It was obvious from the way Sinatra looked at these people in the poolroom that they were not his style, but he leaned back against a high stool that was against the wall, holding his drink in his right hand, and said nothing, just watched Durocher slam the billiard balls back and forth. The younger men in the room, accustomed to seeing Sinatra at this club, treated him without deference, although they said nothing offensive. They were a cool young group, very California-cool and casual, and one of the coolest seemed to be a little guy, very quick of movement, who had a sharp profile, pale blue eyes, blondish hair, and squared eyeglasses. He wore a pair of brown corduroy slacks, a green shaggy-dog Shetland sweater, a tan suede jacket, and Game Warden boots, for which he had recently paid $60.
Frank Sinatra, leaning against the stool, sniffling a bit from his cold, could not take his eyes off the Game Warden boots. Once, after gazing at them for a few moments, he turned away; but now he was focused on them again. The owner of the boots, who was just standing in them watching the pool game, was named Harlan Ellison, a writer who had just completed work on a screenplay, The Oscar.
Finally Sinatra could not contain himself.
“Hey,” he yelled in his slightly harsh voice that still had a soft, sharp edge. “Those Italian boots?”
“No,” Ellison said.
“Spanish?”
“No.”
“Are they English boots?”
“Look, I donno, man,” Ellison shot back, frowning at Sinatra, then turning away again.
Now the poolroom was suddenly silent. Leo Durocher who had been poised behind his cue stick and was bent low just froze in that position for a second. Nobody moved. Then Sinatra moved away from the stool and walked with that slow, arrogant swagger of his toward Ellison, the hard tap of Sinatra’s shoes the only sound in the room. Then, looking down at Ellison with a slightly raised eyebrow and a tricky little smile, Sinatra asked: “You expecting a storm?”
Harlan Ellison moved a step to the side. “Look, is there any reason why you’re talking to me?”
“I don’t like the way you’re dressed,” Sinatra said.
“Hate to shake you up,” Ellison said, “but I dress to suit myself.”
Now there was some rumbling in the room, and somebody said, “Com’on, Harlan, let’s get out of here,” and Leo Durocher made his pool shot and said, “Yeah, com’on.”
But Ellison stood his ground.
Sinatra said, “What do you do?”
“I’m a plumber,” Ellison said.
“No, no, he’s not,” another young man quickly yelled from across the table. “He wrote The Oscar.”
“Oh, yeah,” Sinatra said, “well I’ve seen it, and it’s a piece of crap.”
“That’s strange,” Ellison said, “because they haven’t even released it yet.”
“Well, I’ve seen it,” Sinatra repeated, “and it’s a piece of crap.”
Now Brad Dexter, very anxious, very big opposite the small figure of Ellison, said, “Com’on, kid, I don’t want you in this room.”
“Hey,” Sinatra interrupted Dexter, “can’t you see I’m talking to this guy?”
Dexter was confused. Then his whole attitude changed, and his voice went soft and he said to Ellison, almost with a plea, “Why do you persist in tormenting me?”
The whole scene was becoming ridiculous, and it seemed that Sinatra was only half-serious, perhaps just reacting out of sheer boredom or inner despair; at any rate, after a few more exchanges Harlan Ellison left the room. By this time the word had gotten out to those on the dance floor about the Sinatra-Ellison exchange, and somebody went to look for the manager of the club. But somebody else said that the manager had already heard about it–and had quickly gone out the door, hopped in his car and drove home. So the assistant manager went into the poolroom.
“I don’t want anybody in here without coats and ties,” Sinatra snapped.
The assistant manager nodded, and walked back to his office.
IT WAS THE MORNING AFTER. IT was the beginning of another nervous day for Sinatra’s press agent, Jim Mahoney. Mahoney had a headache, and he was worried but not over the Sinatra-Ellison incident of the night before. At the time Mahoney had been with his wife at a table in the other room, and possibly he had not even been aware of the little drama. The whole thing had lasted only about three minutes. And three minutes after it was over, Frank Sinatra had probably forgotten about it for the rest of his life–as Ellison will probably remember it for the rest of his life: he had had, as hundreds of others before him, at an unexpected moment between darkness and dawn, a scene with Sinatra.
–Gay Talese, from “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” originally published in Esquire, April 1966.
In his first op-ed piece for the New York Times, Bono depicts a Frank Sinatra far less bellicose than the petulant ogre of Gay Talese’s classic profile. Older and wiser, too: the rock star, activist, writer, and philanthropist’s scene with Sinatra unfolded in 1993, around the time they recorded “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” for the older singer’s penultimate ticket to Billboard’s Top Ten: Duets. Ellison got a psychic “get out of Dodge;” with intriguing undertones. Bono got one of Sinatra’s paintings, a “mad yellow canvas of violent concentric circles gyrating across a desert plain.”
Sinatra enlightens America’s youth, the nice way.
While Bono’s description makes me wonder if the violent circles he mentions mark the interval just after the painter ran out of numbers and went looking for jars and cans–or, more likely, sent somebody–I’m still grateful for the revelation. Before reading the piece, I had no idea Sinatra painted. Bono drops a few good quotes, too, but if his story has any value, it’s in his depiction of the artist in the December of his years, finally sufficiently softened by time to share a room with somebody from beyond his dress-code comfort zone. My one real issue with the piece is the writer’s contention that Sinatra’s voice improved with age. I’ve always thought it better before he lost it in the early ’50′s.
Bono could never do this.
But, as we know, Bono is a kind man, what with helping the starving children and whatnot, and probably wouldn’t have called the old croaker on his clogged, corroded pipes even if he agreed with me. Sadly, the singer’s saintliness hasn’t done a thing to stop bloodthirsty bloggers from heaping post-editorial calumny on him. Ostensibly on behalf of “journalists everywhere, “ Conde Nast media observer Jeff Bercovici addresses Bono directly, writing “as a newspaper columnist, you are truly an execrable failure.” Jossip‘s David Hauslaib accuses the singer of writing about being rich (poor’s an option?). In a post unquestionably better than Bono’s piece, Dave at Too Famous To Get Fully Dressed quaintly calls him out for…sentence fragments?
Which brings us to the biggest, longest attack of all, in The Lefsetz Letter. Reading the post made me wonder if maybe Bob Lefsetz is now getting bottles of prescription bluster in one-week supplies, the way William Burroughs got methadone during his days in Lawrence, and like Burroughs, saving a little out of each for special occasions.
Like his fellow assailants, Lefsetz seems unaware of one ineluctable fact: every noteworthy music-related op-ed piece the Times has run so far this century suffers from incurable lameness–to the extent that Bono’s looks good compared to the other two. While Tony Sachs and Sal Nunziato nail the particulars of major label suicide beautifully in “Spinning Into Oblivion” (April 5, 2007)–they’re perfectly, uh, oblivious to the all-too-obvious causes of their brick ‘n mortar venture’s death. Still, they’re paragons of perceptiveness compared to Nick Hornby, whose mawkish ramble “Rock of Ages” sprawls prominently among music journalism’s all-time most-indefensible messes. Granted, Bono isn’t the world’s greatest writer or reporter. While sweet as Twinkies doused in grenadine and chocolate syrup, his recollection of Sinatra has all the depth of a flour tortilla.
Springsteen-fixated writer seeks, finds surrogate.
Still, given the circs, I can’t help but suspect the bloggers’ hostility stems obliquely from Bobo Bono’s scene with Sinatra. Consider Harlan Ellison, a galaxy-class troll target for more than a decade. Talese couldn’t possibly have known that the feisty “little guy” had, with 1965′s “Repent Harlequin!”Said the Ticktockman,” established himself as one of science fiction’s most eloquent rebels. Nor could he have known that in the course of winning 10 Hugos, five Stokers, four Nebulas, and a record four Writers Guild of America Awards–along with countless other honors– Grand Master Ellison has at least partially earned the reputation he currently enjoys…as one of his discipline’s most combative, abrasive figures, a one-man war machine whose inclination toward litigation rivals that of the RIAA,
Even sans necktie, Ellison makes a fine Sinatra 2.0.
He also couldn’t have possibly know that, while dead-on about Ellison remembering his scene with Sinatra–now immortalized in dozens of wildy inaccurate online accounts–he might have been wrong about Sinatra. Could it be that some kind of subtle psychic exchange took place on the night of their encounter, eventually turning Sinatra into the kindly sage of Bono’s story and Ellison into the raging bull who, in the ’80′s, punched colleague and ex-friend Charles Platt over who knows what. (Sinatra would have sent somebody.) Did each see himself in the other? Did Sinatra actually like Ellison? While evidence is slim, one huge (and hugely ironic) fact looms. Every time credits roll for The Oscar–which hadn’t even started shooting when Talese’s piece ran–cast names invariably include Nancy Sinatra’s and (surprisingly, given his initial assessment of the film), her dad’s. Did his scene with kindred spirit Ellison trigger the process that eventually turned him into a more refined version of his early-career gentleman self, ripe for a run-in with a writer destined to dwell only on his good side? If so, Bono should hit Ellison at some point during his Times tenure. Sinatra knows, he could use the love.
Though Sinatra ended up in it, he was right about “The Oscar” first time around.
