Frank: The Voice (67 page)

Frank on the edge. The Copacabana, spring 1950, just before his voice gave out. He wears a coonskin cap and snaps a whip to lampoon Frankie Laine; meanwhile, he’s taking “pills to sleep, pills to get started in the morning, and pills to relax during the day.”
(photo credit 24.2)

Whatever really happened that night, the episode speaks to Frank Sinatra’s deeply divided nature. He is a thirty-four-year-old man, famous and brilliant and deep voiced and well-endowed and sexually voracious, certainly by many measures the big stud Artie Shaw makes him out to be. Yet his behavior throughout this singular evening is oddly childlike, especially when it comes to the faked suicide. That pale little smile when Ava—on top—finally gives him his sought-after, maternally consoling embrace; that cartoonish “Oh, hello.” It’s like the climax of a game of hide-and-seek.

Artie Shaw’s story about Ava’s sexual confession (“
It’s like being in bed with a woman”) may be half-true; it certainly shows Shaw to best advantage, and Sinatra to worst. But it chimes oddly with the incident at the Hampshire House. Sinatra certainly had a hysterical side, and was nothing if not hypersensitive. And Ava was all things to him, siren and drinking buddy and mother surrogate, and great artists have polymorphous souls. Even her private name for him, Francis, sounded (perhaps purposely) androgynous. Picasso, who was every bit as macho as Frank, said, “
Every artist is a woman and ought to be
une gouine
[a dyke].” In any case, if Ava was looking for a man who would dominate her, she was, as would become increasingly evident, betting on the wrong horse.

Frank and Mitch Miller rehearse in Columbia recording studio, circa 1951. The tension between the domineering singer and the domineering producer is palpable.
(photo credit 25.1)

N
ow that Manie had left the picture, Columbia, too, was starting to wonder about Sinatra. From virtually carrying the company, he had become a major liability. (As soon as Sacks arrived at RCA, he tried to sell his colleagues on signing Sinatra: no one was interested.) On March 30, 1950, Columbia Records’ president, Ted Wallerstein, sent a memo to his next in command, Vice President Goddard Lieberson:

Manie, Frank’s ultimate protector, had been the one behind the big advances. With Manie gone, and RCA surging, a cold wind was blowing at Columbia. Wallerstein had already given Mitch Miller the same message he’d sent Lieberson: “
Mitch, we’ve got to make this money back.”

The head of the pop-singles department knew exactly what he had to do. Before this, Frank’s ratio of rhythm numbers to ballads had been about one to ten; Mitch Miller decided to try the reverse. The producer’s exquisite ear and classical background never got in the way when it came to commercial matters. “
What makes you want to dig in your pocket and buy a record?” he mused many years later. “It’s got to be something you want to play over and over again. You look for qualities to make somebody buy it. I was trying to put stuff in records that would tighten the picture for the listener.”

For Miller’s first collaboration with Sinatra, the producer brought the singer an up-tempo Arthur Altman, Hal David, and Redd Evans tune, “American Beauty Rose”:

With a bouncy Dixieland-style arrangement by Norman Leyden, who’d pepped up Glenn Miller’s and Tex Beneke’s bands, “American Beauty
Rose” bounds out of the gate at a breakneck tempo and never lets up. (Miller himself conducted.) The astute Will Friedwald calls the number “
irresistible,” and Sinatra’s rendition “joyous,” but to my ears the song just sounds fast and mechanical, a vapid counterpart to Como’s “A—You’re Adorable.” Frank is in great voice, but there’s no smile in his voice. He sounds as if he’s just watching Mitch’s relentlessly waving baton and going through the motions.

The heartbreaking thing is that Miller knew exactly what he was doing: America
wanted
vapid novelty numbers in 1950. It just didn’t want Sinatra very much—“American Beauty Rose” charted, but only made it to number 26, and only for two weeks. At this point, Frank’s name was plastered all over the newspapers every day of the week as a family deserter and a has-been. You didn’t have to be officially declared persona non grata on the Senate floor, the way Ingrid Bergman had been, to be counted out by the American public.

But Mitch Miller had set the new tempo, and Frank had to keep dancing faster and faster. Not only was he playing three shows a night at the Copa and broadcasting the frenetic
Light Up Time
five evenings a week from the NBC studios at Rockefeller Center, but he was cranking out new records at a brisk new clip in hopes of generating the hits that would pay back Columbia (not to mention the IRS). In April alone, he did three recording sessions and eight new songs—almost a third as many as he’d recorded in the entire previous year. All eight were up-tempo numbers.

Almost all the new songs were arranged by George Siravo, the same man who’d been arranging fast-paced numbers for Frank throughout the 1940s and who had collaborated with Sy Oliver on the July 1949 session that produced the joyous versions of “It All Depends on You” and “Bye Bye Baby.” But the differences between July 1949 and April 1950 in Sinatra’s life and spirit were profound. The previous July, he’d been in the first flush of his grand affair with Ava. Now the affair had entered a complex second phase. Siravo’s new arrangements were lively and inventive, but Sinatra was subtly dragging them down. As with “American Beauty Rose,” he was singing well enough, but joylessly.
On “You Do Something to Me,” he hit some outright clams, flat notes that seemed to mirror his mood.

None of the new sides charted.

In the meantime, Ava had finally heeded MGM’s importuning and flown with Bappie to London. For all the sweet sorrow of parting with Frank—they wept as they embraced—she felt nothing but relief as she boarded the BOAC Stratocruiser. She would be going to Europe for four months—four months without hate mail, American newspapers, the Legion of Decency. Whether she and Frank would be seeing each other during that time was left up in the air.

“
Oh, God,” Ava wrote in her autobiography, “Frank Sinatra could be the sweetest, most charming man in the world when he was in the mood.”

But being with him, she thought, was what it must be like to have a particularly demanding child.

In addition to three shows a night at the Copa, five radio broadcasts a week, recording sessions, and the usual fun and games with the Varsity, toward the end of April Frank opened a one-week stand at the Capitol Theater, where he had drawn less than sensationally in 1947. This time there were even more empty seats. He had been in show business half his life, and he was tired: his eyes bloodshot, his face drawn and thin. The rumors that he was having voice problems persisted—he had a cold that wouldn’t go away. And now there was new gossip: Ava, shooting in Spain, had taken up with a bullfighter. Frank’s stomach hurt at the thought, but he knew just where to look for consolation: sweet Marilyn Maxwell was in town, glad to listen to his troubles and not as worried about being sloppy seconds as, perhaps, she should have been. Then there were the Copa Girls, four of them—imagine the possibilities. The long nights melted into blue dawns, then he slept a little and woke to the brazen light of Manhattan afternoons …

Coughing. He would light a cigarette before he got out of bed, and
when he was through shaving, he would light another. Then whoever had shared his bed would have to get the hell out of there, because he had to get ready for the show.

Meanwhile, in Santa Monica on April 26, Nancy filed a suit for separate maintenance. Her lawyer was Gregson Edward Bautzer—Greg to his friends, of which he had many, mainly female. The dashing, hard-drinking Bautzer was renowned in Hollywood for having taken Lana Turner’s virginity (she didn’t seem to have enjoyed the experience very much), and his specialty was representing beautiful women in their divorce cases: Turner; Ginger Rogers; Ingrid Bergman. These days he was seeing Rogers, when he wasn’t seeing Joan Crawford. Maybe he was also seeing Nancy?

Her suit alleged that Frank had treated her with “
extreme cruelty” and caused her “grievous mental suffering” without provocation on her part. “She estimated the crooner’s 1949 income at $934,740,” said the Associated Press, “and the value of their community property at $750,000.” She also asked for custody of their three children.

There was a crowd of reporters outside the courthouse: they wanted to know if the couple were getting a divorce. Nancy, dignified in a gray dress and the three-strand pearl necklace Frank had given her, said quietly that no divorce action was contemplated. Both she and her husband were Catholics, she said, and “
neither of us wants one.”

Two days later, Frank was in the news again: MGM had let him go.