How Robert DeNiro helped create one of Frank Sinatra’s biggest hits: “We walked out of there highly insulted”
Frank Sinatra had an impressively long career, and even though he doesn’t enjoy the enduring cool factor of John Lennon or Bob Dylan, it’s impossible to deny that his music remains ubiquitous. Walk into a supermarket or a baseball game in New York and you’re bound to hear those silky vocals at some point.
During his lengthy career, Sinatra dominated the airwaves. For decades, he released classic after classic, from ‘Stardust’ in 1940 to ‘I’ve Got the World on a String’ in 1956 to ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ in 1964. However, he saved one of his greatest and most enduring hits for last. In 1980, he released ‘New York, New York,’ an anthem to the city that never sleeps that has become about as omnipresent as the American flag.
What many people do not know is that if it weren’t for Robert De Niro, the soundtrack to Manhattan living would not exist. Cinephiles might know that De Niro starred in Martin Scorsese’s 1977 musical New York, New York and that it flopped spectacularly at the box office. Riding high on the success of Taxi Driver, the director felt that he had another hit on his hands, but the film failed to connect with audiences, possibly because they weren’t expecting a documentary-style musical from the team who brought them Travis Bickle.
Liza Minnelli and De Niro play up-and-coming entertainers in the film who become romantically entangled, and it is Minnelli who sings ‘New York, New York’ to a rapturous audience. The song was composed by John Kander with lyrics by Fred Ebb, the duo who wrote the other songs on the soundtrack. When they met with Scorsese and De Niro, Kander and Webb were lavished with praise, at least until the conversation turned to ‘New York, New York.’
“All of a sudden, as we were wrapping ourselves in congratulations, we saw De Niro, who was sitting on a couch sort of off in the distance, gesture to Marty,” Kander said in an interview with NPR in 2002. “They took one of their famous Italian walks away from us,” Ebb remembered, “And we knew they were dissing the song.”
Sure enough, when they returned, Scorsese asked the duo if they would mind starting the song over from scratch. “Actually, Scorsese put it that ‘De Niro thinks…'” Kander said. “So it was all clearly coming from him. And we walked out of there highly insulted that some actor was going to tell us how to write a song.”
They didn’t have much of a choice, though. Scorsese was in charge, and they had to do whatever he told them, even if it was coming from a non-musical actor. “I think we wrote it in very short time and in great anger,” Kander said, though both men agreed that it turned out to be to their benefit. The new song they wrote turned out to be one of the most enduring classics of the era, even if it didn’t become a hit until Sinatra recorded it three years later.
As far as Kander and Ebb are concerned, Ol’ Blue Eyes took some liberties. “What he did was make mistakes,” Kander said. Most notably, he added that lyrical crescendo “A #1,” which Ebb dislikes. But Sinatra did turn the song into a stone-cold classic, and the song, in turn, gave him his final Top 40 hit. He even sang it with Minnelli as a duet on multiple occasions.
