SINATRA'S SHOES

A CHAPTER FROM MY MOST RECENT BOOK ‘SOUR MOUTH, SWEET BOTTOM’, PUBLISHED BY UNBOUND.

A half dozen years ago, in Los Angeles to film some interviews, I was taken to see a pile of Frank Sinatra’s shoes.

It was a weird thing to be looking at. Just a pile of old shoes – stylish, leather, handmade (probably at $2,000 a pop), and slightly smelly.

I was directing a movie about him. A truly great artist and, like so many others, manic depressive and probably bipolar, screwed up by a traumatic childhood and a bullying father yet stimulated by it to become the star he was. It was a documentary to mark what would have been his hundredth birthday.

Seeing those shoes unnerved me. For the first time in my life I was hit by a sense of mortality. Sinatra was only a few years older than me when he died. The strange thing was − until that moment I don’t think I’d ever thought about my age, not when I reached sixty, nor seventy, nor seventy-five. I was oblivious to it. I never changed the way I lived or behaved or thought. But those shoes hit me.

They were in the cupboard of a man who for years had been Sinatra’s personal manager, Tony Oppedisano. In today’s music business terms we might call him a companion, or an aide, or simply a salaried best friend. George Michael had one, so did Freddie Mercury. But Tony prefers to be called his personal manager, which is fair enough. He was totally a part of Sinatra’s life, virtually lived with him for thirty years, gave up his own career as a guitarist (not a bad one either) and travelled around with Sinatra wherever he went. He had his own room in all of Sinatra’s houses – Palm Beach, LA, New York, wherever he was staying. A bizarre relationship to most of us, simply being an appendage to someone else’s career, though not at all uncommon. Ask any housewife.

Later, back at the Beverly Hilton it was good to get away from Tony’s morose memories. The terrace by the pool is one of my favourite places to eat alone, but one of its pleasures is that they play a lot of Sinatra music. That evening I’d had enough of him so I gave it a miss and had room service. Fortunately, the next day I had something that would bring me back to the present − an interview with a pair of whizz-kid record producers, just out of their teens, taking LA by storm.

Hoping to impress the various journalists coming to see them during their day of promo, their PR lady had rented a posh villa on Benedict Canyon Drive. When I got there, I found myself pressing the doorbell of a house I’d once lived in, which felt odd.

It was rented by my movie director friend Clive Donner during the summer of 1966. I was in America during a Yardbirds tour. Clive was preparing a new film with Peter Falk and Jack Lemmon, who came to the house each day to rehearse. Clive’s secretary was there, too, who I’d been having a fling with in London, but she now had her Australian boyfriend with her. And while Clive and the actors rehearsed, the three of us swam and drank cocktails and listened to the summer’s two great albums − the Beatles’ Revolver and Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde.

Around six in the evening the others would join us for strawberry mojitos and joints and we’d dance together in a circle, slowly, arms round each other’s shoulders, Lemmon and Falk included, to endless repetitions of Dylan’s ‘Rainy Day Women’.

But that was over fifty years ago. Today the house is occupied by two uppity teenagers, and they’re just too full of themselves. From happy, supportive families, they’ve had a couple of small hits and one bigger one and they’re far too sure of the formula they’ve hit on.

‘We can’t lose. In a couple of years we’ll rule the industry.’

So they say. So they think. So the cocaine they keep going to the loo to sniff is telling them.

I couldn’t help thinking - if only these kids could have had unhappy childhoods, they’d be so much more likely to morph into something worthwhile.

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