(10 of 10)
At the recording studio everything is ready: bare walls, hard chairs and rattling music racks, all neuter in a thin fluorescent light. But as Sinatra stands up to the mike, tie loose and blue palmetto hat stuck on awry, his cigarette hung slackly from his lips, a mood curls out into the room like smoke. He begins to sing, hips down and shoulders hunched, hands shaping the big rhythms and eyes rolling with each low-down line. The musicians come to life, the wallbirds start to smile and weave with the very special sound that is Sinatra. Instead of the old adolescent moo, the Sinatra voice now has a jazzy undertone of roostering confidence, and a kind of jewel hardness that can take on blue and give off fire with subtlety and fascination.
"That does it," a technician says, and Frank handshakes his way to the door, purrs off into the California night with his waiting date. They may drop in on some of Sinatra's current set of friends—the Bogarts, Judy (Garland) and Sid Luft—or munch a steak with Montgomery Clift & Co. Frankie loves the clink of ice in well-filled glasses, and the click of Hollywood's oddballs in a well-filled room. But everybody has to go home, sooner or later, and the moment comes sometimes when Frankie is left alone—the thing he seems to hate the most in life. If that should happen, he may ring up a girl he has known for many years. When she arrives, they sit and talk and talk until the sun comes up or she falls asleep, and then Frank may wander next door to have breakfast with Jimmy van Heusen, the songwriter and Sinatra friend. So begins another day in the Arabian Nights of Frank Sinatra.
Sometimes somebody tries to tell him that his way is no way to live, but when they do, Frank has an answer as simple and as emphatic as a punch in the mouth: "I'm going to do as I please. I don't need anybody in the world. I did it all myself."
A "beard," in Hollywood parlance, is a man employed by a male star to accompany him when he appears in public with a woman not his wife. Sometimes female stars use them too. The custom is usually successful in averting trouble with the wife or husband, the gossip columnists and the public. "If Hollywood ever took off its beard," a comedian once remarked, "the public would not recognize it." A "hunker" is somebody kept on the payroll to know baseball scores, send out for coffee, and strike matches on.