Frank: The Voice (44 page)

Sinatra had ears, and he heard.

Also starting in the early 1940s, Sammy Cahn began scouting for him. “
I take great pride in the fact that I introduced Frank to a lot of the great, great songs,” he told Friedwald. He would continue to do so throughout their long professional relationship. But Frank was a lightning-fast learner, and the two geniuses behind his first album, which was issued in March 1946 and consisted almost entirely of what would come to be called standards, were Sinatra himself and the warm businessman Manie Sacks.

As previously noted, Frank recorded prodigiously in 1945. He committed to disc “Where or When” and “All the Things You Are” and “If I Loved You,” and he also recorded “Mighty Lak’ a Rose” and “Lily Belle” and “My Shawl,” as well as a couple of dozen other mostly forgotten tunes. Yet in two sessions—one on July 30 in Hollywood, one on
December 7 in New York—he recorded eight numbers, six of which were masterpieces of songwriting, and these eight songs became the four discs of Columbia Set C-112,
The Voice of Frank Sinatra
. It was not only Frank’s first album but also the first thematic album of popular music available to the American public.
²

It was a time when Frank Sinatra’s singing could be heard profusely, on the radio or in live performance or on shellac 78-rpm discs; yet it was also a time when the very notion of a Frank Sinatra album—indeed, of a phonograph album period—was new and exotic. An
album
was what you put stamps or family photos or butterflies in. Yet now you could buy a wide, flat, heavy box with four records inside, with Sinatra’s curly-haired, red-bow-tied, grinning image on the 1940s-Moderne cover (dancing white, yellow, and black ellipses on a field of teal; a hint of Miró and Calder), selling for the not inconsiderable retail price of $2.50, the equivalent of $30 today. And the people bought it. By the tens of thousands. Canny businessman that he was, Sacks had paid attention to Frank’s masterly (and unprecedented) notion of a musical self-portrait. He had put a new and irresistible product in a new and irresistible package, raising the price but also raising the game. In a very real way, Frank and Manie, together, had reinvented Sinatra.

The bobby-soxers could keep swooning over their fifty-cent discs of “One Love” or “I Dream of You”; but here was a box of music for grown-ups. The theme was adult love: J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie’s “You Go to My Head”; George and Ira Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch over Me”; Strachey, Link, and Marvell’s “These Foolish Things”; Cole Porter’s “Why Shouldn’t I?”; Woods, Campbell, and Connelly’s hymn to barefoot and pregnant, “Try a Little Tenderness”; Victor Young, Ned Washington, and Bing Crosby’s “(I Don’t Stand) A Ghost of a Chance.”

The nod to Crosby was intentional. Bing had made hit recordings of “Ghost of a Chance” and “Tenderness” in the 1930s, and had also been first with “Paradise.” He was still number 1 on the charts to Sinatra’s number 2. Frank was paying tribute, but he was also throwing
down the gauntlet. He was Picasso to the older singer’s Matisse, coming on fast and strong.

And the market responded. Just over two weeks after
The Voice
’s release on March 4, it entered the
Billboard
Top 5 chart, and soon it hit number 1, a position it would hold for seven weeks. The album simply exploded onto the American consciousness, fixing Sinatra’s reputation as not merely a crooner but a
singer
. “
I was working in a record store,” recalled the music publisher Frank Military, “and Dean Martin came in every day to see me. And one day
The Voice
album came in, and it sold like hotcakes. I didn’t know Frank, and Dean didn’t know Frank, but the two of us just sat there listening to all four 78s over and over.”

They were something to hear. Sinatra had purposely chosen the July 30 and December 7 sessions not just because they contained great songs but because of their beautifully spare settings: in each case, a nine-piece string, woodwind, and rhythm ensemble highlighted his voice perfectly. These small-group tracks sounded brand-new and special. Even the two lesser numbers, “I Don’t Know Why,” of fateful Paramount memory—music to get egged by—and “Paradise,” were quietly ravishing, in the former case because of George Van Eps’s restrained and lyrical guitar work, and in the latter because of Mitch Miller’s sublime oboe.

The singing was exquisitely tender and exact and assured and, most important, it was
Sinatra
. At thirty, he had cast off all influences and become, completely, himself. If he had ever sounded like Bing, he didn’t anymore. If he had ever wanted to
be
Bing, he didn’t anymore. And he wasn’t Frankie anymore, either. Now he was just Frank.

Three days after the release of
The Voice
, Sinatra, along with the producer Frank Ross and the co-producer and director Mervyn LeRoy, attended the Oscar ceremonies at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, where they received their special Academy Awards for
The House I Live In
. Nancy accompanied her husband. A photo taken of them afterward
at Ciro’s shows them together like the cutest couple in Hollywood. Frank is in black tie; Nancy is wearing a strapless evening gown. Her hair is up; she wears a pearl choker; her creamy décolletage is lovely to behold. She is a beautiful young woman; he is a handsome young man. Their shoulders are touching.

And yet it is a strange picture: The two of them seem both intimate and distant. Frank is ardently admiring his Oscar; Nancy is smiling at someone across the table. A real couple sitting this close would be holding hands, or at least touching fingers. Yet he holds the statuette in his left hand, and rests his right, with its big pinkie ring, on the table, almost willfully distant from her. Nancy’s left hand, the one closest to Frank, also lies awkwardly on the table. And on her left wrist is what looks very much like a diamond bracelet.

What goes on behind any couple’s bedroom door is one of the great mysteries, but history can say with some certainty that he was outside that door for several weeks after New Year’s, and then, one night, he was back in again. There were conditions, there were strictures and continued reproaches, but he was back in again.

Did she believe him? Naturally she wanted to; at the same time, she wasn’t a fool. She knew that their life as a couple was anything but simple. Yet she needed his promises, not merely to hear the words, but for the sake of her dignity. She needed Frank to remember that he had made this commitment—that whatever he did elsewhere, he would be thinking about her.

As spring lit Hollywood in a blaze of jacarandas and azaleas, Sinatra was making movies again, once more commuting to Culver City. First there was a cameo in a Jerome Kern biopic,
Till the Clouds Roll By
. At Mr. Mayer’s behest, Frank sang “Ol’ Man River” in a white suit, white bow tie, and white shoes, surrounded by a forty-piece (white) orchestra
similarly attired. (The critics would justifiably kill him for it, but it really wasn’t his fault. And the performance was magnificent.)

There was also a new picture, a musical called
It Happened in Brooklyn
. Frank was to play an Army vet (if the Duke could play soldier, so could he) named Danny Miller, returning from the war to find that the Brooklyn he’d lovingly obsessed about while overseas was not quite as he remembered. Jimmy Durante and Kathryn Grayson were to co-star, as well as—a nice surprise—his new pal Peter Lawford, portraying a sensitive young English composer named Jamie Shellgrove. (Of
course
he was a poofter. How could he not be a poofter with a name like Jamie Shellgrove?) Principal photography on the film began on the MGM back lot in March; in June, the company would travel to New York City for location work.

But in the meantime, there was the Metro lot, with its deeply shaded alleys between soundstages and sunstruck fake Main Streets and phony city blocks and its commissary and dressing rooms, and its many actresses—stars and supporting players and extras—every one of them beautiful, every one of them wanting him.

And he, of course, wanted them.

He saw
her
, Marvelous, on his first day back, walking across a knife-edge of shadow between buildings, her hair like the sun. They shook hands, just shook hands (passersby were watching them carefully, pretending not to). Frank suddenly remembered, just for a second, his promise that he would never speak to her again. But as his palm touched hers, her perfume, that perfume, made his brain turn over.

She smiled brightly and told him she was divorcing her husband. She would be free at last.

He smiled back. People were watching.

She didn’t give a damn who was watching. She was going to be free at last. Did he want her?

He took a deep breath, inhaling her perfume.

More than anything.

Not three minutes later, turning a corner on his way to his dressing room, he came upon Lana, walking out of a soundstage in horn-rimmed sunglasses, dictating something to a secretary who followed her attentively. Lana saw him, and waved a dismissive hand to the secretary.

She looked at him and lowered her glasses, smiling.

And there were others, too, of course.

On March 7, 1946, United Press put a story on the wires about a forty-five-year-old New York construction-company executive, one Sven Ingildsen, who had filed a cross complaint in state supreme court to the separation action brought by his twenty-year-old wife, Josephine. “
The day after our marriage, my wife told me she simply had to see Frank Sinatra, the singer, alone—both at the theater where he was appearing and in his apartment at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel,” Ingildsen’s petition stated. “I objected emphatically. She replied that she knew him and his wife and that it would only be for a short visit and she would return in no time.”

Frank Sinatra’s wife was, of course, in Los Angeles. And newlywed Josephine Ingildsen (the report said) didn’t return home to her husband until 5:00 a.m.

“
If I had as many love affairs as you’ve given me credit for,” Frank would tell reporters many years later, “I’d now be speaking to you from a jar in Harvard Medical School.” It was a great quote, a true Sinatra quote, poetry down to the deliciously absurd image, the inner rhyme of “jar” and “Harvard”—except that it was an evasion. No, it was more than an evasion, it was the Big Lie. “Love affairs” was more than a euphemism, but less than the truth: Love was always what it was about, and never quite what it was really about. Love was the fleeting ideal, the thing to be sung about, to be dreamed of while he zipped his trousers on his way from one conquest to the next. In truth, there were probably even more affairs than the hundreds he’d been given credit for. For there always had to be someone. His loneliness was bottomless, but there was always someone to try to help him find the bottom.