The Way You Wear Your Hat by Zehme Bill

Author:Zehme, Bill [Zehme, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-07-01T05:00:00+00:00

“In a tuxedo, I’m a star,” Dean always said. “In regular clothes, I’m nobody.” From the album liner notes to The Main Event, 1974: “There is no better Sinatra than the Sinatra in a tuxedo.” The costume empowered them, enlarged them. There was nothing they could not do or say when formally draped. It was hubris as fabric. The Leader grew ebullient in his ensemble. Playing Joe E. Lewis in The Joker Is Wild, Frank dons tux, turns to a friend, asks and answers: “How ’bout this? Pretty jazzy? Jazzy, snazzy, and razmatazzy!” Frank, surveying the dinner jackets of Dag, Johnny Carson, and Sam (who later changed), onstage in St. Louis at a 1965 charity benefit: “All you boys came out dressed nice tonight! I like that! I say, if you’re going to look dead, dress dead.” (Dean, most poetically, went to the grave wearing his.) Frank Jr., whose father’s proclivities became his own, would perform in black tie with a sort of vengeance: “That’s the way I was raised,” he once said. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable dressing any other way.”

Clad thusly, all men earned Frank Sr.’s unwavering approval. Example: The night of the 1994 Grammy Awards, after he collected the rarely presented Legend Award, a militia of photographers swarmed as he and his missus left a party. Road manager Tony Oppedisano, a compact and unusually cool customer, lunged to obscure the strobe of flashbulbs. He was chagrined the next morning to see the panicked moment captured on the front page of the New York Daily News, worried what Frank would think. At breakfast, perusing the papers, Frank told him: “Your fuckin’ tuxedo looks pretty good!”

For JFK’s Inaugural Gala, which he produced, Sinatra ordered the most elaborate tuxedo of his life. Designed by Don Loper, the Armani of his day, the plumage consisted of an Inverness cape with red satin lining, swallowtail coat, striped trousers, white kid gloves, and a silk top hat. Columnists wrote reams about it; comedians teased. Milton Berle said, “Sinatra would have been here tonight, but he was trying on his new Don Loper wardrobe—and the zipper got caught in the sequins.” Frank bristled: “It’s the story of my life. I buy some new clothes and it becomes a crisis!” Even Dean thought his pally looked more like a guy who was about to be sworn into office. But Frank took things seriously—seriously enough, in fact, to order two of those outfits, in case he spilled on one. All razzing aside, the first time he modeled it before a mirror, he beamed and kvelled: “I am,” he said, “a thing of beauty!”

He never wore a tuxedo on Sundays. As far as he recalled, it was a tradition foisted upon him by Mike Romanoff, the dandified Prince of Beverly Hills, who enjoyed taking credit not his due. (His bogus royal lineage, for instance—for which Frank indulged him, anyway.) Origins of the code didn’t matter. Since Sunday was often the last day of an engagement, or get-away day, going tux-less made it easier to blow town without changing.

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