Frank Jr., the Unsung Sinatra

Armchair music analysts wonder about his psyche, how he has coped -- with the image, the legend, the name. The rocks that built the mountain over the years.

"When I started as a kid, I wanted to be a piano player and songwriter. I only became a singer by accident," he says. "I was in college, playing in a little band. The lead singer got tanked one night. A guy in the band pointed at me and said, 'You sing.' I said, 'Me? Why me?' He said, 'You're a Sinatra, aren't you? Sing!' "

He really never saw much of his father in those days. "He was unreachable. He was traveling, or off making some movie. When I began in this business, it was only on rare occasions when we saw each other."

So he went on the road himself. Older musicians talked to him about life, love, women, their world.

"A lotta years I was out there on the road pulling one-nighters. Then I got hired to sing in Sam Donahue's band in 1963. I was 19 years old. Those days were so much more easier to work than it is today. There was no such thing as a $4 can of gasoline. And there were places to work. Now it's only rock music. Ask somebody who Gershwin is, who W.C. Handy is, they wouldn't have the slightest notion. I'm talking people up to 30."

He orders a charred ribeye.

"I was never a success," he says. "Never had a hit movie or hit TV show or hit record. I just had visions of doing the best quality of music. Now there is a place for me because Frank Sinatra is dead. They want me to play the music. If it wasn't for that, I wouldn't be noticed. The only satisfaction is that I do what I do well. That's the only lawful satisfaction. I was never a rock singer. I lost my job at RCA Victor in the '60s because I wouldn't sing protest songs like all those other groups were doing at the time."

Band members talk of his generosity. Not long ago, Frank bought every band member a fancy oxygen mask: He'd been caught in a hotel fire once. They talk of missed gigs and the check still arriving in the mail.

"In this town they used to have a place called the Steel Pier," Frank is saying. "At the Steel Pier, I used to alternate with a young boy I had never seen before. He was cleanshaven. It was Stevie Wonder. We used to alternate onstage with Duke Ellington. Duke took me under his wing. And I listened to the sounds he made."

He moved through the years, away from his father, Big Frank, and into his father and around his father, and into his father yet again.

He studies wartime bands with the intensity of a scholar. "The real powerful band era didn't come till after the war was over, around 1948. Then came the era of the vocalist. There was the Eddie Sauter and Bill Finegan Orchestra. The late '40s. They had a jazz band. They luxuriated in the French harp. A little bit of the symphonic touch. It was quite something to hear. Them and Stan Kenton's band. They made bands reach heights they had never reached before. More for listening than for dancing. That was the period I was interested in."

He's hardly touched his steak. He asks if everyone is happy with the food.

"When I started out I worked with Ziggy Elman, Charles Shavers, Louis Armstrong. I sang with Harry James's band -- with Harry. I sang with Woody Herman's band -- with Woody."

He'd like the world to know he was never a dilettante. That he works like a demon.

Once, on the road, he found himself in D.C. He had a gig someplace in town and afterward got himself over to Charlie's, a club. "I went over to Charlie's to listen to Al Hirt. In the bathroom there was this old man -- he ran the bathroom -- who gives me a towel. I look above the mirror and notice there's a picture of Sy Oliver's band. I said, 'What are you doing with a picture of Oliver's band?' He said, 'Boy, how you know that band?' I said, 'You play?' He pointed to the picture and said, 'That's Louis Armstrong. And that's me, second clarinet.' I went back outside. I said to Al, 'Al, there's a guy in the bathroom who played in Sy Oliver's band.' Al went and got him and pulled him up onstage. He must have been 85 years old. He still had his chops."

Frank Sinatra Jr. is single. He was married once but it didn't work out. He remains close to his two stepdaughters. He has a son, Mike, from another union. Mike attends the University of California at Santa Barbara. He doesn't sing. "Thank heavens," Frank says.

He wishes he himself could get more work. "The exhibitors see a show with 38 musicians, stage crew, and they get sticker shock. The show is expensive to put on."

This year, for the first time in five years, they've got a New Year's Eve gig. You wonder: Manhattan, maybe, Vegas?

They'll be going to Spokane.

He's grateful, though. "We used to work every New Year's Eve," he says. "Now they give people champagne, karaoke and confetti -- and the people are delighted."

It saddens him.

"Sinatra had this magnificent talent of picking the right stuff for him," he says about his father's endurance. "In those days, of course, there were a lot of songwriters to pick from. Today, whose left? Leslie Briscusse, Neil Sedaka, Rupert Holmes. Most of it has long since passed. But it's okay. You can always reach into the past."

The dinner bill for the orchestra arrives.

Frank pulls out a wad of cash. He came from that money-talks world. He leaves a heap of it on the table, including a generous tip. And he's gone.

Bill Miller, however, is not ready for bed. He sits stabbing a fork into a slice of Key lime pie. Johnny Pizza sits near him, full and happy. Frank hired Pizza mostly to help out Miller. Pizza wears an impressive diamond ring -- black center, diamonds circling the outer ring.

"When do we open?" Bill asks Johnny.

"Tomorrow, Bill," Johnny says.

"Tomorrow? Fair enough," Bill Miller says.

'Strangers in the Night'

---

They come from Cherry Hill and Philadelphia, from Manhattan and Newark and Trenton. "New Jersey is Sinatra country," Frank had said at dinner. "We always get a good reception here."

They come for him, and for his father. (Some come because of more recent intrigues: That was Frank a few years back appearing on an episode of "The Sopranos." Frank played a card sharp. He got a kick out of it.)

They come muscled and they come fragile, leaning on canes. The line at the Atlantic City Hilton starts forming two hours before show time.

They fill the house, 1,450 seats.

Eddie Stasny, 77, wouldn't miss it for the world. He arrives early from Cherry Hill. He's president of something called the Sinatra Social Society. Eddie's in a blue suit with a red hankie. Big Frank knew him personally. "I miss him terribly," he says. "I was his guest at Carnegie Hall, 1979, when the 'Trilogy' album came out. We were in the dressing room with him before the show."

Eddie has great admiration -- and some sympathy -- for the son, for Frank. "It's not easy to follow a giant like that," he says.

"I like the new album," he says about Frank's new release. "It came out on the 6th. I went to Tower Records the next day. The clerk didn't know nothing about it. They had five copies."

The Sinatra society he heads used to have upward of 200 people. "I got about 125 people left," he says. "We used to go everywhere. But it's dwindling down. The age factor. And a lot of people can't drive at night. I do okay myself."

It's 20 minutes till show time. Eddie pops up like a cork from his seat. Gotta get backstage -- again. Just remembered something else he's gotta tell Frank.

Rose Marcie used to go see Big Frank regularly in the '70s. "Junior does his own show, and he's wonderful," says Rose, who's come in from Philly wearing an eggshell white outfit. She goes on: "Close your eyes and give Junior his credit. I do it all the time. I look away -- to make sure I'm not looking at him to make it be his father."

The lights dim. There's no warm-up act, just an instrumental version of "Witchcraft."

Then Frank -- no announcement -- just saunters out onstage. As if he were trying to slip off someplace and got caught. They start clapping, and he stops cold. Grins, then mouths a "Who me?"

He opens with a song called "Lonesome Road."

He holds the mike like a martini glass.

"This is our first gig at the Hilton in five years," he says, pulling a stool close. "You can see they were dying to have us back."

He knows how to deliver a funny line. He used to work alongside the vaudevillian George Burns.

They do "Strangers in the Night" and "Summer Wind." They do "Luck Be a Lady," and Frank pantomimes throwing a pair of dice into the audience.

Rose looks away. Eddie Stasny pokes his wife.

Frank disappears backstage, and his voice, that Sinatra, calls into the velvet darkness from somewhere back in '52: "This man's music will be heard for centuries to come, ladies and gentlemen."

He introduces Bill Miller. A spear of light cuts the darkness and falls onto the old man at the piano and Frank, now standing near him. They slide into "One for the Road" like Ava Gardner slipping into mink.

He goes into "New York, New York": "C'mon," Frank says over the wild applause. "You know I had to do this one."

He takes them in and out of his world, and Big Frank's world. "That man," he says, "played this town for decades."

Afterward, the audience rises up. Some -- rush wouldn't be the right word, but they get there quick enough -- make their way to the stage.

"Let me by!" Eddie Stasny says to anyone in his way.

"He came to my high school in Trenton back in the '60s," a beefy man calls out, making his way toward Frank.

Frank accepts handshakes and congratulations. He cradles a bouquet of flowers.

Backstage, there are more hugs. Frank is smiling. He wipes beads of sweat from his brow with a handkerchief. He seems happy, not least with the height of the mountain. Miller sits a few feet away, behind a slip of velvet curtain.

"I'll see them all," Frank says about the folk lined up.

Miller listens to the hubbub. He's been hearing it for decades.

The old pianist never remarried. He met his Aimee back in 1942. Here, in Atlantic City. In a bar.

Bill Miller sips the last of his drink.

And one more for the road . . .

Then he and Frank leave through the blue smoke of all the ghosts. Headed to Canada for a gig.