Frank: The Voice (43 page)

Nancy found it there a couple of days before Christmas. She’d driven over to her beauty parlor in Beverly Hills and, absurdly enough, wanted to comb her hair before she went in. She saw the robin’s egg blue box. Frank had been sweet, if a little distracted, since getting back home: He’d missed her, he said. And it was sweet; it reminded her of how it had been before the children.

She undid the ribbon and opened the box.

Sitting in the car on Cañon Drive, Nancy put her hand to her chest. The bracelet sparkled in the brazen California light, the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen—it must have cost a fortune. He spent
it as he made it, she thought. The gold engraved Cartier lighters and cigarette cases for all his pals, even useful acquaintances, tens of thousands of dollars’ worth. Whatever else he was, he was hers.

On Christmas morning, with Little Nancy and the baby happy under the big tree with their dolls and toys, he handed her a Tiffany box. A small Tiffany box. She blinked in confusion as she opened it and saw the pearl earrings. Her smile as she hugged him was deeply confused.

The party that year was especially splendid: The war was over! And the show this year would be like no other. Harry Crane had written comedy sketches; Sammy and Jule had created a whole evening’s worth of songs; Dickie Whorf, a young director at Metro, had personally painted a Parisian street scene on the backdrop curtain and supervised the rehearsals.

The men wore black tie; the women, gowns. Sinatra stood at the front door and greeted the guests himself. The songs and the comedy were hilarious. Frank sang “Mammy” in blackface, complete with Jolson voice and head-shaking shtick; Phil Silvers’s dazzling new wife, Jo-Carroll, a former Miss America from Texas, sang a number called “I’m the Wife of the Life of the Party,” enumerating Phil’s many flaws, especially his habit of breaking into comedy routines whether they were asked for or not. A sketch in which Cahn, Crane, and Peter Lawford played three restaurant patrons served by Sinatra brought down the house: when Lawford, a notorious cheapskate, asked for the check, Frank dropped a whole trayful of dishes.

Nancy, struck by an attack of shyness, mostly hovered around the kitchen, seeing to it that the food was served properly. She felt comfortable around the servants. Now and then she stuck her head out to catch a song or a sketch. She watched the beautiful women watching Frank, watched their gleaming eyes and avid smiles, and felt sick with worry.

Then she shook her head in bewilderment at the sight of sweet-faced Marilyn Maxwell, sitting next to her handsome husband, John Conte, watching Frank sing with that
look
in her eyes. When Marilyn reached up to push aside a few strands of that perfect blond hair, the way women do when they’re attracted to a man, there it was, glittering unmistakably, like the palest chips of ice. Her bracelet. And at that moment, Nancy literally had to hold on to the doorway for support: the earth had spun off its axis.

Frank clowns at a CBS rehearsal, circa 1944. Joking aside, however, the man who couldn’t read music really could conduct.
(photo credit 17.2)

Frank and the two Nancys, 1945. “Daddy was … a voice on the radio most of the time,” Nancy junior wrote, years later. “A figure composed of a bow tie and two black patent leather shoes, who was always going away.”
(photo credit 18.1)

S
he felt as if someone had smacked her in the face. Then she collected herself, straightening her shoulders, and walked across the room. She leaned over and took the woman’s wrist—the wrist with the bracelet—and looked Marilyn Maxwell in the eyes.

She would have to leave. At once.

Marilyn just stared at her, saying nothing, admitting everything.

It was all done quickly, quietly, efficiently, so the all-important party could come to its triumphant conclusion. For all anyone knew,
there had been a minor family emergency of some sort. The couple simply got up and left. Frank, trouper that he was, continued the song even as he watched what was going on in front of him. He got a big hand.

Afterward, in the bedroom (he wouldn’t share it that night), he tried, as best he could, swearing she didn’t mean anything to him.

His wife looked at him coldly.

It was a long, slow climb back toward civility, beginning with a week of silent penance and followed by a full floral offensive, bouquet after gigantic bouquet, all of which she loftily ignored. Frank stayed uncharacteristically close to home in the beginning of 1946, not even venturing into the recording studio until early February, then bringing Nancy, as tribute, a test pressing of one of the day’s four cuts, a sappy something called “One Love” (“
How sweet the way you play upon my heartstrings/How strange when you’re away, you give my heart wings”).

She ignored him, but she didn’t smash the record.

Maybe she should have. At this point in his career, Sinatra was doing what he would continue to do until the end of the line: look for hits. But this process was dicey, subject as the singer was to the whims of the marketplace and the tenor of the times. And in those days the times were tricky. The mid-1940s brought two paradoxical trends to American music: the rise of the singer at the expense of the big bands, and the decline of popular songwriting. Frank himself had much to do with the former,
¹
but was powerless to change the latter. Times change; tastes change: the war’s end had brought a kind of giddiness to the American zeitgeist, the result of post-traumatic stress and new fears. The longing wartime ballads that had made Sinatra’s reputation were suddenly uncongenial to the national ear. Cheesy novelty numbers began to pop up like toadstools after a rainstorm. Kern and Gershwin were dead. Berlin and Porter were writing almost exclusively for Broadway, and while musicals continued to be a rich vein of material, the
days of Tin Pan Alley cranking out lovely tunes that went straight to sheet music, records, and radio were swiftly coming to a close.

Astonishing as it may be to think about today, the idea of the standard—the great and lasting popular song, from the hands of one of the above-mentioned geniuses, or others such as Harold Arlen, Harry Warren, and Hoagy Carmichael—didn’t really exist at the end of World War II. There was just a lot of music out there: great songs, good songs, fair songs, and poor songs, among which not even a great artist like Sinatra could always be depended on to navigate reliably.

He got an early leg up from a man who would become a romantic rival (and probably because of this, a Sinatra hater till the end of his life): Artie Shaw. Early in his career, the mercurial, intellectually arrogant clarinetist and bandleader hit on a simple but brilliant notion. “
As Shaw put it,” Will Friedwald writes, “the idea was to take the best possible songs and orchestrate them in the best possible way.” With this guideline in mind, Shaw resurrected great (but incredibly enough, lightly dust-coated) tunes such as Porter’s “Begin the Beguine,” Kern’s “All the Things You Are,” and Gershwin’s “The Man I Love” and made huge hit records of them.