The Vegas Shows: Sinatra's Indelible Tracks in the Sand

(AP)

There was such joy and redemption for him in the desert. Pain and torment lay elsewhere during those times, in a lot of other places, but Frank Sinatra swam in champagne in Las Vegas.

Men and women would roll in big fine Cadillacs across the Las Vegas Valley to get to him -- from San Bernardino and Denver, from Salt Lake City and Portland.

He wore a one-button tuxedo and slid around backstage as if through ether. He'd sip, almost daintily, from the drink in his hand. "Spanish fly and ginger ale," he'd joke.

In those grainy 1960s news clips from the Sands Hotel, he looks so slim, the lights dimmed, the silvery microphone gleaming, and his frame stock-still. And the voice rising and rising, floating out over the bejeweled like bubbles.

A lot of the women wore white gloves. And backstage, afterward, he'd lay the soft eyes on them and chat about home towns and silly movies, about songs and shoeshine stands and bums, and sometimes politics and sometimes about old musician friends who were slipping away in hospitals.

Now, Reprise Records has released a five-disc boxed set, "Sinatra: Vegas," billed as his unreleased live Vegas performances: nearly 70 songs, 13 of which are included on a DVD of his 1978 Caesars Palace concert. The link of singer and geography gives the collection its potency. (George Clooney, as the world knows, showed shrewd commercial insight in remaking Sinatra's "Ocean's 11." The town, the dames, the savoir-faire!) Just as Louis Armstrong could lay spiritual and musical claim to New Orleans, Sinatra could do so in Las Vegas.

The set includes a gorgeous 64-page booklet full of sepia-tinted photos: Frank in pleated slacks out by the pool being interviewed; Frank and Jerry Lewis and Danny Thomas yukking it up backstage. There are riffs by Sinatra family members and acquaintances, Angie Dickinson and Quincy Jones among them. The songs -- crisply mastered -- are often preceded by bits of commentary: Frank the smart-aleck tossing one-liners to the crowd. "I woke up this morning and my hair hurt."

He first played Vegas in 1951, at the Desert Inn. That was the same year he married Ava Gardner. He was much in love. Ava, born poor and full of insecurities and temperamental, was simply too much. (Although Frank had his funny ways, too.) The downfall was swift -- a divorce, lagging record sales, public fisticuffs. He was a mama's boy, and took things personally and emotionally. Boulders fell upon him, loyalties were questioned, friendships snapped.

But in 1961, when Frank reappeared at the Sands in Las Vegas, he was the slim gladiator. He had come back; he had Nelson Riddle hitched to him. Over the next three decades the Vegas shows would sell out. The Hollywood crowd -- Bing and Liz and Danny Thomas and Barbara Rush and Zsa Zsa Gabor -- could get there in a few hours by car. He made sure the politicians got good seats, too.

The posters for his shows had a kind of MGM musical loveliness about them: full of color, pink and sky-blue and red, and full of cursive writing. His fans, the Sinatra crowd, would save the matchbooks, the ticket stubs, put them in scrapbooks, encase them in glass. They'd book a room in Vegas for next year, the year after that, all around his shows. If Frank was alive, they were alive.

He died in 1998 at the age of 82. But here, Sinatra lives.

On one disc you get, among others, "Moonlight in Vermont," "You Make Me Feel So Young," "Witchcraft," "Get Me to the Church on Time." A man and a microphone onstage from 1961 to 1987.