Frank: The Voice (112 page)

What they were discussing, no doubt, was the fact that the fourth and final actress Bogart had married, who had flown seven thousand miles to join him in Rome, was missing
her
couple of babies, badly, longing to fly back to them—and never forgetting the movie career she’d put in abeyance to be their mother.

“There isn’t a single thing about this lousy business I like,” Ava told Lee.

Lauren Bacall carried a coconut cake from Frank to Ava when she went to Rome to visit her husband, Humphrey Bogart, on the set of
The Barefoot Contessa
. Ava ignored the cake. Bacall and Sinatra later formed a close friendship.
(photo credit 39.2)

“A friend of Ava’s,” Lee wrote, “says she talks about Frankie constantly, but confesses that they ‘Can’t live together and can’t live apart.’ What the trouble is neither of them is willing to admit in public—if either really knows.”

Frank escorts Frank Jr. and Little Nancy to the Academy Awards at the Pantages Theatre, Hollywood, March 25, 1954.
(photo credit 40.1)

Y
oung at Heart” had entered the
Billboard
chart on February 13; two weeks later, it climbed to the Top 10.
Songs for Young Lovers
was also selling. Alan Livingston was ecstatic: time to start another album. At the end of February, Sinatra flew back to Los Angeles; on March 1, he went back to meet Nelson Riddle in the Capitol studios.

Frank recorded three numbers that Monday night: Johnny Mercer and Rube Bloom’s “Day In, Day Out,” Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg’s
“Last Night When We Were Young,” and a Sammy Cahn–Jule Styne title theme for an upcoming movie, “Three Coins in the Fountain.” That insipid film, starring Louis Jourdan and Jean Peters, would premiere in June; Sinatra’s singing over the title credits was the best part of it. Neither of the other two songs would be heard for a while, though. “Last Night When We Were Young” landed on Frank’s
In the Wee Small Hours
album in 1955, but “Day In, Day Out” didn’t officially resurface until 1991, when it appeared as a bonus track on a CD reissue of 1960’s
Nice ’n’ Easy
.

The lengthy obscurity of one of Sinatra’s greatest recordings is something of a mystery. He had recorded the song, with an Axel Stordahl arrangement, on his first Capitol recording date the previous April. But the Stordahl version was problematic. On the one hand, there was Frank’s vocal, which was sensational: tender, strong, and ardent. On the other, Axel’s arrangement, to put a fine point on it, was corny, old-fashioned, and soporific, from the chimes-of-midnight pizzicato intro to the soupy wash of strings and harp glissandi that seem to want to recast this towering love song as the theme to a B movie. Alan Livingston’s sharp young ears would have heard every bit of this, making his quest to link Sinatra and Riddle all the more urgent.

More important, though, Frank was eager to get the song right.

So he and Riddle made this magnificent recording, which languished in the Capitol vault for decades—in all likelihood, as the archivist Ed O’Brien has suggested, because Frank’s concepts for each of his albums were so specific that there was simply no place to put “Day In, Day Out” until it resurfaced as an asterisk in the singer’s seventy-sixth year. It was an astounding omission, but we are the beneficiaries of the correction, able to hear singer and arranger already at the apex of their powers. In the thirty-two-year-old Riddle’s hands, “Day In, Day Out” became a hymn to passion, unashamedly romantic and forthrightly sexual. It is real drama rather than melodrama. And the arrangement’s richness is greatly enhanced by the presence of a
seventeen-piece string section, as contrasted to a mere nine for the Stordahl session.

In Riddle’s hands, the fiddles pulse in waves, lilting and halting, with all the teasing hesitancy and onward rush of first love; his flutes and harps are shimmering moon glow rather than schmaltz. The great Mercer lyric, at first all daydreams and possibility, rises to a peak of ardor when the lovers meet and kiss (“
an ocean’s roar, a thousand drums”), and this is when Riddle finally brings on all the horns and timpani … but that’s not the end. The music and the singing grow gentle again—

—before fading to a close. Riddle would later describe his methodology. “
In working out arrangements for Frank,” he said,

This is precisely the methodology of “Day In, Day Out.” The heartbeat trips and quickens toward the climax, then eases back to a serene afterglow.

Sinatra was crazy about this arrangement, and his singing shows it. Here he is not only ardent and tender, as he was on the Stordahl record, but passionate. His emotional and sexual engagement with every syllable of the lyric, every note of the song, every bar of the arrangement, never wavers. This is not just a display of great singing but also a great work of art, rich with autobiographical meaning, shot through with longing and loss.

Infinitely restless, Frank flew to Palm Springs with Chester for fun and games, then, impatiently, flew back to Los Angeles. “
Just for the record,” Parsons sniffed possessively, two weeks to the day before the Oscars, “Frank Sinatra is here in town. He came in a few days ago from Palm Springs. He’ll be on Bing Crosby’s radio show, so the New York and Rome trips are canceled.”

Rome: the world simply refused to stop believing—in much the same way the world couldn’t stop believing in Santa Claus—that Frank and Ava would eventually get back together. But in the absence of hard news, writers were also coming up with their own material. Ava’s new studio publicist, Dave Hanna, was probably responsible for the fanciful item Leonard Lyons used to lead his March 12 column—the subject, the famous coconut cake. “
Ava was sure that a diamond ring, bracelet or necklace was inside the cake,” Lyons wrote. “After all, a husband who is as carefree about money as Sinatra is wouldn’t send an ordinary cake as a way of having a beautiful wife keep him in mind, 7,000 miles away.

“She therefore ate it all herself, chewing each bite carefully, in search of a hidden gem. ‘I finished the whole cake,’ she said, ‘and all I found was that I couldn’t get into my costume the next day.’ ”

Meanwhile, the real Frank and Ava behind the cartoonish images kept grabbing whatever pleasures they could, trying to keep the sadness
at bay. Frank’s method, as always, was ceaseless motion. Van Heusen kept the revels going, the plane warmed up. Just three days after she’d claimed Sinatra was staying put, Louella had to eat her words. “
Frank Sinatra’s excuse for missing the Look and Photoplay Magazine awards: ‘I have business in New York’ and the thought that Frankie’s MOST important business is to attend all events furthering his career,” she harrumphed, incoherent with indignation.

So there really had been a New York trip—was he on his way someplace else? Rome, perhaps? “
Frank Sinatra off to Italy to escort Ava to the Academy Award doings—as though Ava couldn’t find her way back to Hollywood,” wrote Jimmie Fidler, who’d heard it from someone who’d heard it from someone else.

But it wasn’t Rome; it was just New York. And it wasn’t even business; it was just to keep moving.

Westbrook Pegler had laid off Frank for quite a while, not out of any merciful tendencies, but mainly because the Sinatra of the mid-1950s had fallen beneath the notice of the subversive-hunting columnist. For one thing, since Frank’s Mafia scandals of the late 1940s, he had kept his contacts with the wiseguys as quiet as possible—not least because Ava hated the hoods even more than Pegler did. For another, Frank, with plenty to distract him, was no longer the liberal firebrand he had been in the 1940s. And in any case, the political climate of 1953 and 1954 was extremely unfriendly to liberalism. There was a Republican majority in Congress; Eisenhower was in the White House. It was one thing to rally for causes at Madison Square Garden when FDR was president; it was quite another to wear one’s political heart on one’s sleeve when the Hollywood blacklist was at its raging height. Even Bogart, who’d courageously gone to Washington to face down the House Un-American Activities Committee, felt compelled to distance himself from the Hollywood Ten.