Synopsis

Synopsis:

Bill Zehme’s nationwide bestseller is a masterful assembly of the most personal details and gorgeous minutiae of Frank Sinatra’s way of living—matters of the heart and heartbreak, friendship and leadership, drinking and cavorting, brawling and wooing, tuxedos and snap-brims—all crafted from rare interviews with Sinatra himself as well as many other intimates, including Tony Bennett, Don Rickles, Angie Dickinson, Tony Curtis, and Robert Wagner, in addition to daughters Nancy and Tina Sinatra. Illustrated with scores of photos, The Way You Wear Your Hat captures the timeless romance and classic style of the fifties and the loose sixties and is a stunning exploration of the Sinatra mystique.
It started in the early nineties, after Dean Martin’s death, wrote Zehme, had thinned “the ranks of swaggering giants to within a whisper of extinction but for the one who would not let go, the one who best embodied the code to which all free-thinking men aspired, the one who wore the hats.” Zehme sent Sinatra questions, and Sinatra wrote his answers; the remarkable correspondence became an article for Esquire, and then a book designed to answer, once and for all, the question “What would Frank do?”
The result, playful and wise and cocky and rueful all at once, has chapters on love and heartbreak, booze and smoke, family and fraternity. It wound up on the bestseller lists and won raves from the likes of Elvis Costello, who called it “funny and illuminating without being either lurid or sentimental.”
And it also won the approval of one who ought to know just what Sinatra style means. “The Way You Wear Your Hat is a warm, wacky, irreverent…look at Frank’s take on and philosophy of life, by an author who understands what it means to be Frank Sinatra,” said Nancy Sinatra. “With a little help from the man’s own words, Bill Zehme captures the contradictions: the simplicity and the style, the passion and the ice, the party and the pain…the winner who loses and the loser who wins…stories that capture the nature and the essence of the man who invented cool.”

Sample Chapter

SAMPLE CHAPTERTHE WAY YOU WEAR YOUR HAT

From Chapter 2: Ring-A-Ding-Ding!

HOW DOES ONE LIVE LARGE?

“YOU JUST KEEP MOVING.”

Moss must never grow. “You only live once—and the way I live, once is enough,” he said upon turning fifty. “I look upon this as the halfway mark,” he also said. He had plans to swing forever more. Like mercury, he would not be pinned down, would never sit tight. He was all about action. “Let’s keep it moving please, because if it bogs down, it’s deadly,” he would tell his conductors in recording studios. But that was his way. When held in place, his physical presence seemed to radiate geothermally. Thus he was felt in a room before he was ever seen. “You feel an impact, even when he doesn’t do or say anything,” Steve Lawrence would attest. Producer Stanley Kramer once said, “When Sinatra walks into a room, tension walks in beside him.” Atmosphere crackled; other men were infected, absorbed his power, got louder, bigger.

A nucleus among men, his men especially, he lent out the hubris, covered every ass, cleared the forest, rigged the tempo, made the rules. His daughter Nancy interprets the phenomenon: “He believes you must play it big, wide, expansively—the more open you are, the more you take in, your dimensions deepen, you grow, you become more what you are—bigger, richer.” Result: “He is better than anybody else, or at least they think he is, and he has to live up to it.”

And so he lived, and so they took his lead. They followed, man and woman alike. Tom Dreesen gives illustration: “They were all in Las Vegas shooting Ocean’s Eleven, and one morning the actor Norman Fell woke up and looked outside of his hotel window. He saw Dean and Sammy and Peter Lawford running past the pool, running fast. So he stuck his head out and yelled, ‘Hey, where are you guys going?’ And Sammy said, ‘Frank’s up!’ So the day begins. You have to understand that when you are with Frank Sinatra, it’s his world and you are living in it. When Frank says we’re going, we go; when he says we’re sitting, we sit. If you revolve around his energy, you benefit. With Frank, you can never learn enough.”

“Let’s start the action!” he would howl, sounding the gun. Where the action wasn’t he would not be. On movie sets, he could not bear inaction or self-indulgent directors. “I can’t stay in one place for sixteen weeks,” he told one. “I’ll kill myself!” Frank Capra once said of him, “He bores easily. If directors keep him busy, he maintains an uneasy truce; for having started something, Sinatra’s next goal is to finish it—but fast.” (How Frank initiated one film negotiation with Capra, whom he called Cheech: “Cheech! Why don’t you and I make Hole in the Head together? You do all the dirty work, while I smile and knock off all the broads.”) Making Some Came Running, on location in Madison, Indiana, he seethed at the artistic futzing of director Vincente Minnelli. One night, he and Dean Martin and Shirley MacLaine waited endlessly on a carnival set, while Minnelli sized up a camera angle. Dissatisfied, the director decided not to shift his lens; rather, he declared, “Move the Ferris wheel!” Frank turned, leaped into a car, boarded his jet, and was back in Los Angeles hours later. Dean went with him.

Whenever bored at a party or a club, he would say this: “I think it’s going to rain.” This was the signal to depart. He would rise and take a powder, his entourage in tow. Then they would go seek fresh stimuli, on the loose, on the Strip, on the town, moving in a pack, like, well, never mind. He meant for no umbrage to be taken when he saw the rain coming, when the restlessness gripped him. It was biological: “I can’t help it,” he would tell Minnelli, not quite apologetically. “Nobody seems to be able to help me with it. I’ve got to go! I have to move!”

Few could stop him or would dare to try. He led a group into the showroom of the Sahara to watch Don Rickles perform. This was 1965. About an hour into the act, Frank stood up and yelled to the comic: “All right, c’mon, let’s get this thing over with. I gotta go!” Rickles shot back: “Shaddup and sit down! I’ve had to listen to you sing!” Frank: “Who do you think you’re talking to?” Rickles: “Dick Haymes.” Frank laughed, whereupon his group laughed, and they stayed. For a little while.

EXPLAIN THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF SWAGGER.

“I ONCE ASKED JIMMY CAGNEY HOW HE EXPLAINED IT. AND HE SAID, ‘FRANCIS, ALWAYS SPRINKLE THE GOODIES ALONG THE WAY. BE AS TOUGH AS YOU WANT, BUT ALWAYS SPRINKLE THE GOODIES HERE AND THERE. BECAUSE ANYTHING THEY CAN LAUGH AT, THEY CAN’T HATE.’”

He crept up behind Cagney on a movie lot one day and mimicked the tiny master: “Mmmmmm . . . you dirty rat.” Cagney did not flinch. “He never turned around,” said Frank. “He only said, ‘Francis, that’s the worst imitation I’ve ever heard in my life.’” Clearly, he needed to find his own style, which of course he did. The Sinatra bravado twinkled through baby blues. He exerted force through a grin, led with rhythm and snap, swung cocksure. “I think that that’s kind of inbred,” he once said, pondering the way he swung, thus swaggered. “I think you have or haven’t got it. I’m probably one of the fortunate people to whom it was given. I never thought about it much.” But he could not play the role of il padrone straight and somber, without breeze, for who would follow and where would the laughs be? So he mixed his menace with tonic. For instance, the sign on the front gate of his Coldwater Canyon bachelor pad in the fifties read: If You Haven’t Been Invited, You Better Have a Damned Good Reason for Ringing This Bell. Later, at the Palm Springs compound, a gold plaque warned: Never Mind the Dog—Beware of the Owner.

Parlance was his muscle and signature. He spoke in a language of his own devising, a shorthand cool that bristled and baffled and was readily contagious. From the Sammy Davis Jr. memoir, Why Me?: “A young cat with two wild-looking chicks walked by and Frank raised his eyebrows. ‘Cuff links.’” This was the lingo of ring-a-ding-ding and, like any secret code, it was beloved by boys and anathema to girls. After spending time in his midst, one woman reporter said, “For years I tried to get an exclusive interview—and when I got one, I couldn’t understand a word he said.” A Vegas lounge arm-piece to the Pack confessed: “They might just as well have been talking Chinese.”

Some pupils were more awkward than others. After taking English lessons from Sinatra, while making The Pride and the Passion, young Sophia Loren could be heard peppering casual conversation with the phrases: “How’s your cock?” and “It was a fucking gas!” (He told her that cock and fucking were innocent endearments, to be employed freely and often. Of Loren, incidentally, Frank liked to say, “She’s the mostest!”) Noel Coward, who occasionally moved amid the Sinatra group, was spotted at one of Frank’s performances happily crowing: “It’s a gas! It’s a gas!” Even bona fide pally Peter Lawford tended to abuse the privileged argot: “Like, we were getting off the boat the other day in Le Havre,” he told an interviewer, “and this French dame comes up to me and says, ‘Etes-vous un Rat?’ She’s asking me, am I a Rat? I don’t dig. Then I dig. She’s asking me about the Rat Pack, you dig? But there’s no word in French for Rat Pack, you dig?”

Navigational tips for the uninitiated: “A GAS IS A GOOD SITUATION,” the Leader once translated for Art Buchwald, in an unprecedented act of decoding. “An evening can be a wonderful gas. Or you can have a gas of a weekend.” Therefore, a GASSER was one who instilled such delight: “Applies to a person. He’s a big-leaguer, the best. He can hit the ball right out of the park.” (More BROADS were gassers than were guys, understandably so. Should a gasser do something wonderful, she would be rewarded with the exclamation, CRAZY! or maybe COO-COO! When pleased by a pally, meanwhile, Frank showed approval by remarking, YOU CRAZY BASTARD!) On the other hand, a BUNTER would be “the opposite of a gasser . . . a NOWHERE. He can never get to first base.” Likewise, there was HARVEY: “A square. Harvey, or Harv, is the typical tourist who goes into a French restaurant and says, ‘What’s ready?’” CLYDE was no better, for clydes were DULLSVILLE personified, were instructed to SCRAMSVILLE, lest they render an evening ENDSVILLE. Otherwise, clyde was an all-purpose noun employed when words, wit, or memory failed. Explained Frank: “If I want someone to pass the salt, I say, ‘Pass the clyde.’ ‘I don’t like her clyde,’ might mean, ‘I don’t like her voice.’ ‘I have to go to the clyde’ could mean ‘I have to go to the party.’”

If said party cooked, which is to say, was MOTHERY, which is to say, was wild and wicked, then all present would bear witness to a RING-A-DING-DING time, after which couples might pair off to make a LITTLE HEY-HEY. Unless a FINK had infiltrated the scene to queer the odds. “A fink is a loser,” said Frank. “Fink comes from a strikebreaker named Fink who killed his friend during a strike. So to me a fink is a guy who would kill his own friends.” (Dead friends, by the way, bought the BIG CASINO in the sky.) Further: “If a guy comes into a room with a broad and someone asks about his wife, the guy will say, ‘GOOD NIGHT, ALL,’ which means, ‘DROP IT, CHARLEY.’” Charley, in that case, would be a fink, or CRUMB. Thus the phrase LET’S LOSE CHARLEY. But then every pally was affectionately called Charley at one point or another, male or female, and also SAM, but mostly Charley. (Lawford was Charley the Seal, for his nicotine cough, or Charley Pentagon or Charley Washington, because he married a Kennedy. Sometimes Frank simply called him Brother-in-Lawford.) Then again, a CHICK might easily FRACTURE, or amuse, or devastate, a man who got a load of her nice set of CHARLEYS. If that man was Sinatra, and a date was made, then he would be ALL LOCKED UP for that night, so he would bid his boys adieu, telling them, “TA-TA.”

Standard Sinatra greeting: “How’s your bird?”
His concern was anatomical. As always there were variations:
“How’s your Bell and Howell?”
“How’s your Foster, Charley?”
“How’s your cornpone, baby?”

But BIRD was the word that thrilled him most, and he would sneak it into any context whenever possible. Onstage, he would sing, “She loves the free, fresh clyde in her bird” or “I’ve got you under my bird” or “Just say the words and we’ll beat our birds down to Acapulco Bay.” After he nearly drowned in Hawaii in 1964, his only public acknowledgement was, “Oh, I just got a little water on my bird, that’s all.” To inquire about a man’s romantic conquests, he’d say, “Did you grow any orchids in your bird this weekend?” Of any bumbler, he’d say, “He does have a way of stepping on his bird.” Signing a photograph of himself wielding a Jack Daniels bottle, he wrote for a friend: “Drink, Dickie! It’s good for your bird.”

But he did not reserve the term for men only. Once, at the El Matador in San Francisco, he obliged a prim Englishwoman who approached him for an autograph, then asked after her bird. “I—I don’t have a bird,” she replied, confused. “Oh, lady,” he said, “then you’re in deep trouble!” She pinkened with embarrassment, which he instantly regretted. So he seated her at his table and gave her champagne and charmed away the fluster. Birds, after all, do have their place.