Writing Grandissimo, I tried to imagine what the movie of the book would look like, and then did my best to write the book as close to that as I could. Of course, part of any movie is the soundtrack, so the big question I had for myself was, what would the Grandissimo movie soundtrack sound like?
This morning I put together a little Spotify playlist to share with you some songs I think would fit on the book’s soundtrack:
If you don’t have a player embedded there, this link will take you to my playlist, “Inspired by Grandissimo.”
There are some points where the music tracks very close to the book. If you’re reading chapter one, start at the beginning. Al Hirt’s version of “Music to Watch Girls By” should get you in the vibe of the Fontainebleau pool circa 1957 (I know the song was released several years later, but it still thematically captures that moment so well I had to keep it.
The next few songs are hits from the summer of 1957, which is when chapter 1 takes place. These are just to give us a feeling for what music would have been playing as the action’s unfolding.
“Tears on My Pillow” skips ahead a few months, and everything through “Volare” captures the mood of chapter 2. “Wives and Lovers” is a foreshadowing of Sarno’s married life.
Sarno first visits Las Vegas in February 1963, meets Robert Goulet, and gets the idea for a fantastic casino hotel. What better song for all that than “The Impossible Dream?” Doris Day shows up, mostly because of her business relationship with Sarno.
We then skip ahead to the summer of 1966, as Sarno and others are struggling to get Caesars Palace built. Herb Alpert’s “The Work Song” is dedicated without irony to Stuart Mason and all the people who physically built the place. The next few songs are some of the top hits of August, 1966, the month that Caesars opened.
The book shares the events behind Sinatra’s move to Caesars Palace, so the Chairman makes an appearance with “Street of Dreams,” recorded before his departure from the Sands.
Then there’s another move forward, this time to autumn 1968, as Sarno is getting ready to open Circus Circus, with more top hits. Both “Fire” and “Girl Watcher” attempt to sonically recreate the wild ruckus of Sarno’s circus casino.
The next few songs are from the early 1970s, and are intended to evoke some of Sarno’s difficulties and triumphs in those years. “Killer Queen” might have been about some of the women Sarno was spending time with in those days. “Bungle in the Jungle” and “Fight the Power” evoke his 1974-5 IRS bribery case and “The United States v. Jay Sarno” in different ways.
Sarno then has another dream—build the world’s biggest hotel and casino. “Magic” is era-appropriate, and “Fortissimo” by Robert Goulet is the closest I could get to “Grandissimo,” and it seems right. “Sweet Talkin’ Woman” is, again, about a woman Sarno might have met.
“Baker Street” was on the charts about the time that Sarno started running into real difficulties with Grandissimo, and it really fits the mood of those years. The next few songs get perhaps a little nostalgic, as Sarno looks back on his life while his dream remains out of reach. “Against All Odds” and “Time After Time” were on the charts in the months before Sarno’s death, and both of them speak in different ways about what he might have said to those around him at that time.
“Girl Gone Bad,” I sincerely hope, conveys the atmosphere of his last night at Caesars Palace and who he spent it with. Those who have read the book will know.
Last shot of the movie, at least in my head, is a pull back from a speeding ambulance crossing the Strip to the Caesars fountains then a fade to black. The music I head playing as the credits roll is first Richie Havens’ recording of “A Very Good Year,” which perfectly sums up what Jay Sarno might have said about his life, followed by “Can’t Get It Out of My Head,” which resonates in a perfectly ironic way with Sarno’s life. The song seems to me to be about a frustrated man with a vision of Aphrodite that he’s unable to shake. Sarno had that vision, and instead of just dreaming about beauty, he did something to surround himself with it.
So if you want to hear the music inside of the head of the guy who wrote the book, check out “Inspired by Grandissimo.”
