by James Kaplan
In a very short time, of course, Sinatra would be turning down very little himself.
The subject he was dancing around was the root causes of the change. Was the music business really leading the public, or was it the other way around? The one possibility the singer couldn’t stand admitting, to the press or to himself, was that America’s tastes had simply changed.
The novelist William Maxwell once told me, when I asked, starry-eyed, what it had been like to be alive during the Roaring Twenties, that it had been a terrible time, a time of giddiness, shallowness, escape. Much the same kind of mind-set was prevalent after World War II. The country wanted to forget the terrible near past and the deeply troubling present. America was jumpy. We wanted our pleasures quick, and we wanted them simple: they shouldn’t trigger any problematic emotions. We got what we wanted.
The Miracle of the Bells premiered the day before St. Patrick’s Day. RKO, having filled its coffers under the watchword of “Entertainment, not genius,” was still saving money by cranking out B pictures. When it made the odd A feature, it borrowed stars from other studios. Miracle, with Sinatra on punishment leave from MGM and Fred MacMurray loaned out from Paramount, was an attempt, right down to its reverberating title, to cash in on the success of Bing Crosby’s holy-Joe pictures Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary’s. The difference was that Crosby had Leo McCarey to direct him, and Sinatra had Irving Pichel. And then there was the fact that Bing, the sly old genius, could play quite a charming and credible priest. Frank, at this stage of his life, had too much sexual vanity and too many internal conflicts to believably act such a role. Maybe he could have pulled it off ten years later, when he was more manly and battle scarred and able to make fun of himself on-screen.
But the movie’s problems didn’t begin with its star. Ben Hecht, who co-wrote the screenplay with Quentin Reynolds, apparently took the job on the condition that he not be forced to read the sappy popular novel he would be adapting.2 And then there was the picture’s glum setting, a Pennsylvania mining town, and its generally dark tone. “Pompous and funereal,” Bosley Crowther wrote of the finished product. And while Crowther was reliably stuffy, in this case he had a point. The story concerned a young actress who died—just like Camille, of a hacking cough—after starring in her first film. The cynical press agent (MacMurray) who lifted her from the burlesque house to movie stardom takes her body back to her Pennsylvania hometown for burial. Miracles occur.
The dark and dazzling Alida Valli played the actress: even The Third Man, the following year, would not be enough to resuscitate her career after this stinker. And as Father Paul, Sinatra, in his first drama, was subdued to the point of seeming depressed. (“Frank Sinatra, looking rather flea-bitten as the priest, acts properly humble or perhaps ashamed,” Time wrote.) The best that can be said about him in this role is that, as would not be the case in The Kissing Bandit, he didn’t sink the movie. It did that all by itself.
Sinatra was ashamed—not just of The Miracle of the Bells, but of the whole year. He was singing junk on the radio. He was losing his audience, his prestige, his hair. And with Sinatra, as we have seen, shame quickly changed to rage. When the movie’s producer, the Hollywood institution Jesse Lasky, reminded the star that he was contractually obliged to attend the San Francisco premiere, Frank bullied the old man until Lasky was forced to plead for his presence. Sinatra went to San Francisco, but in full Monster mode. Ensconced in the biggest suite at the Fairmont hotel with Jack Keller, Bobby Burns, and Jimmy Van Heusen, Frank ordered eighty-eight Manhattans from room service. Up came several waiters pushing carts full of clinking glasses: Sinatra told them to leave the drinks in the entry hall, and there the eighty-eight Manhattans sat for three days, untouched. Unable to sleep at 4:00 a.m., he ordered a piano to be sent to his suite. A store manager had to be awakened, and a delivery-truck driver paid triple time to deliver the instrument. The next night Frank took twenty people out on the town, then brought them back to the suite for a party that didn’t break up till 7:00 a.m. Two hours later, still revving, he took Keller, Burns, and Van Heusen to a swanky haberdasher and bought each man $1,200 worth of cashmere sweaters, ties, shirts, and socks—all of it charged to Sinatra’s suite at the Fairmont, which of course was on the studio’s dime.
Frank slept through the afternoon, then behaved perfectly at the premiere that night. The next morning, though, he decided he had to get to Palm Springs—instantly. Unfortunately, a thick fog had settled in over San Francisco during the night, and the airlines weren’t flying. Sinatra ordered Van Heusen, the pilot, to charter a plane. No planes were to be had. In the end, Frank and Jimmy took a limousine from San Francisco to Palm Springs—a five-hundred-mile trip—at a cost of over $1,100. Multiply all figures by nine to get the present-day equivalent. So much for cost cutting at RKO.
Hedda Hopper summed up the feelings of pretty much every reviewer in the country when she called The Miracle of the Bells “a hunk of religious baloney.” And then, more shame. In a wrap-up of the previous year’s movies, Life chose Frank’s cameo in the Metro musical Till the Clouds Roll By as “the worst single moment” in any picture: “MGM struck a high point in bad taste when Frank Sinatra stood on a fluted pillar and crooned ‘Ol’ Man River,’ including the line ‘You and me, we sweat and strain …,’ wearing an immaculate white suit.”
With The Kissing Bandit in the can (and every bit as bad as he suspected it to be), and his recording career at a standstill, Sinatra didn’t have much to look forward to in the middle of 1948—with one exception. In the early hours of June 20 (the anniversary of Bugsy’s death), as Frank and Nancy played charades at Toluca Lake with the Jule Stynes and a few other couples, Nancy went into labor. Frank bundled her into the Cadillac convertible and—with great pleasure; just let them try to stop him—ran every red light between the Valley and Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. As it turned out, the haste was justified: Christina Sinatra (she would be called Tina, after Nancy’s sister) was born just minutes after Nancy was brought into the maternity ward. Frank kissed his wife and new baby daughter and drove back to Toluca Lake and jumped right back into the charades, which were still going strong. He mimed an hourglass to signify it had been a girl and held up fingers to indicate her weight. It was early Sunday morning, Father’s Day. It was the first time he had been in town for the birth of one of his children.
On the next day, June 21, 1948, at a press conference at the Waldorf-Astoria, the Columbia Recording Corporation announced, with great fanfare, a startling technological innovation: the long-playing 33⅓-rpm phonograph record. At a simultaneous dealer conference in Atlantic City, a Columbia executive gave a speech lauding the new invention to the accompaniment of an entire movement of The Nutcracker Suite. The record played on a phonograph with a mirror mounted overhead so the audience could see there was no trickery. At the end of the eighteen-minute side—four times as long as one side of a 78-rpm disc—the assembled record dealers leaped to their feet applauding. The future had arrived.
The LP was the brainchild of Columbia’s president, Ted Wallerstein, who had first conceived of it a decade earlier as the ideal medium for classical music. In addition to Tchaikovsky and Beethoven, one of the label’s first pressings was a ten-inch LP reissue of 1946’s The Voice of Frank Sinatra. The album sold well, but not nearly as well as the original: for one thing, few people had the equipment to play it. In October, Columbia brought out a Sinatra Christmas album that did a little better: it lasted a week on the charts, rising just to number 7.
His next hit album wouldn’t come for five years—an eternity.
Four months after the Simon interview, one week after Tina’s birth, Frank stood at the radio microphone at CBS and, with disbelief in his voice, introduced the latest addition to the hit parade: “The Woody Woodpecker Song.” As the show’s vocal group, the Hit Paraders, went into the supremely annoying number, which revolved around the cartoon character’s supremely annoying laugh, Frank could be heard in the background, telling
the studio audience: “I just couldn’t do it!”
Meaning, he couldn’t bring himself to sing it. That was June 26. On July 10, he no longer had any choice.
“Well, I guess I better keep my hat on, ’cause look who’s here in spot number one,” Sinatra told Mr. and Mrs. America—and then, as though he had lost a bet, unbelievably went into that Woody Woodpecker laugh: “Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh! Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh!”
It’s a perfectly ghastly sound. To call it a desecration of Frank Sinatra’s voice is no exaggeration. He got through the rest of the song as quickly as possible. He tossed the thing off, as it should have been tossed off, but also because he felt deeply humiliated. It was only the beginning.
Given the state of Sinatra’s movie career, MGM decided the safest thing would be to put him back together with Gene Kelly. The new vehicle was to be a lighthearted turn-of-the-century musical called Take Me Out to the Ball Game. But much as Frank loved Gene, he had his own plans for resuscitating his film fortunes: he lobbied hard that summer to be loaned out to Columbia for a serious role in a Bogart picture, Knock on Any Door. If he got the role, Sinatra would not only get to act opposite Bogart; he would play a young Italian-American murder suspect, a street guy—a part he felt he could really bring to life. The producers took one look at Frank’s hairline and hired twenty-two-year-old John Derek to play the role. Shooting on Take Me Out to the Ball Game began on July 28.
His memory for names and faces was phenomenal, as was his ability to hold on to grudges, slights, disappointments. Throughout the filming of Take Me Out to the Ball Game, as he danced and mugged for the camera, he couldn’t get the disappointment of Knock on Any Door off his mind. Frank took it out on Ball Game’s veteran director, Busby Berkeley, showing up late, muffing lines and dance sequences, wasting hours. Berkeley, on what would be his last picture, consoled himself with the bottle. Kelly and his young assistant Stanley Donen wound up directing much of the movie.
One day during lunch on the set, Frank got a call from Mayer’s office, saying his presence was requested. Expecting a rebuke, he was surprised to find the boss smiling thinly. He wanted to ask Frank a little favor.
The favor was to sing that evening at a Sacramento meeting of the National Conference of State Governors. Frank would be the only entertainer, the studio chief explained, and everything would be taken care of: Governor Warren would have Sinatra flown to and from the event on his private plane. The reward was implicit—at a moment when HUAC had established a Hollywood beachhead, doing this solid for Republicans Earl Warren and Louis B. Mayer would polish up Frank’s tarnished image a good bit.
Sinatra smiled. Of course, Louis.
Later that afternoon Jack Keller and Frank’s accompanist Dick Jones came to his dressing room to collect him. No Frank. The studio lot was searched: Frank’s car was in his parking spot, but he himself was nowhere to be found. Heart sinking, Keller phoned Mayer’s office and got the expected earful. Eventually, Mayer, furious and humiliated, had to wire the governor’s office that Sinatra had fallen ill.
And where was Frank? Home—having sneaked off the MGM lot under a pile of boxes on the back of a pickup truck.
A few days later, Sinatra’s agent Lew Wasserman got a message from Mayer’s office: as per Frank’s contract with MGM, the studio was once more exercising its yearly option to loan his services out to another studio. In November he would be reporting back to RKO, to film a quickie comedy called It’s Only Money with Jane Russell and Groucho Marx.
Sinatra’s theme that fall was escape. He was going to Palm Springs more and more often, not so much as a retreat from hard work, of which there wasn’t much in late 1948, as to get away from everyone and everything. One weekend in late September, batching it with Jimmy Van Heusen—his increasingly present Falstaff, pilot, pimp, and fixer—he stopped by a party at David O. Selznick’s place. Sipping a dry martini, Sinatra looked across the room and got a jolt more powerful than any gin could’ve given him: it was Ava, smiling at the tall, homely producer.
She felt Frank’s look, turned, and flashed him a dazzling smile. He raised his glass and walked over.
They greeted each other, and Ava introduced their host. Frank gave the man a curt nod—he knew that it had been Selznick who had landed John Derek, the producer’s protégé, the plum role in Knock on Any Door. Knowing that Sinatra knew, and glancing back and forth between the two of them, Selznick excused himself.
“It’s been a long time,” Frank said, when they were alone.
“Sure has,” Ava said.
“I suppose we were rushing things a little the last time we met.”
“You were rushing things a little.”
“Let’s start again,” Frank said. “What are you doing now?”
“Making pictures as usual.” She had just finished shooting The Bribe, at Metro, with Bob Taylor. “How about you?”
“Trying to pick myself up off my ass.”
She nodded sympathetically. “Though I knew all about Frank’s problems,” Ava wrote years later, “I wasn’t about to ask him about them that night. And, honey, I didn’t bring up Nancy, either. This night was too special for that.”
They slipped easily back to their earlier, alcoholic mode. Both of them could hold a lot of liquor. After a couple of hours, they walked out in the crisp desert night, under an inky black sky strewn with more stars than either of them had ever seen.
He offered to take her home.
Ava smiled. It was very gallant of him, but she had to tell him that she wasn’t staying alone—she was renting a little place with her big sister Bappie.
Frank shrugged. Did she feel like taking a drive?
Her smile grew broader. Sure she did.
After he went back into the house and gave the bartender a $100 bill for a fifth of Beefeater, they got in his Cadillac and set off. The top was down, despite the evening chill, and they rode under the river of stars, her hair flowing in the wind. She shivered and clutched her mink stole around her bare shoulders. He passed her the bottle; she took a long drink and passed it back.
Frank navigated out to a two-lane blacktop, Palm Canyon Drive, that led out of town, and they drove southeast, through sleepy villages separated by long black stretches of nothing: Cathedral City, Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert, Indian Wells. Each of the towns had a few streetlights, a couple of stores, a blinking traffic signal. Then it was black again. Once they passed a little graveyard whose gates fronted onto the highway. She shivered.
After a half hour, another pocket of light approached. A city-limits sign read: Indio. The two of them were singing, loudly, as they headed into the darkened town. She had a nice, tuneful voice; she could even do harmony. Frank looked impressed. She sang pretty good!
The gin bottle had gone back and forth a number of times, and the Cadillac was weaving when Frank pulled off the road and into a Texaco station. The car fishtailed as he put on the brakes. He cut the engine. A blinking traffic light hanging over the main drag swayed in the wind. It was two thirty in the morning, and Indio was out cold.
Ava looked around. It sure was a one-horse town. But where the hell was the horse?
He laughed, then kissed her. They kissed for a long time. She was still holding the bottle.
Then he got an idea: how about they liven the goddamn place up?
Frank reached across her, almost falling in her lap, and, after fumbling with the latch for a second, opened the glove compartment. He handed her a dark, heavy metal thing that smelled of machine oil. Ava cradled it in her hand, looked at it in wonderment. It was a snub-barreled Smith & Wesson .38 Chief’s Special. Frank took out another pistol just like it and, squinting, aimed it at the traffic light.
An hour later, the phone rang in Jack Keller’s bedroom. Though he had been deeply asleep, Keller knew exactly who was on the other end before he picked it up.
“Jack, we’re in trouble,” Sinatra said.
It was his one phone call. He and Ava were in the Indio police station, feeli
ng much soberer than they had an hour before, when, whooping and hollering, they had both emptied their pistols, then reloaded and emptied them again, shattering streetlights and several store windows. Then there was the town’s single unfortunate passerby, drunk as the shooters, whose shirtfront and belly had been creased by an errant .38 slug.
Keller shook his head. Sinatra always knew how to up the ante. Still, there was only one thing that concerned the publicist.
“Have you been booked? Do the papers know anything?”
Frank looked at the police chief, who was smiling expectantly at his famous guest, secure in the knowledge that for whatever unknown reason, the gods of chance had dealt him one hell of a payday. Sinatra told Keller that nobody knew nothin’, but that Jack had better get down fast, with plenty of money.
And so, legend has it, Jack did just that. Gardner, in her memoir, denies the episode ever happened, but Keller taped a reminiscence of it before his untimely death—he was a four-pack-a-day smoker—at the age of fifty-nine in 1975; he also told the story to Peter Bogdanovich. In his account of that wild night in Indio, the publicist wakes up a pal, the manager of the Hollywood Knickerbocker hotel, who happens to have $30,000 in his safe. Keller borrows all of the money, charters a plane, flies to Indio, and papers the town with high-denomination currency to keep everybody quiet.