From Hollywood to Ayr: the fall from grace that led to Frank Sinatra squandering a Scottish beach town
On a pavilion on the west coast of Scotland, Frank Sinatra once came to town. This flash of Hollywood would have usually been an excitement, except he barely drew a few hundred people. “Where did it all go wrong?” he thought.
There was no easy way of saying that the early 1950s were undeniably the worst point in the Chairman of the Board’s storied career. Where Sinatramania had taken over the world in the previous decade, and the bobby soxers were falling at his feet, the simple truth was that those teenage girls had now grown up, and their screaming adoration had faded.
That left Sinatra in a somewhat sticky situation, where he was no longer the hero of all stage and screen, and forced to grapple with not only his own sense of bashed ego, but the fact that, very shortly, he may not have had a career at all. The stress took a toll – from his recordings to his relationships, the sparkle was gone.
Having been dropped by Columbia Records in 1952, Sinatra then found himself washed up, quite literally, in the Scottish beach town of Ayr, on a tour of much smaller stages in a last-ditched attempt to revive his seemingly flatlined hopes of success. If his old mirages of glory weren’t enough heartbreak to deal with, he then looked out to the crowd at the Green’s Playhouse to find hardly anybody there.
It was worth remembering how public opinion had soured towards Ol’ Blue Eyes when it had recently emerged at that point that he was having an affair with Ava Gardner, leaving the picture-perfect power couple image of him and Nancy crumbling in pieces. He was the good guy gone bad, the scandal-wrought former star. There was no redemption from that.
But maybe that disastrous European tour, where his appearance in Ayr was far from the only place where he drew very meagre audiences, as in Sinatra’s typical fashion, he didn’t go down without a fight. He had managed to bag a deal with Capitol Records and, without realising it at the time, he performed in the Scottish beach town in July 1953; he was only a month away from the film that would change his fortunes forever.
When From Here to Eternity hit the silver screen the following month with Sinatra in the supporting role, it was suddenly as if all the stress and turmoil of the years just gone by had completely melted away. With a ‘Best Supporting Actor’ Oscar to his name and a career revitalised, he never had to look back on Ayr.
“I’m back, baby, I’m back!” Sinatra declared in the studio, finally confident once again that everything he had worked for wasn’t about to go down the drain. Was it any surprise, though, that the crooner rarely returned to Scotland after that, and when he did, in 1990, he demanded a stadium? Anything less would have brought back bad memories.
As such, you could see Sinatra’s trip to Ayr in the summer of 1953 as nothing more than a culmination of a blip in the road, a mere hurdle that he had a bit of trouble jumping for a time but got there in the end. There was no denying, however, that returning him to a local playhouse with only a few hundred people in attendance would send shivers down his spine until the day he died.
