by James Kaplan
Herron and Wolf had given him a lyric sheet, and Sinatra, as always, had studied it carefully, trying to absorb the words into his bloodstream. But when the orchestra started to play, Frank sang lyrics that were subtly but emphatically different from those that Wolf had written. Joel Herron, still alive in the mid-1990s, when Will Friedwald interviewed him, confirmed that Frank had changed the words but, enigmatically, refused to be drawn out on exactly how. “I asked him specifically, and he evaded the question,” Friedwald recalls.
Sinatra sang just one take—a take for the ages—and then, as the legend has it, fled the recording studio, unable to go on. In this case the legend rings absolutely true. “I’m a Fool” may not be a great song, but Sinatra’s shattering performance of it transcends the material. His emotion is so naked that we’re at once embarrassed and compelled: we literally feel for him.
“That’s a heartbreaking performance,” said George Avakian, not ordinarily a fan. “And the lyric, which I understand Sinatra contributed largely to, is very powerful. Psychologically, it’s very much a part of Sinatra. The fact that it’s a song that reflected his life at the time always intrigued me. There aren’t too many occasions when a record comes out of a person’s life so directly.”
Mitch Miller disagreed sharply on the autobiographical interpretation. “That’s bullshit!” he said. “Because what he’s drawing is the emotion from your personal life. He’s saying it for you.”
But then, Miller was always an ornery cuss—especially in later years, when critics constantly assailed him for supposedly ruining Sinatra’s career. In this case, his irritability probably trumped his better judgment: never before or again would Frank sing so transparently from the heart.
The change from Wolf’s original lyric was marked enough that “when they played us the side, I freaked out,” Herron recalled. “When the session was over, we were with Ben Barton and Hank Sanicola, and Jack and I went off by ourselves and said, ‘He’s gotta be on this song!’ We invited him in as a co-writer.” There are clues to what Sinatra created. Lyric writing, in the great era of American popular song, was an extremely precise art, marked by concision and consistency of style. And at two junctures in this lyric, the style veers ever so slightly, first in the expressively awkward “A love that’s there for others too” and then in the metrically inconsistent “Pity me, I need you,” with its incorrect use of a word—“pity”—whose first syllable must be emphasized, throwing off the rhythm.
Bolstering the case for making these two lines the culprits is their emotional relevance: Frank did indeed worry constantly—and justifiably—about the “others” in Ava’s life. And pity was something he sought constantly throughout his life, but never more so than during the near death of his career in the late 1940s and early 1950s: a period that coincided more or less precisely with his Ava years.
MGM had started test screening Show Boat, and the response cards were coming back with almost unanimous raves for Ava Gardner. She had entered that rarefied realm where she could do no wrong. Accordingly, when she asked Dore Schary if she could take some time off to go to New York, the production chief told her to enjoy herself.
With Frank, as always, everything at first was sweetness and light. Ava was feeling grand. She prevailed on him to take her to visit Dolly and Marty in Hoboken, even though Frank, driven to distraction by Dolly’s incessant demands for money, hadn’t spoken to his mother in nearly two years. Dolly answered the door and greeted Ava like a long-lost daughter, reaching up to embrace her, then giving her wayward son a Look. He was still too fucking thin.
Great to see you too, Ma.
The house smelled delicious—Dolly had prepared a tremendous meal: antipasto with cold cuts (especially Genoa salami, Frank’s favorite); veal piccata; homemade ravioli with meat and spinach. And Ava was charmed:
Dolly showed me the house, every inch of it, and was it clean? Oh, my God. I mean Frank was the cleanest man I ever knew … If I’d caught him washing the soap it wouldn’t have surprised me, and he inherited it all from his ma … And of course Dolly had to tell me all about Frank, with Frank squirming at every word … getting more and more furious as Dolly dragged out album after album of cute pictures of Frank as a child, dressed up in all kinds of little outfits …
It was all so welcoming, such a great warm Italian household with no holding back. They even had an old uncle, either her brother or Marty’s, living with them.
No holding back, except for the fact that Marty (“quieter, withdrawn, with a nice smile”) said barely anything, and poor Chit-U, not a single word. Dolly was the one who didn’t hold back; Ava followed her lead, growing less inhibited with every glass of Chianti. And Frank, Ava recalled, “[looked] at me very carefully, trying to sense how it was going, whether I was approving or not, his face reflecting that slight worry you have when you want someone you love to love what you love.”
Also that more than slight worry he felt every second he spent with his mother.
Of course the visit was more than casual. And once Ava saw how thoroughly her prospective mother-in-law approved of her, she applied the screws even more tightly to Frank. When was he going to get a divorce?
They were riding back to the city. Frank stared out the car window, drawing on his cigarette. He had no answer: it was all in Nancy’s hands.
Ava, who had heard it once too many times, told the driver to pull over as soon as they emerged from the tunnel. She gathered her stole around her, loosing a cloud of that mind-numbing perfume, opened the car door, and got out.
A few days earlier, Frank had taken Ava along to watch the live broadcast of his television show. She was unimpressed. “Stagehands running in and out,” she recalled. “You never knew what camera was on you. I got a nervous breakdown just watching.”
The production values of a TV variety show in the early days certainly couldn’t bear comparison to those of a gold-standard movie studio like MGM, but The Frank Sinatra Show had—technically and artistically—an especially flea-bitten air about it. The rudimentary comedy sketches submerged the talents even of bright lights such as Phil Silvers and Don Ameche. And then there were lesser lights, such as one Virginia Ruth Egnor, known professionally as Dagmar.
Dagmar was Li’l Abner’s Daisy Mae incarnate: a tall, eye-poppingly buxom West Virginia blonde with a big wide smile and a pleasant, unaggressive personality. She could act a little, but mostly all she needed to do was stand there. She was so well-known to the national TV audience that all Sinatra had to do to draw big laughs was raise an eyebrow.
She was therefore a natural to join the troupe when Frank began his first live engagement in six months, a two-week stand at the Paramount starting on April 25. He introduced her by saying, “Please nobody sit in the front row—if she takes a bow you’ll get crushed.” The comedy stayed on that level, though the musical portion of the show was solid: Sinatra was backed by a band led by his old Dorsey pal Joey Bushkin. But the bobby-soxers were gone; there were empty seats in the orchestra. “The only autographs I’m being asked for now,” Sinatra told Bushkin, “are from process servers.” And the movie on the bill was, all too poignantly, My Forbidden Past, starring Ava and her old flame Mitchum.
The only notice the New York Times took of Frank’s Paramount show was in a single sentence at the bottom of a two-column review of the movie: “Featured on the stage of the Paramount are Frank Sinatra, Dagmar, Eileen Barton, Joe Bushkin and his orchestra, Tim Herbert and Don Saxon.”
Not a single Sinatra side had charted since “Nevertheless (I’m in Love with You)” notched a pallid number 14 the previous December. Ballads weren’t working; up-tempo numbers weren’t working; folk tunes were last year’s news. Mitch Miller felt stumped. Then two things happened in quick succession: Miller saw Frank and Dagmar do comedy together at the Paramount, and a songwriter named Dick Manning brought Mitch a cute new novelty number called “Mama Will Bark.”
A great mythology has gathered around this song.1 The deliciously
awful title alone has become a shorthand for the downfall of Sinatra’s career, a collapse that—according to myth—was all but engineered by the nefarious Miller. Sinatra himself liked to reinforce this impression. “I growled and barked on the record,” he told his daughter Nancy. “The only good business it did was with dogs.” Nor did Miller, an irascible and self-promoting character, do much to help his own reputation.
In fact, Mitch Miller was doing everything he could to jump-start Sinatra’s dying recording career in the spring of 1951: the goateed hit maker was up for trying anything—anything—that might work, and so, for that matter, was Frank Sinatra. A novelty number? Why not? It was a crapshoot, but plenty of them had succeeded: look at Frankie Laine’s “Mule Train”; look at Rosemary Clooney’s “Come On-a My House” (both produced by Miller).
Frank Sinatra loved recording great songs, but even more he loved recording hit records,2 and he desperately needed a hit that spring. Moreover, unlike, say, Clooney and Jo Stafford, both of whom were under constant contractual pressure by Miller and Columbia to record songs they didn’t like (and pay for the recording sessions),3 Sinatra had, through the good offices of Manie Sacks, grandfathered final approval over material into his contract with the label. In other words, Mitch Miller wasn’t foisting anything on Frank Sinatra. Miller brought “Mama Will Bark” to Sinatra, and Sinatra said yes.
However, Frank had been able to be considerably choosier just twelve months earlier. Returning from his disastrous visit to Ava in Spain, Frank had stepped off the plane at La Guardia to find his new producer brimming with excitement over two new songs he’d found. “Great stuff, Frank!” According to Sinatra archivist Ed O’Brien, Sinatra and Miller drove directly to the Columbia recording studio, where Miller had an orchestra waiting. Sinatra looked at the sheet music for the numbers, “The Roving Kind” and “My Heart Cries for You.” He gave the producer a look, but gamely enough ran through both songs with the musicians. The first was a bouncy, faux-folksy sea chantey (“She had a dark and roving eye-yyy, and her hair hung down in ring-a-lets”); the second, a swooner with a polka-esque chorus (“My heart cries for you, sighs for you, dies for you”). Hearing these atrocities actually set to music was all Sinatra needed. “Frank looks at Miller and says, ‘I’m not recording this fucking shit,’ ” O’Brien said. “He throws the sheet music on the floor and says, ‘You get yourself some other boy—I’m not doing this in a million years.’ And he walks out.
“Here we are, we’re all set up, we’ve got the music, we’ve got the musicians, the session is that night, we’re paying everybody—‘What the hell am I going to do?’ ” Miller told O’Brien. “So Miller jumps on the phone and calls Guy Mitchell.”
Guy Mitchell—born Albert George Cernik—was a twenty-three-year-old former child movie actor and radio singer recently signed to a Columbia recording contract by Miller (who came up with Cernik’s new name thusly: “You’re a nice guy, and my name is Mitchell—we’ll call you Guy Mitchell”). On the phone, according to O’Brien, Miller asked Mitchell, “ ‘Guy, would you like to come in and do a couple of quick songs for me?’ And Mitchell comes in and does the songs, and they both go right to the top of the charts. One was Number 1, the other made Number 2.”
By May 1951, Guy Mitchell was an important recording star, and no one knew this better than Frank. And so, when Miller—filled with certainty and energy, the main ingredients of persuasiveness—asked him to record “Mama Will Bark,” Sinatra said yes.
And on May 10, Frank and Mitch and Axel, along with a horn section, a rhythm ensemble including the reliable Johnny Blowers and Matty Golizio, a radio and cartoon voice artist named Donald Bain, and—yes—Dagmar, went into the Columbia Thirtieth Street studio and perpetrated the song.
Yet the truth is that Sinatra made many—many—recordings in his career just as bad as, if not worse than, “Mama Will Bark.” In the late 1940s and early 1950s alone he did a substantial number of true dogs, the likes of “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy,” “One Finger Melody,” “The Hucklebuck,” and, in a July 1951 reunion with his old boss Harry James (who was also under Miller’s thrall at Columbia), “Castle Rock,” which James called “the worst thing that either one of us ever recorded.”
“Mama Will Bark” isn’t that. It’s kind of cute and kind of sweet, and even if it’s ultimately regrettable, it’s also pretty harmless. It is, quite simply, a cartoon of a song—a dream-duet between a boy dog (Frank) and a girl dog (Dagmar)—and Frank, whether to his credit or his shame, is wholeheartedly into it. He sings along to the mambo beat in good voice and with good humor, neither taking the thing too seriously nor (sorry) dogging it. Between Frank’s wooing choruses (“You look so lovely in the moonlight … Your eyes are shining like the starlight”), Dagmar delivers her recitativo interjections (“Mama will bark … Papa will spank”) in absurdly flat, Appalachian-accented tones—she was clearly a lot better to look at than to listen to. And despite what Frank said about growling and barking, Bain handles almost all the heavy lifting in that department: all Sinatra has to do is give out with a couple of yips and a single “woof” at the end.
But he hated himself in the morning.
Friedwald points out he might not have had any regrets if the record had simply died, but it didn’t—it charted. The canny Miller released “I’m a Fool to Want You” and “Mama Will Bark” as the A and B sides of a 45-rpm disc on June 23, and (based on number of jukebox plays) “Fool” reached number 14 and “Mama,” number 21. It was ironic, to say the least: the apex and the nadir of his art on two sides of one thin disc. And the public, at this point anyway, liked them both just about the same.
28
Frank and Ava at the Desert Inn, September 1951. He would try facial hair from time to time over the years: It was not a good look for him. (photo credit 28.1)
A week after woofing that woof, Frank flew west with serious business in mind. Ava was taking his calls, but barely: she was curt and wouldn’t see him. When he went to 320 North Carolwood to try to talk Nancy into giving him a divorce at last, it was with hat in hand. And Nancy, who couldn’t help herself when it came to Frank, was genuinely worried about him. All at once, his sadness (which she knew so well) had a quality of desperation. “If I can’t get a divorce,” he begged her, “where is there for me to go and what is there for me to do?”
They talked, and agreed to talk again. He greeted the children sadly and left. He came back twice more—it was the most the kids had seen of him in a long time. As always, Little Nancy had the fantasy that he might be coming home to stay. Husband and wife went into the living room and closed the door; the nanny shooed the children away. Nancy Barbato Sinatra looked into the eyes of the man who had occupied the center of her life for almost fifteen years and asked him if this was what he really wanted.
He quietly told her that it was.
On May 29, Nancy informed the press that she and Frank had come to a decision. “This is what Frank wants,” she said, “and I’ve said yes. I have told the attorneys to work out the details.”
A few days later, she told Louella Parsons: “I don’t think a woman can be blamed for trying to hold her home together, especially when there are children. I held out a long time because I love Frank and I thought he would come back. But, when I saw there was absolutely no chance, and that he really wanted to marry someone else, I had my lawyer get in touch with his lawyer.” Then she said, “I am now convinced that a divorce is the only way for my happiness as well as Frank’s.”
Yes was one thing; lawyers were another. Happiness would be a quantity in short supply all around.
As soon as he left the gloomy confines of the Holmby Hills house (which, without telling him, Nancy had already put on the market, priced to move fast at $200,000), Frank’s mood lifted. His spirits soared as he drove the winding roads up to Nichols Canyon.
He was still walking on air when he returned to New York. “Frank Sinatra was the happiest I’ve seen him in years—and also in wonderful v
oice—when he opened a one-week engagement at the Latin Quarter,” Earl Wilson wrote.
Nancy’s decision to give him a divorce so he can marry Ava Gardner had seemingly put fresh bounce in his songs—especially some of the love songs that some of us romanticists thought might have reminded him of Ava.
Frank—who was bending those notes beautifully—told a friend, rather proudly, that when Ava’s next picture, “Showboat” [sic], is released, she’ll be one of the outstanding movie actresses of the world.
And as for his movie career? Meet Danny Wilson, which he spent July shooting at Universal, would show him how transient happiness was. The problems began with Frank’s co-star, the formidable Shelley Winters. Winters, whom the studio was wrongheadedly trying to build up as a blond bombshell, was a Jewish girl out of St. Louis and Brooklyn (née Shirley Schrift): an actress of unconventional looks, high intelligence, and strong opinions. Like Sinatra, she was a committed liberal, though, if anything, her sympathies lay even further to the left. Prickly and vulnerable, Winters usually liked her leading men—but she hated Frank.
The enmity was inevitable, and mutual. Winters, determined to become a serious actress, was hardworking and insecure. She was scared of him; he was irritable and distracted. When he sent a note suggesting they rehearse together in his dressing room, she saw only one possible interpretation. She fired a self-righteous note back saying they would rehearse, as planned, on the soundstage. It wasn’t that she found him unattractive. “I too had sat in the orchestra at the Paramount Theater when I was a teenager and screamed every time he opened his mouth,” Winters wrote in her autobiography. “But he was married to Nancy, whom I knew and liked from various charity committees, and there were the children. I was determined to keep my association with Mr. Sinatra as professional as possible. In retrospect, I suspect he wanted the same thing.”