Today would have been Frank Sinatra's 100th birthday, and not surprisingly, his legacy is splashed across all media this week. I could certainly add to that, talking about his greatest hits, his finest albums, his most outrageous antics.
But instead, I want to keep it small. I want to talk about how Frank Sinatra made me love a song.
"My Funny Valentine" has been a linchpin of the Great American Songbook very nearly since it debuted in 1937. It certainly has a solid gold pedigree, having been written by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, and being recorded by hundreds of artists over the years, including Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis. Chet Baker's version is in the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry for "cultural, artistic and/or historical significance to American society". By every measure, a classic.
I never much liked "My Funny Valentine". I can't specifically say why, other than that it never moved me much. I guess I've felt that too many singers inject too much sentimentality into their interpretations, turning it into a somewhat cloying little love song, and the world already has an over-abundance of those.
But then I heard Sinatra's version, and the song hit me like a wrecking ball. His take on it was not born of sentiment...rather, it was out of desperation. The man singing these words isn't mouthing sweet nothings with his lover; he's pleading with her from a place of emotional agony.
It's easy enough upon first listen to not pick up on this. There's nothing frantic in Sinatra's delivery. Indeed, he's almost gentle in the way he enunciates the lyrics. But if you know where Frank was in his life at the time he recorded this, suddenly much becomes understandable.
***
He remains such an icon to this day, it's often forgotten...indeed, even incomprehensible...that Frank Sinatra was a washed-up has-been in the early 1950s. But after the dizzying heights of his success during World War II, his popularity began to fade. Partly it was because the ballads that were his forté were falling out of favor, as postwar listeners tilted more toward jump music and novelty numbers (there's an audio recording from the late 40s of Sinatra on the Your Hit Parade radio show, where he was asked to sing that week's #1 hit, "The Woody Woodpecker Song". He does so, but the vitriol in his voice for this wretched piece of doggerel comes through loud and clear). Partly it was because Sinatra at his peak had stepped on a lot of toes and picked a lot of fights, and a good many people in positions to do something about it were actively rooting for his failure. Returning G.I.'s resented that Sinatra stayed home as 4F, and Middle America felt revulsion when Frank left his wife and three young children to chase tail in Hollywood. After one too many disappointments at the box office his movie studio, MGM, dropped him. Not long after, after declining record sales his label, Columbia, did likewise.
He was still a concert draw, albeit nothing like he had been. Gone were the days when he would pack the Paramount in Manhattan for multiple shows each day for weeks. Now, he was doing one night stands in smaller halls and nightclubs, and started making a name for himself in Vegas. But things kept going from bad to worse. Bashing Sinatra became a popular hobby for newspaper columnists, and the papers played up every indiscretion. Connections with mafioso got him labeled (and investigated) as a mob crony, and his longtime liberal politics got him smeared as a Communist in the McCarthy Era. The IRS hounded him for back taxes. Concert promoters weren't always taking his calls now, meaning the one career option left open to him seemed to be closing as well.
Is it any surprise that he began to lose his voice...and his hair...from the stress?
But worst of all for Frank Sinatra was Ava Gardner.
Ava, the love of his life. The passion they shared was as brilliant to behold as it was ultimately destructive. As Ava herself said many times afterward, she and Frank deeply, furiously loved each other, but they were too much alike, and if they stayed together, they would only wind up killing each other. Their arguments were legendary, complete with flying plates, records and picture frames, trashed hotel rooms, and expensive designer clothes removed from closets and cut to shreds with knives. And their brawls usually ended up after a week or two of sulking with Frank sheepishly flying halfway around the world to whatever foreign film set Ava was on to beg her for forgiveness. Reporters would greet him at airports and gleefully needle him by calling him "Mr. Gardner".
(After one of their reconciliations, a co-star on one of Ava's films asked her why she was wasting her time with that hundred pound runt. "Because ninety pounds of that runt is cock," she said with no small satisfaction.)
By 1953, after two tumultuous years of marriage, Frank and Ava were separated. It was not a situation that pleased him in the least, and he was forever conspiring to find ways to win her back. But 1953 was also a very busy year for Sinatra, for it was the year in which he began to rebuild his career.
He worked on two fronts, and both paid magnificent dividends soon enough. First of all, after months of pleading and cajoling (and backstage string pulling from Ava, who was one of Hollywood's biggest stars at the moment and thus she wielded no small amount of power; she never told Frank what she had done, because she knew his ego would be wounded), Sinatra landed the role of Pvt. Maggio in the film adaptation of From Here to Eternity. It's not widely known that Frank had been a voracious reader his entire life, and always had books handy during down times on film sets and between curtain calls on the road. He had read the Eternity novel several times, instantly identifying with Maggio, and was determined to play him on the screen. Columbia Pictures was highly reluctant to cast him, but finally relented...although Frank had to agree to work for so little money, he may have well just done it for free. But the money wasn't important to him...he knew this part would either make him or break him once and for all as an actor. It was straight drama, without so much as a few musical bars for him to hum. And Maggio was central to perhaps the most powerful moment in the entire movie, his own death scene.
Rehearsing intensively with his co-star, Montgomery Clift, Sinatra was more than ready when the cameras began to roll. And when it was over, there was complete silence on the set, as the cast and crew were too stunned to say anything. Who the hell knew Frank Sinatra was a great actor? He'd go on to win the Oscar for playing the role. The movie was the biggest box office smash of '53.
Concurrent with this was Sinatra's reborn career as a recording artist. After every other label turned him down, Capital Records finally took a chance on him. He released four singles in 1953; all of them hits, although only one of them cracked the Top Ten. Each of them displayed a greater maturity of delivery than Sinatra's Columbia sides had. Age, booze and hardship had lowered his singing register, adding a new gravity that he had lacked in his bobbysoxer heyday. One song in particular, "I've Got the World on a String", suggested even greater things to come.
For all of this chart success, as far as Capital was concerned, the real acid test would be Frank's inaugural LP for them. The label was positioning Sinatra to appeal to an older listenership, and while hit singles were always welcome (and profitable), the real goal was to make Sinatra a central figure in the soon-to-be unveiled realm of the 33 1/3 RPM album. So at 8:00 PM (Frank always preferred to work at night, as his internal clock was set to live performance time) on November 5th, 1953, Sinatra stepped into the studio to begin work on his first Capital album.
Sinatra had a specific routine for recording, beyond the late night hours. First and foremost, he would sing live along with the orchestra. He considered his voice as much an instrument as the piano and the trumpet, and he needed to hear, to feel the music around him as he sang. He also had learned to take care of that instrument, forgoing alcohol on days when he was recording, and soothing his vocal chords with tea and honey. He also was exceptionally well-prepared. Rarely did he have to record a song more than once, unless a musician missed a cue. As a result, he cut all of the tracks for his album, to be called Songs for Young Lovers, in just two evenings.
Song 1, Side 1 is "My Funny Valentine", gorgeously arranged by Nelson Riddle (giving credit where credit is due, working from charts done for Frank's nightclub act by George Siravo). As the song that greets us, it not only sets the tone for the album that follows, but more or less for Sinatra's career to follow.
Frank sings with an almost plaintive gentleness, but there's a certain playfulness (hopefulness?) on the fringes throughout. The creative chasm between "The Voice" of the 1940s, the idol of teenaged girls, and the man singing now is the difference between a talented amateur and a singer who has mastered his craft. With this song, Frank Sinatra stakes his claim as one of the most important musical figures of the century...and in the years that followed, he quite possibly established himself as THE leading figure.
But there's one specific reason why this song resounds so deeply for me. I knew it the moment I first heard it, because I knew enough about the backstory of Sinatra's life at that time to read between the lines. And the secret is this: he wasn't singing it as Frank Sinatra...he was projecting the lyrics onto Ava, and imagining her saying these words to him.
Tell me, is this how anyone in their right mind would describe Ava Gardner?:
Your looks are laughable/
Unphotographable/
Yet you're my favorite work of art.
Is your figure less than Greek?
Is your mouth a little weak?
When you open it to speak
Are you smart?
But could those adjectives be used to describe Francis Albert Sinatra? To a T.
This was Frank, yearning so deeply his heart must have felt as if it would burst out of his chest, desperate to reunite with his love. But no matter how much he pleads, she won't take him back. Still, he dreams of the day when she'll call to him, express her love in that sarcastic way she used as an emotional defense, and they'll be happy together forever.
Frankie, the tough Italian kid from Hoboken, New Jersey knew that was a fool's dream. But SINATRA needed that dream. It was the tonic that fueled him, much more so than the gallons of Jack Daniels he would consume each calendar year. It's a dream so powerful, and so complete, that it transforms a song that never spoke to me into something almost spiritual upon every listen. Sixty-plus years after being recorded, it still hits like a haymaker. If one ever needs to make the case that Sinatra matters, then as far as I'm concerned, this is the only thing you need to play to win the argument.
***
There's something of a happy ending to this, in its way. No, Frank and Ava never reunited. They finally divorced in 1957, but oddly this seemed to have brought them closer together, and they remained friends and confidants (and occasional bedmates, what the hell, just to relive old times) until Ava's death in the 1980s. Her last years were ones of illness, and Frank paid all of her medical expenses. He also paid for her funeral.
Frank had a couple of broken engagements (first to Lauren Bacall, then Juliet Prowse) before jumping into a fairly disastrous marriage to Mia Farrow in the 1960s ("You're like the son Frank and I never had," Ava told the tomboyish Mia. Despite this, Mia came to like Ava quite a bit.), before wedding Barbara Marx in a marriage that finally took. The day before marrying Barbara, Frank called Ava and asked her to marry him again. She turned him down. Ava never wed again after Frank.
Two weeks after recording Songs for Young Lovers, with From Here to Eternity still doing big box office, with his latest single, "South of the Border", moving steadily toward the Top 20, and with every indicator predicting huge successes for him as both a singer and an actor in the new year to come, Frank Sinatra sliced open his left wrist and tried to kill himself.
His latest effort to woo Ava back having failed, Frank just didn't want to go on living. His friend, songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen, found him as he was bleeding out, rushed him to the hospital, and spread cash around to the cab driver and the nurses to keep their mouths shut. That bleak night was the last time that Sinatra would ever succumb to such despair ever again.
Of course, he went on to monumental, almost incomprehensible success. And yes, the bad boy streak in him would not-infrequently get him into hot water. But although the man could so often fall victim to his mortal failings, the artist...the man who transformed "My Funny Valentine" into an anthem of lonely hope...remains untouchable to this day.
Happy birthday, Frank...and here's to the next hundred years.
