Frank: The Voice (49 page)

The results show. “That’s How Much I Love You” and “You Can Take My Word for It, Baby” are hardly classics, but Sinatra’s singing on the two jazz numbers is relaxed and good-humored and completely charming. He was especially relaxed at a one-off session he did two days later, a glorious recording of “Sweet Lorraine” with the Metronome All-Stars, including Johnny Hodges, Coleman Hawkins, Harry Carney, Charlie Shavers, Lawrence Brown, Nat “King” Cole, and, lo and behold, Buddy Rich. Many serious music commentators, George Avakian among them, have asserted that Sinatra never truly swings. They should redirect their attention to this “Sweet Lorraine.” Maybe it all depended on the context.
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Avakian, who produced records for many musical giants, from Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington to Miles Davis, disliked Sinatra from the moment he first saw the singer get off the elevator at Columbia’s Seventh Avenue offices, flanked by four bodyguards.
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“
He used to call me ‘kid’ because he didn’t know my name,” Avakian said. “He gave off the feeling that, ‘Listen, I’m a big man and you’re unimportant,
and I’m putting up with your presence.’ ” On the first Sinatra recording sessions the producer witnessed, “everybody was sort of like, ‘Oh, Sinatra is very tough—you have to be careful. Don’t cross him; don’t argue with him.’ ”

Yet to Avakian’s surprise, Sinatra was loose and easy on the two trio numbers the young producer supervised. “
He did them very quickly, two takes of each one,” Avakian recalled. “I thought, ‘Gee, if only he could do this all the time, he’s somebody I could enjoy working with.’ ”

Frank couldn’t do it all the time, of course. He was simply too important a personage to let his hair down (even while he still had it in abundance). He knew exactly how miraculous a singer he was, but he also knew how delicate his voice was—and how fickle public regard. He was protecting his position as America’s most important ballad singer, and the effort made him tense.

Frank’s entire life seemed to be based on the building and the release of tension. When the release came in the form of singing, it was gorgeous; when it took the form of fury, it was terrible. But release was important and constantly needed. “
Hard work and extended play, I mean after hours, never hurt Frank,” George Evans said, not entirely accurately. “But emotional tension absolutely destroyed him. You could always tell when he was troubled. He came down with a bad throat. Germs were never the cause unless there are guilt germs.”

To some degree, this was wishful thinking on Evans’s part. Guilt, with Sinatra, was as transitory as his other emotions. His mercurial nature, as we have seen, was part of his finely tuned temperament. And as his fame allowed ever-greater self-indulgence, there were times he could simply shrug off guilt and go on to the next thing. He was often in beautiful voice that late autumn in Manhattan. He was working hard and spending as much time with his family as he could. He opened the Wedgwood gig with a smile, holding a cup of coffee and singing “The Coffee Song,” a cute Bob Hilliard and Dick Miles novelty number he’d recorded in July.
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But then, unpredictably, the tension would return. He was less
graceful with nightclub hecklers than he’d been before. “
You must be glad the war is over—now you can get parts for your head!” he shouted at one. Another time he walked off the floor in the middle of a song. Something was eating him. In early December he issued an edict barring fans under twenty-one from his radio broadcasts. The public outcry was noisier than anything he’d had to endure in the studio. Frank quickly reversed his decision. He often seemed whipsawed at the end of that year. It wasn’t just the rising pressures of fame: he was also secretly making time in his busy schedule for Lana Turner, whose similarly busy schedule, as fate would have it, had brought her to New York City.

Bugsy Siegel, the jaunty sociopath, was uncharacteristically nervous. He was millions of dollars in the hole for cost overruns (and skimming) on the still-unfinished Flamingo Hotel, and the men who had fronted him the money, Meyer Lansky among them, were not patient people. These men already suspected Siegel of stealing from them, but if the Flamingo’s opening, scheduled for the day after Christmas, was a success, promising rivers of revenue, all might be forgiven. The key to a big event, then as now, was stars. If major Hollywood talent came to the desert, the public would follow.

Bugsy knew everyone in Hollywood, and the week before Christmas he flew to L.A. to call in some chits. He had extended friendship, protection, and business help to some very important people, and now he needed their help back. He called on the biggest names in his address book: Sinatra, Lana Turner, Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, and Jimmy Durante, among others. The response was not enthusiastic.

Worse, December 26 was cold and rainy and the airports in Los Angeles and Vegas were socked in. The Flamingo opening was a gloomy, under-attended event: the stars, to put it mildly, did not turn out. Gable, Hepburn, Tracy, Cooper, and Dietrich all came up with
excuses—a mother was very sick, an ankle had been sprained, a cold had been caught. Durante and George Raft, always friendly where the Boys were concerned, somehow made their way to the desert, as did Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Xavier Cugat, and George Jessel. It wasn’t enough. “
There can rarely have been a more cheerless scene,” wrote Otto Friedrich in
City of Nets
, “than the newly opened casino at the half-empty and half-finished Flamingo, standing alone in the Nevada desert on the night after Christmas.” Cheerless, and snakebit: though Raft compliantly lost $75,000 at the crap tables, the Flamingo’s gaming coffers were $200,000 in the red after its first night of operation.

Maybe Siegel stole that, too. It didn’t matter: his fate was sealed. The process had begun four days earlier, at the great conference of American mafiosi at the Hotel Nacional in Havana, organized by the plush hotel’s co-owner Meyer Lansky (his silent partner, the Cuban president Fulgencio Batista) and presided over by Salvatore Lucania, a.k.a. Charles “Lucky” Luciano.
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Luciano had been released from prison in return for protecting New York City’s docks during World War II, but had had to accept permanent deportation to Italy; now he was back in the Western Hemisphere, hoping to set up a permanent base of operations just ninety miles from Florida. Lucky Luciano had a mesmerizingly cold face, with pitted cheeks, a piercing gaze, and a strangely beautiful mouth—up-curved at the corners, and with a sensual lower lip—that was virtually the double of Sinatra’s. Every important gangster in the United States had convened in Havana to offer Luciano fealty and thick envelopes of cash—every important gangster except for Benny Siegel, who hadn’t even been told about the conference. The message was clear. Meyer Lansky, who perhaps felt remiss at having urged Vegas on Siegel in the first place, argued with uncharacteristic passion that Benny should live, that he might still turn the Flamingo around and be of value, but few at the conference listened.

Sinatra was conspicuously absent from the Flamingo’s opening ceremonies. Whatever Frank may have told Benny, the real reasons for his failure to show were complicated. As for the other absentees,
maybe, as is so often the case with stars, the herd instinct had kicked in. And maybe, as has been rumored, William Randolph Hearst, who was so close to Louis B. Mayer, had put the kibosh on the event for MGM stars because Hearst suspected his mistress Marion Davies had slept with the handsome gangster. As for Frank: maybe Charlie Fischetti’s warning about Ben Siegel still echoed in his head.

It was Frank’s New Year’s Eve party to welcome in 1947. There was a stirring in the big living room as a latecomer arrived: the twenty-three-year-old Peter Lawford, dashing in his well-tailored tux. Handsome as he was, though, it was his date who was drawing all the stares. Dark haired, with dazzlingly high cheekbones, a white fur stole on her wide shoulders, she walked with the easy grace of a tigress; Ava Gardner was on the prowl. Until recently a nobody in Hollywood, Ava entered the room with confidence born of success and buoyed by alcohol.
The Killers
had put her on the A-list; Mayer himself had told her the world was her oyster. She had just turned twenty-four the week before, and she was ready for adventure.

She was more tired than ever of Howard Hughes. She still grudgingly accepted his gifts—the fur she was wearing; a Cadillac convertible. What was harder to take were the spies sent to monitor her comings and goings. It would have been annoying enough if she’d been his only girlfriend, but she happened to know that Hughes was also keeping tabs on Linda Darnell, Jean Peters, and Jane Russell. The man was insufferable. Lawford, on the other hand, was fun, and charmingly irreverent, and a girl couldn’t just sit at home on New Year’s Eve.

It wasn’t just that she didn’t want to be alone, nor was it simply that this was
the
party that night. She had to admit that she was increasingly curious about the man she kept running into everywhere. She was intrigued by how persistently gentlemanly he was, unlike almost every other male she encountered—and unlike his reputation. And while she knew he was married, and the father of two small children,
and she had a strict policy against seeing married men, she was intrigued. All the more so when Lawford took her over to introduce her (he thought) to Sinatra, and she and Frank exchanged an amused glance. Over his shoulder, a few yards away, stood the wife, mousy cute, smiling at another couple. Ava looked at her for a second, then back at Frank, who was still grinning at her. No contest. She felt like a thief inside a bank vault.

Durante, Lawford, Sinatra. February 1947.
(photo credit 19.2)

But the night was still young. From Sinatra’s, she would have Lawford take her to a party at Mel Tormé’s, and then home. By three-thirty the Englishman was done for the night, and she was still raring to go. She would wind up the evening gunning her dark green Cadillac convertible up the Coast Highway with the smitten twenty-one-year-old Tormé at her side, as her long hair blew in the wind and the sky turned baby pink in the East. She was quite sure it was going to be a spectacular year.