Frank: The Voice (95 page)
Authors: James Kaplan
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #General, #United States, #Biography, #Composers & Musicians, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #Singers, #Singers - United States, #Sinatra; Frank
Frank and the papers were virtually collaborators at this point: he was working hard to try to convince them (and by extension the public) that he was behaving himself and up to the task of playing Maggio, and the press seems to have been trying to persuade itself. “
Crooner Frank Sinatra Tuesday joined the ranks of film greats who have switched from song and dance roles to straight drama,” proclaimed a wire-service report, mentioning Joan Crawford, Ginger Rogers, Dick Powell, and Jane Wyman.
Frankie flew 10,000 miles from Africa to Hollywood to try out for the role he coveted and finally won. His highest hope now is that his new impersonation will be well received by the public.
“I know how I feel about it, but how the public will feel is another thing,” he said.
It sounded rather plaintive. In a way Frank was raising expectations, putting huge pressure on himself; at the same time, though, he was asking for what the public had always been reluctant to extend him: tolerance. It was a brilliant job of public relations, one that he couldn’t possibly have brought off himself, and in fact he hadn’t:
Eternity
’s unit publicist, Walter Shenson (who would go on to produce
A Hard Day’s Night
and
Help!
), had taken over the latest Sinatra charm offensive and was stage-managing it in grand style. “
I told him that I could do a lot for him if he’d just behave himself with the press,” Shenson recalled.
He was a pussycat. “Whatever you say, kid, whatever you say,” he said. So I started bringing around news people to interview him. A couple of times he said, “I won’t talk to that one. He was rude to Ava.” Then I’d remind him of his promise to cooperate, and he’d be a charmer.
One day I got a call from a press guy saying that the government
had just released a statement that Frank owed $109,000 in back taxes. He wanted a comment from Sinatra, so I went to his trailer and told him. He looked at me very calmly and said, “You don’t think this is news, do you? If you owe $109,000, you know about it.” I explained that I was getting phone calls from the press wanting a statement. He said to tell them anything I wanted. If I do, I said, it will have to be a quote from you. “Go ahead,” he said. “Tell them whatever you want.”
“Surely your lawyers and accountants are working with the government, aren’t they?” I asked. Frank said they were, so I went back and called all the reporters. “Mr. Sinatra asked me to tell you the following: ‘My lawyers and my accountants are
working with the government lawyers and accountants, and if it takes
From Here to Eternity
, I’m going to pay it all back.’ ” I later told Frank that I
had
to publicize the picture first and him second, but he thought that was brilliant.
Frank and Monty. The two men had enormous respect for each other. By example and through the advice Sinatra eagerly sought from him, Clift raised Frank’s acting to a new level.
(photo credit 33.2)
Tax troubles and Ava troubles weren’t his only distractions that month. “
Isn’t Frank Sinatra switching soon from Columbia records to RCA-Victor?” Earl Wilson wrote in early March. Not exactly, as it turned out.
Nelson Riddle and Frank. The genius arranger and the genius singer had much in common: a New Jersey background, domineering mothers, solitary natures, restless sexual drives.
(photo credit 34.1)
O
f course, since Columbia had dropped him months earlier, Frank couldn’t “switch” to any record label. And he especially wasn’t switching to RCA Victor, where Manie Sacks, despite all his power and influence as head of A&R, had tried more than once, with no success, to sell the washed-up singer to his sales force.
William Morris, too, was trying to peddle Sinatra: What good was a singer who didn’t record? (And what good was a client earning a mere
thousand a week?) Sam Weisbord, the president of the agency and the man who’d sewn up the
From Here to Eternity
deal for Frank, rang every record company’s phone off the hook until he finally reached Alan Livingston.
Livingston, Capitol’s vice president in charge of creative operations, had started at the fledgling label at the end of the war, fresh out of the Army and wet behind the ears. As low man on the totem pole, the boyish-looking ex-GI had been given the theoretically unenviable assignment of creating a children’s record library: he responded by inventing Bozo the Clown. Together with Livingston’s other brainstorm, the read-along record, Bozo sold millions of units and brought in huge merchandising revenues. Almost overnight, Alan Livingston achieved boy-wonder status. Seven years later, still just in his mid-thirties, he was hungry for a grown-up coup.
“
Alan, we’ve just taken on representation of Sinatra,” Weisbord told him.
“
Really?” Livingston said. The response was more than polite; the record man was actually intrigued by what sounded, at that point, like a contrarian notion.
“Yes,” the agent said. “Would you be interested in signing him?”
“Yes,” Livingston said at once.
“You would?” Weisbord said.
It had popped out involuntarily: not an attitude that laid the foundation for a strong bargaining position. But bargaining wasn’t the point at this stage of Sinatra’s career; getting him a foothold was.
Capitol was more of a natural for Frank than Weisbord had imagined. The label had recently signed Axel Stordahl, who’d been telling everybody who would listen, “Frank’s singing great again.” A house producer named Dave Dexter, formerly a critic for
Down Beat
, was similarly vocal about his enthusiasm for Sinatra.
Weisbord took Frank in to meet with Livingston. Livingston recalled:
He was meek, a pussycat, humble. He had been through terrible times. He was broke, he was in debt … I was told he had
tried to kill himself on occasion. He was at the lowest ebb of his life … Everybody knew it.
Frank and I talked, and I signed him to a seven-year contract, one year with six options, which is as long as you can sign anybody. I gave him a standard royalty of five percent and gave him a scale advance. He was glad to have a place to make records. And that’s how I signed Sinatra.
Maybe Frank’s humility was genuine; maybe he was employing some of the acting skills he was learning from Monty Clift. He knew that Capitol was hot, that Livingston was largely responsible, that the label had recently made a superstar out of Nat “King” Cole. No matter that the deal Livingston was offering was the kind that new artists, not superstars, got (the advance was in the low three figures). No matter that for the first time in his life, Sinatra would have to cover his own recording costs. He was glad to have a place to make records.
If he was superstitious, he wasn’t thinking about it when he agreed to meet Livingston for lunch on Friday, March 13, 1953, at Lucey’s,
1
a celebrity watering hole on Melrose, right across the street from the Paramount gate and Capitol’s recording studios. The food smelled delicious, and Frank was in great good spirits—he felt hungry again. As his witness, Livingston had brought along his girlfriend, the actress Betty Hutton, a square-jawed blonde who liked to laugh: there were plenty of laughs. Sinatra had brought Sanicola and Frank Military, a music-publishing pal who screened songs for him. Livingston waited till the drinks had arrived before unsnapping his briefcase and taking out the papers. He raised his glass to a great association.
The toast was seconded by all. Frank clinked his glass with the executive’s, then took a long pull of Jack Daniel’s. Livingston handed him a fountain pen; Frank regarded the papers on the table. He knew well what Capitol’s option clause specified: the label could drop him in a year if things didn’t work out. March 1954. Who knew where anybody would be in March 1954? But things would work out, if he had anything to do with it. He scratched his signature on the contract.
It was a long, pleasant lunch, yet the proceedings were of little note to the outside world. The next morning, a tiny wire-service item on page two in many of the nation’s papers carried the news, buried beneath articles about a UFO sighting over New Mexico’s Kirtland Air Force Base and the illness of the president of Czechoslovakia. “
Frank Sinatra was signed to a Capital [
sic
] recording contract today, terminating his long association with Columbia records,” it read, not quite accurately.
The next week, Alan Livingston flew to Capitol’s annual sales convention in Estes Park, Colorado. “
We had every salesman in our distributing company there, every branch manager, every district manager, every promotion man,” he recalled. “There must have been a couple of hundred people. And I got up and talked about future artists and recordings, and I announced that we had just signed Frank Sinatra.”
Everyone in the room groaned.
Livingston raised his hands to quiet them. “Look,” he told his sales force, “I can only judge on talent. I can’t judge what people did in the past. I only know talent, and Frank is the best singer in the world. There’s nobody who can touch him.”
Still, that groan stayed with him. The past was exactly what Sinatra had to get away from.
“Hey, do me one favor and do yourself a favor,” Livingston told Frank when he got back to town. The executive said he had a great young arranger he wanted to team Frank with. But Sinatra shook his head practically before the executive had finished speaking.
“I’ve worked with Axel for practically my whole career,” he said. “I can’t leave Axel.”
Livingston asked Frank just to hear him out. The arranger was amazingly talented. His name was Nelson Riddle.
Frank shrugged—never heard of him. Practically nobody had. Riddle, a former trombonist and arranger with Tommy Dorsey in the post-Sinatra period, seemed to specialize in working anonymously. When Livingston told Sinatra about all the sides Riddle had arranged
for Bing Crosby, Nat Cole, Mel Tormé, and Billy Eckstine, Sinatra shook his head again. Why hadn’t he heard of this guy?
They hit on an agreement: Frank would do a session with Stordahl, Capitol would put out the record, and they would see what ensued. If the cash registers rang, fine. If not, Frank would give what’s-his-name a shot.
