Frank

by James Kaplan

  Frank’s discontent went well beyond the physical: The rift with Evans gnawed at him. He would impulsively reach for the phone to call George for advice, only to realize he had burned that bridge. The IRS was dunning him, big time, for back taxes, and Dolly was hitting him up for money every time they talked. He was nervous, self-doubting, and cranky—sometimes his skin felt too tight. At a party in Palm Springs, he sucker punched a retired businessman named Jack Wintermeyer after Wintermeyer, who was acting as bartender, couldn’t figure out how to make the drink Sinatra wanted.1 Frank only avoided a lawsuit by agreeing to say he was sorry—then reneged at the last moment by shaking hands without a word. “He just can’t bear to apologize,” wrote the Los Angeles Examiner sports columnist Vincent X. Flaherty, who was present. “No matter what the cost—career, money, anything.”

  Sinatra didn’t like himself very much, and the world seemed to agree with him. In March, Down Beat wrote, of a group of sides Frank had done with the Phil Moore Four, a jazz quartet, “They don’t quite get the intimate between-you-and-me feel that was attempted and Frankie hits a few off-pitch ones to boot.” He wasn’t about to explain to Down Beat what kind of mood he was in these days. They could all go screw themselves.

  At the end of May, he told Your Hit Parade to take a hike, issuing a statement decrying the material he had been forced to sing and the style in which he had been compelled to sing it. Yet Lucky Strike swallowed the insult and immediately went into negotiations with Frank’s people to create a new broadcast. The new show, unambiguously titled Light Up Time, would debut in September. One thing about that Sinatra: he certainly sold cigarettes.

  But not records. His latest album, Frankly Sentimental, released in June, completely failed to chart: a bad first. And while Sinatra’s singles did far better than in the annus horribilis of 1948—they spent a total of fifty-nine weeks on the charts in 1949—not one record rose above number 6. Other singers, some of them on Columbia, were charting higher with the same songs Frank was recording. The big seller of 1949, on RCA Victor, was the soothing but insipid Perry Como song “A—You’re Adorable” (“M, N, O, P, I could go on all day/Q, R, S, T, alphabetically speaking, you’re OK”). It was perfect pabulum for the masses in a nervous year: in August, the Soviet Union would confirm Americans’ worst fears by testing its first A-bomb.

  Frank was striving after an ideal impossible at that point in history: to succeed commercially and satisfy himself artistically. When he merely went for hits, he produced abominations like the pseudo-country “Sunflower” (whose melody would later reappear, unimproved, as “Hello, Dolly”). When he let himself go, as he did in the three up-tempo numbers he recorded in a remarkable July session orchestrated by George Siravo and the great Sy Oliver (“It All Depends on You,” “Bye Bye Baby,” and “Don’t Cry Joe”), the results were thrilling. Lacquer-disc safety copies of the Sunday-evening session (Sinatra always preferred recording at night—“The voice is better at night,” he was fond of saying), transcribed and analyzed by the Sinatra musicologist Charles L. Granata, have preserved Frank’s obsessive pursuit of artistic perfection in exquisite detail:

  The recording date is July 10, 1949. As the evening session gets underway at Columbia’s cavernous 30th Street Studio, Sinatra, arranger Sy Oliver, and conductor Hugo Winterhalter are auditioning a second instrumental run-through of George Siravo’s arrangement of “It All Depends on You.” Tonight’s date will be jazz-flavored, the orchestra really a big “band”—no strings. Amid the chatter and bustle on the studio floor, the vocalist, listening intently to a passage by the brass section, feels that something is amiss …

  “I’d like to hear the introduction, with the muted brass,” he instructs the conductor. The musicians comply, and the brief section is played for his approval. After hearing the passage, Sinatra carefully instructs both the musicians and the engineers: “I’d like to get that as tight as we can. Trombones: you may have to turn around and face the microphone or something. I’d like to hear the six of you, as a unit,” he says. The engineer brings down a microphone with two sides, to help capture the precise tonal quality that Sinatra desires. The section played through again, the singer continues. “Just once more, Hugo, and would you use less volume in the reeds, with the clarinet lead? And would you play it lightly, trumpets and trombones, if you don’t mind? I mean softly,” he emphasizes.

  The trombone problem rectified, Sinatra, now in the booth, turns his attention to the rhythm section. He inquires of drummer Terry Snyder: “You got enough pad on the bass drum? It booms a little bit.” Then, without the slightest hesitation, he turns to the studio prop men. “Would you put in a small piece of carpet, enough to cover the entire bottom of the drum?” Satisfied, he addresses the pianist. “Say, Johnny Guarneri, would you play something, a figure or something, and have the rhythm fall in? We’d like to get a small balance on it.” Guarneri begins an impromptu riff on the melody, as bassist Herman “Trigger” Alpert, drummer Snyder, and guitarist Al Caiola join in. After a few moments, Sinatra’s directions continue. “Bass and guitar: Trig, can you move in about a foot or so, or you can pull the mike out if you wish. And the guitar—also move in a little closer. Just a shade—uh, uh, uh—that’s enough.”

  This was no mere voice: this was a great artist in full command of his powers and the means required to convey his art.

  And yet the public mostly failed to pay attention.

  The malaise seemed to be catching: as Sinatra flatlined, Columbia sputtered. Dinah Shore and the producer and arranger Mitchell Ayres defected to Como’s label, Victor, which had come out with a record format to compete with the LP, the 45-rpm microgroove single. The two formats, and their labels, dueled for a couple of years, and at first things didn’t look good for Columbia Recording Company.

  On Labor Day, September 5—exactly a week after the Russian A-test—Sinatra began Light Up Time. The NBC program, broadcast from Hollywood, aired every weeknight at 7:00 p.m. (on the East Coast) for just fifteen minutes: its format and time slot were copied directly from another NBC show, Chesterfield Supper Club. As a sign of Sinatra’s still existing but rapidly waning power, the Chesterfield show—hosted by Perry Como on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and by Jo Stafford and Peggy Lee on Tuesdays and Thursdays, respectively—was bumped to 10:00 p.m. in the East. Frank’s co-star on the new broadcast was the Metropolitan Opera soprano (and fellow New Jerseyan) Dorothy Kirsten. The jam-packed format featured two solos by Sinatra, one by Kirsten, and one duet wedged between commercials. Every show began—it seems impossible to imagine in these days of fifteen-second TV ads—with a two-minute commercial for Luckies.

  Frank was earning $10,000 a week for the show. Newsweek wrote, “The sometimes unruly crooner, whose exuberance over rapid fame has left him in staggering financial debt, could look to the show as a good boost back up the money trail.” Could—but didn’t. Ten thousand a week was a grand salary for the era, but it was a per-broadcast comedown from Your Hit Parade, and a drop in the bucket as far as his fiscal woes were concerned.

  He was on a treadmill. With the breakneck pace of arranging for a five-day-a-week show, Stordahl was unable to conduct the Light Up Time orchestra: a further erosion of his relationship with Frank. His replacement, the choral director Jeff Alexander, went into the recording studio with Sinatra in mid-September in Sibelius’s stead, arranging and conducting three numbers, including an Italianate piece, lush with mandolins, accordion, and Stordahl-esque strings, called “Stromboli”:

  On the island of Stromboli

  Recklessly I gave my heart.

  The too-apt tune was the title song for a romantic movie of the same name, directed by Roberto Rossellini and starring Ingrid Bergman. The film had just wrapped in Italy. In the course of making the picture, Rossellini and Bergman, who was married and the mother of a ten-year-old daughter, had fallen in love and conceived a child. The affair became a monumental scandal—unimaginable in the present era of casual celebrity couplings. Soon after Ber
gman gave birth, she would be denounced on the floor of the U.S. Senate and effectively driven out of the country.

  But that night in September, Frank Sinatra was just recording a pretty song.

  The next day, he sat down and typed yet another letter of complaint to Sacks. He began by giving his old friend the benefit of the doubt: Maybe Manie didn’t know about it, Frank wrote, but other Columbia artists were recording the same songs he was. The charge was more serious than it sounds. Sinatra pointed out that he had put in many hours poring over standards to find the best songs to record. It was part of his genius to know which numbers worked for him, which tunes he could move into and make his own. And when his own label let its other singers record songs like “That Old Feeling” and “You Go to My Head” after he had already put his stamp on them, it hit Frank where it hurt the most: the pocketbook. He wanted to hear from Manie, he wrote, with stiff, furious formality, “advising me why you permit this policy and if you intend to pursue it in the future.” This time he signed not with love but best regards.

  The letter, typed on Sinatra’s stationery (“FRANK SINATRA” and “BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA” embossed across the top), is signed assertively in blue fountain pen, with the singer’s first and last names. Sacks annotated it in pencil. “Check this,” he wrote, next to “You Go to My Head.” And then, underneath, “Doris Day’s album.”

  It was treacherous, and it was true: Day, whose name Sinatra hadn’t been able to bring himself to mention, had recorded both songs. The late-summer correspondence between Frank and Manie reflects a growing tension between the two, a tension that in some ways was symptomatic of the singer’s troubles at Columbia. On September 20, Manie fessed up:

  Dear Frank:

  I must admit that recording with another vocalist standards you have already recorded should not be done. Frankly, I must also accept the blame in this instance because, without enough thought, I selected the songs, and not until I received your letter and checked the list did I realize you had recorded the same songs.

  In the future, I assure you I’ll pay closer attention so that it won’t happen again. I am the guilty culprit and I’m sorry.

  Kindest regards. Sincerely, Manie

  The tone of this exchange is markedly different from the Sinatra-Sacks letters of 1945. In those days, the two men had closed their missives with “Love”—even “Love and kisses.” Now it was “Best regards” from Frank, and from Manie—who apparently didn’t want to be outdone in the coolness department—“Kindest regards,” immediately followed, with sublime passive aggressiveness, by “Sincerely.”

  Sacks also sent his reply to Sinatra’s office and not to his home address, as he had done previously. Maybe this was just a bureaucratic detail; more likely, it meant Manie’s friendship with Frank was slipping.

  All that summer and fall, Frank visited the little stucco house high over Nichols Canyon. Ava had worked hard to make the place her own, hanging the walls with Degas prints, lining the den with massive antique bookcases containing all the volumes Artie Shaw had bullied her into reading: The Magic Mountain and Buddenbrooks and The Interpretation of Dreams and Babbitt. She really had read them, mostly—and also, under Artie’s dictatorship, learned to play chess well enough to beat him. All this despite what she once told an interviewer: “Deep down, I’m pretty superficial.” In truth, she was anything but. Still, her lack of intellectual confidence never left her. On the other hand, when it came to her beauty, she had no doubts.

  The house was surrounded by a picket fence covered with yellow roses, a trellis with petunias and honeysuckle, drying laundry snapping in the breeze. Inside was heaven.

  But beware, her friend Lana told her:

  We met in the ladies’ room during a party [Ava wrote], and she told me her story. She had been deeply in love with Frank and, so she thought, Frank with her. Though he was shuttling backward and forward between her bedroom and Nancy’s, trying to equate obedience to Catholic doctrines with indulgence in his natural inclinations, divorce plans were all set up and wedding plans had been made.

  Then Lana woke up one morning, picked up the newspaper, and read that Frank had changed his mind and gone back to Nancy for good. It was the old Catholic arrangement: wife and family come first. Nancy had almost made a theme song out of it: “Frank always comes back to me.”

  I really liked Lana. She was a nice girl, and she felt neither anger nor malice toward Frank and me. She just thought I ought to know. I told Lana gently that Frank and I were in love, and that this time he really was going to leave Nancy for good. If I’m in love, I want to get married: that’s my fundamentalist Protestant background. If he wanted me, there could be no compromise on that issue.

  That cataclysm, along with a number of others, was close at hand.

  The roster of Sinatra’s activities that autumn was strikingly sparse. His daughter Nancy, usually the most assiduous (and relentlessly upbeat) of chroniclers, can come up with only two events between the summer and December. “October 30, 1949: Dad returned once again to The Jack Benny Show,” she notes. And, “November 6, 1949: He performed on Guest Star, a radio show for the U.S. Treasury Department.” (Trying to butter up the IRS? Or the FBI?) Frank wasn’t shooting a movie, and he was barely recording: between September and the end of the year, he cut just eight songs, in three sessions. (In all of 1949, despite the end of the musicians’ strike, he laid down only twenty-seven sides, compared with seventy in the pre-strike year of 1947.) He did Light Up Time every weekday afternoon, but the quarter-hour show was rushed and frequently superficial. Stordahl’s absence didn’t help, nor, due to NBC budgetary constraints, did the absence of a string section.

  As Frank had noted in his pained September letter to Manie, others—even at Columbia—were recording the same songs he was. And selling better. There was a new Italian boy on the scene, with a husky tenor voice so dramatic that some listeners thought he was black. To add insult to injury, he also called himself Frankie—Frankie Laine. (He had been born Francesco Paolo LoVecchio.) He could sing torch songs, spirituals, and up-tempo rip-roarers, and he could crank out gold records (“That’s My Desire”; “Mule Train”). Laine’s career was being shepherded by a brilliant, fiercely ambitious A&R man at Mercury named Mitch Miller—the same Mitch Miller who had turned Sinatra on to the classical compositions of Alec Wilder.

  But the king that year was Perry Como. “Anodyne,” with its dual meanings of pain relief and insipidness, applied perfectly to the smooth-voiced, smooth-faced former barber from Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. Times change; the culture shifts. Yearning was out of fashion, and Sinatra was now just part of a big pack of popular singers. Billboard ranked him number 13 at the end of the year; the Down Beat poll put him at number 5. He was officially yesterday’s news. Lee Mortimer all but jumped up and down with glee. “The Swoon is real gone (and not in jive talk),” he wrote, in his Daily Mirror column, noting that all the hysteria over Sinatra had merely been “an unhealthy wartime phenomenon.”

  Emotionally, Frank was as busy as it is possible for a human being to be: he was in love. And not sweetly and contentedly in love, but in the throes of a grand passion, one whose DNA was stamped with wildness, violence, contradiction, pain. In Ava Gardner he had literally met his match. In a woman of spectacularly sensuous beauty he had found a soul whose turbulence equaled his own. Like Frank, Ava knew herself to be a kind of royalty, but still harbored profound feelings of worthlessness. In each, this duality fueled volcanic furies. “Both Frank and I,” Ava wrote in her memoir, “were high-strung people, possessive and jealous and liable to explode fast. When I lose my temper, honey, you can’t find it anyplace. I’ve just got to let off steam, and he’s the same way.”

  Frank had found a true partner in the opera that was his life. All his other women had been supporting players; Ava was a diva. Like Frank, she was infinitely restless and easily bored. In both, this tendency could lead to casual cruelty to others—and sometimes to each other. Both had titanic appet
ites, for food, drink, cigarettes, diversion, companionship, and sex. Both loved jazz, and the men and women, black and white, who made it. Both were politically liberal. Both were fascinated with prostitution and perversity. Both knew the bottomless loneliness that stalks the deep watches of the night: both distrusted sleep—feared it, perhaps, as death’s mirror. Both hated being alone.

  And behind every move each of them made lay a fine and regal contempt for the banal established order of the world.

  It was around then, Ava wrote, that Frank told her, “All my life, being a singer was the most important thing in the world. Now you’re all I want.”

  For a man whose ambition had always preceded all else, this was an astonishing statement, even if he felt differently a few hours later. To the extent that he meant it (and to a great extent he did), it was as if his towering ambition had suddenly gone up in smoke. But their love was like a fire that flamed up and consumed them both. And since both were performers, exhibitionism was part of the kick—even at the very outset, there were amazed onlookers. Among them were Sinatra’s manager Bobby Burns and his wife, Betty, who tried to help the adulterous couple early in the affair. Betty Burns remembered: