Frank

by James Kaplan

  17

  Manie Sacks, Sinatra’s rabbi at Columbia Records, with Frank in 1944. The singer’s high-handedness in business matters caused bitter divisions between the two close friends. “Don’t friendship and sincerity mean anything to you?” Manie wrote to Frank in 1945. “Or is it that, when you make up your mind to do something, that’s the way it has to be?” (photo credit 17.1)

  Throughout 1945, as Sinatra recorded up a storm in New York and Hollywood, he was building up a thunderhead of resentment against Columbia Records. Money was the ostensible cause—the singer was bearing costs, for music copying and arrangements and studio conducting, that he felt weren’t his to bear. (On the other hand, once he bought the arrangements, he owned them forever—a fact that would aid him innumerable times over the span of his performing career.) But on the evidence of a remarkable correspondence between Frank and Manie Sacks in the late summer of that year, it seems as though something else, something deep and personal, was behind the fight.

  The opening salvo was a relatively petty complaint: a late July telegram from Sinatra to Sacks, grousing that Columbia must not think much of him, since everybody except him, including Axel, was getting free records. “Oh, well,” he concluded. “After taxes I still have a few bucks.” He signed with a sarcastic thank you.

  And then, an extraordinary reply, not from Manie, but from some suit:

  AUGUST 1, 1945. MR. FRANK SINATRA, 1051 VALLEY SPRING LANE, NORTH HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA. RE YOUR BRUTAL WIRE TO OUR MR. SACKS. THIS IS YOUR AUTHORITY, ON PRESENTATION OF THIS TELEGRAM TO ANDREW SCHRADE, TO DEMAND ONE EACH OF ANY COLUMBIA RECORDS YOU WANT FOR YOUR COLLECTION.

  Brutal wire! A letter from Manie arrived a week or two later, attempting to clear the air:

  Dear Frank. For the past six months, there seems to be a question in your mind about certain payments which I am at a loss to understand. I’ve discussed the matters with Nancy, Sol Jaffe, Al Levy, Eddie Trautman [sic; Sacks evidently means Sinatra’s business manager, Edward Traubner: see below]—in fact, with everyone except yourself. For some reason or another, the opportunity never presented itself, although I’d much have preferred talking to you in person rather than writing to you …

  I want to preface my remarks, though, by telling you (and this really goes without saying) that your interests are very important to me, and I wouldn’t permit anybody to take advantage of you. But in fairness to you, and also to Columbia, I want to point out and explain why we can’t do certain things.

  In the case of Axel: You will recall standing on the corner of 51st Street and Broadway after we had finished lunch at Lindy’s, when we discussed what Axel should get [as a conducting fee]. The price of $300 [about $3,500 today] was agreed upon as being more than fair. At that time, I explained to you how it wouldn’t cost you $300: I would arrange with Axel to return to you the amount that he got from Columbia for each session, which is Scale, and that you would pay him $300. For example, if we have a record date and he received $80, you would pay him $300, the $80 would be turned over to you and actually would be a net [cost] to you of $220. There was never any question at that time that we should pay the full amount for Axel. In fact, I wrote Nancy on January 31st explaining this setup and sending her some of Axel’s recording checks.

  Look, son, if anyone received compensation of that kind from Columbia, believe me, you would be the first to get it, but it’s never been done and we couldn’t start a precedent of that kind. It’s not good business, and I’m sure, if you’ll analyze it, you’ll agree with me. I’m not trying to bargain or be cheap because you know I’m not built that way. I’m only trying to point out a principle and also tell you that there was never any question about who was to pay Axel’s salary. To enlighten you, do you recall you asked me to speak to Axel regarding the money you were to pay him, and I told you the same evening that everything was okay and that he seemed very happy about it?

  Now, regarding the second matter, which I don’t understand. Lately, I’ve been getting bills from Joe Ross for copying. What is that all about? His work is your property … How could we set a precedent of paying for copying when we have nothing to do with it? …

  Let’s take a Sinatra date—say the one of March 6th. There were 37 men and the cost was $1,905. This we paid for. In other words, the cost of the orchestra is not deducted from royalties—it’s a flat outlay by Columbia. You’re the only artist who has such an arrangement … If you’ll think about it for a minute, I’m sure you’ll understand that the conductor’s fee and the copying costs are not obligations of Columbia. If you want, I could go to Ted [Wallerstein, Columbia president] and ask him to advance these monies to you and charge them against royalties.

  I don’t have to tell you about the way I worry and look out for your interests. I am certainly not trying to take advantage of you …

  I miss you—come home soon. Love and kisses, Manie.

  P.S.—I just got a letter from Traubner charging us $2100 for Axel’s services up to the last date, and $300 for the last date—ALSO $400 for arrangements! Are we supposed to be paying for arrangements, too? What’s this all about?

  A couple of weeks pass, then Sinatra lets Sacks—or rather Columbia—have it. He begins the telegram with a complaint that he can’t reach Manie on the phone, then goes on to say that it’s not personal, but he doesn’t plan to pay any of the bills. Not one. If Columbia Recording doesn’t agree, Frank says, he will have to request an immediate release. He signs with love.

  Sacks writes back immediately, in a letter of August 24, 1945:

  Dear Frank: I received your wire and to say that I was taken aback and surprised is putting it mildly. I’m sorry we aren’t able to discuss this in person or on the ’phone, but since there is nothing else to do, I’ll have to write you my thoughts on this matter.

  You said, “Whatever decision I arrive at does not concern you personally.” Well, who else does it concern? All the negotiations that had to do with records or anything else were worked out by the two of us. Why, ever since you walked into my office the first time, I have gone through everything with you. Your problems have been as much a part of my life as my own. No one, with perhaps the exception of George Evans, has lived Sinatra as I have. Many is the night I have gone sleepless thinking and worrying about your problems. I could write pages on how we sweated them out together. Everything of concern to you concerns me, too … So your unreasonable demands are actually a slap in the face to me … I explained in my last letter exactly what the situation was and why we can’t pay for arrangements, copying, and the fees for Axel … If you are doubting me or questioning my sincerity, that really hurts.

  Do you think for a minute that, as head of the department you work for at Columbia, I’d let anyone take advantage of you—or do so myself? You have a better deal today than anyone else at Columbia. We can’t pay for the things you’ve requested—your demands are entirely out of proportion.

  You’ve had pretty much your own way and have done the things you wanted to do. So far you’ve recorded 49 sides, and we’ve released 32 sides—more than any other artist. You’ve had the pick of songs, you’ve recorded anything you want to, you’ve had greater promotion than anyone else with Columbia. You told me yourself that our promotion was the most outstanding you’d ever seen. Every one of us here at Columbia, from Ted Wallerstein down, has gone out of his way to make you happy. What more do you want? Just because you’ve made up your mind that Columbia should pay for things that are strictly your obligations and I can’t tell you Columbia can’t pay for them, you become annoyed and try to convince me it doesn’t concern me personally, and you want your contract back.

  As long as you’re talking bluntly, I will, too. We have no intention of paying for all the abovementioned extras. Just because you asked for your contract back, there’s no reason why you should get it. We don’t do business that way. I don’t know who has been putting these ideas into your head or where you’re getting them from. They don’t sound like Sinatra …
I had an operation, it took a lot out of me, I’ve had family difficulties of which you’re well aware. But nothing has hurt me as much as the wire I received from you. Don’t friendship and sincerity mean anything to you? Or is it that, when you make up your mind to do something, that’s the way it has to be? I’m telling you, I’ve seen it happen and so have you. If this is the attitude you want to adopt, it’s got to hit you—you just can’t get away with it; life itself won’t permit it. Love, Manie.

  No doubt Frank was nervous. Both Crosby and Harry James were outperforming him on the Billboard charts, and he was in a tight race with Perry Como. Dick Haymes was nipping at his heels. Manie Sacks was just learning some hard lessons about his protégé: First, friendship and sincerity weren’t even on the same page with success where Sinatra was concerned. Second, when Sinatra made up his mind to do something (right or wrong, as witness the Frank Garrick clash), that was precisely what he would do. And third, life would permit him to get away with it for another full half century.

  Columbia stood firm. Yet despite the label’s refusal to change its policy on paying for music copying, conducting, or arrangements, Sinatra would remain there for seven more years. Manie Sacks was another story. Disillusioned and unwell, he would leave the company almost three years before the man he’d once thought was his best friend.

  On October 17, Ava Gardner, the gorgeous MGM B-film player Sinatra kept running into all over town, married Artie Shaw in Beverly Hills. Gardner was not quite twenty-three. It was her second marriage (she had divorced Mickey Rooney two years before), and Shaw’s fifth. Shaw kept company with artists and intellectuals and tried to get Ava to start reading. Instead, she began drinking. The marriage would be over by the following fall.

  Frank would test Manie’s patience even further that autumn. In November the singer returned east for a three-week stand at the Paramount, then another engagement at the Wedgwood Room, and, in between, further recording sessions at Liederkranz Hall. But that wouldn’t be all: Frank would turn thirty on December 12, and he wanted to end the year in style.

  Success had intensified his cravings for class. Playing the Wedgwood Room helped: Cole Porter once again rode the elevator down from his Waldorf Towers suite to catch Sinatra’s act. All that was gratifying, but ultimately, as Porter had written, merely massage.

  One of the first things Frank had discovered as a recording artist was the difference between New York and Los Angeles studio musicians: West Coast instrumentalists, though every bit as virtuosic as their eastern counterparts, were far more relaxed, accommodating, showbiz savvy. Most of them made a good living playing movie scores. They knew how to adapt, take orders, work well with others.

  Their Big Apple brethren, on the other hand, tended to be temperamental and egotistic classical artistes. The record producer George Avakian, who worked at Columbia in the mid-1940s, said, “They were tough-minded, insular people who were protective of their own positions—even which chair you were going to sit in.” Many of the musicians initially looked down their noses at Sinatra. And since the singer already had huge respect for musical virtuosity, and a fine sense for clubs that didn’t want him as a member, he courted their admiration.

  But one of their number, substantially more ambitious than the rest, sought Frank out. Mitchell William Miller—Mitch for short—was a short, chin-bearded, energetic careerist from upstate New York, a brilliant classical oboist who had a deep love for jazz and popular music. A child prodigy, Miller had graduated at twenty-one from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, where he’d formed an abiding musical friendship with his fellow student Alec Wilder—a.k.a. the Professor, the very man who had arranged and conducted Sinatra’s musicianless Columbia sessions with the Bobby Tucker Singers.

  Sinatra had been intrigued by Wilder’s effortless musical intelligence, his rumpled academic quality, his endlessly digressive sentences, and (most of all) by the fact that unlike virtually everybody else the Professor seemed to have zero interest in kissing up to him. That was classy. When Miller pushed forward to introduce himself to Sinatra after a recording session, he also pushed his friend Wilder. Alec wasn’t just an arranger and a conductor, Mitch said, but also a composer in both the popular and the classical idioms.

  “He’s got a few things I think you should listen to,” Miller told Sinatra. The singer liked the oboist’s nerve, which went well with his sweet playing.

  The first couple of things, it turned out, were songs, one by Wilder and one by a quirky writer of rustic Americana named Willard Robison. Both, tellingly, had the word “old” in the title: “Old School Teacher,” by Robison, and Wilder’s “Just an Old Stone House.” The two numbers, similar tonally and thematically, couldn’t have been more different from the love ballads Frank Sinatra was recording in the mid-1940s. They were art songs, with melodies that wandered and twined and landed in unexpected places. It was brave and imaginative of Sinatra to want to record them, and it was nervy, even for him, to push Manie for studio time and musicians, musicians to be conducted not by Stordahl but by Mitch Miller. But Frank pushed, and Manie yielded. Sinatra and Miller recorded the songs.

  When it came to Sinatra’s next high-art initiative, though, Sacks drew the line. Frank, whose ears were opening up to all kinds of classical music, listened raptly to an air-check disc Miller had given him, containing two of Wilder’s serious orchestral compositions. Sinatra played the record three or four times, then picked up the phone and tracked down the Professor. “These should be recorded,” he said. He called Manie first thing in the morning and told him the same thing.

  Manie begged to differ. He pleaded wartime shortages: “We don’t have enough shellac to even press the stuff from our own artists.”

  “Sinatra gave us the bad news,” Miller recalled. “So I came up with an idea. I said, ‘Why don’t you conduct them? Then he can’t refuse you—if your name is on it.’ And Frank agreed, although he had never conducted.”

  Never conducted? He couldn’t read a note of music! It was a crazy idea, but to his eternal credit Frank went at the project—which, as Miller had predicted, Manie was forced into okaying—with grace, dignity, and even a kind of humility.

  “Listen,” he told the studio full of tough New York musicians gathered to play Wilder’s airs for oboe, bassoon, flute, and English horn, as well as two other pieces. “I don’t know the first thing about conducting, but I know this music and I love it, and if you’ll work with me, I think we can get it down.”

  “That was a very strange session,” recalled George Avakian. “I thought to myself, ‘My God, Sinatra isn’t a musician; this will be a disaster.’ But it wasn’t. He really did conduct. Alec, of course, rehearsed the orchestra thoroughly, and they were also all crack musicians. In fact, I think Mitch Miller played oboe on that.”

  He did indeed, but Miller—never one to hide his light under a bushel—also claims to have been in charge of the whole show. “Sinatra was then at the Waldorf [Wedgwood Room],” Miller said, “and he would finish at one in the morning. All the top musicians were there with us at the old Liederkranz Hall on Fifty-eighth Street. And I rehearsed all the stuff and got it ready, and Frank came in and he waved the stick. And he didn’t get in the way.”

  One of the musicians who played on the session, the flutist Julius Baker, was more charitable. “You know,” he said long afterward, “Sinatra wasn’t so bad as a conductor.”

  Frank Sinatra Conducts the Music of Alec Wilder, the cover of Columbia Masterworks Set M-637 declared, when it was released the following spring. Sinatra’s name was in considerably larger type than Wilder’s, a fact Frank protested, but Columbia, Manie explained, had to sell something. The album cover was a black-and-white photo of a skeletally thin Sinatra, on a field of yellow, tieless, his white shirt buttoned to the neck, a belt tightly cinching the twenty-eight-inch waist of his pleated pants. He was raising his arms, his mouth open, his eyes closed as if in transport. His head was highlighted in a white circle, like the halos on mediev
al icons.

  Columbia Masterworks Set M-637 was an album in the old sense: a cover with contents. Heavy contents. Inside the album were three twelve-inch shellac 78-rpm records, green labeled, each with one Wilder composition per side, six in all: Air for Oboe, Air for Bassoon, Air for Flute, Air for English Horn, Slow Dance, and Theme and Variations. Goddard Lieberson wrote the delightfully forthright liner notes:

  If you don’t know already, this album of records—if nothing else—will convince you that Mr. Frank Sinatra is a very versatile young man. I am sure that he has no pretentions [sic] as a conductor, but on the other hand his conducting these pieces of Wilder is not merely an exercise of a whim. Frank is an idealist and an energetic reformer …

  [He] had never conducted before, and because of his position in a different world of music, the orchestra players first looked upon him with an ill-disguised cynicism. But it did not last long. Frank knew this music by heart, knew what he wanted, told them in a straightforward way what he expected of them, made intelligent suggestions and, in short, really conducted the orchestra.

  The result was not only smooth, but artistic and expressive.

  If you are reading these notes, it will mean that Frank has accomplished one of his prime objectives as a conductor, which is to introduce you to this music in which he so thoroughly believes.

  Frank finished up the second and final session for the Wilder album late on the night of December 10, and the following Monday, after the stand at the Wedgwood was over, flew back home. There was a New Year’s Eve party to prepare. And a girl he’d been missing a lot.

  He had bought her a diamond bracelet at Tiffany while he was in Manhattan, a ridiculous outlay, almost half a week’s take from the Paramount, but he was a man in love. They’d talked on the phone almost every day while he was away—not easy, between his work schedule, her work schedule, and her husband. Not to mention the long-distance operators: it had forced them to speak in a kind of code, which was frustrating, but also kind of romantic.