Frank: The Voice (56 page)
Authors: James Kaplan
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #General, #United States, #Biography, #Composers & Musicians, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #Singers, #Singers - United States, #Sinatra; Frank
I hurried around the corner to the stage door. There must have been five hundred kids ahead of me, waiting for a look at him. When he appeared, the crowd surged forward like one massive body ready to go right through the side of the building
if necessary. Girls were screaming, fainting, pushing, waving pencils and papers in the air. A girl next to me shouted, “I’d faint if I had room to fall down.” She got her laugh and the crowd kept moving. I stood on tiptoe trying to see him. God, he looked like a star. He wasn’t much older than a lot of us but he was so calm, like we were all silly kids and he was a man, sure of himself, completely in control. He acted as if he didn’t know there were hundreds of papers being waved at him. He concentrated on one at a time, signing it, smiling, and going to the next. He got to me and took my paper. He used a solid gold pen to sign his name. I thanked him and he looked at me. “Don’t I know you?”
The story rings true, solid-gold pen and all. Sinatra did have an amazing memory for names and faces, and Sammy Davis didn’t look like anybody else. Frank invited him to come to his dressing room after the next week’s show. Sammy remembered that once there, all he could do was stare at his idol and think, “ ‘
I can speak to Frank Sinatra and he’ll answer me.’ But I couldn’t think of anything clever enough to say so I just watched him, smiling and laughing at his every word.”
It was a perfect relationship for both men.
By the time Frank got to the Capitol in November 1947, he had established a tradition. “Frank Sinatra,” Will Mastin explained to the two Sammys after the fateful telegram came, “
always has a colored act on the bill with him.”
Even if George Evans had nothing but public relations in mind when he pushed his star client to accept all those tolerance awards, that didn’t make Sinatra a phony liberal. And his sentiments about working with black entertainers ran deep: artistically speaking, he knew where his bread was buttered. He simply understood too much about the roots of American popular music to imagine that he didn’t owe an important debt to the geniuses of Fifty-second Street, Billie Holiday first among them.
But aside from that, Frank genuinely liked black people. And,
understanding this, most black people—who, by the fact of their existence in America, possessed an intricate radar for racism—liked him back.
3
He clearly understood what it was like to be discriminated against. He had great style. And that voice of his told the truth, no matter what color your ears were.
So he hired colored acts. Sinatra, in addition to being color-blind, was generous—and, once he had decided to help someone, tenacious. MGM could squawk all it wanted about taking on those unknowns Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne, but if they didn’t, they didn’t get Sinatra. The Capitol Theater could remind Frank until they were blue in the face that if he wanted a colored act, he could easily get the more famous Moke and Poke, or the Berry Brothers, or the Nicholas Brothers, who were even in a movie, for God’s sake. Frank shook his head obstinately. “
There’s a kid who comes to my radio show when he’s in town, he works with his family, his name is Sam something. Use him.”
“All right, Frank, if you want ’em you got ’em. How much do you want to give them?”
“Make it $1,250.”
“We can get the Nicholas Brothers for that kind of money and … they’re hot.”
“$1,250. That’s it. I don’t want the Nicholas Brothers. I want Sam and his family.”
And once the Will Mastin Trio (which up to this point had been making $350 in a good week) was onstage at the Capitol, Frank would stroll out and throw his arm around Sammy’s shoulder—in an era when such a gesture from a white man to a black man was a very rare sight indeed—and personally introduce him to the crowd.
Even if the crowd, especially by the second week, was no longer quite the size the crowds had been so very recently.
During all this disappointment, Frank kept recording as though his life depended on it—which, in a very real way, it did. In October alone, he cut an amazing twenty sides at Liederkranz Hall, more than he
had done in all of 1943. Committing to shellac such great standards as “All of Me,” “Laura,” “The Song Is You,” and “What’ll I Do?” was a kind of atonement for all the mediocre material he was being forced to sing on
Your Hit Parade
. On Friday, October 31—having spent the previous afternoon grinning through a cold rain as Hoboken celebrated Frank Sinatra Day—he recorded three beautiful songs, “Mean to Me,” “Spring Is Here,” and “Fools Rush In,” and he sang them beautifully.
The only problem was, the public wasn’t buying.
Dolly had stood close by Frank’s side as the mayor of Hoboken presented him with a giant wooden key to the city. Wearing a big feathered hat and the mink stole Frank had bought her, she threw her head back as the photographers snapped away, a rapturous smile creasing her chubby cheeks. Rain or no rain, her moment in the sun had come at last. Frank Sinatra Day, Dolly Sinatra Day—same thing. At his son’s other shoulder stood Marty, looking grim in his old-fashioned fire captain’s uniform with its two rows of brass buttons. Firemen marched in parades; they didn’t lead them.
Just out of range of the photographers stood Nancy, smiling despite the proximity of her mother-in-law. George Evans was holding an umbrella over her. She wore a wool coat, the Tiffany pearl earrings Frank had bought her, and, out of sight but cool against her breastbone, the triple strand of pearls. She was also carrying a very tangible token of her husband’s recommitment to their marriage: she was pregnant again.
At the construction site on Alejo Road, out in the desert at the edge of Palm Springs, the bulldozers and cement mixers ran double shifts, working all day and then at night under floodlights as the builders hurried toward the Christmas deadline. E. Stewart Williams had shown Frank Sinatra two very different sets of drawings: one was of the Georgian mansion Frank had requested, and the other depicted Williams’s far more modern concept, a low-lying concrete structure with tall picture
windows and a shed roof. The young architect had literally held his breath as the singer scanned the drawings, a serious look on his tanned features. Sinatra’s domineering reputation had preceded him, yet Williams, trying to forge a career, knew that building Georgian in the desert—impractical as well as retrograde—would make him a laughingstock in the field. He would be seen as a servant rather than an artist. Frank nodded, frowning, as he inspected the modern design, then, suddenly looking interested, nodded some more.
Williams exhaled.
The house wasn’t quite a mansion—at forty-five hundred square feet, it was large but not gigantic, and there were only four bedrooms—but the rooms and the windows were big, and every window, as well as a sliding glass wall, looked out onto the swimming pool, which was shaped (Williams couldn’t help smiling at this inspired touch) like a grand piano. A breezeway over one end of the pool was designed to shed shadows that would resemble piano keys. Bright sun and sparkling
light off the pool filled the living room: if shade was needed, the flick of a switch closed a $7,000 motorized curtain. In the distance stony Mount San Jacinto shimmered white in the fierce sun; in the foreground, two palm trees waved in the desert wind. The house, made pleasant by air-conditioning in the summer and fireplaces in the winter, would be a shelter from the desert around it. Frank would call the place Twin Palms.
Twin Palms, Palm Springs. Architect E. Stewart Williams designed the desert retreat, complete with piano-shaped swimming pool, for his demanding client and his family; within weeks of its completion, Frank was courting Ava Gardner.
(photo credit 21.2)
No one like her, before or since. “I just noticed the body,” said Sammy Cahn’s first wife. “It just moved like a willow. She was built beautifully. She was a gorgeous creature.”
(photo credit 22.1)
A
s his wife grew great with child for the third time, Sinatra found more and more reasons to be elsewhere. Pregnancy may be deemed sexy by some cultures in some eras, but in late-1940s America it was anything but. The women got fat and sick and peevish; the men took increasing notice of the unbelievably slim waistlines of the young women they passed. For Frank, the delectable bodies of the young women all around him proved increasingly irresistible.
It was a time of challenge in general. A new American Federation of Musicians strike had begun on the first day of 1948: once again, there could be no recording with orchestras. The ban wouldn’t end until early December. In the interim, Sinatra would go into the recording studio exactly twice, laying down just three sides—two that would be released later with overdubbed orchestral backing, and one with a choir (“Nature Boy,” a version far inferior to the glorious one Nat Cole had recorded before the strike began).
Sinatra was not spending much time in movie studios, either.
The Kissing Bandit
had wrapped, thank God (though Frank’s agony was to be prolonged: extra scenes had to be shot the following March); production on
The Miracle of the Bells
had finished at the end of September. He would start work on a new Metro musical with Gene Kelly,
Take Me Out to the Ball Game
, in July.