Fan Remembers Ol’ Blue Eyes, His Own Way
Ric Ross is a big fan--maybe the biggest--but he’s not planning anything showy tonight. He’ll watch the Sinatra tribute on Larry King, go out to his favorite club with his special lady, dance, have a drink, raise a toast.
Other places, guys who think they’re in the know will observe the anniversary of the Chairman’s death with slavish imitation.
They’ll fill their tumblers just the way Frank did, with a couple fingers of Jack Daniel’s, three or four ice cubes, a little water. Just like the Rat Pack, they’ll suddenly call anything and everything “clyde”--”Pass the clyde, will you?” “Love your clyde, baby!” Maybe they’ll stumble up to the karaoke stage and melt away those little-town blues with a few bars of “New York, New York.”
Not Ross. He was too close to Sinatra for any of that strictly-from-Dullsville nonsense. Plus, he’s a class act.
At 61, Ross runs a one-man financial planning shop in Thousand Oaks. But that’s just his day job. For 43 years, his passion, discipline, and life’s purpose has been to chronicle the career of Francis Albert Sinatra--to collect and catalog every recording, every clipping, every program, every photograph from every lounge in every city where Sinatra liked to have one more for the road.
Packed into file cabinets and onto floor-to-ceiling shelves, Ross’ collection numbers more than 100,000 meticulously cross-referenced items. He’s seeking a new home for the massive collection--a university, a library, a Las Vegas hotel--but has found no takers.
In his office, Ross dug out one of 10 black binders that together hold month-by-month calendars dating back six decades.
“I can tell you where he was on virtually every day of his career,” he said, pointing to a calendar page studded with handwritten notations.
“Look, here: On Sept. 8, 1935, he sang on the ‘Major Bowes Amateur Hour’ with the Hoboken Four.” (Ross has the application Sinatra filled out for that very first of his radio performances).
“Want to know how he spent his 21st birthday? That’s Dec. 12, 1936: He was in a blackface minstrel show at the fire station in Garfield, N.J. . . . “
Sinatra himself was impressed with Ross’ diligence.
“I’m sure that Ric Ross knows more about me than I do about myself,” he told a reporter in 1988.
Through the years, Ross helped out on TV productions about Sinatra, discographies of Sinatra’s work, even Nancy Sinatra’s memoirs. In return, he was invited behind the curtain that separated Sinatra from the press and his legion of fans.
“How many people get to see Sinatra in the studio doing take after take?” he asked. “How many get to sit ringside at Sinatra appearances in Vegas, and then get to go backstage to tell him what a great job he did on a particular number?”
A year ago today, a friend called in the middle of the night to tell Ross the bad news.
“I’ll never forget it,” he said. “We knew he wasn’t in the best of health, but he was alive, he was here, he was with us.”
Since then, the predictable has happened--the commercialization that Ross disdainfully calls “the selling of Sinatra.”
He points to a flood of “autographed” items on Internet auction sites.
“I know his signature, and I know how it changed from the ‘40s to the ‘90s,” he said. “I’d say 75% of the ‘autographed’ items were signed by his secretaries or others.”
Then there are all the tacky souvenirs. Ross can’t understand why the Sinatra family has authorized “toys and cigars and commemorative plates,” but hasn’t released the tapes of his old TV shows.
“They’re classics,” he said. “You see Sinatra alone at the bar with his raincoat and hat, singing ‘One for my baby and one more for the road . . . ‘ This is gangbusters stuff!”
Maybe at another time Ross could have talked the Sinatras into making the tapes public. But, he said, he and the family fell out of touch a couple of years ago.
It’s not his only recent loss.
A close friend in Palm Springs died of cancer. Ross took the death so hard that he hasn’t been able to visit Sinatra’s grave there.
On top of that, he and his wife have split up. One of the contentious points in their pending divorce is the value of all the Sinatra material Ross collected during their years together.
Understandably, he prefers not to talk about such matters.
Memories of Frank and a happier time buoy him. Not a day passes that he doesn’t listen to the most famous saloon singer the world has produced.
“If you were doing a painting of the 20th century, all you would have to do is draw Sinatra--and all his songs would be the colors.”
No, no, they can’t take that away from him.
Steve Chawkins is a Times staff writer. His e-mail address is steve.chawkins@latimes.com.
