Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [145]
I can’t recall whose idea it was that Frank record an album of duets with other singers, but I know he didn’t like the notion much at first. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to work with friends like Liza Minnelli, Julio Iglesias, Bono, Aretha Franklin, Tony Bennett, and Barbra Streisand—plus several contemporary artists he’d never heard of—it was more that he didn’t think his seventy-eight-year-old vocal cords were up to the job.
He hadn’t cut a new album in almost a decade. It was one thing to wow an audience of enthralled fans worshipping at the shrine of Sinatra, people who could be won over by his legendary charm if he hit a bum note. But to lay down some tracks onto a little metal disc that could be played anywhere and listened to with clinical appreciation frightened him. As he once said in an interview, “Once you’re on that record singing, it’s you and you alone.”
Frank had a management team around him by then. It wasn’t my place to say anything, though, and I butted out mostly. My husband wasn’t exactly a shrinking violet, after all, and I knew that if he didn’t think he could do something, then he wouldn’t. He was wise like that—he made all the right moves. To begin with, he refused even to consider the duets album and asked his team, “Why would I want to record all those songs again?” Under pressure, he eventually capitulated but warned everyone, “This better be good.”
I went with him to the studio at Capitol Records in L.A. for his first session in the summer of 1993. Frank preferred to record at night, when his voice was warmed up, and he also liked to work to a tight deadline, which gave him the stimulus he needed. The plan was that the vocals he recorded that night would be edited and melded in with those of the other stars, who would record their parts later in studios around the world and phone them in on a new digital telephone line the producer had set up. With typical thoughtfulness, Frank had arranged for flowers and thank-you notes to be waiting for each of his fellow singers before they cut their vocals. We walked into the studio to find the musicians and engineers waiting, along with a film crew hired to record the historic event. There must have been well over sixty people crammed into that hermetically sealed space. Each of their faces, even those of the old-timers who’d been with Frank for years and whose children he could name, were full of the usual Sinatra anticipation. A few minutes after we arrived, though, their idol suddenly turned to me and announced, “I’m not going to sing tonight.”
I looked around the room and saw the shock wave hit. Quietly, I asked him, “Can’t you at least do one song?” He shook his head. “I’m so sorry,” I told the producer, Phil Ramone. “Frank’s not going to sing tonight.” That was that. We turned and walked out as the musicians began to pack their instruments away.
The following day we went back in, and Frank was full of voice.
“Are you ready?” the sound engineer asked.
“I’ve been ready since I was a kid,” Frank quipped.
Playing around with tempos and phrasing, changing songs slightly as he went, Frank was on fire. In one session alone, set up like a live gig, he recorded nine complete songs, and when it was done his orchestra gave him a standing ovation. Frank knew he hadn’t been up to it the previous night, and secretly, that bothered him. Rather than lower his exacting standards and appease the waiting crowd, he decided not to sing at all.
It was during the recording of that first Duets album that Frank was told it would make “I’ve Got a Crush on You” with Barbra Streisand more personal if he said her name, especially as she’d sung the line “Oh, you make me blush, Francis.”
Frank liked and respected Barbra enormously, as did I, but he was bothered by the request. “I’m not singing to any woman