Frank: The Voice (62 page)
Authors: James Kaplan
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #General, #United States, #Biography, #Composers & Musicians, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #Singers, #Singers - United States, #Sinatra; Frank
In March,
Take Me Out to the Ball Game
came out, to tepid reviews. “Don’t be surprised,” Crowther wrote, “if you see people getting up for a seventh-inning stretch.” The movies were providing diminishing returns for Sinatra, but with not much else going on in his career, he needed that MGM paycheck. At the end of the month he got back into a sailor suit and began shooting
On the Town
, with Gene Kelly, who was co-directing the film with Stanley Donen. For the first time on one of his movies with Sinatra, Kelly would get first billing. Not only were Frank’s fortunes falling, but he was thirty-three, not so young in those days. The thinness that had once seemed so cute was now something more like gauntness: with age and trouble, his face was growing harder. “
He just didn’t seem comfortable with his looks,” said Betty Garrett, who co-starred with him on both
Ball Game
and
On the Town
. MGM cosmeticians had to do extensive work on him every morning, augmenting his hairline, filling in his facial scars, even padding the posterior of his sailor pants to give a more pleasing contour to Sinatra’s totally flat fanny.
Frank’s discontent went well beyond the physical: The rift with Evans gnawed at him. He would impulsively reach for the phone to call George for advice, only to realize he had burned that bridge. The IRS was dunning him, big time, for back taxes, and Dolly was hitting him up for money every time they talked. He was nervous, self-doubting, and cranky—sometimes his skin felt too tight. At a party in Palm Springs,
he sucker punched a retired businessman named Jack Wintermeyer after Wintermeyer, who was acting as bartender, couldn’t figure out how to make the drink Sinatra wanted.
1
Frank only avoided a lawsuit by agreeing to say he was sorry—then reneged at the last moment by shaking hands without a word. “
He just can’t bear to apologize,” wrote the
Los Angeles Examiner
sports columnist Vincent X. Flaherty, who was present. “No matter what the cost—career, money, anything.”
Sinatra didn’t like himself very much, and the world seemed to agree with him. In March,
Down Beat
wrote, of a group of sides Frank had done with the Phil Moore Four, a jazz quartet, “
They don’t quite get the intimate between-you-and-me feel that was attempted and Frankie hits a few off-pitch ones to boot.” He wasn’t about to explain to
Down Beat
what kind of mood he was in these days. They could all go screw themselves.
At the end of May, he told
Your Hit Parade
to take a hike, issuing a statement decrying the material he had been forced to sing and the style in which he had been compelled to sing it. Yet Lucky Strike swallowed the insult and immediately went into negotiations with Frank’s people to create a new broadcast. The new show, unambiguously titled
Light Up Time
, would debut in September. One thing about that Sinatra: he certainly sold cigarettes.
But not records. His latest album,
Frankly Sentimental
, released in June, completely failed to chart: a bad first. And while Sinatra’s singles did far better than in the annus horribilis of 1948—they spent a total of fifty-nine weeks on the charts in 1949—not one record rose above number 6. Other singers, some of them on Columbia, were charting higher with the same songs Frank was recording. The big seller of 1949, on RCA Victor, was the soothing but insipid Perry Como song “A—You’re Adorable” (“
M, N, O, P, I could go on all day/Q, R, S, T, alphabetically speaking, you’re OK”). It was perfect pabulum for the masses in a nervous year: in August, the Soviet Union would confirm Americans’ worst fears by testing its first A-bomb.
Frank was striving after an ideal impossible at that point in history: to succeed commercially and satisfy himself artistically. When he merely went for hits, he produced abominations like the pseudo-country “Sunflower” (whose melody would later reappear, unimproved, as “Hello, Dolly”). When he let himself go, as he did in the three up-tempo numbers he recorded in a remarkable July session orchestrated by George Siravo and the great Sy Oliver (“It All Depends on You,” “Bye Bye Baby,” and “Don’t Cry Joe”), the results were thrilling. Lacquer-disc safety copies of the Sunday-evening session (Sinatra always preferred recording at night—“
The voice is better at night,” he was fond of saying), transcribed and analyzed by the Sinatra musicologist Charles L. Granata, have preserved Frank’s obsessive pursuit of artistic perfection in exquisite detail:
The recording date is July 10, 1949. As the evening session gets underway at Columbia’s cavernous 30th Street Studio, Sinatra, arranger Sy Oliver, and conductor Hugo Winterhalter are auditioning a second instrumental run-through of George Siravo’s arrangement of “It All Depends on You.” Tonight’s date will be jazz-flavored, the orchestra really a big “band”—no strings. Amid the chatter and bustle on the studio floor, the vocalist, listening intently to a passage by the brass section, feels that something is amiss …
“I’d like to hear the introduction, with the muted brass,” he instructs the conductor. The musicians comply, and the brief section is played for his approval. After hearing the passage, Sinatra carefully instructs both the musicians and the engineers: “I’d like to get that as tight as we can. Trombones: you may have to turn around and face the microphone or something. I’d like to hear the six of you, as a unit,” he says. The engineer brings down a microphone with two sides, to help capture the precise tonal quality that Sinatra desires. The section played through again, the singer continues. “Just once more, Hugo, and would you use less volume in the reeds, with
the clarinet lead? And would you play it lightly, trumpets and trombones, if you don’t mind? I mean
softly
,” he emphasizes.
The trombone problem rectified, Sinatra, now in the booth, turns his attention to the rhythm section. He inquires of drummer Terry Snyder: “You got enough pad on the bass drum? It booms a little bit.” Then, without the slightest hesitation, he turns to the studio prop men. “Would you put in a small piece of carpet, enough to cover the entire bottom of the drum?” Satisfied, he addresses the pianist. “Say, Johnny Guarneri, would you play something, a figure or something, and have the rhythm fall in? We’d like to get a small balance on it.” Guarneri begins an impromptu riff on the melody, as bassist Herman “Trigger” Alpert, drummer Snyder, and guitarist Al Caiola join in. After a few moments, Sinatra’s directions continue. “Bass and guitar: Trig, can you move in about a foot or so, or you can pull the mike out if you wish. And the guitar—also move in a little closer. Just a shade—uh, uh, uh—that’s enough.”
This was no mere voice: this was a great artist in full command of his powers and the means required to convey his art.
And yet the public mostly failed to pay attention.
The malaise seemed to be catching: as Sinatra flatlined, Columbia sputtered. Dinah Shore and the producer and arranger Mitchell Ayres defected to Como’s label, Victor, which had come out with a record format to compete with the LP, the 45-rpm microgroove single. The two formats, and their labels, dueled for a couple of years, and at first things didn’t look good for Columbia Recording Company.
On Labor Day, September 5—exactly a week after the Russian A-test—Sinatra began
Light Up Time
. The NBC program, broadcast from Hollywood, aired every weeknight at 7:00 p.m. (on the East Coast) for just fifteen minutes: its format and time slot were copied directly from another NBC show,
Chesterfield Supper Club
. As a sign of Sinatra’s still existing but rapidly waning power, the Chesterfield show—hosted by Perry Como on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays,
and by Jo Stafford and Peggy Lee on Tuesdays and Thursdays, respectively—was bumped to 10:00 p.m. in the East. Frank’s co-star on the new broadcast was the Metropolitan Opera soprano (and fellow New Jerseyan) Dorothy Kirsten. The jam-packed format featured two solos by Sinatra, one by Kirsten, and one duet wedged between commercials. Every show began—it seems impossible to imagine in these days of fifteen-second TV ads—with a
two-minute
commercial for Luckies.
Frank was earning $10,000 a week for the show.
Newsweek
wrote, “
The sometimes unruly crooner, whose exuberance over rapid fame has left him in staggering financial debt, could look to the show as a good boost back up the money trail.” Could—but didn’t. Ten thousand a week was a grand salary for the era, but it was a per-broadcast comedown from
Your Hit Parade
, and a drop in the bucket as far as his fiscal woes were concerned.
He was on a treadmill. With the breakneck pace of arranging for a five-day-a-week show, Stordahl was unable to conduct the
Light Up Time
orchestra: a further erosion of his relationship with Frank. His replacement, the choral director Jeff Alexander, went into the recording studio with Sinatra in mid-September in Sibelius’s stead, arranging and conducting three numbers, including an Italianate piece, lush with mandolins, accordion, and Stordahl-esque strings, called “Stromboli”:
On the island of Stromboli
Recklessly I gave my heart
.
The too-apt tune was the title song for a romantic movie of the same name, directed by Roberto Rossellini and starring Ingrid Bergman. The film had just wrapped in Italy. In the course of making the picture, Rossellini and Bergman, who was married and the mother of a ten-year-old daughter, had fallen in love and conceived a child. The affair became a monumental scandal—unimaginable in the present era of casual celebrity couplings. Soon after Bergman gave birth, she would be denounced on the floor of the U.S. Senate and effectively driven out of the country.
But that night in September, Frank Sinatra was just recording a pretty song.
The next day, he sat down and typed yet another letter of complaint to Sacks. He began by giving his old friend the benefit of the doubt: Maybe Manie didn’t know about it, Frank wrote, but other Columbia artists were recording the same songs he was. The charge was more serious than it sounds. Sinatra pointed out that he had put in many hours poring over standards to find the best songs to record. It was part of his genius to know which numbers worked for him, which tunes he could move into and make his own. And when his own label let its other singers record songs like “That Old Feeling” and “You Go to My Head” after he had already put his stamp on them, it hit Frank where it hurt the most: the pocketbook. He wanted to hear from Manie, he wrote, with stiff, furious formality, “advising me why you permit this policy and if you intend to pursue it in the future.” This time he signed not with love but best regards.
The letter, typed on Sinatra’s stationery (“FRANK SINATRA” and “BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA” embossed across the top), is signed assertively in blue fountain pen, with the singer’s first and last names. Sacks annotated it in pencil. “
Check this,” he wrote, next to “You Go to My Head.” And then, underneath, “Doris Day’s album.”
It was treacherous, and it was true: Day, whose name Sinatra hadn’t been able to bring himself to mention, had recorded both songs. The late-summer correspondence between Frank and Manie reflects a growing tension between the two, a tension that in some ways was symptomatic of the singer’s troubles at Columbia. On September 20, Manie fessed up: