B009HOTHPE EBOK (30 page)

Now it’s the sixties, I want to give him a song, but most of the stuff I’m writing is not really in Frank’s genre—to put it mildly. “Lonely Boy”? I don’t think so. “Puppy Love”? Not too likely. In the back of my head I want to write that song, but I’m scared shitless. I’d be competing with guys like Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen. I don’t have those kind of chops yet. It wasn’t until 1965 or 1966 that Sinatra began putting out pop records, because by then he saw the writing on the wall. The long and winding road to writing a song for Frank began in 1967 when I had rented a house in Mougins, a quaint little town in the south of France near Cannes, and one day sitting by the pool with Anne and my daughters heard this song on the radio. It was a pop record, light rock ’n’ roll:
“Comme d’habitude,”
which means, “as usual.” It’s a story about a couple breaking up, a very French lyric: le money, les eyelashes, le coffee, whatever. It was okay, it wasn’t a huge hit. But I heard something in the melody that grabbed me.

It had been written in February of that year by Gilles Thibautt and Jacque Revaux, recorded by Claude François, in September and October, and released by Barclay Records on November 3rd. On December 17, I negotiated to acquire the rights for my company, Spanka Music, with Eddie Barclay at the Plaza Hotel in Paris. I knew Eddie Barclay well, a larger-than-life guy who’d had seven wives—he was Mr. France. He was close to Quincy Jones, who, to this day, is one of my dearest friends. Eddie and I had become close, I’d done some business with him, published the James Brown catalog in Europe with him, so I called him up and told him what I wanted to do: take the melody, write new words to it. He said, “Yeah, take whatever you want. It’s not doing so well, you want it?” It was a small industry back then, so he gave me the song—no money. It was just two pieces of paper. I mean, we weren’t buying the pyramids here. He gave me the publishing, the right to re-create the song. I went back to New York and put it in a drawer. But I never forgot it was in that drawer—it was in there, palpitating, waiting for the moment I’d awaken it.

I knew there was something special to this song. I heard the melody as a foundation to something very interesting—but what? It just had such a solid base to it, I knew that the story was going to be very dramatic and have a grand sweep to it. And I knew the kind of story I was going to lay over it would be very graphic. It was inspiring to me but I didn’t quite know what to do with it yet. I began playing
“Comme d’habitude”
on piano again, and everything came together. Then it really grew into itself. I transformed it on piano, got the right vibe to it, taking it away from the original Europop version. But I hadn’t figured out the hook yet.

Sometime in 1967, I’m in Florida performing at the Fontainebleau Hotel. Sinatra was doing a film down there, one of those detective movies,
Tony Rome,
I think, and I get a call from Jilly Rizzo. He says, “Kid, come on over, the old man wants to have dinner with you.” I go and have dinner with Frank at a restaurant. We’re at dinner, and Frank tells me that he’s going to retire from show business. He’s had enough. The Rat Pack thing was starting to wane, it was splintering off, which made him feel vulnerable. He was still getting harassed by the FBI because of his mob connections.

Frank was vulnerable. There were irritating kinds of things going on in his life all the time, to the point where he decided to do one last LP with Don Costa, who had always been my guy.

“Kid,” he said, “I’m fed up, I’m going to do one more album, and I’m out of here.” And after he’d finished bitching about his problems, he lightened up and said, “Hey, kid, you never wrote me that song.”

“Frank, you got me there. I gotta think about that.”

“Don’t take too long!”

When I contemplated the idea of Sinatra retiring I got quite emotional. I went back to New York. It’s one in the morning and I’m haunted by the idea that he’s quitting. I couldn’t quite accept it.

I was living in a midtown apartment in the 70’s at the time. I would write songs on my Selectric typewriter. I was afraid to start, because he was into Gershwin and all those other jazz-tinged composers. He never liked pop music and had only dabbled in it at this point.

I’ll never forget the night. It’s about one in the morning, I know there’s a storm moving in, the atmosphere is charged, there’s a sense of drama in the air. I’m all alone, playing this melody on the piano, writing it as if Frank were writing it, in the person of Frank, tuning in Sinatra’s vibe, a sense of foreboding and finality. I get that first line, “And now the end is near, and so I face the final curtain.” The rain is getting heavier. The great legend is leaving the stage, the lights going out. It needed to be operatic, a big, swelling moment. I start typing like a madman—forget the craft, I told myself, just write it the way he talks: “Ate it up … spit it out.” I finish it in about four hours, and edit it down to what I think it should be, give or take, a few optional lines. That’s the way I do it, building it up, adding, rewriting, etc., and then cutting it back until only the essential emotional core is there.

Little did I know I was to write a song that would ultimately revitalize his career and change the direction of mine.

I had the first verse done and then—wow! I said, this is for Frank. I’m going to finish it for him. The title, “My Way,” which came to me first, gave the story a particular feel, and I went along with it. Sometimes you write something very special that starts to write itself. I know that from the get-go. The song has to be treated as a person in a sense, the person who is evoking those feelings. It was a departure for me—I would never under normal circumstances write something so chauvinistic, narcissistic, in-your-face, and grandiose. The reason I pursued it was that I knew now that this was for Sinatra and that he could pull it off. One unexpected side effect of “My Way” was that it came out right on the eve of the Me Generation—it was all, me, me, me which is possibly why the song became so popular among a very diverse group of singers.

I finished typing my final draft of “My Way” at five
A.M.
in the morning. I know Frank is at Caesars, I know he’s offstage, drinking at the bar and I know he’s there with Don Costa, because I’m also working with Don, and I say, “Frank I’ve got something very interesting, I’m gonna bring it out.” I then flew to Las Vegas in August 1968 and I played it for Sinatra. I knew Frank loved the song when I originally played it for him but he always wanted to be cool, so all he said was “That’s kooky, kid. We’re going in.” Coming from him, you have to understand, that meant he was ecstatic.

They carefully planned to record it when Sinatra had a week off. Frank went to Palm Springs, rested, rehearsed the song, knew it well—doing what he liked to call woodshedding. Meanwhile I called Claude François, the French writer, on December 7, to tell him Frank planned to record it. Frank and and his daughter, Nancy, went into the studio on December 30. He knew it so well he sang it in one take. All the musicians were there, this huge orchestra playing live. Everybody who’d worked with him through the years was there, they all stood up and gave him a standing ovation.

I get a phone call from the studio on Sunset Boulevard and Sinatra played it to me over the phone and I started crying. And that was it. That was the turning point. As a writer, it was like a miracle; it was hugely important for me to have Sinatra record a song I’d written finally come true. They decide to make “My Way” the single off the forthcoming album and I send Claude François a copy.

“My Way” is released on March 28, 1969—in May it gets to #27 on the charts. In January 1970, I receive a special citation from BMI for a million plays on American radio. In December 1970, I meet Claude François for the first time in Paris—unfortunately he never got to meet Sinatra, he was electrocuted in the shower with a hair dryer under bizarre circumstances. “My Way” goes on to be a megahit for Sinatra, the Coca-Cola theme song, and the most-played, most-covered song in the world. I wrote a second song for Frank, “Let Me Try Again,” which was the follow-up, but nobody expected that lightning was going to strike twice.

Hanging out with Sinatra and knowing what he was about, the song came out of that. Everything in that song
is
him. I loved him. I could never have set it up as he did. It was written for Sinatra and it went to him first—no one else heard it.

I was with RCA at the time and when they caught wind that I’d given the song to Frank they were furious. “Why don’t you keep it for yourself?” they asked me. “Hold it!” I told them. Forget the ego thing and forget the money and the guarantees, forget everything—none of that stuff means anything here.… The old rules don’t apply. The song has to be treated as if it were a person in a sense, and that person was Sinatra.

There was never any question of singing it myself. I couldn’t have pulled it off. The song wouldn’t have had anywhere near the impact that Sinatra gave it.

“My Way” was Sinatra’s way—and that was the right way, basically the only way. Although I do like the way Sid Vicious did it. At first I thought he was just goofing on the song. He starts out making fun of it, but then he gets into it, gets swept up in it. It’s as if the song midway reaches out and grabs him by the foot.

I really questioned whether I was going to grant the license or not. But after I made some calls and realized his intent was sincere, I said, yeah, I’ll let him do it. He’s entitled. You know, I wasn’t concerned about the copyright. Sid went in there, took primarily a jazz band in Paris, pulled some tubes out of the amps, and after his vision of it, and I think Jonesie—Steve Jones from the Sex Pistols—added some stuff later. It was believable and unique enough that when Scorsese called to use it at the end of
Goodfellas,
I was all for it. It had an anger to it, a voicing of his resentments.

Sid’s version is not as extreme as what I did later on with
Rock Swings
—although in my case in reverse—taking those songs and doing big band versions, but at that time it was shocking, when you first heard it. It was also very prescient. Prophetic for Sid, too. Sid Vicious’s version isn’t my favorite, and I can’t say honestly that I would listen to it every week, but what he did worked as both a goof
and
a sincere take on it, which is a pretty amazing accomplishment in and of itself. Sid put himself into the song, and he really did do it his way. It’s perfectly in sync with Sid Vicious going down that staircase in the video. An incredible visual, no doubt about that.

So when Vicious did it, I was pleased to hear that it touched him in some way, that he wanted to make that statement, and at the same time I was very amused by it. I was flattered that a punk like Sid wanted to do “My Way,” someone who was into music totally different from mine.

I wasn’t thinking in terms of the big picture, when I wrote “My Way,” my only objective was to write something for Sinatra. I never really had any kind of premonition or design that it was going to be anything other than a song that Frank would want to sing. I wasn’t thinking,
Oh, if I do this, it’ll become a standard
. I had no idea.

“My Way” changed everything for me, for Frank, for our relationship.

Even though I’d written outside the teen genre in the themes I’d composed for
The Longest Day
and
The Tonight Show,
it was with “My Way” that the second stage of my writing career began. And after the onslaught of The Beatles and Dylan, I now had the luxury of writing a new kind of lyric. I could stretch out. Everything had opened up. After that, I realized that I was going to be mature a whole lot longer than I was a teenager. Whenever Sinatra performed “My Way,” he’d do a minute on how we met and how the song came about and how he felt about my writing, which was really nice.

In 1973, I hear from Don Costa whom I’m still working with, that Frank is going back into the studio so I wrote a song for him, “Let Me Try Again,” as a follow-up to “My Way.” Everyone was thrilled that he was getting back into the business. My good buddy Jerry Weintraub promoted Sinatra’s famous comeback show at Madison Square Garden in New York in October, 1974. Who else but Jerry could have put that “main event” together? He’s the best promoter in the world!

Frank kept going on and on touring as did Sammy and I, as you can see by the schedules we kept. We didn’t care how old we got and as long as we were healthy, we were going to keep going. Despite the dispersal of the Rat Pack we kept crossing paths, hanging out, socializing through the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, Frank, Sammy, and I in Vegas, Florida, New York. From 1968 on Sinatra performed frequently at Caesars Palace as did I, as did Sammy. I’m there in February, September, and December of 1972, and January and March of ’74. Sinatra is there again in June after his long absence in Vegas. I am there again in October and December of that year. In January, Sinatra follows me in, January 16th, I follow him, again on January 23rd. I am back in April with Freddie Prinze—who never finishes the engagement because of drugs. I am there in May and July. I am there again in December. In 1976, I am there in January, Frank follows me on January 15th. I’m back in June 1977, followed by Sammy Davis; I am there in August, followed by Sinatra August 25th, and so forth.

With each passing year Frank was visibly aging. And then word started coming out that Kitty Kelley was writing a book about him. He was not happy. Now, the Jack Daniel’s had no limit. What freaked him out the most was how Kitty Kelley attacked his mother. He never got over the assault she leveled at Dolly. He was very verbal about having Kitty Kelley whacked for what she had written about his mother. Jilly told me it so upset him he had to be treated at the hospital for an anxiety attack.

Kitty Kelley also wrote a book about Nancy Reagan in which she implied that Frank and Nancy’s three-hour lunches alone at the White House involved more than eating. But, as Sammy said, “At that age it probably took him that long to eat lunch.” Barbara Sinatra’s comment was, “If Frank and Nancy had sex during those three-hour lunches at the White House, Nancy would still be smiling,” alluding to the size of Sinatra’s “pencil.” As Ava Gardner said there was only 10 pounds of Sinatra but 100 pounds of cock.