Frank: The Voice (72 page)
Authors: James Kaplan
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #General, #United States, #Biography, #Composers & Musicians, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #Singers, #Singers - United States, #Sinatra; Frank
Frank didn’t contest the action.
As Nancy left the courthouse, the photographers called out to her, asking for a smile. “
I don’t feel much like smiling,” she told them.
She had won, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. “
I would see her faint into her plate at dinner from the stress,” Nancy junior wrote.
Sometimes it was heart palpitations, sometimes a cold, sometimes fatigue. Until then, she had never been sick. I used to think it was the food. Maybe she wasn’t eating right. She was in pain. And though I wasn’t aware of it, her pain was exacerbated by the scandal. She was deeply in love and terribly hurt. I would hear her crying quietly at night while I was going to sleep. She would never show it in front of us, never, but my room was next to hers and I would tiptoe out and I’d listen at her door and she’d be crying. Sometimes I would go in to her and just put my arms around her. And sometimes I would just go away, thinking, “Mind your own business. Daddy’s just on the road again,” and cry myself to sleep.
The picture of Frank painted in court by Nancy and her sister is not a pretty one, and while it was certainly tinged by rancor—no
doubt many of the guests he snubbed were Barbatos—it feels all too true. Sinatra certainly used Twin Palms as a bachelor pad, and would continue to do so for as long as he owned the place. And though his remoteness was exacerbated by his obsession with Ava, it was also deeply ingrained in his character. He was, and always would be, the loneliest son of a bitch he knew.
It therefore made perfect sense, in Frank’s world, that the Varsity was still up and running: Sanicola, Ben Barton, Toots Shor, Jackie Gleason, Al Silvani, Tami Mauriello, Manie Sacks, and whoever else might be lighting his cigarettes and laughing at his jokes. Ava hated the whole thing, hated the sycophancy and the boys’-club exclusivity, but there was little she could do about it. Frank—much like Picasso, with the group of hangers-on he called his
tertulia—
was a king who required a court.
And he needed all the support he could get on October 7, at 9:00 p.m., when
The Frank Sinatra Show
made its debut on CBS television, opposite the smash hit
Your Show of Shows
on NBC. Continuing Bob Hope’s swimming-pool metaphor, the
New York Times
’s Jack Gould wrote, “
Frank Sinatra walked off the television high dive on Saturday night, but unfortunately fell into the shallow end of the pool.” Gould went on to call the show “a drab mixture of radio, routine vaudeville and pallid pantomime.” John Crosby, of the
Herald Tribune
, called Sinatra “
a surprisingly good actor but a rather bad emcee.” And
Variety
cited “
bad pacing, bad scripting, bad tempo, poor camera work and an overall jerky presentation.”
And the $41,500 the episode cost was money straight out the window for CBS, which hadn’t been able to attract a sponsor.
Clearly the occasion called for a big celebration.
Toots Shor’s (of course) was the venue, and Sinatra’s new publicist, Nat Shapiro, invited 150 of the singer’s closest friends. Three hundred showed up, along with a writer and a photographer from
Look
magazine, which ran a feature on the bash.
But no amount of publicity could slap much life into
The Frank Sinatra Show
. The broadcast would limp along for the rest of the season at forty grand per episode (though in November, Bulova signed on to sponsor the first half hour), as the critics continued to snipe and the viewing public mostly tuned to Sid Caesar. Things might have been different if Sinatra had devoted himself to the program, but he appeared to have other fish to fry. “
Frank was always late, sometimes two and three hours late,” recalled Irving Mansfield, whom the network brought in to produce after the first show bombed.
He hated to rehearse and refused to discuss the weekly format. Usually, he ignored the guest shots entirely. Once he wanted to book Jackie Gleason, who was very hot at the time, but Frank would not rehearse. Even though he and Jackie were pals, Jackie refused to go on the air without a rehearsal, and we ended up having to pay him $7,500 [almost $70,000 today] plus expenses for being the guest star who did not do Frank’s show. Another time I came to work and was told by [Sinatra’s entourage] that Brian Aherne was the guest star for the following week. “Frank wants to class up the show,” they said. What could I do? Aherne was a B actor with a mustache and no flair for television. He was a disaster, and Frank was furious afterwards. “Why’d you put that bum on my show?” he screamed. “It wasn’t my idea,” I said. “It was yours.” He refused to talk to me again for days.
As was so often the case, Frank was furious because he felt out of control. His movie career was DOA; his concert and nightclub bookings were flatlining. The one place where he felt most dominant, the recording studio, was increasingly dominated by another. His response was not only disengagement and petty tyranny but also a spike in his obsessive-compulsive symptoms. “
Frank was always washing his hands, constantly washing, washing, washing, as if he was trying to wash his life away or something,” Mansfield said. “When he wasn’t
washing his hands, he was changing his shorts. He would drop his pants to the floor, take off his drawers, and kick them up in the air with his foot. Some flunky would chase those dirty shorts around the room while Frank put on a clean pair. He must’ve changed his shorts every twenty minutes. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.”
He felt unclean. Unworthy.
He also grew obsessed with the idea that Ava was cheating on him. Three thousand miles away, who knew what she might be up to? The main suspect was Artie Shaw. According to Mansfield, “
Frank was insanely jealous of Shaw. Whenever he couldn’t get her on the phone he’d start screaming on the set that she was having an affair with Artie. ‘I know she’s with that goddamn Artie Shaw,’ he’d yell. ‘I know she’s with that bastard. I’ll kill her. I’ll kill her. I’ll kill her.’ ”
He was in a dangerous state of mind: the world seemed to conspire against his every move. The condition is all the worse for its circularity. Jackie Gleason, riding high, understood that rehearsal brought polish, which brought success, which brought more confidence. Sinatra, feeling like a failure, was ensuring nothing but more failure for himself.
The new radio show, on Sunday afternoons, was a blip. Some programming genius at CBS had come up with a weird formula for
Meet Frank Sinatra:
Frank wouldn’t just sing, he would engage in repartee with his studio audience and guests. The talk felt scripted, forced. The singing was another matter: he was backed by a five-piece rhythm combo, a format that always made him feel comfortable and spontaneous. The only problem was, nobody was listening.
That same month, Columbia released
Sing and Dance with Frank Sinatra
, his first album specifically conceived as a ten-inch LP—and, as it turned out, his last for the label. The record consisted entirely of George Siravo–arranged, up-tempo numbers, seven of them from the overdubbed April sessions, and even if there was a slight disconnect between Frank and the Frank-less musicians, the album was—and still is—joyous, swinging Sinatra.
But
Sing and Dance
failed to even graze the
Billboard
charts.
He flew to Los Angeles for Christmas, to bring his kids presents and remind them who he was, but mainly to see Ava. It had been over three months, yet the reunion was ambivalent. She was thrilled at her gift: he’d bought her a puppy, a Pembroke Welsh corgi; they named it Rags. And she was thrilled with
Show Boat
, which was close to wrapping at Metro, the studio that had fired him. Frank’s smile slowly chilled. He had scant patience for listening to Ava enthuse about her director, George Sidney—who had directed Frank in
Anchors Aweigh—
and her co-star Kathryn Grayson, who had co-starred with Frank not once but three times. Not to mention the wonderful Howard Keel.
Was she banging him?
She was never one to flinch, not even for a second. How about Marilyn Maxwell—was he still screwing her?
His voice rose. What about Artie Shaw?
She gave as good as she got. What about his wife? Was he ever going to leave her, or was that going to go on forever?
The puppy cowered. Then came more screaming, and breaking dishes, and slamming doors—followed, of course, by the absolutely stupendous making up. After which she nestled sweetly in his arms, and they swore never to fight again.
Then he was back off to New York again.
September 1950: Nancy, beautiful in distress, wins her separate-maintenance suit in Santa Monica Superior Court. She dabbed away “a tear or so,” the
Los Angeles Times
reported, as Judge Orlando H. Rhodes awarded her “the Holmby Hills home, its furnishings and effects, a 1950 Cadillac, 34 shares of stock in the Sinatra Music Corp. and one-third of Sinatra’s annual gross earnings on the first $150,000 and 10% of the next $150,000.”
(photo credit 26.2)
Frank and Ava with Dolly and Marty at the premiere of
Meet Danny Wilson
, November 1951. Dolly, who constantly clashed with Nancy, was crazy about Ava.
(photo credit 27.1)