Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [129]
One of the nicest consequences of the children’s center experience for Frank was that it got him interested in painting again after several years of not lifting a brush. After he’d attended the art auction and seen what his friends were up to in their studios, he went home, put on some opera, and picked up his palette. I never thought I’d relish the smell of turpentine again.
From that day, he was on a roll. He invited over a friend who ran an art gallery in Palm Springs, and the two of them painted together every day for two months. He completed several large canvases and donated them to the children’s center. He had some of his oil paintings of New York scenes copied onto silk ties to be sold in the menswear department of Bloomingdale’s as the Frank Sinatra Neckwear Collection, which raised even more money. Each time one of our parties ended and everyone had gone home or to bed, Frank would wander to his studio at two or three in the morning and paint. He was fascinated by it.
As with his singing, Frank never had any proper art training; he just picked up a few tips along the way. There were no artists in his family; his was a natural talent. My theory is that if you’re talented in one area of the arts, then you can do almost anything. Great singers can act. They can often paint and dance; they are naturally artistic. Frank even co-wrote a few songs in the fifties, and he wrote poetry, mostly private things to me, but some of it was really rather good.
His art was mostly abstract in style and often Cubist, with precise blocks of bright colors, carefully delineated. After visiting Japan, he began to copy some of the flowing Oriental styles, daubing black onto red to depict flowers, birds, or symbols. He was, of course, Charlie Neat when it came to his painting; there was rarely any mess. He only ever had one “Jackson Pollock moment” that I knew of. I walked into his studio one day and found him reaching into pots of paint with his fingers and hurling it at the canvas. I don’t think he even knew I was there. Watching him lost in a world of his own creativity, I knew that art was another kind of therapy for him.
Frank was also very particular about which artists he liked. One Brooklyn-born artist he admired, Walt Kuhn, specialized in painting circus and vaudeville entertainers. Frank painted clowns too—he called them self-portraits because I think he identified with the masks they wear—but his clowns were never sad or evil looking. He bought two paintings of Kuhn’s clowns, but I didn’t share his enthusiasm for them because their eyes seemed to follow me around the room. I finally told him, “You know, Frank, I don’t like mean art. In fact, I don’t like mean anything, and I really don’t care to live with those clowns anymore, particularly the one in the television room, which takes up the whole wall.” He didn’t say anything, but within a day or two they were gone. I saw them for sale in an art catalog a few weeks later. Two gentle landscapes appeared instead, hung in their place.
Frank loved the Impressionists and would sometimes take me to visit their homes or museums when we were in Europe. He also liked artists like Salvador Dalí, who came backstage one night to give us a sketch he’d secretly done of us dining by ourselves. Irving Berlin called Jimmy Van Heusen one day to ask for a picture of me. I sent a photograph, and Irving drew a rather sweet penguin holding a microphone in which the eye of the penguin was cut out and my photo was inserted. It was very interesting. Apparently, Irving loved penguins and drew them all the time. I also have a sketch of us that LeRoy Neiman did, and another by Tony Bennett.
A lot of people painted Frank, but the only portrait he ever commissioned was by an artist he admired