Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [56]
He went back into the studio with his old friends the producer Gordon Jenkins and the arranger Don Costa and recorded his bestselling album Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back, featuring some interesting and new material he’d never sung before. The song he chose as the opening track was “You Will Be My Music,” written by his friend Joe Raposo, which I watched him record in New York. That was such a romantic moment in a lifetime of romantic moments—Frank looking directly at me as he sang that song with all the tenderness in his heart:
Wanting you is everything
You will be my music
Yes, you will be my song.
The words were so lovely, and he told me afterward, “This is our story, baby.” It was a difficult song to sing and a little too rangy for him, but he liked the words so much he sang it time and again, always dedicating it to me as “the love of my life.” Another number he’d often sing to me was called “You’re So Right (for What’s Wrong in My Life),” which had the lines, “You just fill every void in my life” and “Through the darkness of night, you’re my one shining light.” I couldn’t have agreed more.
To launch Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back, Frank performed in a TV special of the same name, for which Gene Kelly came out of retirement. Frank and Gene performed a fun song-and-dance routine together to a song called “We Can’t Do That Anymore.” Frank opened and closed the show with “You Will Be My Music” and told his audience that he missed making music. He also joked that he had to come out of retirement because after two years his golf handicap was still seventeen. He said that he’d been away from the business for so long he had to spell his name to telephone operators, and spoke self-effacingly about some of the “underwhelming” movies he’d made in his career, including The Kissing Bandit in 1948. His was a warm and intimate performance by a man who clearly loved being back in the spotlight. Just about everyone we knew came along for the ride and to welcome him back. It was the most incredible night, and when he said the words “Good night and sleep warm,” the entire audience rose as one.
Jack Benny went crazy when he heard the title of Frank’s new album. “How come you’re calling yourself Blue Eyes?” he asked Frank indignantly. “Don’t you know that’s my nickname?” It might have been once, but from the day Frank’s album was released, no one but Frank Sinatra would ever be recognized by that nickname again. Poor Jack tried to bill himself the Original Old Blue Eyes after that, but it never really worked.
I thought Frank Sinatra was invincible in those early days and impervious to any normal anxieties and concerns. But I was surprised to discover that he was nervous about the quality of his voice and feared it might have lost something in his absence from the microphone. He told Larry King during one interview, “For the first four or five seconds onstage, I tremble. I worry, Will it be there?” Strangely, he’d never been unduly concerned about what smoking or drinking might do to his voice and admitted to his doctor in all honesty that he often drank a bottle of Jack Daniel’s a day. When the doctor realized he was serious, he said to him, “My God! How do you feel in the morning?”
Frank smiled and told him, “I don’t know. I never get up till the afternoon.”
Partly on the advice of his friend the opera singer Robert Merrill, Frank believed that as long as he warmed up by practicing his scales for an hour or so every day, his voice could take anything. I’d hear him singing “Come talk a waaaaalk with me” or “Let us wander by the bay” as he shaved or dressed. He was never one of those singers who wore a scarf or avoided winds. “I catch colds from people, not drafts,