Frank: The Voice (75 page)

His voice wasn’t right. He sipped hot tea, he joked with Sibelius and the musicians, he tried to keep smiling, but all of it—the late nights on the phone with Ava, the bad calls at odd hours from Little
Nancy, the cigarettes and whiskey and the fucking subpoena—all of it was starting to get to him, scratching away at his confidence and at his instrument itself.

Yet even though “Hello Young Lovers” took not three or four or even ten but twenty-two takes, Frank smiled; he sipped his tea, happy to keep going however long it took. It was Rodgers and Hammerstein; it was Stordahl. He was, for the moment anyway, in the best possible hands.

Of course the mood couldn’t last. While MCA was busy attending to its important clients—in a groundbreaking precedent, Lew Wasserman had recently secured Jimmy Stewart profit participation in his pictures—Sinatra was screaming at Henry Jaffe to get him a goddamn movie, fast.

Offers were not pouring in. But then the screenwriter and Sinatra drinking buddy Don McGuire came up with a hard-hitting scenario he thought might be right up Frank’s alley, a story about a hot-tempered saloon singer who gets a career boost from a mobster and regrets the consequences. It was a little close to the bone, but Frank liked it anyway. Here was a chance to put Clarence Doolittle and all those sailor suits behind him, to do the kind of gritty movie he could have done with
Knock on Any Door
, if they’d let him do it. To be, at last, a man on-screen. As for the subject matter: Let the goddamn public think whatever they wanted, he thought; they were already thinking it anyway. The screenplay was called
Meet Danny Wilson
.

Jaffe managed to sell the script, and Frank as the star, to Universal International, a studio that was making its big money from Abbott and Costello and Ma and Pa Kettle and Francis the Talking Mule. Universal offered Sinatra a flat fee of $25,000 to do the picture. It was almost an insult, but things being what they were, he jumped at it.

In the meantime, Ava’s fortunes were skyrocketing. MGM was thrilled with her performance in
Show Boat
, convinced it had a major
new star on its hands. Her contract was soon up for renewal, and there was serious talk of a big increase, something in the neighborhood of $1 million a year. She soft-pedaled the money when she spoke with Frank on the phone, but he could hear the excitement in her voice. Some part of him was happy for her—he did love her—but naturally enough, he also felt belittled. He knew all about career trajectories. There were times, at four and five o’clock in the morning (and who could he tell about this?), when he felt like the lowest of the low.

He and Axel and many of the same musicians were back in the Thirtieth Street studio to record three more songs on the night of March 27. The first was another number from
The King and I:
a cute thing called “I Whistle a Happy Tune,” with a typically inspirational Hammerstein lyric about coping with fear by pretending not to be afraid. And Mitch Miller, who was in the control room that evening, had come up with a cute idea—Frank himself would do the whistling parts. Sinatra gave the tune a charming, convincing performance, which made the next number he recorded all the more shattering.

The song, composed by Joel Herron, the former musical director of the Copacabana, and the lyricist Jack Wolf, was called “I’m a Fool to Want You.” It was a big, melodramatic ballad, much in the style of “Take My Love,” another melodramatic ballad Herron and Wolf had previously sold to Ben Barton, who ran Sinatra’s publishing company, Barton Music Corporation. Frank’s recording of “Take My Love,” which turned a perfectly honest theme from Brahms’s Third Symphony into an outright weeper, sold like the dog it was. “I’m a Fool to Want You,” however, was something else. Yes, it was sappy, but the vaguely Slavic, minor-key melody felt original rather than canned, and when Frank sang it that night, something amazing happened.

Herron and Wolf had given him a lyric sheet, and Sinatra, as always, had studied it carefully, trying to absorb the words into his bloodstream. But when the orchestra started to play, Frank sang lyrics
that were subtly but emphatically different from those that Wolf had written. Joel Herron, still alive in the mid-1990s, when Will Friedwald interviewed him, confirmed that Frank had changed the words but, enigmatically, refused to be drawn out on exactly how. “I asked him specifically, and he evaded the question,” Friedwald recalls.

Sinatra sang just one take—a take for the ages—and then, as the legend has it, fled the recording studio, unable to go on. In this case the legend rings absolutely true. “I’m a Fool” may not be a great song, but Sinatra’s shattering performance of it transcends the material. His emotion is so naked that we’re at once embarrassed and compelled: we literally feel for him.

“
That’s a heartbreaking performance,” said George Avakian, not ordinarily a fan. “And the lyric, which I understand Sinatra contributed largely to, is very powerful. Psychologically, it’s very much a part of Sinatra. The fact that it’s a song that reflected his life at the time always intrigued me. There aren’t too many occasions when a record comes out of a person’s life so directly.”

Mitch Miller disagreed sharply on the autobiographical interpretation. “
That’s bullshit!” he said. “Because what he’s drawing is the emotion from
your
personal life. He’s saying it for you.”

But then, Miller was always an ornery cuss—especially in later years, when critics constantly assailed him for supposedly ruining Sinatra’s career. In this case, his irritability probably trumped his better judgment: never before or again would Frank sing so transparently from the heart.

The change from Wolf’s original lyric was marked enough that “
when they played us the side, I freaked out,” Herron recalled. “When the session was over, we were with Ben Barton and Hank Sanicola, and Jack and I went off by ourselves and said, ‘He’s gotta be on this song!’ We invited him in as a co-writer.” There are clues to what Sinatra created. Lyric writing, in the great era of American popular song, was an extremely precise art, marked by concision and consistency of style. And at two junctures in this lyric, the style veers ever so slightly, first in
the expressively awkward “
A love that’s there for others too” and then in the metrically inconsistent “Pity me, I need you,” with its incorrect use of a word—“pity”—whose first syllable must be emphasized, throwing off the rhythm.

Bolstering the case for making these two lines the culprits is their emotional relevance: Frank did indeed worry constantly—and justifiably—about the “others” in Ava’s life. And pity was something he sought constantly throughout his life, but never more so than during the near death of his career in the late 1940s and early 1950s: a period that coincided more or less precisely with his Ava years.

MGM had started test screening
Show Boat
, and the response cards were coming back with almost unanimous raves for Ava Gardner. She had entered that rarefied realm where she could do no wrong. Accordingly, when she asked Dore Schary if she could take some time off to go to New York, the production chief told her to enjoy herself.

With Frank, as always, everything at first was sweetness and light. Ava was feeling grand. She prevailed on him to take her to visit Dolly and Marty in Hoboken, even though Frank, driven to distraction by Dolly’s incessant demands for money, hadn’t spoken to his mother in nearly two years. Dolly answered the door and greeted Ava like a long-lost daughter, reaching up to embrace her, then giving her wayward son a Look. He was
still
too fucking thin.

Great to see you too, Ma.

The house smelled delicious—Dolly had prepared a tremendous meal: antipasto with cold cuts (especially Genoa salami, Frank’s favorite); veal piccata; homemade ravioli with meat and spinach. And Ava was charmed:

No holding back, except for the fact that Marty (“
quieter, withdrawn, with a nice smile”) said barely anything, and poor Chit-U, not a single word. Dolly was the one who didn’t hold back; Ava followed her lead, growing less inhibited with every glass of Chianti. And Frank, Ava recalled, “
[looked] at me very carefully, trying to sense how it was going, whether I was approving or not, his face reflecting that slight worry you have when you want someone
you
love to love what
you
love.”

Also that more than slight worry he felt every second he spent with his mother.

Of course the visit was more than casual. And once Ava saw how thoroughly her prospective mother-in-law approved of her, she applied the screws even more tightly to Frank. When was he going to get a divorce?

They were riding back to the city. Frank stared out the car window, drawing on his cigarette. He had no answer: it was all in Nancy’s hands.

Ava, who had heard it once too many times, told the driver to pull over as soon as they emerged from the tunnel. She gathered her stole around her, loosing a cloud of that mind-numbing perfume, opened the car door, and got out.

A few days earlier, Frank had taken Ava along to watch the live broadcast of his television show. She was unimpressed. “
Stagehands running in and out,” she recalled. “You never knew what camera was on you. I got a nervous breakdown just watching.”

The production values of a TV variety show in the early days certainly couldn’t bear comparison to those of a gold-standard movie studio like MGM, but
The Frank Sinatra Show
had—technically and artistically—an especially flea-bitten air about it. The rudimentary comedy sketches submerged the talents even of bright lights such as Phil Silvers and Don Ameche. And then there were lesser lights, such as one Virginia Ruth Egnor, known professionally as Dagmar.