I was at Frank Sinatra’s house, the one in the southern California desert. It was a complex, a compound, with a multi-story mansion and acres of well-sprinkled lawns. Many of the rooms had no furniture, as the Chairman of the Board typically only occupied a handful of rooms in the fortress and the rest of them, like the “record room” we were in now, didn’t warrant chairs or cushions or lamps or end tables. So here we are, Frank’s sitting in the middle of the unfurnished room cross-legged on the floor like an Indian in front of a frontier fire, me standing in an awkward position off to the side as if Sinatra’s the pope and I’m waiting for some sort of final blessing. The room was much larger than the typical three-car garage and a common shelf, three feet from the ceiling, encircled the entire room. On those shelves, the entire way around, were antique wooden crates filled with Sinatra albums, there had to be thousands of them. Like they have in an old university library there was a somewhat rickety wooden ladder on wheels. It was linked with bronze brass rings to a pewter pipe that protruded from just under the shelf. The ladder thereby was affixed to a track, and any brave lad who wanted access to the vinyl pressings in the wooden boxes could complete a full circuit.

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