We Love scoo-be-do-be-You

Louis Chunovic

Tuesday, May 26, 1998 | 10:20 a.m.

"Nobody in the world could bogart a song like Frank," says musician-turned-media-mogul Quincy Jones, impresario for Saturday's "Remember Frank" gala, chuckling as he uses the slang term for holding on to a marijuana cigarette. "His legacy will be the art of owning a song."

Apparently, nobody could bogart a stage entrance Sinatra's way either:

Forty years ago in Monaco, Jones recalls, he met Sinatra for the first time, after actress Ava Gardner told the singer, then her husband, that an American orchestra was in France. Sinatra was preparing for a concert, so he summoned Jones and his 55-piece band to play a benefit at the local palace.

"The music drama was just overwhelming," says Jones, who was the orchestra's conductor on that long-ago day. "The band was supposed to play a play-on (his entrance music) ... and Frank came in from the back (of the huge hall). I was worried that the applause was going to run out (before he got to the stage). ... I thought, 'If he trots up here, he's going to make it in time.' "

"He stopped at the (head) table, he kissed Princess Grace. Cary Grant was there, Noel Coward. He kissed them all. He walked a little farther, stopped ... took out his cigarette case, knocked a cigarette on it like he does, pulled out his lighter, lit it, took his time. He continued to walk. The applause never stopped. ... By that time, I'm just totally confounded.

"He gets to the stage and we go into 'Come Fly With Me.' He's still got the cigarette, and just before we go into the bridge, he takes a puff ... and he (sings) 'When I get you up there' -- no smoke out yet -- 'where the air is' -- and the lights come down to a pinspot, and he extends his arm as he says 'rare.' And it was as though he pulled the smoke out of his mouth! I couldn't believe it, it was like David Copperfield."

The stories about Sinatra's talent, his temper, his appetite for life, his generosity and his loyality are legion, particularly now, in the wake of the presidential-level coverage surrounding his death.

Just how musical was the Chairman of the Board? None other than Miles Davis studied Sinatra's phrasing, Jones says. And pop figures as disparate as Bruce Springsteen and the Sex Pistols paid him musical homage.

How large were his appetites? He "partied the 'art' out of 'party' " is how Jones puts it. And his long-time personal publicist, Lee Solters, who began representing him when Sinatra moved to Caesars from the Sands and whose clients have also included Michael Jackson and Barbra Streisand, allows that before he was ever known as Chairman of the Board, Sinatra's friends called him Chairman of the Broads.

Confronted with pomposity or power, Sinatra could be fearlessly tart-tongued. "In the Waldorf Tower elevator, I was there," Solters says. "Sinatra, Lee Iacocca (then the Chairman of Chrysler) and John Kluge (the head of Metromedia and one of the richest men in the country).

"When the doors closed, Sinatra said, 'Will the real Chairman of the Board raise his hand?' " Both Iacocca and Kluge deferred to the real Chairman, Solters recalls.

Sinatra helped ex-champ Joe Louis and drummer Buddy Rich through health crises. He also made it possible for Sammy Davis Jr. to pay off his gambling debts with dignity by adding him to a lucrative tour. Once, he bought a car for a group of needy nuns; years later, when the car was run down, he bought them another one.

He gave anonymously to needy strangers whose stories in the press caught his attention, including one woman in upstate New York who, according to Solters, to this day does not know where the $35,000 to repair her local church came from. And he raised as much as $1 billion for charity, once even donating $250,000 to Israel (where a building at Hebrew University is named after him) in the name of a "Mrs. Goldberg."

Asked who Mrs. Goldberg was, Sinatra explained that she'd been his next-door neighbor when he was growing up in a Hoboken tenement house. "Every time my mother kicked the (expletive) out of me," Solters remembers him saying, "I'd always go to Mrs. Goldberg and she told me what I did wrong."

In the early '60s, Jones played with Sinatra and the Rat Pack at the Sands. "He was concerned with the racism in Vegas," Jones says. "Frank had about 16 guys there, like bodyguards, and he gathers the band over by the slot machines, and he says, 'Anybody looks at the band funny, break their legs.' And he meant it."

He meant it too when he sent Jones' newborn son a card welcoming him to the world with the hope that he'd "build a better world than the one we messed up." Inside the envelope, Jones says, was a $10,000 bond, enough then to pay for the boy's entire college education.

Sinatra loved Las Vegas, Jones adds. "He and Barbara met here...and (in our last conversation) he said he expected everybody (at the Las Vegas tribute) to stay up all night and party."

The city even figured in the Chairman's favorite color, according to Jones. "Somebody asked him his favorite color. He said it was five forty-five in the morning Vegas blue."

Even after the funeral and the eulogies, Sinatra's friends and

colleagues still tend to express a certain amount of disbelief. His former publicist remembers that "at least four times a year," he'd get press reports of the singer's death, and that Sinatra himself would call regularly to say "Hey, did you hear the rumor that I died?"

His children, Nancy, Frank Jr. and Tina, and his three grandchildren posted a poignant note of farewall last week on their Internet website, saying: "His lessons and love were the only constants in an ever-changing world. He is and always will be the center of our universe."

"The first thing that came to mind," Jones -- who was one of Sinatra's pallbearers -- says of the moment when he learned of the singer's death, "was when we (recorded) 'L.A. Is My Lady.'

"I know this is silly, but at the end of the session he winked at the end of the last take. (The line was something like) 'You're lookin' at a man who never, ever plans to kiss this lady goodbye.' And he says, 'Well, I guess I'll unpack my bags and stick around here a little longer.'

"Something in that just gave me goose bumps. He'll be here forever."