Sinatra

In the wee small hours of the morning, when the whole wide world is either fast asleep or wide awake, depending on what social circle you prefer, the voice of Frank Sinatra-bittersweet, magical, lean, insinuating, nudging, shrugging (yes, this man can shrug his voice)-weaves itself into the day-and-nightdreams of America's womankind. Hat set cockily on the back of his head, raincoat draped carelessly over a bony shoulder, this hip brand of love god, so different from the lush and limpid-eyed love gods of yore, casually ambles into the phantasies of females young and old, dances on the ceilings near their beds, bids them come fly with him down to Acapulco Bay. And if the real Sinatra were to make the offer, a goodly number would hop at the opportunity.

For the scrawny kid from Hoboken, precariously perched atop what he inwardly fears may be the tallest and most trembly house of cards in the history of showbiz, is a love god and no mistake-a bona fide sex idol, with the stamp of his epoch upon him. It may not be extravagant to surmise that more women would rather park their pumps under Frank Sinatra's pad than that of any other male in the world, including Gregory Peck, Rock Hudson, Porfirio Rubirosa, Senator Kennedy and Commander Whitehead. And to Frankie's credit, he has displayed a sporting willingness to give a fair number the chance.

It is doubtful that anyone, anywhere, makes out any better than Sinatra. And that is partly because "the broads," as he calls them, are an obsession with him. He is as intense in his pursuit of a better broad as he is of a better song or better part in a picture. When he first arrived on the West Coast, he put up in his MGM dressing room a list of the most desirable movie actresses and he didn't take it down until he had worked his way through the lot. Sinatra has been, in the euphemistic lingo of the newspapers, "romantically linked" with Lana Turner (whose taste for tough Italians has produced some unhappy headlines since), Marilyn Maxwell, Anita Ekberg, Gloria Vanderbilt (who chose Frankie for her first date after separating from Leopold Stokowski), Marlene Dietrich, Kim Novak, Joan Blackman (an attractive 18-year-old actress whom he once introduced to inquisitive reporters as "Ezzard Charles") and Lauren Bacall. He is followed, like the Pied Piper, wherever he goes, whether in Hollywood or on location in the tiniest hamlet. Budding young starlets wait for his call; society matrons in Bar Harbor and Chestnut Hill dream of subtle assignations with him; leggy airline stewardesses pack his picture in their travel-kits and yearn for the day when he will ask them to come fly away.

What does Frank Sinatra have that prompted one critic to describe him as "the most complete, the most fantastic symbol of American maleness yet discovered, for both good and bad reasons"? Sinatra, himself, understands the least. He still thinks his success was all an accident. He has little faith in either his voice or his ability as an actor. Nor does his mirror give him any cause for confidence. He has none of the Latin mystery of a Valentino or the distingue hauteur of a Barrymore. He is, in fact, short and slight (140 pounds, including hair pieces). His face and neck still show the scars from the forceps used in a difficult birth. His face is so undistinguished that his double, Johnny Delgado, is always pestered for autographs when the two are on location. He tends to overdress, with suits cut a bit too sharp and Windsor-wide knots in his ties. What manner of love god is this?

Sinatra is the most potent performer in show business today, the most spectacularly popular singer of popular songs, the most sought-after movie star, the most successful wooer of women. In searching for explanations for his phenomenal appeal, the London Times felt that the secret was not the voice but the smile, "the shy, depreciating smile, with the quiver at the corner of the mouth, that makes the young ladies in the gallery swoon in ecstasy and the maturer matrons in the dress circle gurgle with protective delight . . ." The sculptor, Jo Davidson, thought the secret might lie in Frankie's bone structure. "He's like a boyish Lincoln," said Davidson, after probing at Sinatra's face. Frankie, himself, in a rare excess of becoming modesty, credited "ham" for his rise: "Ham," said Sinatra, "can make a scrawny kid, who has to leave the hanger in his coat to have any shoulders, into a movie star." But what he dismisses as "ham" is actually a remarkable personality that Sinatra has been able to project in his performances and with which the public has been able to strongly identify. It is his personality that is the key to Sinatra's success.

The personality found its first expression in his singing, in the way he took an otherwise no more than pleasant voice and charged it through and through with sex, pathos and fierce sincerity. "Why, the little punk," said an incredulous sideman. "He really believes those words!" And when Sinatra the singer became Sinatra the actor, it was not unusual acting ability that won fans and an Oscar. It was again the projection of a vital, intense human being – if not handsome, then surely the hippest of the hip, and yet naively childlike, too; and despite his many affairs, an incurable romantic about life and love – if not suave and sophisticated, then most certainly a fascinating mixture of both man and boy, at once tough and tender, brooding, searching, and always very much alive.

As any ex-usher who worked at New York's Paramount Theatre back in the mid-Forties can tell you, Frankie's appeal with the girls could have been predicted early. What could not have been foreseen was the universality of his appeal, which crosses all lines of sex, age and station as they have never been crossed before. There was a time when the girls swooned over Francis Albert Sinatra and the guys dug him not at all. During World War II, the showing of a Sinatra movie to a company of U.S. marines elicited groans and gripes and a derisive cacophony of shouts like "Kiss me, Frankie! Ooooooooh, Frankie!" and an army sergeant remarked, when Sinatra sang in the Hollywood Bowl: "After this performance in the bowl, I hope they don't forget to flush it." Actually, this male attitude was an overreaction to the young females who were bandaging their arms where Sinatra touched them and ripping at his clothes whenever he left a theatre. Without really understanding why, these squealing teenagers were the first to fall under the Sinatra spell. There he stood, holding onto the microphone for dear life, a curl hanging limply over his forehead, a sweet-sad smile on his face, crying out for love and togetherness. "My sister saw him twice," said one admirer, "and she's afraid to go again because she's engaged."

Today, Sinatra's appeal is so universal that when he arrived at the Chicago Stadium to watch the recent Sugar Ray Robinson-Carmen Basilio championship fight, it caused as much excitement at ringside as the entrance of the two boxers the audience had paid heavy sugar to see. A fight crowd is about as far from Frankie's original underage female following as it is possible to imagine, yet the entire stadium rose, almost to a man, to get a look at Sinatra as he came down the aisle to his seat.

Sinatra has been behaving in a highly individual manner most of his life, including the occasion of his birth on December 12, 1915, at which he weighed 131/2 pounds and had to be pried into life with the aforementioned forceps. Upon hearing of his birthweight, a jokester later remarked, "Too bad he's lost so much weight since then." The story of how Sinatra grew up as the son of a pork-and-beans prizefighter who later became a fireman and a mother who neglected her family to pursue a political career in Hoboken and throughout New Jersey is by now as familiar as the weary old saga of how jazz came up the river. Frank was not much good in school. Because his mother dressed him in too-fancy clothes, he was often the object of derision; but his father taught him to fight and he began using his fists to defend his honor early. He had always enjoyed singing and he talked his mother into buying him a $75 microphone and rhinestone-studded amplifier, quit school, and began singing wherever he could around New Jersey at lodge meetings, Communion breakfasts, weddings and neighboring roadhouses. At one such, named the Rustic Cabin, he was heard by Harry James; and when this Benny Goodman sideman cut out to form his own band, he hired Frank to handle the vocals. Nothing very important happened to Sinatra while he was with James, although they recorded a tune called All or Nothing at All that was reissued and became quite popular after Frank had made it big as a single. Sinatra earned $85 a week with James and after about six months he caught the ear of Tommy Dorsey who hired him away for $110, which seemed like a remarkable amount of money to Frank at the time.

Sinatra's highly personal singing style was developed early and all the fundamental features were there by the time he left the Tommy Dorsey band in October of 1942. Two of Sinatra's records made with TD, I'll Never Smile Again and There Are Such Things, sold over a million copies each. The Dorsey trombone influenced his singing. "I sort of bend my notes," Sinatra has explained, "gliding from one to another without abrupt breaks. The trombone is the greatest example of this." His "up" style was influenced by the frohlich trumpet of Dorsey sideman Ziggy Elman. But mostly his style was influenced by himself. He was a complete identity, unlike any other singer before him. He was a total loner, going his own way in music as in life. He sang emotionally – he really did believe those lyrics – and audiences reacted. His phrasing became the archtype for a whole new school of singing; singlehandedly, he changed the emphasis in American popular music from the big band with the incidental singer to the big singer with the incidental band.

And as Sinatra "The Voice" became known, Sinatra the man became a subject of national interest. The public discovered a strangely driven, searching and forever dissatisfied soul. Sinatra the man became a living representation of the songs he sang. He grew as a symbol of romance as he loved, and lost, and loved again. He had married an attractive, dark-haired girl named Nancy Barbato, whom he met when he was 19 years of age and she was 16. They had three children, Nancy, Frank and Tina. By 1945 Sinatra was making a million dollars a year, but there were mounting tensions at home. Nancy had overlooked the teenage girls who threw themselves at Frankie in the East, tore at his clothing and hid themselves in his hotel room, but in Hollywood it was different. There were continuous column items linking her husband with various film fatales. His open affair with Ava Gardner was what finally wrote finis to his first marriage; on October 30, 1951, Nancy got a divorce charging cruelty, and was awarded custody of the children and one-third of Sinatra's earnings. Eight days later, Sinatra and Ava Gardner were married in Philadelphia. The lanky North Carolina beauty was a mixed-up girl with a history of marriage to mixed-up men Mickey Rooney and Artie Shaw. Like Sinatra, Ava had a reputation for wanting most what she didn't have, and Frank found her fiercely desirable. It was a much publicized, stormy romance and marriage. Sinatra sent her expensive gifts, flew thousands of miles to woo and win her, but once together, they fought continuously.

At about this point, Sinatra's career took a nosedive, setting the stage for one of the most remarkable comebacks in show business history. Sinatra now indicates he feels the fluctuations in his career were more imagined than real, (continued overleaf)Sinatra(continued from page 64) but they were very real in 1951 and 1952. Sinatra and MGM had come to a parting of the ways: the studio was unhappy with the bad press he had been receiving and Frank was upset because of being continually cast as a singing sailor. His box office appeal had dropped away to almost nothing. But worse than that, so had his record sales. He secretly feared that his voice was gone. He was under tremendous emotional and physical strain. He was singing at the Copacabana when his throat began hemorrhaging. He refused to stay in bed and returned to finish the engagement only because he heard that a columnist he hated had bet the club owner $100 he could never do it.

While Sinatra's career was going down, Ava's was climbing. In 1952 she was sent to Africa to make Mogambo with Clark Gable and Grace Kelly. Sinatra, out of work, went along to be with his wife. They fought on location and they fought in their tent at night. Sinatra was flat broke and he owed the government more money in back taxes than most men earn in a lifetime. He was down, but he wasn't out, and he had a plan. Before going to Africa he had read James Jones' novel From Here to Eternity. He thought that the part of Maggio, the tough little Italian kid, was made to order for him, and he went to see Buddy Adler, who was producing the picture for Columbia.

Adler never tires of telling the story. "It's an acting part, Frankie," he said, trying to keep a straight face.

"It's me," said Sinatra.

Adler was still dubious. He was testing five other actors for the part. He said. "I'll have to think about it."

Sinatra went to his agent and said, "I'll play that part for 50 bucks a week. For nothing. You've got to get it for me."

In Africa, Sinatra received a cable from Adler saying he would be given a chance to test for the film and that he should fly back to Hollywood at once. Sinatra flew.

"The first take, we knew we had it cold," he says. "I thought to myself. if he's like that in the movie, it's a sure Academy Award performance."

But Sinatra didn't wait for the results of the test. He borrowed money from a friend and returned to Africa loaded down with Christmas gifts. He built Ava a shower bath in the midst of the jungle and staged a Christmas party in which he led a group of Belgian Congo natives in singing carols. Then it began to look like he might not get the role in From Here to Eternity, and he reverted to his state of depression, and the bickering with Ava began again.

A cable arrived informing him that he had been given the part. He would receive only $8000 compared to his usual $150,000, but he had meant it when he said he was willing to play the part for nothing. Pacing up and down in front of Ava's tent, the cable clutched in his hand, he said, "Now I'll show the bastards."

Sinatra returned to Hollywood a week later. While still on location in Africa, Ava was flown to London with what was reported to be "a severe case of anemia." Later she admitted, "It actually was a miscarriage, and we lost the baby we both wanted so much." After completing his work in Eternity, Sinatra joined her in England, but they began fighting again almost immediately. He returned to New York. They were reconciled about a year later, largely through the efforts of Sinatra's mother, but they were together only about a week. In October 1953, it was announced that they had separated. For a while, in 1956, it looked as though they might go back together again. Sinatra went to Spain, where Ava prepared a honeymoon house to receive him. but Frank arrived with a nightclub singer, Peggy Connelly, on his arm.

Of course, the psychiatrists have their explanations. Says one: "Sinatra's behavior is clear and basic. His mother turned him over to substitute mothers when she went off on her busy political life in Hoboken. First it was his grandmother, then his aunt, then an elderly Jewish woman, Mrs. Golden. Frank never worked out the crucial early relationship with his mother because his mother gave him a sense of rejection. A childhood like that will produce a restless, insatiable man. Now he repeats the childhood pattern of searching for love, finding and rejecting it. The other side of the coin is the female response to such a man. It is no accident that the first reaction of early Sinatra fans was to want to mother him, to protect and watch over him. That is exactly the need that he projected and on a very basic, emotional level, girls responded to it. Nothing has happened down through his succession of unhappy love affairs to change the picture he projects."

And the picture he projected was also the songs he sang. For once in the history of show business, there was no need for a myth. "Everything happens to me." "I couldn't sleep a wink last night." "The night we called it a day." "There's no you." Myth and man blended into one. When Frankie sang of life and love, he knew the meaning of the lyrics all too well.

Nor did his movie career change the pattern. It was no accident that his spectacular comeback was triggered by his role in From Here to Eternity. At heart, Maggio was a loner who asked for help from no man. When Frankie won an Oscar for his portrayal of the part, friends insisted, "Frank wasn't acting. He said it himself. He is Maggio." Maggio died in the arms of a buddy, still loveless and searching, bravely making the best of a sad life. Again, fact and fiction were in mesh. Sinatra has had his bouts with the sleeping pills and the cut wrist. Death is on his mind, but he goes indomitably on. Indeed, he goes cockily on. He may love and lose, but he will never yield. Like his close friend Humphrey Bogart (about whom Sinatra still talks constantly), he is his own guy. He takes no man's lip and no man's advice. Bogart himself once warned a would-be interviewer of Sinatra: "I love the guy, but there's one thing you've got to remember. When you talk to him, don't try to tell him anything. Don't tell. Suggest! You tell him anything and he's gonna boot you right out of the joint. He's the same with me."

Sinatra remains monumentally unimpressed by the opinions and ideas of experts. Nelson Riddle, his conductor-arranger, says: "He thinks nothing of turning around and conducting the orchestra himself to get the exact tempo he wants." He also thinks nothing of changing the lyrics of a poet the likes of Rudyard Kipling. In singing The Road to Mandalay, he switched "Burma girl" to "Burma broad," to the considerable discomfort of Kipling's daughter who protested publicly. Even his language is unique: if he is amused or strongly moved by any emotion, he is "gassed"; any person, or anything, that affects him is a "gasser." He has used the word "clyde," the origin of which remains a mystery, the way soldiers use a four-letter synonym for sexual intercourse as a noun, adjective, verb and even as a pronoun. "Get off your clyde and let's go get ourselves some clydes," Sinatra will say, meaning, "Get off your ass and let's go get ourselves some pizza." His current favorite is "mother," a euphemism for an expression definitely not intended for polite company. Frankie insisted on introducing "mother" to television audiences on more than one occasion (thus helping to make the climate right for the gag: "What are we going to call that dear old lady now that mother's a dirty word?"). Some were offended. Says Mitch Miller, with whom Sinatra had a large falling-out when he split with Columbia Records to join Capitol: "The ability to sing 32 bars of music doesn't entitle anyone to flout the rules of society." But songwriter Sammy Cahn. one of Sinatra's really close friends, makes no apologies for Frank's maverick behavior. Says Cahn: "If he (continued on page 84)Sinatra (continued from page 66) functions as an artist, I can forgive him anything."

Apparently the public can forgive him anything, too, accepting him on his own terms, overlooking his mistakes and seeming immaturity, respecting him for his talent, his sincerity and his tempestuous struggling and striving. He has slugged a columnist for invading his privacy and a radio engineer for making an anti-Semitic remark; he can be rude and inconsiderate to those around him and is notorious for not being on time for rehearsals and public appearances or missing them altogether, but he will expend considerable time and energy helping a friend or even a casual acquaintance, or a cause he considers worth while: he once flew to Gary, Indiana, in an attempt to talk high school students into ending a strike against Negroes; at a time when he was turning down personal appearances and nightclub offers all over the country, he played two weeks at the Mocambo in Hollywood as a tribute to a pal who owned the club, the late Charlie Morrison, and for the benefit of Morrison's widow (two solid weeks of SRO crowds that broke every house record within memory and had the biggest celebrities in town waiting in line with the rest for a chance at a table to watch Frankie perform).

Unfortunately, many of Sinatra's friendships are not lasting ones. At one time, Sinatra and Jackie Gleason were inseparable companions. Gleason was then playing bit parts in gangster films ("I got $500 a week but I had to buy my own bullets," he says) and Sinatra was a star. A few years later their situations were reversed. Sinatra was in his pre Eternity slump and Gleason was on his way to becoming the hottest property in television. Gleason gave Sinatra a number of guest spots on his show. Later, after Sinatra had climbed back to stardom, Gleason met him one night and jokingly made some remark about how he had helped Sinatra when he was down and out. Sinatra became angry. They have stopped speaking; when they meet, they merely nod. Not long ago a friend asked Gleason why the two old pals aren't speaking.

"I speak to him," Gleason said. "I tell him where he can go."

Hank Sanicola is a friend who has stuck from the earliest days. He was a song plugger who used to bring Sinatra free sheet music from the music-publishing firm for which he worked; when Frank joined Harry James' band and later Tommy Dorsey's, Sanicola went along. He wrote This Love of Mine with Frank and Sol Parker and Sinatra recorded it with Dorsey; Sanicola is now Sinatra's personal manager. He is a big, good-natured guy with very protective feelings where Sinatra is concerned. When Frank finds himself in a scrape, Sanicola is usually near at hand to help him out of it, which has given rise to the notion on more than one occasion that he is Sinatra's bodyguard.

Humphrey Bogart was one of Sinatra's closest friends, and Frank was around the Bogart household almost constantly. Sinatra and Bogart organized a group of Bogey's neighbors into an informal hell-raising club, dedicated to drinking heavily and staying up all night singing and waking non-partici-pating neighbors. They called them-selves The Holmby Hills Rat Pack and other charter members included the David Nivens, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, Mrs. and Mr. Judy Garland, Nunnally Johnson, the Leland Haywards, Prince Mike Romanoff and his Princess Gloria, Irving Paul Lazar and John Huston. "Bogey was the only man to whom Sinatra would listen," observed a good friend of both. "Bogey and Betty were like a set of parents to him." Bogart said of Sinatra, "Frank's idea of Paradise is a place where there are unlimited supplies of women and no newspapermen. He'd be a lot better off if it were the other way around."

Betty Bacall has made no secret of her affection for Sinatra. Soon after Bogart's death, the two of them began appearing together frequently at prize-fights, in nightclubs, at Villa d'Amore, on weekends with friends in Las Vegas and Palm Springs. Rumors circulated that a marriage might be in the offing (although Sinatra is still legally tied to Ava Gardner), but when Joe Hyams, who was the only newspaperman Bogart allowed the run of his house, called Betty and asked if it were true, she replied, "Marry that bum? I ought to clobber you for suggesting it."

A bit later, she went to visit Sinatra on the set of Kings Go Forth. Sinatra said, "Excuse me, I've got to go do this scene with Tony Curtis where I tell him he's got to marry the girl."

"This," said Bacall, "I got to hear."

Nevertheless, friends noticed that whenever Sinatra's name was mentioned, Bacall's eyes would shine, and that when he was away from Hollywood, she would not leave her Bellagio Road house until after six p.M. each night, the time he called her every day, even when he was in Europe.

Finally, one night at a party, Irving Paul Lazar, the literary agent and close friend of both Bacall and Sinatra, told Louella Parsons that they were going to be married, and Miss Parsons dutifully broke the news to her readers. The trouble was, it wasn't true. Joe Hyams called Betty immediately and asked if it was, and she said, "Well ..."Sinatra, as usual, was unavailable to the press. The real story is that Bacall and Sinatra did, for a time, entertain the idea of marriage. Much was in their favor: they have a great deal in common, many mutual friends, and Sinatra worships her little son and daughter. ("That Leslie girl of mine is ready to walk out of the house with him any time," Bacall once said. Leslie is five.) But then Bacall drew up sharply and, aided by reports she received of Sinatra's boudoir athletics in faraway places, began to wonder if she really was doing the right thing. A friend says, "She could handle Bogart because he was a completely faithful husband. He never messed around with other women. Something in Sinatra makes him, when he stops for a hamburger or a malted, want to take a chop at the pretty little carhop who brings it to him." Sinatra does not deny this. "I love broads," he says, which ranks as one of the more conservative public utterances of the year.

Frank's heart leads his mind. He functions on an extremely emotional level, although he is an intelligent, self-educated man (he reads voraciously, mostly non-fiction, is interested in astronomy, painting and serious music). And when his various peccadillos get him in hot water, he is apt as not to thumb his nose at sympathizers, asking help from no one, telling the press to go to hell and his friends to omit the flowers. His constancies are few, but they are indelible: a fierce devotion to his children and his friends; a fierce devotion to the twin muses of singing and acting; a fierce devotion to his privacy. Everything else is Bridgeport. A therapist who attempted to strip away Sinatra's layer on layer of frustrations and angers would have to get down to these three constancies which sustain and protect him from what fellow actor Arthur Kennedy has called "the furies that possess him."

Frankie would say obscenity the obscenity furies; they are nobody's business but his own. His acting and his singing are in the public domain, but the rest of his life is his own business and if you cross over that boundary, in the words of a pug friend, "You're dead wit Frenk." He is always in the company of a curious collection of friends who look like extras from On the Waterfront. Their chief functions are to run errands and answer the telephone (Sinatra's telephone is never still, even though he gets a new unlisted number on the average of once a month; he gets new ones so often that he sometimes forgets them himself, which angers him). This entourage forms a near impenetrable wall between Sinatra and people who are trying to get to see him. Even his business managers, Lefkowitz and Berke, have difficulty in getting him on the telephone. "Frenk ain't heah," a low, ominous voice says to all callers, even though Sinatra's voice may be heard plainly in the background. "Frenk's sick. Frenk's wit de doc-tuh."

When Look did a three-part story on what makes Frankie run, the gist of which seemed to be that he required the services of a first-rate headshrinker, he hit them with a $2 million suit for slander. The lawsuit for slander later was withdrawn and a test case for invasion of privacy substituted. It will be some time before it comes into court. He feels that no one has the right to pry into his personal life, and the concept of Sinatra as a skinny dragon, breathing fire and noxious fumes, has been perpetuated largely by reporters who resent this attitude.

Frankie goes his own route. It is the route of the large appetite, the unchecked desires, the chase. His behavior recently in Madison, Indiana, was typical. MGM was on location for Some Came Running, James Jones' latest marathon, and Frankie was playing Dave Hirsh, the sad-eyed ne'er-do-well who makes a little love and catches a little bullet. He balked at much of the direction of Vincente Minnelli, a top director with Lust for Life and Gigi to his credit. A fellow actor commented: "It's too bad he won't listen to Minnelli. Minnelli could give him a new dimension." But Frankie isn't looking for a new dimension. He rewrote whole scenes, even talked Minnelli into changing the ending so that the heroine catches the bullet. At night, he retreated to a rented house atop a hill and indulged his insatiabilities. While his cronies joined him in shifts, he paced back and forth till dawn, drinking, trading jokes, talking long-distance with pals like Rocky Marciano and Leo Durocher, playing gin rummy, arguing, visiting with girls who dropped in from all points of the compass, cursing the mothering hot summer weather. At week's end he was off to Newport, Kentucky, for an orgy of blackjack, craps, Jack Daniel's, beer and broads. "He can't go on like this," said another member of the cast. "That much liquor and that many women would kill a man twice his size."

And what does Frank Sinatra have to show for all the suffering, striving and shenanigans? All it has profitted him is total pre-eminence in his field, the respect of most everyone connected with music and acting, and a personal net income this year of close to $2 million before taxes – probably an all-time high for a show-business personality.

Plus, of course, the romantic adulation that has made him the number one love god of our time. And where does the love god go from here? To a love goddess, perhaps. Over the big drink, in France, they have one called Brigitte. The publicists proclaim that Frankie and BB have signed their names to a contract requiring them to co-star in something called Paris at Night. What happens when these two volatile substances mingle in the same crucible, when The Voice meets The Broad of Broads? The concept is enough to make Olympus tremble, the skies darken, the oceans churn, and to knock the whole world flat on its collective clyde.