SINATRA WAS FAMOUS, or notorious, for insisting on doing his movie scenes in one take. He felt that repetition would diminish his spontaneity. First take was best take. And as he grew in fame and power, after his fabled comeback, “One-Take Charlie” would get his way more often than not, and if not, he had no hesitation about walking away. He had signed on to play Billy Bigelow in the screen adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel, had gone up to Boothbay Harbor, Maine, where the 125-member company was working, but walked off the set the moment he learned that the film was being shot both in CinemaScope and in a wide-screen format—a process that would require at least two takes for each shot. Although we have a pretty good idea of how he would have handled the eight-minute “Soliloquy”—he recorded it with all the drama that Oscar Hammerstein packed into the lyric—we will never know what the bench scene would have sounded like if Shirley Jones had sung the duet of “If I Loved You” with Sinatra rather than Gordon MacRae.
When shooting a movie, Sinatra wanted to get every scene wrapped with the greatest dispatch. Pauline Kael asked: “Why didn’t Frank Sinatra take the professional pride in his movies that he took in his recordings?” Sammy Cahn provided part of an answer: “In pictures you never have time and Sinatra never had patience.” But in the recording studio, the perfectionist took over. On the twelfth of January, 1956, it took him no fewer than twenty-two takes to do Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You under My Skin” to his satisfaction. It is an amazing track, maybe Sinatra’s greatest up-tempo song. After the playback, the musicians spontaneously stood and applauded the arranger, Nelson Riddle, and the singer. The trombonist Milt Bernhart, who improvised a swinging trombone solo during the bridge, got his share of kudos. It was a historic moment. Whenever Sinatra sang the song in concert or for a recording, he introduced variants, as was his wont, but he always used the Riddle chart, and the trombone solo got written into it.