Singing Sinatra, Playing Jazz for Valentine's Day

No one, but no one, sings love like Old Blue Eyes. Despite his own roller coaster of romance , Frank Sinatra is the voice of love for many listeners. His story is told, most recently in Frank: The Voice, by South Orange native and CHS grad James Kaplan. Kaplan will be speaking at Words on Saturday night, with music by Sarah Partridge, making for a unique Valentine's Day celebration. 

Kaplan considers Sinatra an ideal subject for a Garden State writer or reader. As he told Patch,  "I heard the Jersey in his voice as a very familiar sound," says Kaplan, who moved to South Orange as a young child and attended Montrose School, the brand-new South Orange Junior High School, and Columbia High School.  "Boundaries are porous in New Jersey," he explains. "If you live in South Orange, you know Maplewood, Irvington and Newark. Every place in New Jersey flows into another. This consanguity among places means that Sinatra knew South Orange, in one way or another."

South Orange inspired the setting for one of Kaplan's earlier works, a novel entitled Two Guys from Verona. He admits that the "bones of that landscape" are those of South Orange. In aninterview with Charlie Rose, Kaplan explained that the fictional Verona describes, "My suburbs as I experienced them, as I knew them growing up."

Kaplan's South Orange was bounded on the west by Gruning's, then located at the edge of the Reservation.  Kaplan was a loyal library patron, recalling fondly the glass floors in the Connett Building. "It was a wonderful old building," he remembers.

Kaplan also recalls time spent at Flood's Hill, Cameron Field, and the Baird Center. However, said Kaplan, though some landmarks remain, the community has changed.

"We moved from Pennsylvania in the late 1950s," he explains. "South Orange was in transition, still small, idyllic and poky." The Village was in the midst of population growth and change, notes Kaplan, including an influx of Jewish residents.

His education began at Montrose, and Kaplan remembers, "exactly what the halls looked like." At South Orange Junior High School, which was newly-opened, Kaplan saw "fantastic, near Broadway-quality" student musicals. He recalls seeing Joel Fisher, who invented Ultimate Frisbee before becoming a legendary Hollywood producer and actor, on stage at South Orange Junior High.

At Columbia, Kaplan studied English with Don Hamingson, the influential teacher who is remembered each year with the Literary Showcase named for him. Kaplan remembers Hamingson as "a brilliant, very tough teacher." While Kaplan wrote seriously before he knew Hamingson, he credits the teacher with making English class "inspiring and exciting," comparable to work he did later in college.

Kaplan attended New York University and graduated from Wesleyan University with a degree in studio art. After graduation, he studied painting at the New York Studio School in Greenwich Village. He sold his first story to The New Yorker Magazine at age 23, and his written steadily since, including several years as a screenwriter for Warner Brothers. His name is family to readers of many magazines, as he profiled many notable people in the pages of Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly, New York Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and The New Yorker.

His books include the 1989 Pearl's Progress, 1994's The Airport: Terminal Nights and Runway Days at John F. Kennedy International, Two Guys from Verona: A Novel of Suburbia, published in 1998, as well as works co-authored with Jerry Lewis and John McEnroe.

Frank: The Voice, published in November of this year, brings James Kaplan, who now lives in Westchester, back to Jersey and close to home. He describes memories of South Orange as a "pastiche" of the pool, basketball at Baird, watching tennis at Orange Lawn. Kaplan laughs. "Nostalgia makes it all look great."

The evening includes admission for two, live jazz, light refreshments, conversation with the author, and a signed copy of Frank: The Voice. 

Find out more here or buy tickets here.