Posts Tagged ‘Frank Sinatra’
Alexander Dorogokupetz : the teenager who threw eggs at Frank Sinatra and lived to tell the tale
On Flashbak the story of Alexander Dorogokupetz, the 18-year-old who carried a small bag containing three eggs into a Frank Sinatra concert and tossed them at the singer. He struck a few days after the so-called Columbus Day riot, when as many as 35,000 bobbysoxers overwhelmed the area around New York City’s Paramount Theatre for a chance to see the return of the dreamy Frank Sinatra.
There was a lot that irritated Dorogokupetz about Sinatra and his fans. In particular, the bow ties frustrated him, those famous bow ties they were famous for wearing. Why, he thought, did people say he looked like Sinatra if he wore one, and not that Sinatra looked like him? He had a collection of two hundred bow ties at home, and had got his first when he was seven years old. Bow ties were his thing, not Sinatra’s.
…
There was a lot that irritated Dorogokupetz about Sinatra and his fans. In particular, the bow ties frustrated him, those famous bow ties they were famous for wearing. Why, he thought, did people say he looked like Sinatra if he wore one, and not that Sinatra looked like him? He had a collection of two hundred bow ties at home, and had got his first when he was seven years old. Bow ties were his thing, not Sinatra’s.
…
Sinatra began singing I Don’t Know Why (I Just Do). This was what Dorogokupetz had wanted, a romantic song, the more romantic the better. He thought of himself as a singer too, having been in the choir at high school. Sometimes, he told people he was a better singer than Sinatra. As proof, he would sing a plaintive duet, done solo.
He threw the first egg gently, and missed. The second, more forceful, hit Sinatra between his eyes, as he was singing the first “you” of the song, his mouth open: “I don’t know why I love you…”
Sinatra stopped.
The third egg hit him on the chest of his gray suit, glancing his bow tie. For each egg, there was a gasp from the crowd. The “horde of female rug-cutters,” the papers said, “were confronted with the deliberate desecration of their bow-tie idol.” Someone shouted, “get the skunk who done it!”
The Teenager Who Egged Frank Sinatra And The Bobby Sox Riot – New York City, 1944
Posted: 1st, October 2020 | In: Celebrities, Key Posts, Music | Comment
The making of Frank Sinatra’s Strangers In The Night
Mark Steyn celebrates his Sinatra Centenary series with a look at the making of a hit song:
It was 1966. Enter Bert Kaempfert “the German kaiser of kitsch”:
He eschewed the standard 32-bar A-A-B-A song, possibly on the grounds that a middle section was way too much work. Instead, his tunes are built on the slightest of melodic themes, endlessly repeated. Yet they are, as the Germans say, Ohrwürmer – or earworms: maddening tunes that insinuate their way into your head and refuse to get out. “L-O-V-E” is the über-Kaempfert, a tune so simple that its lyricist Milt Gabler turned it into a spelling lesson, an “Alphabet Song” for grown-ups:
L is for the way you look at me
O is for the only one I see
V is very very extraordinary
E is even more…So Kaempfert had form. And so Jimmy Bowen listens to Hal Fine’s bunch of Kaempfert themes and something called “Beddy-Bye” comes up. And Bowen plays it again, and again. And then he says, “Man, get me a lyric on that, and I’ll do it with Sinatra.”
“Beddy-Bye” sounds to me like yet another minimalist Kaempfert tune: the five-note title phrase, reprised a tone up and a tone down, is about 50 per cent of the tune. Yet a remarkable number of other people claim to have had a hand in its creation. The last time I mentioned the thing in this space David C Tobin of Washington, DC wrote to say that it was composed by Avo Uvezian, a Beirut-born Armenian-American pianist cum cigar manufacturer. He does indeed claim to have written the music, but so does the late Ivo Robić, the crooning Croat, who insisted that he’d composed it for a folk music festival in Split, Yugoslavia. M Philippe-Gérard, the Brazilian-born French composer of “When The World Was Young”, sued on the grounds that the tune was stolen from his “Magic Tango”, but lost in court.
So until these various Croatian-Armenian claims are as litigated as the Franco-Brazilian ones, we’ll stick with the official narrative. In 1966, Bert Kaempfert wrote this tune for his first Hollywood movie score, for the aforementioned A Man Could Get Killed, directed by Ronald Neame. And all it needed now was a lyric and Jimmy Bowen would make good on his promise and get Kaempfert a recording by Frank Sinatra.
Bowen had never made such a pledge before – for a fairly obvious reason: He was in no position to promise any such thing. “Obviously,” he explained subsequently, “nobody knows what Frank is going to do till he says what he’s going to do.” But he knew that that “Beddy-Bye” theme smelled like a hit, and Hal Fine took him at his word. He farmed the tune out to various writers, and submitted a couple of lyrics. Jimmy Bowen didn’t like either of them.
So Hal Fine tried again, this time with Eddie Snyder and Charles Singleton….
For “Beddy-Bye”, Eddie Snyder took his cue from the film and the James Garner/Melina Mercouri characters: They’re strangers, exchanging glances, and, by the time the tune’s reprised in the final moments, you know that, as the song says, they’re “in love forever”. “We had the scene,” recalled Snyder. “A man is sitting across from a girl in a bar. That was it.” But that was all they needed:
Strangers In The Night
Exchanging glances
Wond’ring in the night
What were the chances
We’d be sharing love
Before the night was through…
They Closed Frank Sinatra’s Bootleg Cal Neva Casino
THEY’VE closed the casino at the legendary, notorious Cal Neva Lodge, the Lake Tahoe resort on the California-Nevada border once owned by Frank Sinatra, visited on her final weekend by Marilyn Monroe and a key location of Rat Pack history.
Sinatra owned the Cal Neva in its heyday, from 1960 to 1963.
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Rock Hudson’s Lover Marc Christian Dies From Frank Sinatra Syndrome
ANORAK’S Man in LA looks at the death of Marc Christian, who gained a kind of fame as screen legend Rock Hudson’s lover.
AFTER months of rumours and unverified reports, Elaine Woo of the LA Times has confirmed the death of Marc Christian, who gained tabloid fame as the lover of Hollywood icon and AIDS victim Rock Hudson.
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Posted: 5th, December 2009 | In: Celebrities | Comment
Michael Jackson Opens Paul Anka Home For Resting Singers
MICHAEL Jackson’s new song “This Is It” is breathing life not only into Jackson, the Jackson Five, who sing backing vocals and papa Joe Jackson who can be heard playing the cash register, but also Paul Anka.
Anka is still very much alive, a singing conker who we learn co-wrote Jackson’s first post-reality hit yet remains un-credited on the record sleeve.
Anka says he has been promised 50 percent of the song’s profits:
“They did the right thing. I don’t think that anybody tried to do the wrong thing. It was an honest mistake.”
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Posted: 13th, October 2009 | In: Celebrities | Comment
Susan Boyle Sings On Larry King: Video
SUSAN Boyle Watch: She’s live on Larry King live…
Anorak reader Cheryl in the US writes:
Anderson [Cooper] carried more on her tonight (right on after Larry King) but mainly repeating what Larry King said and he also showed her singing the song from the Titanic
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Posted: 18th, April 2009 | In: Celebrities, Key Posts | Comment (1)
