T A B L E_.T A L K

Share your thoughts, remembrances and reflections on Frank Sinatra's life and career in the Music area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

The rise and fall of Paul "Spanker" Johnson
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The right-wing historian's longtime mistress deals him the unkindest whack of all
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Return of the journalist supervillains!
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The moral posturing that surrounds media scandal obscures regular, run-of-the-mill journalistic sleaze
(05/27/98)

When a school massacre isn't Page 1 news
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Behind the Chicago Sun-Times' decision not to run the Oregon school-shooting story on Page 1
(05/22/98)

The traveling depression road show
By Janelle Brown
"Party of Five" cast members and the doctor from Mars try to cheer America up
(05/22/98)

The unauthorized Godzilla
By Matthew Flamm
Two writers confront the mighty media giants and discover that size does matter
(05/20/98)

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BY SARA NELSON | As Frank Sinatra breathed his last on May 14, the publishing business came to life. Superstar dies, publishers go into overdrive: an increasingly common sequence of events. Did you cruise any bookstores after the deaths of Kurt Cobain, Princess Diana and Mother Teresa? Quickie books seemed to appear overnight. In the case of the much anticipated --- and heavily rumored -- death of Ol' Blue Eyes, book publishers in search of a buck didn't need to look much farther than their very own warehouses and inventory files. The trick was to get their products out fast, fast, fast, which made May 15 a very busy day for journalists, publishers and publicists.

Paul Osewski, the HarperCollins publicist in charge of "The Way You Wear Your Hat: Frank Sinatra and the Lost Art of Living," an homage-cum-how-to-be-cool guide by Esquire writer Bill Zehme, was, for example, awoken at 2 a.m. by a friend who was both a Sinatra fan and a producer for "Good Morning America." Osewski quickly began working the phones, desperately trying to reach Zehme. The writer, who managed to sleep through Osewski's urgent calls, awoke to find 17 Sinatra-related messages from ABC, CNN and other news organizations on his machine.

Leaving a string of phone numbers -- home, cell, office -- Osewski set off in the wee hours of Friday morning for HarperCollins headquarters, where he penned a press release to be faxed to all media. Zehme's book had been out since December (to coincide with Sinatra's 82nd birthday) but now HarperCollins could stake a sizable claim: The book contains Sinatra's last interview EVER (never mind that the singer had answered Zehme's faxed questions intermittently over several months, and only when HIS publicist could cajole him into it). By notifying the media -- and ordering up 60,000 more books -- the publisher might turn a respectable selling tribute (110,000 of a 140,000 print run) into a megahit.

At the various newsweeklies, the mood was at least as frenetic. Newsweek culture writer Karen Schoemer got a similar late-night call, and rushed to her office to write her much-admired Sinatra tribute, even though she was, technically, on leave from the magazine. (Farsighted, she'd had it built into her leave agreement that she'd return for just this eventuality.) At Time, at People, at Entertainment Weekly, staffers hunkered down to 20-hour days of writing, reporting and picture editing. "People around here really dropped their egos," says one newsmagazine staffer. "We had political editors making calls and writers helping choose pictures. It was a bunker mentality."

Of course, it helped to have done some prep work. Or, in the case of TV Guide, all of the work. With its special tribute issue edited and produced after Sinatra's heart attack in late 1997, executives had only to call the warehouse and get the magazine distributed to newsstands. They must have breathed a sigh of relief that Sinatra didn't suffer too long: The issue was dated 1998.

Other newsweeklies had at least begun the process: "We already had some of the pieces in house," admits Schoemer, who says that Shirley MacLaine's tribute to her rat-pack buddy had come in "within the last few months." Similarly, editors at People had constructed most of their pieces -- "We do these all the time," says a People staffer. "You think we don't have stuff on Reagan, Bob Hope and the Queen Mother just about ready to go?" Only the details (date, time, place of death) need to be inserted. And how did all those talk shows like "Charlie Rose" and "Nightline" have all those Sinatra-expert round tables ready for easy clipping by the morning shows? They were taped far in advance, of course, by prescient producers who'd gathered guests last winter for "birthday tributes." Some segments had in fact already aired and were revived when Sinatra could no longer be -- but some were to-the-viewer new.

It's not always so easy, of course. No one could have predicted the death of Princess Diana last August, for example, and so the publishing scramble for quickie books, special issues, etc., was fierce. That Andrew Morton, author of a just-published book on the princess, became a media star was just an example of unseemly good luck, for him and his publisher. But this time, you didn't have to be the chairman of any board to know that the end was near. Stuart Applebaum, vice president of Bantam Doubleday Dell, says that the New York Times Syndicate had negotiated for the rights to the 1987 Kitty Kelley bestseller "His Way" "many months ago"; chapters from that book showed up in the New York Post and the Daily News last week. Similarly, as the then executive editor of America Online's The Book Report, this writer commissioned an excerpt of Zehme's book and planned to post it for the singer's birthday in December. But amid daily e-mail rumors that A) Sinatra had been read his last rites and B) that he'd actually already died, I went back to HarperCollins and tried to cover both bases: I requested a longer-than-usual archive period should the rumors be wrong and a clause permitting AOL to post the piece earlier, should they be right.

Call it ghoulishness or just good business, this industry isn't shy about selling the dead. Like Zehme, who finally woke up, contacted his assistant and taped a new outgoing message to the effect that he wasn't around because he was out talking about Frank (and quoting his book), journalists and publishers quickly managed to rise to the occasion. Racing to offices, putting Sinatra CDs on boomboxes, they canceled weekend plans, hired baby sitters and got down to business. And as usual, the hard work paid off: Pretty soon, you couldn't find a TV Guide special issue anywhere, 30,000 warehoused copies of Kitty Kelley's books were spoken for just 24 hours after Sinatra's death and a Chicago Barnes and Noble, Zehme was told, sold 500 copies of his book in one day. By Monday, in other words, the stores and stands were saturated with Sinatriana. The biz had done it again, thanks to publishers' smart planning, quick thinking and dedicated staffing. And, of course, to Frank Sinatra, who had the good grace not to die on a Saturday night.
SALON | May 29, 1998