Frank: The Voice (38 page)

Sinatra sings the National Anthem with Lower East Side kids at a UN Day ceremony, 1950. Frank’s commitment to tolerance was genuine and profound.
(photo credit 15.2)

Sinatra and Axel Stordahl, CBS radio broadcast, 1940s. Frank couldn’t read a note of music but knew precisely what he wanted at all times.
(photo credit 16.1)

F
rank began 1945 by ending his contract for Lucky Strike’s
Your Hit Parade
. The decision wasn’t his. The show’s producer, George Washington Hill—the flinty-eyed old tobacco peddler whose grand achievement in life had been the marketing of cigarettes to women—had wiped his hands of Sinatra when the troublesome singer had the temerity not only to ask for a raise but also to demand the show be moved to the West Coast. In Frank’s place, Hill hired the opera singer
Lawrence Tibbett—at $700 a week more than Sinatra had been earning. Still: no Mediterranean blood; much less trouble.

Sinatra too knew how to wipe his hands of someone. The big drawback of
Your Hit Parade
had been that he was only the show’s co-star; the chief benefit had been to keep his voice and his name out there. He had plenty of other ways to do that, including his other radio show,
Frank Sinatra in Person
, which had now switched sponsors from Vimms to Max Factor and was based in Los Angeles.

Then, thank God, there were records again—with musicians. Sinatra spent much of the following year on a white-hot streak of recording for Columbia: an average of one session per month in Hollywood and New York, forty sides in all. The songs ranged from the timelessly sublime (“Where or When,” “If I Loved You,” “These Foolish Things,” “You Go to My Head,” “Why Shouldn’t I?”) to the schmaltzy and quickly dated (“Full Moon and Empty Arms,” “Homesick, That’s All,” “The Moon Was Yellow”) to the merely odd (“Jesus Is a Rock in a Weary Land,” “My Shawl,” “Old School Teacher”). Crosby, too, had experimented with offbeat material, Latin and gospel numbers. It was safe: the golden age of American popular songwriting was still alive. The vein, Frank believed, would never run out.

In August he cut—for the third time in a year!—a somewhat less than golden number, one whose lyrics, legend had it, Phil Silvers had dashed off in twenty minutes at a party and presented to Sinatra as a gift for Little Nancy’s fourth birthday: “Nancy (with the Laughing Face).”

When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. In point of fact, Silvers did dash off just such a lyric at a party, and Jimmy Van Heusen—a great one for sitting down at the piano at parties—came up with a winsome tune to go along with it. But the song was originally titled “
Bessie
(with the Laughing Face),” in honor of Johnny Burke’s
wife, whom Silvers had reduced to giggles with one of his patented one-liners. Upon further consideration, though, Silvers and Van Heusen (who always had a sharp eye for ingratiating himself with the friend he would come to call the Monster) weighed the benefits of pleasing Bessie Burke against those of pleasing Frank Sinatra and wisely opted for the latter. The result was, even if saccharine, a big hit for Sinatra and a very nice birthday present for the little girl, to whom Chester, with superbly politic flair, assigned his songwriter royalties.

Some wonder why Frank recorded this number three times in the space of a year. He may have done it out of extreme love for his daughter and wife (for, after all, the song could be construed both paternally and amorously); he may have been trying to perfect it; or there might have been another reason. On that hot August afternoon in Hollywood, Sinatra might have been recording the song as an act of atonement, for he was behaving very badly that year and things were not going at all well at home.

He was in love. In fact, he was always in love. He could barely sing a song without feeling that giddy feeling for one girl or another. (In truth, the feeling itself counted far more than the girl.) This time, though, it was pretty serious. Sinatra had known Marilyn Maxwell since 1939, when he was with Harry James and she was an eighteen-year-old singer (alongside Perry Como) with the bandleader Ted Weems, using her real first name, Marvel. She and Frank ran into each other all over the map as their respective bands crisscrossed the country; she was one of the first people to advise him to go out on his own.

As for her given name, it was corny, but only slightly. She was a marvel: a stunning, corn-fed Iowa girl, bottle blond, with a body to kill for, a real brain in her head, and a truly sweet disposition. Marilyn was
nice
, and that was what made it so hard when she and Frank reconnected at Metro (where she had just wrapped
Lost in a Harem
, with Abbott and Costello). In Hollywood he picked up and threw away girls like Kleenex, and this one simply wasn’t disposable, something about her genuineness got him where he lived.

At 1051 Valley Spring Lane, where various Barbato relatives were
trooping in and out at all hours of the day, little romantic was happening. Nancy’s sister Tina was still in residence, answering fan mail, and now the other sisters and their families had moved west, too, as had Mike and Jennie Barbato, who were in the process of building a house in Glendale. Somebody was always around, having a meal, a cup of coffee. It was all-Barbato, all the time, and Frank had had it. His wife had company, fine; but he had no wife. Between recording and seeing his agents and taking meetings at the studio and going out on the town, he barely appeared at the house. When he did, it was to stalk in at four or five or six in the morning, sleep till 1:00 p.m., have his breakfast served by the maid, then stalk out again. On the rare occasions when he and Nancy did have an extended conversation, it was either about his business (to which she paid close attention) or about her family (to which he objected strenuously). It seemed they were fighting all the time these days.

The hell of it was that she was still in love with him. She
knew
him: to her, he was still the boy with the ukulele who had courted her down the shore so long ago. Every once in a while, when the clouds lifted for a second and he smiled, she could see that boy. She knew about the other women, and she hated it, but what could she do? She had asked Frank to be discreet, but now they were in Hollywood, capital of indiscretion, where the night and the day had a thousand eyes. He was so cold lately: she knew exactly what was going on.

But what could she do about it?

It went without saying that when Frank went out, he went out without her. Once he left the house, he never wanted for company. Sanicola and Silvani were with him at all times, to fend off the riffraff; and he could always summon the posse—Cahn, Stordahl, Styne, Silvers, Chester. Other stars might create a stir when they walked into a joint, but no one else walked in with such a retinue. One blossom-heavy night in May 1945, Sinatra and company stopped by Preston Sturges’s restaurant, the Players, on Sunset across from the Garden of Allah. There, in a banquette near the front door, sat a man
Frank genuinely idolized, Humphrey Bogart, with his beautiful young bride, Betty Bacall.

Sinatra took immediate notice of Bacall: Bogart’s fourth wife was just twenty, with lazily insinuating feline eyes, voluptuous lips, and perfect skin. She smiled at Sinatra, he smiled back at her, and Bogart took it all in. He was jealous—what man wouldn’t be?—but he also wore an air of carefully maintained irony. He was a world-weary forty-five years old, with a rapidly receding hairline, bags under his eyes, and a perpetual cigarette between nicotine-stained fingers. Humphrey Bogart looked at Frank Sinatra and, smiling that wolfish smile, said, “
They tell me you have a voice that makes girls faint. Make me faint.”

Frank grinned. The world’s toughest tough guy was giving him the full treatment. He accepted the compliment. “I’m taking the week off,” he told Bogart.

Bogart liked his sand, asked him to sit down for a minute and have a drink.

But there were other nights when Sinatra was out with Marilyn—or, since she was, after all, married (for whatever that was worth in Hollywood), any one of a dozen other girls, at Ciro’s, the Trocadero, Mocambo—and Hedda and Louella and their colleagues had to write
something
. “
What blazing new swoon crooner has been seen night clubbing with a different starlet every night?” ran one blind item. Another: “Wonder if the wonder boy of hit records tells his wife where he goes after dark.”

In a small town, a company town, Wonder Boy’s wife was all too aware, and it was killing her inside, but what could she do?

She did her best. In a land of extreme, overbearing beauty, Nancy Barbato Sinatra of Jersey City was mousy at worst, merely lovely at best. She did her best. She had more work done on her teeth, and, as much as she hated spending all that money (she could never forget the days when she’d slaved as a secretary at American Type Founders in Elizabeth),
Nancy bought some Jean Louis gowns for those rare occasions when he took her out. She tried to look as good as she possibly could, but deep down she knew she was Jersey City and always would be. She was both ashamed of it and proud. She took care of her babies, she talked for hours with her mother and sisters, and—having taken the driving lessons but still unwilling to scratch the new Cadillac convertible—she tooled around town doing errands in the other new car he’d bought her, a big Chrysler station wagon. She was quite a sight in it. Petite as she was (a little taller than Dolly, but not much), Nancy could barely see over the steering wheel without sitting on a pillow.

She also took care of his business. In a handwritten letter to Manie Sacks, undated, on heavy white stationery with “FRANK SINATRA” embossed in blue across the top, she expressed concern for the record executive’s health, noted that she was returning (for unexplained reasons) a check of his, passed along household news about the children’s health and schooling (oddly, strikingly, referring to Frankie as Francis Emanuel
¹
), and then came to the point. Frank was beginning a New York theater stand (probably the Paramount), and she asked Manie’s help in seeing that he got his rest. “I am depending on you to watch him,” she wrote, “for you know how Frank likes to make the spots … and stay out late talking.”

It would take a heart of stone not to melt.
I am depending on you to watch him. Frank likes to make the spots and stay out late talking
. Talking. Poor Nancy! Poor Manie!

Frank Sinatra didn’t have a heart of stone, but rather, one that was divided into a million chambers. He knew all too well how his wife felt, yet he could not change. Nancy was going thirty miles an hour; Frank was moving at the speed of sound. Even while he slept, his mind churned, calculating the possibilities: Metro. Columbia. Radio. Theater. Marilyn. Lana. Betty. Jean. Jane.

The possibilities were infinite, and he never stopped. He darted back and forth between the two coasts like a hummingbird. In February he reported, yet again, to his draft board in Jersey City, playing out
the unfunny comedy a little further, getting reclassified yet again, to 2-A, which meant he was not only physically unfit to serve but also employed in an occupation “
necessary to the national health, safety, and interest.”
IS CROONING ESSENTIAL? one headline asked. And then, on March 5, the draft board announced it had all been a mistake, that 4-F was the real classification. The headlines and editorials fulminated some more … but Sinatra was too fast for them. On March 6, he was back in the studio in Hollywood, recording four more numbers, including a Norman Rockwell poster of a tune Gordon Jenkins called “Homesick, That’s All”: