Frank: The Voice (104 page)

In the meantime, Frank had brought record-breaking crowds to the Copa Room. True, these were still early days in Vegas—there were
only seven hotels on the Strip; the tumbleweeds blew among them. The Sands had been open less than a year; the paint was barely dry. But a pattern had been set, thanks in no small part to the heat of
From Here to Eternity:
suddenly, in this two-horse town, Sinatra meant excitement, excitement meant crowds, crowds meant gambling, and gambling meant money for the casinos, especially the one where Frank was playing. Ten years later, Billy Wilder summed up the phenomenon: “
When Sinatra is in Las Vegas, there is a certain electricity permeating the air. It’s like Mack the Knife is in town, and the action is starting.”

In a very real way, Sinatra built Vegas: not only was he present at the creation, but he was responsible for it. And the town’s true owners—Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello and Joe Adonis and Doc Stacher—wanted him to feel welcome, to come back again and again, and to bring all those lovely crowds with him. “
The object was to get him to perform there,” Stacher said, “because there’s no bigger draw in Las Vegas. When Frankie was performing, the hotel really filled up.” The Sands’s real owners wanted Frank to own a piece of the place, 2 percent, and they wanted it badly enough that they were glad to front him the money, a mere $54,000. The problem was the Nevada Tax Commission, which smelled a New York or Miami rat and used Sinatra’s difficulties with the Internal Revenue Service as a club to beat him with.

The equity idea had first come up in March; Nevada newspapers had inveighed against it; the tax commission had tabled it. Now, however, for whatever reason, the wheel had turned. On October 31, Frank went before the commission, in Carson City, to plead his case, and though one out of the state’s seven commissioners remained adamantly opposed,
⁴
wondering yet again why the $54,000 Sinatra supposedly had in hand shouldn’t go straight to the IRS, the matter was put to a vote and he got his gambling license.

When he left the commission, the reporters were waiting, but it wasn’t gaming licensure they wanted to discuss.

“
Frank! Is your marriage to Ava over?”

He squinted behind his sunglasses. “I guess it’s over if that’s what she says.”

“How do you feel about it?”

A long pause while Frank tried to think how he felt about something in whose reality he did not believe. “Well, it’s very sad,” he finally said. “It’s tragic. I feel very badly about it.”

“What about the rumors that you might get back together with Nancy?”

He waved the question off as he might have waved off a pesky housefly. Sanicola opened the car door for him and he got in.

In Los Angeles, at exactly the same time, a United Press reporter who had managed to get the private number at 320 North Carolwood was asking the same question of Frank’s ex-wife.

“
There is positively no chance of a reconciliation,” she said. “All the rumors about Mr. Sinatra and me are false.” She slammed down the phone and leaned on the kitchen counter for support, staring out the window for a long time.

Frank flew back to Las Vegas and, that night, hosted a Halloween party at the Sands. The next day, the New York papers carried an Associated Press photograph of the host standing between two chorus girls, wearing a clown costume. If his life was a kind of opera, at the moment it was
Pagliacci
.

Frank, hairline headed north, with the two Eddies: Cantor and Fisher.
Colgate Comedy Hour
, November 29, 1953. Sinatra’s cuff conceals the bandages on his left wrist, the result of a suicide attempt two weeks before.
(photo credit 37.1)

H
e’d been singing to many audiences, good, bad, and indifferent, over the past six months, but the songs he’d sung had shimmered out into the air and vanished: over that tumultuous period he hadn’t committed a single tune to posterity. This all changed on Thursday, November 5, when Frank returned to Capitol’s Melrose studios, shook hands with Nelson Riddle and Voyle Gilmore, and began recording
what would become his first album for the label,
Songs for Young Lovers
.

There were only eleven musicians in Studio C that night: two reeds, four strings, piano, guitar, bass, drums, and harp. No brass. George Siravo, not Riddle, had written the arrangements, months before, for the even more stripped-down bands (eight players) that accompanied Sinatra at the 500 Club, the Riviera, and the Sands. On this night, Riddle was there only to conduct, a role he never had much taste for. But it was Sinatra, and Nelson was glad to receive Frank’s warm greeting: he was now a known quantity.

Nelson Riddle heard, from the moment he lowered his baton, that something was different—that this was not the same Sinatra he’d recorded with the previous May. During that last session, Frank had sung beautifully but politely over the lushly orchestrated strings, muffling the promise of the great “I’ve Got the World on a String” he’d recorded just two days before. Now he fulfilled that promise. This time, with only half the number of musicians he’d had in May (and just four fiddlers rather than nine), his voice was more exposed. The band was hipper—Allan Reuss’s electric guitar imparted a 1950s-modern sound on some numbers—and the songs were better: two Gershwins (“A Foggy Day” and “They Can’t Take That Away from Me”), a Rodgers and Hart (“My Funny Valentine”), and Tom Adair and Matt Dennis’s lovely (and gorgeously titled) “Violets for Your Furs.”

This time, coming out from the protective cover of the orchestral backing, Sinatra was astonishing. On the first song, “A Foggy Day,” he established dominance. The voice was as magnificent as ever, but now he showed a rhythmic ease, a sense of play, that he hadn’t shown since he’d recorded the jazz-trio throwaways “That’s How Much I Love You” and “You Can Take My Word for It, Baby,” and his great “Sweet Lorraine,” with the Metronome All-Stars, in 1946. His tossed-off, Hoboken-bratty lyrical improvisations (“I viewed the morning with much alarm/The British Museum—it lost its charm”) showed the world that while Ira Gershwin might be Ira Gershwin, Sinatra was Sinatra.

He’d been loose in 1946 and he was loose now, but with a new component added: maturity. This year Frank had been through the crucible, emotionally and professionally. His “Foggy Day,” from pensive verse (“
I was a stranger in the city …”) to joyous chorus, is an autobiography in miniature, a masterpiece of phrasing forged from Sinatra’s inseparably intertwined life and art.

Frank had always been in impatient command in a recording studio—even with Mitch Miller. Nelson Riddle recalled: “
If I wasn’t conducting the orchestra to his liking, he’d shove me out of the way and take over. If he asked for diminuendo from the orchestra and didn’t get it immediately, he’d take things into his own hands and you can believe that they damn well played softer for him than they did for me.”

On “World on a String,” Frank had brought a new kind of authority to the music itself. On “Foggy Day,” he once more took charge, but with a chastened undertone. “
Ava taught him how to sing a torch song,” Riddle would say later. In this “Foggy Day,” you can feel Frank and Ava’s actual agonies and ecstasies in the real London, just three months before. His voice has such a plaintive tremolo that you worry for his emotional well-being. On the song’s ultimate line, “and in foggy London town the sun was shining everywhere,” Frank sings the word “shining” not once, not twice, but
five
times in a row—sings it so passionately that you can feel the deep dark in back of the sunlight.

The next night he recorded four more songs, and one of them, the first—a pretty Burke–Van Heusen tune called “Like Someone in Love”—had been arranged by Riddle. Siravo’s charts were lovely, but this orchestration, with its Debussy/Ravel-esque flute passages (the flute would soon become a Riddle signature), was something special: a gift from one lover of impressionism to another, and a promise of more complex beauty to come.

Saturday night, November 7, wasn’t just the loneliest night of the week, as Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne’s great song had it, but the loneliest of
Sinatra’s life: his second wedding anniversary, with his wife nowhere in sight. Accordingly, when Jimmy Van Heusen—Frank’s master of revels, and the champ at getting him to Forget—picked him up at Beverly Glen, he announced in his wry voice that they were going to get Frank laid. But good. He was as good as his word.

The next night Chester accompanied Sinatra to the El Capitan Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, where Frank was to do a guest spot on
The Colgate Comedy Hour
, with his old pal Jimmy Durante. If Frank was suffering over Ava, he hid it well, clowning it up with the Schnozzola, who kept interrupting him whenever he tried to sing—especially when he tried to sing “From Here to Eternity.” The two did a musical quiz-show skit together; they sang a duet about how all comedians want to be singers and all singers want to be comedians. Frank even warbled the Halo Shampoo jingle, “Halo, Everybody, Halo.”

Maybe he was able to feign good spirits so convincingly because he’d found a pleasant distraction: while he sang the jingle, a blond twenty-two-year-old beauty-pageant winner from North Dakota named Angeline Brown Dickinson smiled and showed off her silky tresses for the camera. Later, she and Frank—and then she and Frank and Jimmy—struck up a conversation backstage. Angie Dickinson was very young and, as she remembered vividly many years later, “bursting with awe” at being in Sinatra’s presence. She had a humorous, easygoing presence about her that he liked a lot. She was witty, but not caustic; she knew how to talk, but she knew how to listen, too. It turned out she was married in an informal sort of way, yet she was also an extremely practical girl, and her sights were set firmly on Hollywood. Chester asked her for her number—for Frank, of course—and of course she gave it to him.