Frank: The Voice (70 page)

Obvious to whom? Frank’s absolute composure was—now more
than ever—mostly an artful illusion. And television was not to be his medium. The whiff of arrogance, whether contrived or real, made him a hot presence on the cool tube: the contrast jangled. Nor did he have much of a gift for comedy, the lifeblood of television variety. He was too angry, too edgy. In a sketch on the Hope show he played—of all people—Bing Crosby, the avatar of cool. The results were less than impressive, counteracting the magic Frank had spun with his singing. “
If TV is his oyster, Sinatra hasn’t broken out of his shell,”
Variety
noted.

The day after his television debut, Frank went back to radio—for one more week. His contract for
Light Up Time
had expired, and Lucky Strike wasn’t hustling to renew. Yet another company had cut him loose. On Monday, June 5, he was officially at liberty.

In the meantime, Jaffe was in talks with CBS, which was laboring mightily to squeeze some value out of its rapidly diminishing asset, to create a pair of vehicles for Sinatra that fall: another radio program and, against all better judgment, a TV show. Frank was also booked at London’s Palladium in early July; until then, he was facing an empty month, and a vacation was the last thing he needed. His voice was back; he wanted to sing.

In late May and early June, while Sinatra’s first collaboration with Mitch Miller, the dreadful “American Beauty Rose,” was having its brief moment at the bottom of the charts, it became clear to Miller that none of the other eight up-tempo numbers Frank had recorded that spring were tickling the public’s fancy. Accordingly, the producer decided to take a stronger hand with his star. If the public didn’t want to hear Sinatra swing, then maybe he should sing something else.

Miller had been instrumental in the decision to move Sinatra up-tempo, but it had been Frank and George Siravo who’d made all the creative decisions in April. For the session on June 28, Miller had a new concept, one he controlled completely. The songs, “Goodnight Irene” and “Dear Little Boy of Mine,” had an earnest, folksy quality
(“Irene” had recently been a big hit for the Weavers), and to heighten that quality, background voices were used—the Mitch Miller Singers. Miller himself, naturally, arranged and conducted. And Frank Sinatra just sang along with Mitch.

If he hated it, it didn’t show. Sinatra was in excellent voice on both numbers—utterly unsuited to his character and personality though they were. Listen to them, and even with the corny background chorus they almost make sense. In fact, “Goodnight Irene” went straight to number 5 on the
Billboard
charts, Sinatra’s biggest hit in over three years.

Ava had finished all her location shooting for
Pandora
. All that remained were some interiors, to be filmed at Shepperton Studios outside of London. With a fond farewell to Spain and an
hasta la vista
to Mario Cabré, she moved into a luxury flat near Hyde Park, and a corps of reporters and photographers promptly set up camp at her doorstep. She greeted them with husky-voiced, affectionate ribaldries when she went out in the morning and returned at night, and they, like everyone else, fell in love with her.

On July 5, Sinatra flew to England, in high spirits: Henry Jaffe had arm wrestled Bill Paley into giving Frank a five-year contract for a TV variety show, to commence in October. (CBS also threw in a new radio show,
Meet Frank Sinatra
, to start concurrently.) At $200,000 per annum, the deal was potentially worth $1 million, and while it was subject to all sorts of provisos, escape clauses, and caveats, it theoretically gave Sinatra the edge over Bing Crosby as the highest-paid singer in show business.

Landing in London was like stepping out of a time machine. In the States, it was a new, bad decade: President Truman had just sent U.S. troops to Korea; Joe McCarthy was rapping pieces of paper and barking threats. In England, where bombed-out buildings were still much in evidence, it felt like the early 1940s, a time that had been very
good to Frank Sinatra. London, a town desperate for some cheering up, greeted him with the kind of hysterical acclaim he’d been missing badly lately—especially from teenage girls, who once again came out in screaming droves.

When he reunited with Ava, it was as a man who’d gotten his mojo back. He was a cock of the walk again, and she liked him that way.

He in turn devoured the adulation. One night, Ava’s co-star Sheila Sim and her husband, Richard Attenborough, picked up Ava and Frank to take them to the premiere of a new Noël Coward musical. Crowds were gathered outside Ava’s flat, and when she emerged, she whisked right through them and hopped into Sim and Attenborough’s car. Frank came out a moment later, a huge grin on his face, and signed every autograph book thrust at him. When he finally got in the car, Ava was furious: they had agreed ahead of time that they would skip all that. Frank just shrugged.

He may have been One-Take Charlie for the movies, but when it came to his music, he was a man possessed. The Palladium was at least the equivalent of the Paramount, and he rehearsed all day, every day, until the opening.

And he didn’t disappoint. Backed by England’s biggest big band, Woolf Phillips and the Skyrockets, Frank knocked them dead. Nancy junior writes:

The critics loved him too. “
I watched mass hysteria,” wrote the
New Musical Express
’s reviewer. “Was it wonderful? Decidedly so, for this man Sinatra is a superb performer and a great artiste. He had his
audience spellbound.” The
Sunday Chronicle
’s man mustered even less English reserve: “
Bless me, he’s GOOD! He is as satisfying a one-man performance as the Palladium has ever seen.”

The deeper thinkers of Fleet Street tried, hard, to analyze Sinatra’s appeal. Most of the results reflected the eternal cultural divide between the two great countries separated by a common language. But the London
Sunday Times
’s distinguished drama critic, Harold Hobson—later to be a prescient champion of Harold Pinter, John Osborne, and Tom Stoppard—was far ahead of the rest of the world in his penetrating assessment of Sinatra:

Kissing Ava good-bye—no tears this time; she’d be returning to the States soon—Frank flew back to New York and, on August 2, walked into the Columbia studios to record a number from an upcoming Bing Crosby picture (there was no escaping Crosby!),
Mr. Music
. The song, written by Bing’s personal tunesmiths Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen (Chester may have traveled with Sinatra, but he was still earning his money from Crosby), was called “Life Is So Peculiar.”

The arranger and conductor was the Canadian-born Percy Faith, who, long before “Theme from
A Summer Place
” and “Love Theme
from
Romeo and Juliet
,” knew how to swing. Sinatra, backed by a superb small band (including his old pal Matty Golizio on guitar and the great Johnny Blowers on drums) and accompanied by singer Helen Carroll and the vocal group the Swantones, was in a fine mood, and it showed. The number is a trifle, to be sure, but it’s a charming, exuberant trifle—and something more.

In an earlier context, the producer George Avakian spoke of a contrast he observed at a 1946 Sinatra recording session: when Frank sang a couple of heavily orchestrated ballads, Avakian said, he seemed tense; yet late in the session, when laying down a couple of “
pleasant throwaways” with a jazz trio, the singer was utterly relaxed.

So it was on the “Life Is So Peculiar” session. Even though this band was fourteen pieces rather than three, Sinatra was clearly comfortable with the jazz context and, even more important, with the triviality of the tune itself, which he would soon refer to, in an interview, as “
a cute little novelty song.” But he sounds (if a bit husky around the edges) just great, easy and swinging. And most remarkably, his voice, imbued with a new maturity, actually harks
ahead
to the great Capitol sessions he will do two and a half years later, in a new, unimaginable lifetime.

And further: there’s a positively eerie moment at the end of the second chorus as Frank sings:

The rascally lilt he gives to those two very familiar last words harks ahead
two
lifetimes, across the Capitol years and deep into the Reprise era, to the turbulent year in which Sinatra’s wedding to the twenty-one-year-old Mia Farrow would be bookended by two disastrous physical altercations, signaling the singer’s deeply disquieted state of mind. Frank was angry when he recorded “That’s Life” in October 1966, angry at a world that was starting to pass him by and angry
at a record producer who’d just told him that his previous take of the song had been … well, not so interesting. (His audible anger made the final take very interesting.) In August 1950, of course, he was simply having fun.

In the middle of the month Ava returned to Los Angeles, and Frank was there to meet her. Then she vanished. “
There’s no sign of life around [Gardner’s] pink stucco house on a mountain top behind Hollywood,” a wire-service report noted, a little plaintively.