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pianist William Kapell, later that year—Frank Sinatra’s legend would no doubt have grown over the decades to come. He would not have been forgotten like the two-dimensional Russ Columbo or Buddy Clark; rather, he would have left a large, tragic, stunted legacy, that of a great talent cut short at a low ebb (like Hank Williams, who had died of an overdose that New Year’s Day). The grand and troubled relationship with Ava, never resolved, would have been remembered and romanticized; the dozens of great recordings he had already made would have grown in stature. Even the few slight but charming movies would have taken on a nostalgic glow. His career decline near the end would have given the saga an extra fillip. Sinatra would have been recalled not only as an important figure of the mid-twentieth century but also as a great should-have-been. Who knew what he might have become?

But his plane didn’t go down (nor, for all his abject fear of heights and flying, would any of the thousands of flights he would take over six decades). Instead, he arrived, unheralded, at Idlewild on a chilly afternoon in late January 1953.

“Frank Sinatra, needing a haircut, got into town from Africa and Ava and headed for Boston …” This was the full extent of Earl Wilson’s item on Sinatra, final ellipses and all, in his column of Friday, January 23. In fact, Frank had landed in New York on Monday the nineteenth, but he was such old news at this point that Wilson could wait awhile to take note of his arrival. All but incognito, Sinatra was on his way to do two weeks at Lou Walters’s Latin Quarter (where Lou’s daughter Barbara, aged twenty-three, was director of publicity). From there he would fly to Canada and play a week at the Chez Paree in Montreal. As promised, he was touring the provinces. The gigs were all he could get, and he was glad for them.

The next day—it was Eisenhower’s inauguration—Frank got that haircut, flew to Boston, checked in at the Ritz-Carlton, and went over to the Latin Quarter to rehearse. Young Barbara Walters greeted him eagerly, telling him proudly of the newspaper interviews she had lined up. Frank smiled wearily, imagining the line of bullshit he would have to spin for the gentlemen of the press. He took the band through its paces, liked what he heard, and went back to the hotel alone. A little bit after eight, the phone rang. It was Bert Allenberg, calling from the Morris office in L.A. Was Frank sitting down?

Sinatra poured himself a tumblerful of Jack Daniel’s after he hung up. He drank the whiskey, refilled the glass, and drank that one off too. He paced the living room of his suite, fast, talking to himself. “I wanted to tell somebody but there was nobody around to tell it to!” he later recalled. “I thought I’d go off my rocker.”

The shock of finally getting what he had wanted so badly was so great that at first he wasn’t sure how to feel. One of his first emotions, irrationally enough, was sharp regret at having agreed to work for so little. A thousand dollars a week … It was not only less than pocket change;1 it could brand him for life as cut-rate. A couple of nights after opening at the Quarter, he went over to George Wein’s Storyville club in the Hotel Buckminster to hear Duke Ellington, and got to talking with Pearl Bailey, who was also on the bill.

She asked Frank what he was up to. Another movie? Bailey turned to her husband, Ellington’s drummer, Louie Bellson, and gave him a wink. She just loved to see Frankie in those sailor suits. Bellson gave her a mock scowl.

Frank shook his head. No more sailor suits. “Pearl, they’ve offered me a movie called From Here to Eternity. They’re paying me a thousand bucks a week, which is nothing.”

Bailey looked impressed. From Here to Eternity? That big book?

That was the one.

“Take it and don’t look back,” Bailey told him.

He took it. And he’d brought it off without having to put a horse’s head in Harry Cohn’s bed. Mario Puzo was the one who did that, fifteen years later. The famous scene in The Godfather has a Sinatra-like singer named Johnny Fontane beg his