Frank Sinatra | The New York Observer

Saying Goodbye To The Old 'City': Writers, Bagpiper, Bid Farewell to Defunct 'Times' Section

Tue, 05 May 2009 06:31:00 -0400

On the rainy evening of the fourth of May, a small group of people showed up at 17 Murray, a bar in Tribeca decorated with Frank Sinatra's mugshot and one of those talking Rodney Dangerfield statues one might find in an Archie McPhee catalog, to celebrate the life and recent death of The New York Times' 'City' section

In keeping with the thing that brought them all there, the event, planned by 'City' essayists...

Scorsese to Take On Sinatra?

Thu, 22 May 2008 16:09:18 -0400

Marty Scorsese recently ducked out of a Bob Marley project and passed it along to another rock doc director, Jonathan Demme. They cited "scheduling conflicts" for the switcharoo, but what will Mr. Scorsese be working on instead? According to Frank Sinatra's youngest daughter, it might be a biopic about Ol' Blue Eyes.

Cinematical points us to an interview Tina Sinatra did with Sun Media in which she said the movie would be helmed by...

Nobody Changes Frank Sinatra’s Wallpaper: Chairman’s Old East Side Haunt Selling for $6 M.

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 17:22:34 -0500

Apartments with cracked walls, prehistoric floors, Eisenhower-era décor and a half-built cantilevered floor (for an extra bedroom) don’t usually go on the market for $6 million.

But in New York City, the right provenance can make up for almost anything.

A two-floor, three-bedroom penthouse at 530 East 72nd Street, which Frank Sinatra helped design when the building went up in 1961; then lived in with his much-younger bride, Mia Farrow; then...

Chan Marshall Grows Up

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 07:51:58 -0500

Everybody needs to stop complaining about Chan Marshall. If I hear another person talk about how she has smoothed over the rough edges that made her so great and eradicated all the warts-and-all charm from her repertoire, I'm going to spit.

Just a year ago, after releasing the strongest album by far of her career, Ms. Marshall, or Cat Power as she's known, cancelled a tour due to a breakdown. Plenty reacted with smug I-coulda-called-it...

Joey Bishop, 89, Last of the Rat Pack

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 13:57:32 -0400

Joey Bishop, the last surviving member of the Rat Pack, died at his home of multiple causes, according to his publicist.

CNN via AP:

The Rat Pack -- originally a social group surrounding Humphrey Bogart -- became a show business sensation in the early 1960s, appearing at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas in shows that combined music and comedy in a seemingly chaotic manner.

Reviewers often...

Gino Avoids Strike, Zebras Stay Put

Tue, 24 Oct 2006 11:55:37 -0400

Bring cash: Gino's all-union staff won't strike, after all. The ghosts of Frank Sinatra and Ed Sullivan may now rest in peace. Owners and employees at legendary celeb-haunt Gino restaurant (commonly called "Gino's") signed a new employment contract yesterday, ending weeks of speculation about a possible strike and potential closure of the historic Upper East Side eatery. Read our previous coverage here. Longtime Gino waiter and union liaison Marco Dell'Aguzzo told The Observer that the two sides...

Osso Bucco, Pronto! The Legendary Gino May Face a Strike

Sun, 15 Oct 2006 20:00:00 -0400

But, he said, he may have to do just that, as early as next month. The current contract for Gino’s 27-member all-unionized staff is set to expire at the end of October. The owners are saying they won’t sign;...

Osso Bucco, Pronto! The Legendary Gino May Face a Strike

Sun, 15 Oct 2006 20:00:00 -0400

“Who wants to close the Gino restaurant?” asked Salvatore Doria, co-owner of the legendary Italian eatery at Lexington Avenue and 60th Street. “There are very few places [like it] left in New York.” But, he said, he may have to do just that, as early as next month. The current contract for Gino’s 27-member all-unionized staff is set to expire at the end of October. The owners are saying they won’t sign; the staff...

Trouble at Gino; Artists in the Meat Market

Wed, 11 Oct 2006 06:33:15 -0400

Under destruction? In today's New York Observer: The staff of legendary Upper East Side red-saucery Gino (a favorite of Gay Talese, Frank Sinatra, Wes Anderson and Woody Allen) are threatening to walk out over a contract dispute, according to our new guy on the beat, Chris shott--and the owners say they'll shut down before giving in to their demands. Says co-owner Salvatore Doria: "For not much more can you sell a dish of pasta, you...

Ava Pearl Greisberg

Sun, 17 Sep 2006 20:00:00 -0400

July 26, 2006 12:32 p.m. 7 pounds, 9 ounces New York Presbyterian Hospital Send over the velour sweat suits, size super-small! Sara Greisberg, sales manager at Juicy Couture, has welcomed a fair-skinned little fashionista who enjoys listening to Frank Sinatra and Elvis and staring at the world with her big blue eyes. “She’s a deep thinker,” said the new mom, 32. “An old soul.” Dad is Scott Greisberg, 31, a psychologist based in Ardsley. The couple moved...

When Sexy Met Indie: Junior Boys Grow Up Fast

Sun, 17 Sep 2006 20:00:00 -0400

Let’s assume for the moment that today’s “independent” music scene is an aesthetically—or failing that, ethically—unified realm, and that its citizenry is capable of doing certain kinds of useful cultural work: indie rock captures generational ennui; indie pop distills wistful romance from wide-eyed juvenilia; indie rap wrestles with dialectical contradictions, etc. So far, so good. But there’s still something missing. It’s an absence that occasionally drives even the most dogmatic indie acolytes sheepishly to...

Thursday: Oscar Doorstops

Thu, 02 Mar 2006 03:47:12 -0500

Bill Weld, former Massachusetts governor running in New York, compared eminent domain to "Communist China." (The Real Deal) A real-estate guide to Bob Dylan. (Gothamist) Niche marketing has created gay ghettos. (Matrix) Perhaps before one invests in a Honduran island that Americans know little about, one must think about resources. (The Wall Street Journal) Next in home decoration tips: where to put your Oscar. Frank Sinatra used his as a doorstop. (The New...

Smuin's Pointless Nostalgia; Hubbard Street's Sheer Joy

Sun, 21 Aug 2005 20:00:00 -0400

First came Dancin’ with Gershwin, an endless potpourri of routines to recordings of Gershwin music, from the obvious hits—“’S Wonderful,” “The Man I Love,” “Summertime,” “They Can’t Take That Away from Me”—to the adagio movement from the Concerto in F....

Smuin's Pointless Nostalgia; Hubbard Street's Sheer Joy

Sun, 21 Aug 2005 20:00:00 -0400

It’s not often you go to the ballet and see something with absolutely no redeeming value, but the recent Michael Smuin season at the Skirball Center was exactly that—two hours of glitzy junk, poorly danced. First came Dancin’ with Gershwin, an endless potpourri of routines to recordings of Gershwin music, from the obvious hits—“’S Wonderful,” “The Man I Love,” “Summertime,” “They Can’t Take That Away from Me”—to the adagio movement from the Concerto in...

Great Musician Minus the Music Makes for a Botched Biography

Sun, 22 May 2005 20:00:00 -0400

Sinatra: The Life, by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan. Alfred A. Knopf, 576 pages, $26.95.

I believe, based on a lifetime of consideration, that Frank Sinatra was the greatest interpretive musician this country has ever produced. By that I mean he took the music and words of composers and lyricists, passed them through his own emotions, intellect and life blood, and distributed them to grateful recipients all over the world for 60 years. His singing...

Great Food, Wonderful Times: At 50's-Inspired Abboccato

Sun, 09 Jan 2005 19:00:00 -0500

"The problem with giving up drinking," Frank Sinatra once said, "is that you know that the way you feel when you wake up in the morning is the best you're going to feel all day."

I thought of Sinatra on New Year's Eve as I sat with some friends on a cream-colored semi-circular leather banquette in the dining room of Abboccato, an Italian restaurant that has opened across the street from City Center. You'd never...

Hear the Angel Voices, And Listen for Surprises

Sun, 26 Dec 2004 19:00:00 -0500

When something good becomes bad, it can always become good again. Christmas has inspired some of the greatest short, moving music in the world. But laziness, routine, inattention, imitation, vulgarity, knockoffs, cashing in-all the byproducts of the industrialization of art that is the gift of the Magi of commerce, science and democracy-have, for a century and a half, done their worst. The result is the Christmas tape, endlessly looped through stores and restaurants. Fake...

Smacking Foreheads in the Night: A Sexual Narcissist Remembers

Sun, 26 Sep 2004 20:00:00 -0400

It Seemed Important at the Time: A Romance Memoir, by Gloria Vanderbilt. Simon & Schuster, 161 pages, $22.

Do you wish that you’d found the time to have sex with Frank Sinatra? Is it a source of eternal regret that—in between bouts at the dry cleaner and walking the dog and the gym—you never did squeeze a young Marlon Brando between your sheets? If so, then Gloria Vanderbilt’s book, It Seemed Important at the...

Final Farewell To Friends and Icons

Sun, 11 Jan 2004 19:00:00 -0500

Frank Sinatra used to say, "Growing old can kiss my ass." Nobody ever said it cruder or better. Just take a look at the long and sobering list of celebrity farewells who matured and signed off in 2003, and you know whoever called them the "golden years" must have been auditioning for a straitjacket. Now 2004 is here-but before we can properly usher in that new kid with his year to grow, could we...

Dining out with Moira Hodgson

Sun, 26 Oct 2003 19:00:00 -0500

Move Over, Rocco …

Little Italy's Back on the Map The annual festival of San Gennaro was going full blast, and the smell of fried dough, sausages and onions filled the air. Under the twinkling arches stretched over Mulberry Street, parents tossed away their dollars in the shooting galleries and walked off with garish soft toys 10 times the size of their children. It was a warm night, and the tables set outside the restaurants...

More of the Right Stuff

Sun, 09 Feb 2003 19:00:00 -0500

On the morning of Saturday, Feb. 1, Tom Wolfe got a phone call from NBC's Today show. "I had just gotten up," he said. "They said, 'Can you come on and talk about the shuttle?'" He was confused. "At first, I thought they were talking about the shuttle between Washington and Boston. I had no idea."

Soon, it became all too clear: The space shuttle Columbia , with its seven astronauts, had burned up re-entering...

CD's That Will Keep on Giving

Sun, 08 Dec 2002 19:00:00 -0500

Ready or not, the Christmas season is upon you, and the tacky tradition of maxing out your Visa card to make someone happy is right behind. O.K., so you can't afford a Lexus. Judith Lieber, Hermès and Gucci all wear out in time. Practical gifts are boring, and subtle incentives to improve the body of the one you love that come from the Sharper Image and can't be assembled without the aid of an...

Uncle Jesse Goes Weimar

Sun, 26 May 2002 20:00:00 -0400

Blackie Parrish is all grown up and baring his ass on Broadway.

John Stamos is a good boy always trying to play bad. He followed his role as Blackie on General Hospital with a turn as the rebellious heartthrob Uncle Jesse on the hit ABC sitcom Full House , a role which made him famous in American living rooms in the late 80's. Last year People magazine named him the Sexiest Comeback of the Year...

You and Me, Miss Peggy Lee

Sun, 10 Feb 2002 19:00:00 -0500

The death of Peggy Lee was a cruel nail in the coffin of good music, and a special loss to everyone who knew and loved her personally. We all had favorite songs from her 65 years in show business. I think mine was "Autumn in Rome," a gorgeous ballad by Sammy Cahn and Paul Weston, recorded in 1954, that turned up on the flip side of the dreary "Johnny Guitar." Peggy's favorites were on...

Yes, J. Lo Can Do Wrong … Hello, Keely; Farewell, Portia

Sun, 20 May 2001 20:00:00 -0400

Yes, J. Lo Can Do Wrong

Jennifer Lopez, free from tabloid sleaze and looking for respect, does not shake her booty in Angel Eyes . This is not good: A little of the old paprika might have saved this turgid bore from instant oblivion. Here she is, playing a tough Chicago cop named Sharon, so chaste that she sleeps alone and so emotionally isolated from the fun life that she doesn't even own a canary,...

Ol' Blue Eyes Has Neighbors Seeing Red

Sun, 22 Apr 2001 20:00:00 -0400

There was a time when Frank Sinatra could bring the traffic in Times Square to a standstill: the blinding marquee on the old Paramount dazzling approaching drivers, the hysterical bobbysoxers spilling onto Seventh Avenue and into the path of Broadway-bound cars. Happy days, members of Board 5 fear, might be here again.

Into the heart of the area now overrun with gawking pedestrians and crawling traffic will soon be added a statue of Ol' Blue...

More Tables, More Tourists at Midtown Sibling of Rao's

Sun, 13 Aug 2000 20:00:00 -0400

I've always wanted to go to Rao's, but I could never get a table. But then a friend who knows the owner invited me there for dinner one night. We drove up and left the car on a dark, deserted street in East Harlem under the scrutiny of a couple of beefy guys in suits. Inside the small corner restaurant, which was hung with signed celebrity photographs and old Christmas decorations and reeked of...

Hurricane's Story, One Hell of a Movie

Sun, 09 Jan 2000 19:00:00 -0500

In Norman Jewison's new film The Hurricane , Denzel Washington gives the most dynamic performance of his career as Rubin (Hurricane) Carter, the boxing champ who was on the verge of winning the middleweight title when, one night in 1966, he was falsely arrested by a racist cop, accused of murdering three people in a bar in Paterson, N.J., mistakenly identified by a witness who was himself a suspect, convicted by two all-white juries,...

Ousted Post Theater Columnist Re-emerges as … a Playwright!

Sun, 25 Jul 1999 20:00:00 -0400

The Producers

Theater columnists and Broadway producers often find themselves in disagreement when it comes to reporting on things like grosses or trouble backstage between cast members. But when you join the two together to write a play, you sort of expect them to agree on at least how they got the idea for writing the play. Or not, as is the case with If It Was Easy … "People were laughing so hard they...

Parting Glance at 1998: Sinatra, Young, Rogers

Sun, 10 Jan 1999 19:00:00 -0500

You hear the word closure a lot these days. There's a need for closure in Washington, in Hollywood and in life. So before a fresh new start in 1999, we need closure. What a year for goodbyes. James Cagney once said, "When one considers just what man is/ Happy it be that short his span is." But in the year just ending, we lost so many first-rate people, so many icons whose creative capacities...

Who's Afraid of G.M.A.?… Molly on Ally … Michael Bergin on His Tan … Come Back to Courtside, Marv!

Sun, 21 Jun 1998 20:00:00 -0400

Peter Bogdanovich's Movie of the Week

In all the unprecedented outpouring of tributes to, reminiscences of and commentaries on Frank Sinatra after his recent death, everyone of course mentioned his Oscar-winning performance in the 1953 adaptation of James Jones' novel, From Here to Eternity , but only one or two singled out for special attention the other James Jones novel he was involved with for the screen, and yet it was a far more...

Getty's Modernist Palace: Not For the Hoity-Toity

Sun, 07 Jun 1998 20:00:00 -0400

As we swoop down the San Diego Freeway, my stepdaughter looks up at the off-white Getty Center atop the Sepulveda Pass and says, "It's a research hospital." Exactly, thinks this New Yorker. An immense medical complex aiming to cure, or at least coax into remission, the sprawl-cum-city that has become the template for most of America's growing conurbations. A mountaintop temple consecrated to conspicuous civilization in the thereless there-how much more L.A. does it...

This Ding-a-ling Culture Values Warhol and Time

Sun, 24 May 1998 20:00:00 -0400

With Memorial Day, summer officially begins, more or less. If normal patterns hold, most systems will blast off this coming weekend, then June will be a kind of phony war, followed by the Verdun of July, the Passchendaele of August, with the dese-but-never-"please" brigade making a Balaklava-like final charge on the redoubts of decorum over Labor Day. All in all, a heartening prospect.

I was looking forward with relish to the coming summer, if...

Peter Bogdanovich and Gay Talese Remember Sinatra

Sun, 24 May 1998 20:00:00 -0400

The first thing I remembered when I heard that Frank Sinatra had died was his parting wish to a concert audience at the Royal Albert Hall in London one of the times I saw him perform there: "May you live to be 100," he had said, "and may the last voice you hear … be mine!" And something like 10,000 British people had cheered wildly, as though death would surely lose its sting were...

Brokaw Jumps the Gun … NBC Movie Mocks ABC Ads … Nachman, Guida Say: 'So Long, Stupid Ex-Colleagues!'

Sun, 26 Apr 1998 20:00:00 -0400

Peter Bogdanovich's Movie of the Week

Our cup runneth over: In one week, three of my all-time favorite films, all made by the same director, the inimitable though much imitated, popular and innovative genius of a filmmaker, especially to be remembered for the irresistible sparkle of his comedies and musicals; that Berliner of Polish and German Jewish extraction who, as no less than Jean Renoir once said to me in the 60's, "invented the...

For a Night Only, a Good Excuse To Act Bubbly

Sun, 11 Jan 1998 19:00:00 -0500

I don't understand those people standing out there in the cold, waiting for the ball to fall on New Year's Eve. I don't understand why they wave at the camera and, most of all, I don't understand the screaming as we cross an arbitrary line on the calendar. With or without celebration, with or without our approval, time keeps on moving, and all the shouting in the world won't stop it. You can bang...

No Teacher's Pet, D'Amato Barks Again

Sun, 07 Dec 1997 19:00:00 -0500

Alfonse D'Amato is running his mouth about schoolteachers again. He's been attacking the teachers and their "liberal" union for months now, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to air an early re-election commercial with that same theme, and even inserting himself into the city's mayoral campaign for a day or two.

This approach seems to be serving him well, if recent polls are to be believed. Since his teacher-bashing commercials began to appear, his approval...

Rat Pack, Shmat Pack: Lounge 'Movement' Just Won't Die

Sun, 23 Nov 1997 19:00:00 -0500

On Oct. 22, Joey Altruda, the Los Angeles-based bass player and composer, brought his band east to play a night at the Strato-Lounge, a weekly happening at Windows on the World. Mr. Altruda's band plays, for lack of a better term, lounge music: They have horns, they dress well; it is, to paraphrase a Frank Sinatra LP, a swingin' affair. But they can improvise, and do so with more wit than sarcasm. They riffed...