On the anniversary of Frank Sinatra’s death, a fascinating new book shines new light on the very human side of one of music’s greatest feuds – Elvis and Sinatra
It was the heavyweight clash that had the music industry holding its breath. Frank Sinatra, the King of the Rat Pack, who had conquered not just the charts but Broadway and Hollywood, was at the peak of his powers. And now, on his 1960 TV special he was about to share a stage with the man who was stealing his empire: Elvis Presley.
Sinatra, who died on May 14 1998, had launched the feud by slamming Elvis in a magazine article, branding rock and roll “the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear.” Elvis responded calmly. He said he admired the older singer and that rock and roll was simply the latest trend, “just the same as Sinatra faced when he started.”
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Author Matt Thorne, whose new book Famous examines the real relationships behind sixty-five years of pop history, puts it this way: had this exchange happened today, “Sinatra’s essay would have been an intemperate tweet, Presley’s response a measured Instagram post.”
Sinatra’s fear was losing his grip on the industry he had dominated for decades. Before Elvis, Sinatra had been the first singer to inspire that level of hysteria among teenage girls. Those female fans had already been drifting away. Writer Pete Hamill, who spent many late nights with Sinatra, believed “his female fans never fully returned, the original bobby-soxers shocked by Sinatra’s brutal humiliation of his wife,” after he flaunted his relationship with film star Ava Gardner while still married.
Elvis, meanwhile, “was open-hearted towards his competition, believing there was space for everyone in show business.” But he “had his eye on a bigger challenge: proving himself to a man who believed his entire genre of music was despicable.”
As well as the tension over music, there were other factors at play. While Elvis had served in the US Army, spending two years in Germany before returning home in 1960, Sinatra’s wartime exemption remained controversial for years. He claimed an ear injury at birth and described himself as a nervous agoraphobe who woke up exhausted. He avoided a USO tour until the war was already over, fearing angry soldiers would pelt him with eggs.
Hamill believed the exemption haunted Sinatra for years, alienating his male fans. When the Korean War broke out in 1950, it reminded those fans all over again. There was one more source of friction beneath the surface. The two men were rumoured to have shared a lover.
South African actress Juliet Prowse was linked to Sinatra before appearing in his 1960 film Can-Can. She then went straight to Elvis’s GI Blues, playing a club dancer called Lily who is considered, in the film’s blunt terms, frigid for resisting soldiers’ advances. Thorne writes that “the GIs take bets on who might ‘defrost’ her, running a book on how quickly Presley might get this done.”
Prowse had been Sinatra’s girlfriend for a period and the pair were seen together often and the relationship looked serious. She then moved on to Elvis and rumours persisted of a romance between the two stars. Prowse later admitted the strong physical attraction she felt towards Elvis. The book presents the Prowse rumour as “one reason for friction between the two stars,” sitting beneath the public battle about music and the unspoken tension over the draft.
For his special, Sinatra paid a record $125,000 to Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’s manager, for the booking, the highest fee ever paid for a television guest appearance. His comedian sidekick Joey Bishop had actually served in the US Army, unlike his boss. He joked onstage: “For what it’s costing you for Presley, you could’ve presented World War II in person.” Everyone in the room understood what he meant.
When they finally performed together at the Frank Sinatra Timex Special, Welcome Home Elvis, recorded at Miami’s Fontainebleau Hotel, broadcast on May 12, Sinatra came out swinging. He turned Love Me Tender into a deliberate nursery rhyme, a way of diminishing Elvis in front of his own fans.
It did not work. Elvis responded by singing Sinatra’s own song Witchcraft with such sincerity that when the two men harmonised, Sinatra could not stop himself. He leant into the microphone and said: “Man, that’s pretty.”
Sinatra had made a joke at the start of the show about Elvis only losing his sideburns in the army. He and Bishop had approached Elvis onstage, “like two bouncers brought in to deal with a drunk.” When the screaming started, the audience began chanting “WE WANT ELVIS.” By the end of the night Sinatra was glancing to the wings, the book says, “like a party host who wants everyone to notice his glamorous guest.”
How each man handled that challenge tells the rest of the story. Jerry Weintraub, the talent manager who worked for both singers, wrote about them in his 2010 autobiography When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead. He claimed it was his idea to take Elvis back out on the road after his career stalled, pursuing Colonel Tom Parker until he agreed and presenting him with a cheque for a million dollars.
When Weintraub brought Presley back to Miami for a show at the city’s convention centre, he was so worried about the crowd that he paid convicts to remove half the seats from the venue so Presley would not notice it was not a sell-out. Weintraub believed Sinatra followed Elvis’s renewed success closely and that it helped prompt his own return to major live touring.
When Sinatra approached him in 1972 asking to play the same venues as Elvis, Weintraub drew the distinction between the two men starkly: “Elvis was for the masses, for the people in the little towns between the big towns, the great crowds that filled the state fair. Sinatra was for the Italians and the Jews, for the city people. He was urban.”
The divergence in their careers is where the story turns darker. Thorne argues that Colonel Tom Parker kept Presley making lightweight Hollywood films for too long, insulating him from the reality that his audience had begun to shrink. He writes that Presley would sometimes lie in the back of his limousine with a coat over his head, shielded from the outside world by the people around him. Elvis died at 42. Sinatra, who survived the entire rock and roll revolution, was still performing in 1995. He packed stadiums, Thorne writes, “nearly two decades after Presley’s death.”
Famous feuds
Chuck Berry vs Keith Richards: Richards admitted he spent years stealing from Berry, “I’ve stolen every lick he ever played. So I owed it to Chuck to bite the bullet,” which is why he agreed to make the documentary Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll with him in 1986. Berry made Richards’s life hell throughout. He pulled a gun on someone from the production team who came to collect money owed to the backing band. And when Richards appeared to be reuniting Berry with his old piano player Johnnie Johnson as a generous gesture, he was quietly encouraging Johnson to sue Berry for songwriting royalties on songs like Sweet Little Sixteen . The case was eventually dismissed. Richards later admitted he “put on a straitjacket” just to get through the project.
Taylor Swift vs Kanye West: It started at the 2009 VMAs when Kanye took Swift’s microphone mid-speech, announced Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time, and was ejected from Radio City Music Hall. Swift told reporters it hurt because “he’s Kanye West.” Sixteen years on it is still going. Swift encoded a hidden message in the capitalisation of her song thanK you aIMee – a song about Kim Kardashian – designed so that, as Thorne puts it, Kardashian’s own daughter would end up singing an insult about her mother. Kanye responded by selling a twenty-dollar swastika T-shirt at the Super Bowl. Swift has since served him with a cease-and-desist order.
Paul McCartney vs Diana Ross: In January 1968 McCartney watched Diana Ross and the Supremes perform at London’s Talk of the Town. Ross sang a medley of two McCartney songs, Michelle and Yesterday . Journalist Ray Connolly, who was there, asked McCartney afterwards what he thought. His verdict: “The show business event of the year.” It was described “a dismissal so poorly disguised as a compliment it sours mid-sentence.” A recording made a few months later catches McCartney in the studio telling Donovan he played his new song Blackbird to Diana Ross and she took offence at it.
*Famous by Matt Thorne, published by White Rabbit, £23, is out now
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