Pepperoni, vino, and Christie Brinkley: The moment Billy Joel and Frank Sinatra almost collaborated
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that two heavyweights of the New York songbook came close to a collaboration.
Billy Joel feels tethered to popular music’s old world, no matter the chart trends around him. Burnishing his solo career in earnest via the street-level tales of urban melancholy on The Stranger, through the new wave’s bristle on the spiky Glass Houses and ending the 1980s on the pop rock bluster of Storm Front, the ‘Piano Man’ always anchored his shifting guises with an evident veneration for the old masters.
A namecheck of one of his hometown’s musical ambassadors nearly prompted some hallowed studio time between the two. In an earlier interview, Joel had likened swing legend and Rat Pack leader Frank Sinatra’s voice as akin to a saxophone player’s phrasing, prompting a letter of gratitude thanking Joel for the kind compliment. Good enough, but then came the offer that sent Joel’s nerves racing: “If you ever have 16-bars lying around, send ‘em to me.”
This was a bona fide call to pen a tune for the voice behind ‘My Way’, ‘Fly Me To The Moon’, and the immortal ‘Theme From New York, New York’. Joel’s lyrics had found their way on a Sinatra record before, ‘Just the Way You Are’ featured on the contemporary disc of 1980’s Trilogy: Past Present Future triple LP, but never had an original been penned. While it’s not entirely clear when the proposition was made, Joel managed to cross paths with ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’ in person when the two played high-profile shows in Australia.
There’s contention between the dates, as Sinatra played Sydney Entertainment Centre in March 1991 while the multiple dates performed by Joel as part of the Storm Front Tour wrapped up in February, but in any case, a meeting was had at the city’s luxury Park Hyatt hotel following the crooner’s Brisbane show.
It was Sinatra’s wife, Barbara, who invited Joel and his then partner, Christie Brinkley, to the lobby laid out with the finest Italian banquet of wine, pepperoni and all the pasta you’d want.
It turned out, however, that Sinatra had played a bad show and carried a black cloud with him back to the Sydney hotel. Upon entering the lobby and seeing Joel and Brinkley amid the greeting company, Sinatra reportedly let out a narked “Who the hell are these people?”, prompting the Sinatras to argue in another room while Joel’s welcome evaporated in a short time.
Second time’s a charm, right? The next night, Joel and his wife made their way to the hotel bar and spotted a rather sunnier Sinatra raising the room’s spirits with a drink and a song, even adlibbing a crooning number to the name of “Christine Brinkley” as they introduced themselves again. While the reception was warmer and some form of rapport was had, Joel was no closer to nailing that glowing song deal.
It would never come to be, with Sinatra passing away in 1998, but it was clear there stood a mutual affection. When Sinatra’s acceptance speech for the Grammy Legend Award in 1994 was cut short for a commercial break, Joel expressed his solidarity with the slighted swing legend by stopping short his performance of ‘River of Dreams’, holding his watch aloft and announcing “valuable advertising time going by” to the whoop and cheer of the crowd.
