Search Results

This chapter considers popular music icon Frank Sinatra’s fifty years singing “Ol’ Man River.” He first sang the song in the early 1940s, when it was an unlikely addition to his repertoire of love ballads. In these years, “Ol’ Man River” functioned as a showpiece for Sinatra’s voice and a display of masculinity: some listeners didn’t think the tune worked for a crooner but Sinatra kept on singing it. Across his career, he framed the song as a “classic” or “great” piece of popular art. Sinatra took two approaches to “Ol’ Man River,” which can be characterized as the bombastic and the intimate. Central to both was a choice of phrasing that pulls the listener’s attention toward Sinatra’s technical ability to sustain a long musical line on a single breath. This idiosyncratic approach to the tune hints that Sinatra conceived of “Ol’ Man River” primarily as an opportunity for vocal display.

This chapter covers Milestone’s life until his death in 1980. During this time he directed two high-profile features. Warner Brothers’ Ocean’s Eleven, a widely-imitated heist movie set in the Las Vegas casinos, starred the celebrated and notorious “Rat Pack” led by Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, as a group of army buddies out to make a fast buck. Milestone next took over from fired director Carol Reed MGM’s expensive blockbuster epic Mutiny on the Bounty, shot under difficult conditions in Tahiti, along with its difficult star, Marlon Brando. Warner Brothers then hired Milestone to direct PT-109, about John Kennedy, but fired him after a month. In his last years Milestone directed a few episodes for television, but found TV work unsatisfying.

From roughly 1940 to 1945, a number of prominent big band leaders expanded their ensembles by adding strings and other orchestral instruments. Capitol Records stood at the forefront of this movement in the late 1940s and 1950s, releasing a variety of richly orchestrated, urbane, jazz-inflected recordings, including acclaimed releases by Frank Sinatra and Nelson Riddle. While the postwar period saw the decline of the traditional big band as a commercial force in popular culture, these jazz-pop ventures reinvented swing for the hi-fi era. Through close study of select arrangements, contemporary cultural discourse, and marketing and promotion, this essay articulates the larger aesthetic issues and cultural conditions that shaped the hybrid, middlebrow ideals of these jazz-with-strings subgenres.

During his career in jazz, Buddy Rich was a much-admired yet controversial figure. Because of a unique relationship between his hands and feet, and a natural connection to the music, Rich continually created ideas, patterns, and a time feeling that were his alone. With drum history as his foundation, he evolved an approach to music that links jazz drumming's beginnings to what's happening today. Rich's drumming continued to be valid almost fifty years after he started because he took his cues from what the music unleashed within him. Rich changed the view and conception of drums as had other great players of the instrument.

The gossip industry underwent a fundamental transition after the war, from the gawking clatter of the classical era fan magazines to the gossip columns of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons and scandal sheets that so successfully harried the Hollywood community after the war. Movie stars were lucky and pretty, rich and famous. But they were as well political neophytes and their everyday lives were, thanks to the columnists after the war, lumbered with undue consequence. It was one thing for the columnists to bemoan the unearned privileges of celebrity, and then to cut folks so lucky and full of themselves down to size. But it was quite another to cast the private and personal lives of these celebrities as fundamentally anti-social and un-American, to subject the lives and loves of movie stars to a narrow and frankly unrelated notion of patriotism, one that asked movie stars to behave, or at least pretend to behave, like the rest of us.

Tom attends Yale. Gets his first film job as a production assistant on a John Wayne film directed by Michael Curtiz. Curtiz fires Tom but Tom is rehired by the Duke. Tom visits his dad's set in Rome - Cleopatra - dines with Liz Taylor, hangs with Richard Burton. The film nearly kills his dad and bankrupts 20th Century Fox. Tom gets his first writing job on a TV show, writes his first feature, writes two Emmy-winning TV specials with Nancy Sinatra and Herb Alpert.

The Walters-Darrow relationship ends, yet they retain a close friendship. Chapter 21 takes a comprehensive look at the creation of the screen comedy The Tender Trap (1955) and Walters’ work with Frank Sinatra and Debbie Reynolds. The Sinatra-Walters association continues with High Society (1956), a Cole Porter musical version of The Philadelphia Story. This chapter presents a detailed study of that production, including the casting process that brought together Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong, and Grace Kelly, the creation of Porter’s original score, Kelly’s engagement (and wedding) to Prince Rainier III of Monaco, and the film’s runaway success.

Hermes Pan continues at M-G-M with Kiss Me Kate in which he permits Bob Fosse to choreograph a portion of “From This Moment On.” He continues turning out musicals—The Student Prince, Jupiter’s Darling, in which he designed an underwater ballet for Esther Williams, Hit the Deck, and Meet Me in Las Vegas for which he created the spectacular “Frankie and Johnny” ballet for Cyd Charisse and John Braccia. He assisted Fred Astaire with the choreography for “Clap Yo’ Hands” in Funny Face before moving on to Silk Stockings with Astaire and Charisse and Pal Joey at Columbia Pictures with Frank Sinatra, Kim Novak, and Rita Hayworth. Pan choreographs Un Paio d’Ali (A Pair of Wings) in Milan and falls in love with dancer Gino Malerba.

As the 1940s began, there was little evidence of the changes that were to dominate the next ten years. The music business was still built around the big bands. With the advent of World War II, music began to turn increasingly romantic. By the time the guys and gals began coming home from the war in 1945, music and the music business were quite different. After the great success of the Woody Herman First Herd in 1944 and 1945, it was clear that the public was moving away from the music and the musicians of the 1930s. Much of the music of the middle and late 1940s was not really appropriate for dancing. The choice in 1945, and for a few years thereafter, was between two polar opposites: the modem-jazz movement and the pop singers.

This chapter considers Show Boat in the post-World War II era by way of the 1946 Broadway revival and two film versions made by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Hollywood (extended excerpts in Till the Clouds Roll By and the 1951 Technicolor version). The Broadway production remade two black dance numbers by featuring black concert dancers Pearl Primus and LaVerne French. These changes benefitted the careers of a generation of black dancers, including Alvin Ailey. MGM underemphasized the show's black content, using “Ol' Man River” to feature Frank Sinatra and reshaping the role of Julie around screen goddess Ava Gardner. The 1951 film remains the most drastic revision of the show, truncating its historical reach and eliminating black performance as a central element of the story.

This chapter details the release of the Leon Uris novel Exodus and subsequent film adaptation as well as the less celebrated Frank Sinatra vehicle The House That I Live In. The pages also recount the kidnapping of 8-year-old Yossele Schumacher by his Orthodox Israeli grandparents, as well as the extradition drama between Israel and the US concerning Dr. Robert Soblen. Finally, the chapter explores the respective relationships to Israel of writers James Baldwin, John Steinbeck, and Saul Bellow.

Because the new Bond film was shot mostly in France, John Barry could return to the franchise and scored Moonraker — about a villain who has built an entire space station above Earth — in Paris. His grand plans for a 2-LP set to be recorded by the Orchestre de Paris while the film was still being made, however, came to naught. Paul Williams wrote the original lyric to Barry's “Moonraker” melody and were to be sung by Frank Sinatra. Those plans fell through, however, and Johnny Mathis sang the Williams lyric, only to see both words and recording scrapped as subpar. Hal David wrote a new lyric at the last minute, and Shirley Bassey sang the song in Los Angeles just weeks before the premiere of the film in June 1979.

“Ol’ Man River” was frequently heard on television during the height of the civil rights era—from roughly 1957 to the end of the 1960s. This chapter considers eleven televised versions performed by singers Sam Cooke, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Judy Garland, Cab Calloway, and Sammy Davis Jr. and a recitation of the lyric by actor Henry Fonda. Analysis of these performances includes both matters of musical style and visual presentation. Discussion of Garland’s two televised versions highlights how one female performer remade “Ol’ Man River” as a personal anthem. Sinatra’s and Davis’s late 1960s versions find these iconic performers altering small details in their respective approaches to the song, drawing attention away from or directly to the confrontational content of Hammerstein’s lyric at a time of heightened racial tension.

The market for single recordings, now on the 45 rpm format, was still huge in the 1950s. Songs from Broadway shows were immensely popular with commercial singers at the time, such as Perry Como, Dinah Shore, Peggy Lee, and Rosemary Clooney; their renditions often shot to the top of the pop charts for weeks on end. Often these songs were placed by music publishers with A&R (artists and repertory) divisions in advance of their appearance in the actual Broadway show, as a way to promote both song and show. The LP format had matured by the mid-1950s and artists such as Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald dug deep into the catalog of Broadway songs from the earlier decades of the century to fill out extended “songbook” tributes to great Broadway songwriters, often restoring obscure material to the popular consciousness.

The 1957 screen adaptation of Pal Joey—starring Frank Sinatra as Joey, Rita Hayworth as Vera, and Kim Novak as Linda—redeems Joey. Now a singer rather than a dancer, Joey genuinely falls in love with Linda. In the end Joey gets the girl. The film promotes a set of emerging gender archetypes that defy middle-class, suburban constructions of masculinity and femininity. Joey’s stage-to-screen evolution—from heel to swinging bachelor—is mirrored by Linda’s transformation from stenographer to sex kitten. Both of these archetypes are responses to what cultural theorists have called the postwar “crisis” in masculinity. The character Vera too is altered. As played by Rita Hayworth, she is tamed by Joey. The anxiety over contested gender roles is reflected in the alteration of the original score, which is reworked, repurposed, and in some cases eviscerated in order to promote the ethos of the film.

In 1949 Betty Comden and Adolph Green discovered that MGM finally wanted to move forward with a screen version of On the Town. Before it could go in front of cameras, though, there were obstacles to overcome, particularly the fact that the studio only wanted to use a few of the original songs that they had written with their friend Leonard Bernstein. Eventually all parties were able to negotiate terms, and Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, making their debuts as co-directors and co-choreographers, were able to start work on the project, which starred, in addition to Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Ann Miller, Vera-Ellen, and Betty Garrett. After they completed work on this screenplay, they attempted to pen a book for the Cole Porter musical Out of This World.

Ike Day was modeled after the network of polio benefit balls and dinners that honored Franklin Roosevelt’s birthdays in the 1930s and 1940s. The chapter describes the political culture that Eisenhower inherited and transformed. Before television, celebrity politics relied primarily on advocacy groups organized to support specific candidates and policies. One of the first instances of celebrity politics came when the singer Al Jolson appeared with other Broadway stars in support of Republican presidential candidate Warren G. Harding. Though Franklin Roosevelt regarded them as no more valuable than other labor organizations, he enjoyed the support of Hollywood and Broadway groups that included such stars as Orson Welles, Frank Sinatra, Helen Gahagan Douglas, and Judy Garland. Inspired by the Popular Front, these groups toured on behalf of Roosevelt and appeared in nationally broadcast radio programs during the 1940 and 1944 presidential elections. Eisenhower’s advisers replaced the ideological fervor of a series of pro-Roosevelt radio programs with televised glamour and consensus.

Betty Comden and Adolph Green, after finishing work on the screenplay for Good News, began work on their third Broadway musical. It became Bonanza Bound, and the tuner, a comedy set in the 1890s in Alaska, closed during its tryout engagement in Philadelphia. Though critics were chilly toward this show, there were warm notices for the film. It prompted MGM to offer them work on two more movies, and Comden and Green returned to Hollywood to work on the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers picture The Barkleys of Broadway and Take Me Out to the Ball Game, which starred Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra.

The advent of radio in the early 1920s allowed for the music of Broadway to penetrate even more households with dance bands, variety shows, and interview programs that exploited the rarified atmosphere of Broadway. In the 1920s, personalities such as Eddie Cantor and Rudy Vallee hawked not only the sponsors’ products, but the latest hit songs of Broadway. Songwriters, such as George Gershwin, as well as Rodgers and Hart, wrote original material for radio and appearing on the air as acclaimed celebrities. The Hit Parade program also codified the hit-making potential of Broadway songs. By the 1940s, Frank Sinatra brought the music of Broadway to avid listeners and used the “bully pulpit” of several popular radio series to disseminate the content and context of Broadway.