Frank: The Voice (84 page)

On April 1, CBS finally pulled the plug on Sinatra’s TV show. Ratings had continued to erode (introducing an act on
Texaco Star Theater
, Berle smirked, “
These people have never been seen on TV before—they were on the Sinatra show last week”). Ekco had dropped its sponsorship in early January. Since then, except for fifteen minutes of the
Valentine’s Day broadcast underwritten by Elgin watches,
The Frank Sinatra Show
had been entirely sustaining, a straight cash drain to the network of $41,500 a week. Word around the industry was that CBS had taken a million-dollar hit on the program.

Frank was now reduced to booking himself, and the only engagements he could scrape up were a couple of concerts in Hawaii. He mulled it over for about a half minute, and agreed to go. The weather in New York was cold and rainy; he could use a change of scene. He had nothing else happening.

Ava, on the other hand, had been summoned by MGM to Mexico, to shoot something called
Sombrero—
a frothy confection about three pairs of lovers, complete with cockfights and bullfights and beauty contests.

It sounded like
The Kissing Bandit
warmed over, Frank told her. Why not come to Hawaii? He could do a little work, then they could relax.

She smiled mischievously.

Ava (who these days was signing autographs “Ava Sinatra”) wired MGM’s vice president Eddie Mannix that a vacation trip with her husband unfortunately prevented her from being able to report, et cetera—and Mannix wired her right back, expressly forbidding her to go to Hawaii.

Three days later, in Honolulu, Ava got another wire from Mannix’s office, informing her that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had sent Yvonne De Carlo to Mexico in her stead, and that Miss Gardner was now officially on suspension. Stop. All further salary and benefits were to be withheld. Stop.

She flipped the telegram into the wastebasket. They would come crawling back, she knew it.

Frank winked at her. But in truth, he was afraid. He was broke—and now she had nothing coming in, either. The chicken feed he was getting paid in Hawaii wouldn’t take them very far.

The weather on Kauai mirrored his mood: heavy rain on a Sunday afternoon. Ava was back at the hotel in Honolulu, and Frank was playing a county fair in a tent. A leaky tent.

He pulled aside a flap and peered out at the audience. It was just a couple hundred red-faced tourists and hicks in aloha shirts and jeans and muumuus. Jesus Christ. The rain was drumming on the canvas, dripping on the ground. There was no orchestra, just an upright piano on a wooden platform. He closed the flap and looked at Bill Miller sitting on a folding chair, lean as a spider and pale as death—in Hawaii!—and sipping a cup of tea. Miller raised his eyebrows. Sinatra shook his head. Soon he’d be playing revival meetings.

Miller’s thin lips formed into something like a smile.

Suddenly two brown-skinned girls in grass skirts came in, carrying flowered garlands, beaming. They dropped the leis over Frank’s head, one by one, giggling, covering his cheeks with little kisses, and even as he grinned, his eyes grew moist.

Frank turned to Miller. Should they do it?

Miller nodded and rose. Frank pulled the canvas aside and walked out onto the little stage, the garlands around his neck. The small crowd went nuts the second they saw him, clapping over their heads, whistling, stamping the ground. For a minute you couldn’t even hear the rain on the tent. Sinatra was still smiling, the first time he’d been happy in weeks. He sat on the edge of the stage, dangling his legs, and said: “
What do you want to hear?”

On the plane back from Hawaii (he and Ava had quarreled, and she’d flown back ahead of him) he sat with his dog-eared copy of
From Here to Eternity
on his lap, rereading for the tenth time all the Maggio sections—the scenes with the bugler Prewitt, whorehouse scenes, drunk scenes, the fatal fight with Fatso—and marking them up in pencil. After he landed, he began sending telegrams: to Harry Cohn; to the director the Columbia chief had chosen for
Eternity
, Fred Zinnemann; to the producer, Buddy Adler; to the screenwriter, Daniel Taradash.
One wire a week per man, every week, beseeching, cajoling, joking, but always coming straight to the point: he was the only man who could play this role. He signed every telegram “Maggio.”

One night in early June, Sinatra recorded five songs at the Columbia studios in Hollywood. (Three songs per session, the maximum before the musicians went into overtime, was the norm.) It was Frank’s third recording date of only four that year, and the last on the West Coast that he would do for the label. Mitch Miller had flown out for the occasion.

Columbia was about to announce that it was not going to renew Frank’s contract. He hadn’t come close to making back the more than $100,000 Manie Sacks had advanced him to pay his taxes. Miller was looking for just one last hit from Sinatra to slow the flow of red ink, and he and Sinatra were on the coolest possible terms.

There were any number of bones of contention, not least of them the fact that
Frank didn’t want Mitch around when he was recording. The headstrong executive, as brilliant and domineering in his own way as Sinatra, tended to march in and take over all aspects of a session, even the recording engineer’s role of manning the dials in the control room. “Frank didn’t want you turning dials,” recalled the drummer Johnny Blowers.

Now Mitch was back. And while Frank had decided to make the best of a bad situation and go ahead with the session, Miller was bent
on showing him who was boss. Columbia’s West Coast A&R man Paul Weston, who was nominally producing, stood aside and let Miller take over.

One of the songs Mitch had high hopes for—and let us remember that Sinatra had the right of refusal—was a twangy piece of nonsense called “Tennessee Newsboy.” To give the tune the right country-and-western-flavored sound, Miller had hired a steel guitar player named Wesley “Speedy” West, who, as Weston recalled, “
was known for making the guitar sound like a chicken. Frank sang the vocal, and Mitch rushed out into the studio, and everybody thought he was going to congratulate Frank for getting through, because he did it well. Instead, he rushed right past Frank, and embraced Speedy West, because he’d made a good chicken noise on the guitar. Frank was disgusted.”

Nothing Frank recorded that night became a hit, but “The Birth of the Blues,” orchestrated by the clarinetist, saxophonist, and arranger Heinie Beau, was every bit as brassy as January’s “Walkin’ in the Sunshine,” and much tougher. Sinatra’s singing had a forward-looking, microphone-cord-snapping authority, the same kind of authority he would wield in Vegas ten years later. And his little vocal snarl at the end was certainly directed at the goateed tormentor behind the control-room glass.

He was still booking himself, scrounging whatever gigs he could, running around the map. Meanwhile, Ava was sitting at home, nursing a grudge. “
Today is our seventh anniversary,” she told
Modern Screen
that spring. “Seven
months
. You want to see your husband, and where is he? Playing the Chez Paree in Chicago! Then he’s hitting St. Louis … it’s rough.”

In late May, despite feeling lousy, she’d done her noble-wife bit by attending Frank’s opening at the Cocoanut Grove in L.A.—and then he went and ignited their usual tinderbox by winking at some broad
in the audience. Afterward, having drunk too much for a change, they started going at it, then he gave her a hard slap that sent her reeling. She tripped over a table and landed on the floor, and suddenly she was bleeding.

An ambulance rushed her to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, where Dr. Leon Krohn, a gynecologist and friend of Frank’s, discovered that Ava had suffered a miscarriage. She honestly hadn’t known she was pregnant—or perhaps she’d just tried to pretend she didn’t know.

When the Hollywood columnist Harrison Carroll interviewed her a week later, she was still hurting—and still mad. Would Ava accompany Frank to his engagement at the Chez Paree in Chicago? “
I don’t know,” she replied coldly. “It will depend on how I feel.”

It wasn’t just Frank’s anger, and the lost pregnancy, that ate at her; there was also her continued tenancy in MGM purgatory.

This she tried to brazen out. Carroll wrote:

The truth was that she was as undecided about her own career as she was about having children, or about her marriage to Sinatra. “
She is unwilling to admit she cares about what she is doing,” noted Stanley Kramer, who would direct her in
On the Beach
several years later. “She regards such an admission as weakness of some kind, with the result that she will not give of herself as fully or as effectively as she can.”