Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [313]
But he had not stolen the statue. He was Frank Sinatra.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The true origin of this book was a slightly rowdy dinner at a Santa Monica restaurant called Guido’s in September of 2004. I was finishing Dean & Me, the memoir I co authored with Jerry Lewis; Jerry was in the midst of preparing his annual Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethon and in order to give some of the participants in the show a night off, his manager Claudia Stabile hosted an impromptu party. Present, among others, were the bandleader Jack Eglash, the guitarist (and Claudia’s husband-to-be) Joe Lano, the pianist and arranger Vincent Falcone, the singer Jack Jones, and, to my great good fortune, me. The occasion was convivial and uninhibited and show-biz gossipy in a Vegas-centric way, and at a certain point in the evening the conversation turned to Frank Sinatra.
Several of the men present had worked with Sinatra; almost everyone at the table, myself excepted, had known him well. Given the atmosphere of boozy hilarity, it wouldn’t have surprised me a bit if the talk had been mildly iconoclastic or gently scathing—the Old Man (as they all referred to him) had been dead for six years, after all—but, in fact, it was uniformly reverent.
These were musicians talking, they were speaking of Sinatra as a musician, and they spoke with awe—of his pitch, his incomparable way with a lyric, his transcendent professionalism, his collegiality. And even his vulnerability. At one point Vinnie Falcone, who was Sinatra’s conductor and accompanist toward the end of the singer’s career, spoke of his fruitless efforts to get Frank to record the great and legendarily difficult Billy Strayhorn classic “Lush Life.” “Come on, Boss, just you and me and a piano,” Vinnie said. Sinatra shook his head. Even the gods know their limits.
The evening stayed with me. Here was a vision of Frank Sinatra as a man and an artist, without the traps and trappings of celebrity, without a trace of the bad behavior for which he was so celebrated and which so often seemed to be the main, if not the only, topic of conversation. Sinatra lived and breathed in the talk of these awed colleagues. And so when yet another major biography of him came out just months after that dinner at Guido’s—an apparently exhaustively researched book, in which, remarkably, the subject (and certainly the great artist) neither lived nor breathed—my interest was piqued.
The book you hold in your hands would have never existed without Phyllis Grann, great editor and—I am proud to say—great friend. To encourage a first-time biographer to take on Sinatra—not only a gigantic subject but also, perhaps, the most chronicled human in modern history—might have looked like sheer folly to most people (including, often, the biographer himself) but never to Phyllis, who evinced a mysteriously deep and abiding belief in me from the first time we met.
From the word go with Frank, it was starkly clear to me that I was far out of my depth, miles out at sea where my limited expertise was concerned. I proceeded with maximum misgivings, even with terror. But I worked hard at it, slowly and steadily; and the one thing I never lost sight of was that dinner at Guido’s. Here was a genius and a great artist, a man who had changed—shaped—the twentieth century, and I owed him his due. If I wasn’t qualified to provide it, I owed it to Sinatra to qualify myself. My affection for him may have wavered—he had a genius, too, for making himself dislikable—but the one note I could never find within myself was the condescension, even the contempt, on which so many other writers based their narratives. Frank always brought me back. I dreamed of him, spoke to him,