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late summer of 1946 that he was twice as crazy about Lana Turner. Later he would tell Hedda Hopper, “I haven’t much to say in my defense except that I was in a terrible state of mental confusion.” A nightclub photograph from the period confirms this. The picture shows Sinatra and Turner dancing close, Lana in a polka-dot blouse, her lush blond hair pulled up into elaborate whirls and topped with a kind of snood. She’s smiling happily. Frank, in a gray suit with white pocket square, looks ecstatic. There are thousands of pictures of Sinatra smiling, but extremely few in which he’s grinning with such complete lack of restraint. Eyes slit with pleasure, he looks like an eleven-year-old at his birthday party. His left hand is clasped tightly with Lana’s right, and there on the fourth finger, for the photographer and all the rest of the world (including Nancy) to see, is his wedding band.

What was he thinking? Clearly, he wasn’t thinking. He’d come back to L.A. in the middle of July and flown straight into Lana’s arms. “Sinatra arrived from New York but reported he was ill and didn’t work,” the production memo of July 17 reported. On the other hand, perhaps he really was exhausted. Besides singing concerts, intermittently shooting a movie, making speeches, attending prizefights and ball games, rubbing elbows with mafiosi, and screwing around, Frank was recording at a blistering rate: five sessions and eighteen songs since February. After July he would pick up the pace. He was still in wonderful voice when he recorded “Begin the Beguine” and “How Deep Is the Ocean?” but, interestingly, the two versions he recorded of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s great “Soliloquy” from Carousel, while pleasantly sung, don’t really do justice to the material.

Maybe he just hadn’t enough sense yet of what it meant to be a father. When I think of all the family affairs and events I would miss over the years because I was on the road …

Even when he was at home, he was on the road.

On August 20, Rags Ragland died. The cause was acute kidney failure, after, according to Earl Wilson, “an over-festive vacation in Mexico.” Given the state of medicine in those days, who knows? In any case, the death was tragically premature: the hulking comic was three days shy of his forty-first birthday. His sudden demise came as a massive shock to Frank, who stood vigil at Ragland’s hospital bedside along with Rags’s old Minsky’s Burlesque partner Phil Silvers. It was the first time Frank had witnessed the death of a close friend and near contemporary.

Among the deceased’s possessions was a gold Cartier cigarette case, engraved TO RAGS FROM RICHES.

Sinatra sang at the funeral with tears in his eyes, as much for himself as for his friend: the absolute injustice and indignity of it all made him furious. With few exceptions after that, Frank resolutely avoided hospitals and funerals. Not only were illness and death unpleasant to witness, but they might also be contagious.1

You get word before the show has started

That your favorite uncle died at dawn.

—Irving Berlin, “There’s No Business Like Show Business”

Two days later, Frank was back in the CBS studio, recording four numbers, including “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” His rendition is game enough, but overall—quite understandably—shockingly dispirited: it sounds as though Stordahl’s sprightly thirty-five-piece orchestra, plus the male chorus, is carrying all 127 pounds of the singer.

That was Thursday. On Monday morning, Frank was on the set at Culver City, but he was just phoning it in. It wasn’t just the thought of Rags. Phil Silvers was calling every few hours, sounding desperate. Several weeks before, the comic had snagged a plum booking: the Copacabana, his first time. The problem was that the Copa had signed Silvers and Rags Ragland as a team.

Silvers telephoned Jules Podell the day after Rags’s death to explain that he couldn’t possibly make the booking, and—not entirely to the comic’s surprise—Podell informed him, in terms both blunt and obscene, that Silvers would go on solo or he could forget