His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [289]
As much as Frank still wanted a good movie role, he refused to play any part that made him look old. Consequently, he turned down the role of the aging Kennedy patriarch in Winter Kills, by one of his favorite writers, Richard Condon.
“I went out to see Frank with the screenplay to ask him if he’d like to play Pa,” said the novelist. “He read it seriously, but when I got back home, I had a letter from him saying that the part is just too old for me.’ He didn’t want to appear on the screen as a venerable elder.”
Frank tried television again in 1981 with “Sinatra—The Man and His Music,” but the special fared so poorly in the Neilsens (forty-eighth out of sixty-five) that NBC refused to renew his option.
Yet, his voice, now darker, tougher, and loamier, swept him into his most successful period, bringing him greater financial rewards than he had ever known. In 1980, he released Trilogy, his first album in five years. The three-disc package with 500 musicians comprised his past, his present, and his future. In the album he sang hauntingly of making peace with his roots, of returning to Hoboken before his music ended.
The album sold for $20.95, turned “gold” (sold 500,000 units) within weeks, and was followed by She Shot Me Down in 1981, an album consisting of nothing but songs of lost love. In 1982, RCA Records released the complete Tommy Dorsey-Frank Sinatra sessions in three double-album sets. In 1983, Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs released a sixteen-album package from his Capitol years (1953–1962) entitled Sinatra, which sold for $350 and became a collector’s item. In 1984, at the age of sixty-eight, he recorded another album, L.A. Is My Lady, with Quincy Jones. Reviews were mixed, sales modest. He followed with The Best of Everything.
Among serious collectors, the most prized Sinatra recordings are the private vinyls, the unreleased masters, and the recording session outtakes that have been pirated over the years, creating a lively underground market. The noncommercial material is fiercely guarded by collectors, including Frank himself, but occasionally some of it is broadcast by radio disc jockeys, much to Sinatra’s dismay. New York radio host Jonathan Schwartz, a devoted Sinatra fan, frequently played material from his private collection, which included an outtake of Frank trying to sing “Lush Life,” a difficult song that he never could master. After several starts and stops, Frank stormed out of the recording studio and slammed the door, all of which was captured on the pirated tape. For years, Frank had been seething about Schwartz’s playing such noncommercial material, but when the disc jockey broke the release date for Trilogy and then criticized it as “narcissistic … subservient” and “a shocking embarrassment in poor taste,” Sinatra called the owner of WNEW, saying: “Get him off!” The next day, Schwartz was put on an extended leave of absence.
New York Daily News columnist Liz Smith printed what happened in her syndicated column, saying: “I don’t care how fabulous the singer is … What kind of world is it when critics are not safe to criticize freely? And since when did criticism ever hurt Frank Sinatra one jot or tittle?”
The next day she received one of Frank’s virulent telegrams: YOUR INFORMATION IN REGARD TO JONATHAN SCHWARTZ AND MYSELF STINKS. I NEVER AT ANY TIME ASKED ANY EXECUTIVE OF WNEW TO “GET RID OF HIM.” WE DID NOTIFY SAID RADIO STATION THAT IF SCHWARTZ DID NOT STOP PIRATING AND PLAYING UNRELEASED RECORDS AND OUTTAKES, WHICH IS ILLEGAL, WE WOULD BRING A LAWSUIT AGAINST JONATHAN AND SAID RADIO STATION. IT IS ASTONISHING TO ME HOW YOU AND MOST OF YOUR COLLEAGUES CAN GET SO SCREWED UP WITH YOUR INFORMATION. He Went on to Say: MY WORK IN EVERY FIELD HAS BEEN CRITICIZED, GOOD AND BAD, FOR YEARS AND NONE OF IT EVER MEANT CRAP TO ME BECAUSE THE PEOPLE WHO CRITICIZE ME DO NOT HAVE THE CALIBRE OF