Frank: The Voice (82 page)

Sinatra thought about it: Maybe humility would work. Anything was worth a try at this point. He phoned Marja and, on his nickel, gave her an hour’s worth of honey. He explained, carefully and undefensively, how often he felt he’d been misquoted and mistreated by the press—but then, in the next breath, allowed that he’d sometimes mistreated them back. “
I lost control of my temper and said things,” he told the young reporter. “They were said under great stress and pressure. I’m honestly sorry.”

While he spoke the last sentence, he made a hideous face, a face like a medieval gargoyle, for nobody’s benefit but his own.

Marja asked, over the scratchy connection, how Frank was feeling.

He was much better. Better all the time.

And his voice?

It had been a little rocky there for a while, but it was improving, too.

And he and Ava—?

They were extremely happy.

The articles appeared in the
Post
. Fern Marja, young but nobody’s fool, acknowledged her initial skepticism about Sinatra’s insistent niceness, but then admitted he had won her over. The
Post
called the series “The Angry Voice.”

Double Dynamite
, with Frank billed third after Jane Russell and Groucho Marx, opened on Christmas Day. The movie had been sitting in the can for three full years while Howard Hughes tried to figure out what to do with it. There was nothing much to do with it—the picture was an out-and-out dog. But in December 1951, as RKO was divesting its theater chains and hemorrhaging money, it was time to get the thing out there and try to make a couple of dollars back.

Nobody was buying. “
Even the most ardent devotees of Frank Sinatra, Jane Russell and Groucho Marx,” wrote Bosley Crowther in the
New York Times
, “will find meager Christmas cheer in ‘Double Dynamite,’ yesterday’s arrival at the Paramount. Whatever that sizzling title is supposed to mean, this thin little comedy is strictly a wet firecracker.”

That sizzling title, to the puzzlement of nobody except Bosley Crowther, referred to Jane Russell’s size 38D breasts, a subject of endless fascination to Howard Hughes—and, to paraphrase Bob Hope, the two and only marketing gimmicks the sinking studio had for this crummy picture. (So low had Sinatra’s reputation sunk, and so complete was Hughes’s detestation of him, that Frank didn’t even appear on the poster, which—it was a simpler time—showed Groucho’s eyes popping after he got a load of Jane’s chest.)

The story, such as it was, concerned a meek bank clerk, Johnny Dalton—Sinatra, in his last Bashful Frankie role ever—who saves a gangster from being beaten up by rival thugs, thus earning the crook’s deepest gratitude. The crook, who runs a bookie joint, gives Johnny a thousand-dollar reward—and then, with a few phone calls, parlays Johnny’s thousand into sixty grand. Voilà—the timid little clerk now has enough money to marry his ladylove and fellow bank wage slave, the pneumatic, perpetually sneering, helium-voiced Russell. Except that his sudden wealth arouses everyone’s suspicions. Groucho, as the philosophical waiter in the couple’s favorite luncheonette, hijacks the picture.

It’s all kind of low-grade fun for a little while. Frank is charming
and natural, despite the tiresomeness of the milquetoast act, and his scenes with Groucho are pretty good, their on-set enmity notwithstanding. The most surreally delightful touch is Nestor Paiva’s energetic turn as the sunglasses-wearing bookie: with his bald dome and dark round lenses, he bears an eerie resemblance to 1960s photos of Sinatra’s great and good friend Sam Giancana.

Then comes the world’s cheesiest process shot (even Robert De Grasse couldn’t make this dog look good) as Frank and Groucho skip down a soundstage sidewalk with a street scene shakily projected behind them, singing “It’s Only Money,” the lousy would-be title song (one of the two mediocre tunes Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne dashed off for the occasion), and your heart sinks for just how bad movies can be sometimes.

Double Dynamite
fizzled, like the dud it was.

Frank kept reading. His nose was always in some tome or other, especially when he was flying (which was often). And there were a lot of good books to read in late 1951. There was John Hersey’s
Hiroshima
and
The Diary of Anne Frank
and John Gunther’s big book about the United States and Churchill’s and Eisenhower’s memoirs and
Kon-Tiki
by Thor Heyerdahl and
The Caine Mutiny
. Then somebody gave him a great big doorstop of a novel called
From Here to Eternity
, James Jones’s scathing postwar portrait of the prewar U.S. Army. Once Frank started reading it, he couldn’t put it down.

Early in the novel, there was a character Frank couldn’t stop thinking about. His name was Angelo Maggio, and he was a buck private from Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, “
a tiny curly-headed Italian with narrow bony shoulders jutting from his undershirt.” A fast-talking, wisecracking, no-shit street guy who liked to drink and play cards and craps and pool and cared little about Army discipline. Frank read all the Maggio parts raptly, speaking his dialogue along with him. He knew this guy. More than that. He was this guy.

The book had come out in February and immediately shot to the
top of the best-seller lists. In March, Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures bought the screen rights for $85,000—a fortune in those days, especially for a novel that was critical of the Army in an era of fear and conformity. Soon cynics were calling the project “
Cohn’s Folly.”

But from the moment Frank laid his eyes on Maggio, he was obsessed with wanting to play him. Fuck
Double Dynamite
. It was forgotten anyway. All he needed to turn his career around, Frank began to tell everyone around him over and over and over, was one good role. This was that role. (And it was better than good. As Tom Santopietro wrote in
Sinatra in Hollywood:
“
No wonder Sinatra felt desperate to play Maggio—the character is ingratiating, complex, a bit dim-witted, vulnerable, and ultimately doomed. It was a role that had Oscar written all over it.”) That he was the last person on anyone’s mind to play Maggio was a mere technicality.

The Empress Club, London, December 1951. When nothing else got in the way—which was seldom—they cared deeply for each other.
(photo credit 30.1)

A
va Gardner writes in her autobiography that Frank was once again having voice troubles soon after their marriage, but she doesn’t say why. It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out why. In early 1952, Sinatra’s matchless instrument was undergoing unusual physical and emotional stress, for a whole gamut of reasons. One of the new ones was his marriage itself.

Sammy Cahn’s then wife, Gloria Franks, recalled a dinner she and Cahn had early on with Frank and Ava and the Axel Stordahls.
“It was
like we were sitting on cracked eggs,” Franks said. “You never quite knew if it was going to be pleasant or there were going to be verbal daggers, or if she was not in a good mood. And Frank was so subservient to her. He was
insane
about that woman. I thought, ‘My God, look at him.’ He’d hold the door, pull the chair out, that kind of thing. I used to think, ‘God, I don’t remember seeing him do that with Nancy.’ It was a whole other Frank. He was a different person around Ava. And she was … Ava.”

It was hard work being married to Ava Gardner. It was hard work being married to Frank Sinatra, too, but there is evidence that he did the heavy lifting in the relationship. “
Neither gave an inch, though I must say Frank worked harder on the marriage than she did,” a friend of Ava’s once said. “She’s a very selfish girl.”

Well, she was a movie star. And classically, show-business marriages involve one high-maintenance partner, usually the better-known spouse, and one maintainer. Frank was being pushed into the latter role. God knows he could be high-handed with friends and lovers and underlings, but Ava had a unique power over him—and all the more so as his own power waned. As a foulmouthed and dominant facsimile of Dolly (certified by Dolly), she wielded the metaphorical baton. (Jimmy Van Heusen, who when out of Frank’s earshot could be scathing about all things Sinatra, took to calling her “The Man.”) As a sexual volcano, she ruled him in bed. And to top it all off, she was paying the bills.

The combination was corrosive. Sinatra’s voice was delicate in the best of circumstances, and now he was spending sleepless nights worrying about his career, taking downers and uppers, reading obsessively at
From Here to Eternity
, dog-earing pages, marking up the Maggio sections. He was ragged and irritable during the day, and when he snapped at Ava, she snapped right back. At a point when even getting to make love with his wife involved a lot of preliminary yelling, it was a wonder he could sing a note at all.

Yet just a week into the new year, he went into Columbia’s Hollywood studio and recorded three songs in gorgeous voice and high style.
Axel Stordahl arranged and conducted, and for the first time Bill Miller was sitting at the piano. The first number, Rodgers and Hart’s “I Could Write a Book,” marked a new artistic peak. Singing with beautiful simplicity and perfect diction, Frank sounded like the artist he was fated to become after he had crossed the valley of the shadow of death. He made a great song sound so believably brand-new (it had debuted on Broadway in
Pal Joey
in 1940) it practically glistened with dew. Then, after the forgettable “I Hear a Rhapsody” (schmaltzily written, beautifully sung), he belted out the utterly charming (and little-known) “Walkin’ in the Sunshine,” a romping, brassy, bluesy jump, growling and winking his way through in a wham-bam style that looks ahead to the best of his late-1950s collaborations with Billy May:

Unfortunately, the world outside the studio wasn’t listening. Frank urgently needed to get something going. He was, according to his old pal, the Paramount Theater manager Bob Weitman, “knockin’ on doors.”

It was February; Weitman was down in Miami, getting a tan. Someone handed him a poolside phone. The voice on the line was unmistakable. Frank wanted to know when Bob was coming back. He was in trouble.