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| From top: Betty Garrett, Celeste Holm, Vivian Blaine |
The enduring image of Mr. Frank Sinatra today is from the early 60s, the a ring-a-ding-dingin' wiseguy crooning, chairman-of-the-board for the Rat Pack, shtupping a plethora of broads from the casino and Hollywood. But did you know that during WW2 he used to be called 'Frankie' and in the late 40's was but a humble and naive wingman to blustery Gene Kelly in MGM musicals? The women he wound up with were often bigger than he was, even a bit matronly. "the mother instinct" was the reason they pursued him and this Brooklyn beanpole never put up more than token resistance. If she had a good pitching arm, a car, her own apartment, a money-making job, and a refusal to take no for an answer, what could he do? Ring-a-ding-done! So what was the deal for this unusual romantic strategy?
It all began during the Second World War, wherein Sinatra's quiet storm radio broadcasts won a massive following of stateside sweethearts, which might have made the soldiers listening on Armed Forces Radio jealous. So they played up the mother instinct aspect. Frank was just a skinny kid with a golden voice and women could love him and not be unfaithful because they just wanted to cook and to care for him. He was no threat to a red-blooded serviceman and he was a good sport about being mistaken for a broom or carried off by strong winds when he guested on Bob Hope or The Jack Benny Show.
But after the war he found it a persona to shake. When the war was over, morals changed, soldiers were home, but not all of them and war widows were abundant. Now their mother instincts were more intense than ever, but they could do something about it, if they wanted to make a move. And these ladies perhaps found their model in Betty Garrett.
In Take Me Out to the Ballgame (1949) their relationship was perhaps best summed up by the song "It's Fate, Baby it's Fate," a duet wherein Garrett makes her passes and Frankie tries to argue his way out as she chases him around the empty ballpark:
Betty: Too late, baby, too late,
So accept your destiny,
It's fate, baby, that you were meant to fall into love with me.
(break)
I'm gonna start it out on my astrology, and phrenology
Frank: It does not matter that you are Aquarius, or Sagittarius
Or Gemini or Scorpio or Taurus the Bull, Capriconicus or Pisces the fish.
Betty: Winter, summer, spring or fall,
As long as you were born at all,
Mister, you're my dish.
It's fate baby, it's fate.
Frank: Can't I even put up a fuss?
Betty: It's fate, baby, the stars have written that you and me is Us.
In On the Town (released the same year) she's a NYC cabbie who sings "Come up to My Place," and--in a move very bold for the 1949--convinces Frank's sailor to abandon planned sightseeing. Their horny quicke / nooner hook-up vibe gets so intense that the clueless cockblocking of her sniffling roommate is almost not funny. We feel the heat and want Garrett to get her man planted. Finally Garrett packs the roomie off to the movies so she and her mother love object can presumably have some of the most forthrightly implied casual afternoon sex since Dorothy Malone closed up the bookstore in The Big Sleep (1946). (See more about my love for the Garrett / Sinatra dynamic in my 2006 piece, "The She Wolf Gets Her Man").
Garrett was a blast in both roles and was a tough act to follow. She wound up blacklisted--a commie!--and Frank had troubles of his own. He finally lost the 'ie' at the end of his name when he landed a major role in From Here to Eternity (1953) but he still made musicals, of course, contending with the bossy broad Adelaide (Vivian Blaine, above) in 1955's Guys and Dolls, but it wasn't until 1956 that his musical persona began a transitional phase. He made two films that year-- The Tender Trap and High Society. The staid, supportive, witty, and patient Celeste Holm took over the matron role. She was no cabbie, but a photographer in one and a concert violinist in the other. She was high class, a lady of substance rather than a brassy girl from the neighborhood like Garrett. Frankie was making the grade but there was no spark with Holm. She was his launch pad, boosting his courage and catching him if and when he ever fell.
In High Society, Holm is in the place usually reserved for Joan Blondell or post-code Jean Harlow, the patient, long-suffering girl friday. It's Grace Kelly of course that Frank really sparks with. She's supposed to be Bing's true love but as soon as Sinatra gets behind the bar, pours some drinks, and sings to her of course, a curious magical thing happens: the swinger Frank is born. The bar is clearly Frank's place of power, his voice is the sonic equivalent of the giddy warm flush in your cheeks when the first drink lights up your soul like a beam of cocktail hour setting sun. Frank's set to 'smolder' and Grace lights him up. Together they leaves Bing looking almost anemic, hungover and outgunned, ready for Celeste to lead him out to pasture.
This moment wasn't just a Hoboken son getting lucky with a future princess but a career-turning revelation. A deep, poetic, sincere romanticism that Sinatra could only really convey in his best recordings comes out onto screen finally, and the last shred of the old innocent 'Frankie' disappears forever. The booze, the bar, the saloon song, the intimacy of two people alone at a bar, this--it was clear--was Frank's place of power, and the world's knees was shaking.
But he still had to go back to Holm in the end, because he would never be able to go all the way into high society. He was meant for the quiet hideaway bar rather than the ritzy soirees. And Holm, at least in High Society, wins him by default. But her mother instinct had just gone obsolete. She expected her Icarus high-flyin' swinger would plummet back into her arms once his wings melted into the morning's hangover and the bar was closed but there was a city where the bars never closed, the crooning, drinking, and seducing could go on 24/7. There was no need for Holm in... Las Vegas.
In Frank and Holm's other 1956 film, The Tender Trap, he plays a swinging New York City talent agent with a constant stream of dames, allegedly, but he only seems to be seen with Holm, whose classy carriage (she's an orchestra violinist) and Broadway wit anchor his confidence. She will puts up with his tomcatting and sticks by him because she's got nothing better going on, for now, and so the years pass. Easy sex keeps him dependent, but there's no kick. When the pair are out at a restaurant and meet marriage-minded virginal singer Debbie Reynolds (one of producer Frank's new clients), they grill her on her life goals (she wants three kids and a home in the country within five years, or bust), and she's so naive she doesn't even recognize they're kidding her. Holm gets to seem cosmopolitan here but then the censor steps in, presumably, and it's revealed Holm is just a plain old-fashioned girl, too.
Ugh.
At least she's fun before then but Reynolds' character is bossy and controlling and frowns at any kind of non-Better Homes and Gardens-style party planning. Still, Frank's womanizing attitude buckles like arctic summer ice when he finally falls into her arms, and its beautiful to see, despite the icky subtexts.
Frank was now drawing the A-list stars, but nothing could prepare him for the Shirley MacLaine experience. Her 'party girl' make-up and a solid range of acting chops didn't preclude her playing the doormat, adopting some Vivian Blaine-shrillness as the girl who won't stop chasing Sinatra even into his hometown (where he goes for a frigid English teacher instead) in the non-musical Some Came Running (1958). As he almost did with Holm in Trap, Sinatra marries Shirley for the wrong reason and she runs into her pimp's bullet mere hours afterwards, to save Frank's life and open him up for more reciprocal relationships. Were any of them coming? Or just some more mothering easy Brooklyn-type broads (whom he considered himself too good for) and slumming college-grad good girl virgins (vice versa)?
But Frank was finding his inner fire, and it gave off a heat of booze, artistic aspirations (he did after all pioneer a whole new style of microphone recording) and that old black magic. He can knock your socks off in his "Lady is a Tramp" rendition, performed for Hayworth in the empty club, or when he starts to walk away from her at the end in his iconic white raincoat and hat you can feel an earned gravitas in his step, walking way from Hayworth's yacht and off into the fog, with a dog and Novak at his side. Bogey had that same walk and a similar raincoat in Casablanca, and we all know Bogey ran the original Rat Pack, which Frank had been in, as an admiring young pup. It paid off.
A mark of his maturity was his willingness to look foolish. In one of the Joey songs, "My Funny Valentine," Novak sings of his less-than-Greek figure and unsmart dialogue. For "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered," Hayworth refers to him a "half-pint imitation." Each song is a smoldering high in the film, each asking the eternal Frank question: why this half-pint imitation-- skinny, arrogant, class climbing so-and-so still delivers the sexual goods. It's a testament to all three performers that we can feel their rapture so keenly. As Stephanie Zacharek recently wrote about Baz Lurhman's Gatsby, there's a difference between a faker and a phony. And Frank is so authentic he can submit his faker persona to enough withering epiphanies and humiliations to kill ten ordinary Gatsbys, and not even flinch.
By 1960, due no doubt to all this good bad behavior, his mother instinct stigma had receded even farther, to the occasional needy ex-one night stand cum-stalker, while in the foreground the McLaine broad types, the slumming socialite types, and the homey types were coalescing into one perfect package, such as Angie Dickinson in 1960's Ocean's Eleven. An ironic mention of the old mother instinct is found in a snatch of dialogue between Dean Martin and Dickinson upon their meeting up:
DM - What made you come back? I've come to the conclusion it must be love. Mother love
AG: I'll consider many things: mistress, plaything, toy for a night, but I refuse to be a mother, that's out.
DM - Don't get me wrong, I'm the mother....
Then there was one final mother: Janet Leigh i The Manchurian Candidate (1962). This one comes in like a relapse, understandable since Frank's character is in the process of becoming unglued as a result of nightmares and PTSD. Janet Leigh, hardly a matron or a broad, follows him out of the bar car. He's shaking and glazed with sweat, unable to make eye contact. She gives him a cigarette because his hands are too shaky to light his own, gives him her address and phone number, presuming a man in his DT-esque condition will effortlessly remember both. He calls her to pick him up from jail, and in the cab home she announces she's already broken off her engagement before even getting the call, because sweaty, shaky, twitchy, imprisoned Frank is such a catch. In the car she says she's an orphan, a reincarnated Chinese laborer (an eerie prefiguring of Mrs. Iselin's Asian connections). Is she a spy, or is the mothering instinct here gone so rogue it's gone red, found its way into the cold nether regions of political intrigue in a bizarre mirror of Lansbury? Leigh's character is sexy and smart, but her love is so total and so unearned its unnerving. At least, by the end of the film, Frank looks great, sober, secure. The sweat glean is gone, the uniform is pressed, and he's not skinny anymore. He looks ready to evolve even higher.
Then, JFK, a personal friend of Frank's, died. It traumatized him, the nation, the world, and brought an immediate end to all innocence. Mother instincts were out, for keeps.
Do I have a purpose here, in following this 'mother instinct' thread through Sinatra (whom I adore so don't think I'm criticizing him). It's just that as an ex-boozer, an ex-rock band member, an ex-husband, a struggling writer whose work is littered with typos, a burn-out, I've had my own troubles with mothering co-dependent women. I've been fought over and plowed under, ignored and suffocated, I've stared out hotel windows at dawn with a bourbon in my hand and Steinbeck on the bed in the wee wee hours.... not even trying to be legendary, just trying to not shake. Have I suffered for Frank's sins? Is the whole mother instinct thing and Frank's efforts to be rid of it responsible for the glamorizing of boozy misogyny that coursed through Sinatra's Rat Pack schtick, and which in turn infected generations of men like me?
Frank would know--he was always more intellectual and caring than he let on--but he's gone, flown off to the next marquee. Hopefully in the next life he won't have to spend another film career escaping and then submitting to the tender trap, and then maybe those of us who follow after him (avidly, avidly) won't confuse maturity and womanizing, won't end up settling for the one apron string that ties us up faster than the rest, so we can spend the rest our stage time escaping, bemoaning the leash like the courageous dog whose a coward off it. It's not fate, baby, it's just men trying to figure out how the hell they wound up where they are. Once they figure it out, they're gone. They'll call you, baby. Don't crowd them.
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