Frank: The Voice (68 page)
Authors: James Kaplan
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #General, #United States, #Biography, #Composers & Musicians, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #Singers, #Singers - United States, #Sinatra; Frank
While it was true that Sinatra wanted to work in television, and equally true that in 1950 the movie studios were increasingly paranoid about the hot new medium, Frank’s separation from Metro came at the studio’s request, not his—and in particular at the request of Louis B. Mayer, who had a very specific grievance. A couple of months earlier, after a horseback-riding accident, the boss had been pushed into work in a wheelchair, a cast on his leg. While Sinatra sat with some pals at lunch in the MGM commissary, someone said, “
Hey, did you hear about L. B.’s accident?” And Frank said instantly: “Yeah, he fell off of Ginny Simms.”
Ginny Simms, a former band singer with Kay Kyser and now a wannabe movie star, was Mayer’s mistress.
Frank’s remark got a big laugh at the table. He could be funny when he wasn’t trying too hard, though, as with Dolly, his jokes usually had a stiletto concealed—or not concealed—about them. In this case, the blade was double-edged: Simms, while vivacious and appealing, was no beauty. To put a finer point on it, she was a bit horse faced.
The remark got back to Mayer.
Frank made the long trudge into the inner sanctum. The old man was ominously calm. He was even smiling a little.
“So,” he said. “
I hear you been making jokes about my lady friend.”
Frank winced. “I wish I could take that back, Louis. I’m so sorry. I wish I’d never said anything so stupid.”
“That’s not a very nice thing to do,” Mayer said. “I want you to leave, and I don’t ever want you to come back again.”
That had been in February. Mayer had been genuinely offended
by Frank’s remark, but he was also a businessman. The gaffe had given him a perfect pretext to unload damaged goods. By the end of April, MCA was finished working out the severance: Sinatra would receive a final payment of $85,000. Greg Bautzer instantly called MGM and slapped a restraining order on the check until Nancy and Frank settled the separate-maintenance suit.
Meanwhile, Frank was doing big business at the Copa, thanks to the cognoscenti, who, heedless of his troubles, continued to roll in night after night. But every dime he made, and then some, was going straight out the door. He went to MCA’s chairman, Jules Stein, for a loan; Stein all but laughed in his face. Those “unlimited important personal appearances, radio and TV offers” mentioned in the press release were in fact extremely limited: Frank Sinatra was a drug on the market.
Not to mention a king-sized pain in the ass. He treated everyone at the agency like a servant, including his chief representatives, Lew Wasserman in Hollywood and Sonny Werblin in New York. MCA might have stood for this behavior if he’d been bringing in money. As it was, Sinatra’s agents had effectively cut him loose: by 1950, they were no longer working actively on his behalf.
Worse, he was losing what was most precious to him: his voice. Many years later, Mitch Miller recalled:
Listen, Sinatra had a marvelous voice, but it was very fragile. There were certain guys like Gordon MacRae who could stay up all night and drink and sing the next day—he could sing underwater. But if Frank didn’t get enough sleep or if he drank a lot the night before, it would show up. And Frank was a guy—call it ego or what you want—he liked to suffer out loud, to be dramatic. There were plenty of people, big entertainers, who had a wild life or had big problems, but they kept it quiet. Frank had to do his suffering in public, so everyone could see it. And this was a time he was having trouble with Ava, she was in Spain, and it showed in his work. He would come in to
record, and he couldn’t get through a number without his voice cracking.
Every time Frank’s voice went, Miller would have to start the session over again, racking up studio fees and musicians’ overtime. (Which, as per Sinatra’s unique contract with Columbia, were the label’s responsibility.) But thanks to the new technology of tape recording, Miller was able to come up with a simple fix:
I can say this now: I could have been kicked out of the musicians’ union because tracking was not allowed. There were a lot of musicians involved. So what I did, to save the session, I just shut off his mike and got good background tracks. Didn’t even tell him.
Then after it was over, I said, “When your voice is back …” We’d come in crazy hours, in a locked building, so no union representative could come in. Then when Frank came in, say, at midnight, we would play the disc. He would put earphones on and he would sing, just the way they do now. And we would remix it. He did them very well after that, and the whole orchestra was perfect on it.
It sounds simple, but it couldn’t have been. Sinatra, who revered musicians and always insisted on doing right by them, knew he was taking money out of his musicians’ pockets, not to mention depriving himself of the pleasure of working directly with them. The pleasure of
being with
the musicians was central to Sinatra as an artist, and it infused all his best recordings. Indeed, even as recording technology advanced and tracking (today known as overdubbing) became almost universal, Sinatra did not like to record separately—and when he did, the music was always the worse for it. The renowned sound engineer Lee Herschberg, who supervised most of Frank’s Reprise sessions in the 1960s, noted that unlike most other singers, Sinatra couldn’t bear to sing behind sound-absorbing isolation panels—gobos.
“You couldn’t
do that with him, because he wanted to hear the piano, number one,” Herschberg said. “He’d stand right behind Bill Miller, or whomever.”
Frank wanted the intimacy. He’d stand right behind Miller and tease him, and Miller, or whoever, would joke back, and the studio would start to take on a kind of glow. “Sinatra wasn’t like some of the other people you would record,” Herschberg recalled. “When he walked in, it was special. Because there was an air in the studio that something special was going to happen. He always had the best arrangers and he had the best players, and everybody was having such a good time and was so happy to be there, and it really made him give what he had to give.”
That was in the 1960s. In 1950 it was a very different story: good times were in short supply; Sinatra was sinking fast. During the day he was stripping the gears—and obsessing over Ava. “Every day,” writes Gardner’s biographer Lee Server, “
he would send off a heartfelt cable and then telephone her in the early evening in New York, late night in Spain, and try again sometime after midnight, early morning [at the location] in Tossa de Mar.”
But long-distance telecommunication in Catalonia was still erratic at best. Sometimes hours of transatlantic operator assistance were necessary only to be told again that the lines were down or that no one was answering. When at last he would reach her, the connection was often filled with static and her voice a maddeningly faint and broken echo. Conversations would end with his frantic declaration of love and anguished hope that he had correctly heard Ava declare the same.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that you can hear the disconnect in the records he made during that grueling April: As Mitch Miller triumphantly noted, the orchestra was perfect. Frank, however, was merely good. And the main thing was that he and the orchestra didn’t sound good
together
.
Then, at the Copa dinner show on May 2, Sinatra reached for
a high note on
South Pacific
’s “Bali H’ai.” The note wasn’t there. He somehow managed to finish the show—then rushed back to his bed at the Hampshire House, where he sat in his pajamas, weakly calling for hot tea and honey. As Frank rested, feeling deeply sorry for himself, Hank Sanicola let slip a rumor that had been making the rounds in midtown: Lee Mortimer had bet Jack Entratter $100 that Sinatra would never finish out the Copa engagement.
That was all he needed. At 2:00 a.m., strictly against Dr. Goldman’s orders, Frank was back at the club, dressed and ready for the last show of the evening. He cleared his throat and dedicated “I Have But One Heart” to Ava. He sang it all the way through. Then Skitch Henderson kicked the band into gear for “It All Depends on You.” What happened next “
was tragic and terrifying,” Henderson recalled:
He opened his mouth to sing after the band introduction and nothing came out. Not a sound. I thought for a fleeting moment that the unexpected pantomime was a joke. But then he caught my eye. I guess the color drained out of my face as I saw the panic in his. It became so quiet, so intensely quiet in the club—they were like watching a man walk off a cliff. His face chalk white, Frank gasped something that sounded like “Good Night” into the mike and raced off the floor, leaving the audience stunned.
It may have been tragic and terrifying to Skitch and Frank, but to the newspapers it was a source for gloating:
BALI TOO H’AI; VOICE VOICELESS
Frank Sinatra’s voice deserted him Tuesday and his doctor said it was because the crooner tried to make it do the impossible—hit a soprano note.
Dr. Irving Goldman explained that Sinatra’s normal range is two octaves in the baritone-tenor class. When Frank tried to hit too high a note in the song “Bali H’ai,” the physician said, his left vocal chord [
sic
] dissented.
In medical terms, Sinatra suffered what the doctor called a “submucosal hemorrhage.”
Doctor Goldman ordered ten days of silence for “The Voice,” who has been appearing at New York’s Copacabana night club. Sinatra is due to open an engagement in Chicago May 12, and if he is to make it, said the doctor, he must keep mum until then—no talking or singing.
Sinatra’s friends said that to keep the ban of silence, Frank will go to a vacation hideaway.
The hideaway was Charlie Fischetti’s mansion on Allison Island in Miami, an establishment where hoarse monosyllables would not be at all out of place.
On May 12, Sinatra was tanned and rested, his voice much improved. But instead of heading to the Chez Paree in chilly Chicago, he was waving to reporters, pointing to his throat, and boarding a flight to sunny Spain with Van Heusen. “
Yes, I’ll probably see Ava,” he croaked to the reporters. “But we’ll be as well chaperoned as at a high-school dance.”
“Even if he has to hire sixteen duennas,” Chester piped up.
Frank was, of course, bearing gifts: Ava had said she was missing her gum and her favorite soft drink, so he carried along a carton of Wrigley’s Spearmint and a six-pack of Coke. And a $10,000 diamond-and-emerald necklace.
The suits at MCA were grim faced at the news that he had blithely canceled the Chicago engagement (though the owners of Chez Paree, where the Fischettis had a special table, were quite understanding).
But Frank had to reestablish contact with Ava. She had been gone for over a month now—anything could have happened. Knowing her, plenty probably had.
If he was pining for her, the reverse did not seem to be true, as a production assistant on
Pandora and the Flying Dutchman
, Jeanie Sims, recalled. “
I remember one time we were shooting a scene of Ava by herself,” Sims told Lee Server.
She was supposed to be lost in some deep thought about the man she was in love with. And she couldn’t sort of get it right for [the director, Albert Lewin] … Al finally went over and said to her, “Ava, is there some one person in your life who you love or have loved more than anyone else on earth?” And she answered him so quietly I could not hear her. And he told her to think of that person and it was just the impetus she needed, and she got it perfect on the next shot. And afterward I was a bit curious, and I asked Al what she had said, who she had loved more than anyone, and Al said, “The clarinet player—Artie Shaw.”
Ava, though, was living for the present. She took her pleasures as she found them, and she found them everywhere. With a kind of beauty that comes along once in a hundred years—not just in her lush and haughty face but also in her long-limbed body, her smoky voice, her feline walk—she transfixed men and women alike. She had never been out of the States before, and Europe, still depressed after the war, was stunned at the sight of her.
“
A very, very wild spirit,” recalled her
Pandora
co-star Sheila Sim. On a quick sightseeing and shopping jaunt to Paris before filming began, Ava and Bappie had ditched their MGM driver and sneaked off to see the
real
sights. Soon, completely by accident—or so Ava swears in her memoir—they were shocked, shocked, to find themselves in a bar full of men who weren’t really men. Well, Bappie was shocked.
As her little sister wrote: “
‘Ava,’ Bappie said in her dark-brown North Carolina Baptist Belt voice that fortunately nobody understood except me, ‘we are in a
House of Lesbians
!’ ” From Ava’s point of view, however, “All the girls [were] welcoming, and charming.”
Everyone was smitten with her. Albert Lewin, recalled the cinematographer Jack Cardiff, “
thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world, and he used to just gaze and gaze at her. And we would shoot her, and he would say, ‘I want to do another close-up. Closer.’ And we would do that. And then he would say, ‘Let’s do another one. Different angle.’ Then one more, ‘
Closer
.’ And on and on like that.”
