taxes. "Anyone know of a bigger
bore just now," the Daily News inquired, "than Frank Sinatra?"
Frankie, said the boys in Toots Shor's and in Chasen's, was
done.
</p>
<p> They underestimated Angles. Frankie loosened his ties to
M-G-M. "Then," says he, "I started all over again with a clean
slate." He changed his agent, from M.C.A. to William Morris; he
changed his record company from Columbia to Capitol. His voice
came back, better than ever; record sales began to climb. He
started to freelance on TV on a larger scale, and to look around
for roles he really liked in the movies. Along came Eternity.
"That's me!" said Frank Sinatra when he read about the
roistering, ill-starred little Italian named Maggio. He wanted
the part so badly that he offered to play it for only $1,000 a
week, made only $8,000 on the picture.
</p>
<p> Almost magically, humpty-dumpty was together again. What
was he like after his great fall, and his miraculous bounce back
to the high wall of fame? In recent months, Frank Sinatra has
managed to irritate a crowd of 10,000 in Australia, sue a well-
known producer for breach of contract and make it widely known
that he "would rather punch him in the face," display scorn in
public for Marlon Brando, alienate the affections of Sam
Goldwyn, mount a wide-open attack on another entertainer in a
prominent newspaper ad ("Ed Sullivan. You're sick...P.S.
Sick! Sick! Sick!").
</p>
<p> But many of Frank's friends insist that he has matured of
late. He shows intense devotion to his children, visiting them
almost every day and taking them with him wherever he can. He
has buttressed the flimsy walls of present success with long-
range business enterprises--five music companies, an
independent film outfit, a 2% chunk of the enormous Sands
gambling hotel in Las Vegas, and eleven shares of the Atlantic
City Racetrack. In movies, he picks his parts carefully, as he
has always picked songs that suit both his talent and his taste.
He works as fiercely as he plays.
</p>
<p> Box Lunches & Cadillacs. The Sinatra day usually begins
about 10 a.m. with a mug of hot coffee and a grandiose
scattering of transcontinental telephone calls. A dozen people
crowd around him as the makeup-man goes to work, all trying to
outshout each other and a blaring radio. Off to the set in a
bevy of Cadillacs, where the mob grows to 50 or 100 until Frank
suddenly stands alone against a sky-blue set and moves his mouth
expressively, while his voice drifts out of a distant amplifier.
At the first break he piles into a box lunch, then takes a
catnap. There are some dialogue loops to make, and then across
town in his colossal Cad ("I like lots of armor around me."),
with brooding on the way about "them Giants," happy cackling
about "Rocky" Marciano or the fun he will have with the boys at
Toots Shor's on a scheduled trip to New York.
</p>
<p> At the recording studio everything is ready; bare walls,
hard chairs and rattling music racks, all neuter in a thin
fluorescent light. But as Sinatra stands up to the mike, tie
loose and blue palmetto hat stuck on awry, his cigarette hung
slackly from his lips, a mood curls out into the room like
smoke. He begins to sing, hips down and shoulders hunched, hands
shaping the big rhythms and eyes rolling with each low-down
line. The musicians come to life, the wallbirds start to smile
and weave with the very special sound that is Sinatra. Instead
of the old adolescent mob, the Sinatra voice now has a jazzy
undertone of roostering confidence, and a kind of jewel hardness
that can take on blue and give off fire with subtlety and
fascination.
</p>
<p> "That does it," a technician says, and Frank hand-shakes
his way to the door, purrs off into the California night with
his waiting date. They may drop in on some of Sinatra's current
set of friends--the Bogarts, Judy (Garland and Sid Luft--or
munch a steak with Montgomery Clift & Co. Frankie loves the
clink of ice in well-filled glasses, and the click of
Hollywood's oddballs in a well-filled room. But everybody has
to go home, sooner or later, and the moment comes when Frankie
is left alone--the thing he seems to hate most in life. If
that should happen, he may ring up a girl he has known for many
years. When she arrives, they sit and talk and talk until the
sun comes up or she falls asleep, and then Frank may wander next
door to have breakfast with Jimmy van Heusen, the songwriter and
Sinatra friend. So begins another day in the Arabian Nights of
Frank Sinatra.
</p>
<p> Sometimes somebody tries to tell him that his way is no way
to live, but when they do, Frank has an answer as simple and as
emphatic as a punch in the mouth: "I'm going to do as I please,
I don't need anybody in the world. I did it all myself."
</p>
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