Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [94]
Sinatra had bought the new house at 1051 Valley Spring Lane sight unseen: a big pale pink Mediterranean-style stucco pile on Toluca Lake in the San Fernando Valley, ten miles from Hollywood—a posh suburb, orange-blossom-sweet, in those pre-freeway days. Bob and Dolores Hope lived just down the street. Bing and his brood weren’t far away.3 That spring, oddly enough, Sinatra’s future arranger Gordon Jenkins had written an upbeat, gospel-flavored hit called “San Fernando Valley,” which Sinatra sang on the Vimms show:
I’ll forget my sins
I’ll be makin’ new friends …
It was a lovely song, and one very much of its era: wholehearted, full of the American promise of rebirth through moving west. Crosby recorded it around the same time, and his version is a thing of beauty—the forty-year-old Old Groaner at the top of his game, playing with the number’s spiritual flavor, then reaching down low to kick it home. Still, it’s a middle-aged reading. Sinatra’s version—lighter, more youthful, and genuinely optimistic—has that unique quality that Haymes and Eberly, for all their appealing masculinity, simply couldn’t bring off: the quality of conversation. Frank had lasered in on the lyric and, as his old teacher Quinlan had taught him, understood its depths. As a result, the singer was able to tell the song as an irresistibly charming story.
It was an irresistible story to Frank himself. In his westward relocation, he was reinventing and expanding himself, moving onto a larger canvas. The new house was of a piece with the expansion. It was full of big rooms: an antidote to his claustrophobia. On the wall of his new den (his own den!) was a framed quotation from none other than Schopenhauer: “Music is the only form of Art which touches the Absolute.”
The musician, however, did not himself wish to be touched: the house was surrounded by a high wall, to keep fans at bay. There were other lovely perks. Tied up at Sinatra’s private dock was a new single-masted sailboat, a gift from Axel Stordahl. And whenever the phone’s incessant ringing began to get to him, Frank could swim or sail out to a wooden raft and play poker with cronies. Hasbrouck Heights’s Warm Valley, with its little rooms and lingering cooking smells and close-in neighbors, was a distant memory.
Frank and Nancy named the new place Warm Valley too, in hopes of importing some domestic good luck (not that that had been in high supply back in Hasbrouck Heights). But it might not have been a good omen that the house’s previous owner was the bedroom-eyed actress Mary Astor, whose lurid private life had been a tabloid playground in the mid-and late 1930s.
Life remained complicated. Dolly was furious at being left in the dust of the Barbatos’ mass westward exodus. Over each successive month in the last five years, less and less love had been lost between her and Nancy; now, to all appearances anyway, her snip of a daughter-in-law had triumphed. And gone Hollywood. The Sunday-afternoon long-distance phone calls between the dutiful son and the irrepressible Dolly grew increasingly tense. Her anti-Nancy vitriol cannot have failed to leach into her son’s system. Even as he was making a game effort at reviving his domestic situation, Sinatra was increasingly skeptical about his marriage.
And rhapsodize as he might about reinventing himself, Frank knew the West was alien soil. “When I arrived at MGM, I was a nobody in movies,” he later told his daughter Nancy. “What was I? Just a crooner. A guy who got up and hung on to a microphone in a bad tuxedo and brown shoes.” Hollywood is traditionally inhospitable to presumptuous strangers, no matter how celebrated they may be elsewhere, until they have demonstrated both fealty and mastery.
Sinatra, of course, had demonstrated neither. He had done two features for RKO (only