Frank

by James Kaplan

  The Paramount gave me a couple of rows of seats for VIPs whom I got out for the opening on March 26, 1952. Jackie Gleason, Phil Silvers, Ted Lewis, Jimmy Durante and the columnists stood up in the audience and sang out greetings to Frankie, and I reported it in the papers: “Jule Styne reached for his handkerchief when Frank sang ‘The Birth of the Blues.’ ”

  Maybe he was blowing his nose. After all, a claque was just a claque, no matter how high the star wattage. The rest of the crowd, while enthusiastic, were dry-eyed. After the Times reviewer gave his kind word about Meet Danny Wilson, he reflected on the “somewhat subdued” crowd, noting: “Perhaps it is the beginning of the end of an era.”

  A feature article in the New York World-Telegram and Sun was far less genteel. GONE ON FRANKIE IN ’42; GONE IN ’52, read the three-column headline. And to put a finer point on it, the subhead: “What a Difference a Decade Makes—Empty Balcony.” The article was cast in the form of an open letter from the reporter Muriel Fischer. Fischer was young and ambitious, and her tone was snarky. “I saw you last night. But I didn’t get ‘that old feeling,’ ” she wrote.

  I sat in the balcony. And I felt kind of lonely. It was so empty. The usher said there were 750 seats in the second balcony—and 749 were unfilled … Later I stood outside the stage entrance. About a dozen people were waiting around. Three girls were saying “Frankie” soft and swoonlike. I asked, “How do you like Frankie?” They said, “Frankie Laine, he’s wonderful.” I heard a girl sighing, “I’m mad about him,” so I asked her who. “Johnnie Ray,” she cried. All of a sudden, Mr. Sinatra, I felt sort of old!

  Johnnie Ray wasn’t just that season’s sensation but a game changer: a skinny, androgynous, half-deaf, sob-singing white soul singer who pounded the piano and writhed on the bench—even sometimes on the floor—while he performed. Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis were in the wings. Just four months earlier, Ray had been all but unknown, but then along came “Cry,” his million-selling 45 on the Columbia subsidiary Okeh. The lyrics, by the one-hit-wonder composer Churchill Kohlman, were sheer schmaltz:

  If your sweetheart sends a letter of goodbye

  It’s no secret you’ll feel better if you cry

  and Ray’s vocalizing was appropriately sappy. He had a theatrical way of hanging on to syllables (“but it’s on-lyy fal-se ee-motions-uh that you feel-l-l”), and something about his whole sound—that Great Plains accent (he was an Oregonian, half Native American) and keening voice, that big echo behind him—chimed with the era’s taste for emotional bombast (Mario Lanza; Laine) and pointed toward a growing American predilection for countrified songs and singers such as Brenda Lee, Teresa Brewer, Patti Page, and, of course, the great Hank Williams himself. We were still a spread-out, lonely nation in those blue-highway days, and something about those high, lonesome sounds struck home in ten thousand back-roads burgs—and, maybe, served as welcome counterpoint to such urban (and ethnic) sensations as Uncle Miltie, Your Show of Shows, and Martin and Lewis, not to mention Sinatra himself.

  Under the headline JOHNNIE’S GOLDEN RAYS DAZZLE MUSIC BUSINESS, Down Beat wrote that Ray had “most certainly established himself as the phenom of the music-record business of the second half of the century.” Big words—there were many phenoms still to come. But the point was made: Bing and Frank, those sensations of the century’s first half, were old news. Even Earl Wilson succumbed. “Do you folks suffer, too, from juke box jitters, or Johnny [sic] Rayitis?” the columnist wrote in March. “Well, you will. They call Johnny Ray ‘the Heat Ray’ and he’s the wildest, craziest, looniest, goofiest, weirdest singer since Frankie Swoonatra … He has this broken-hearted voice and … when he opens soon at the Copacabana, we expect to hear crying all over town, especially at the other night clubs.”

  With Ava in tow (she’d finally come to New York, so the fighting and making up could commence afresh), Frank attended Ray’s Copa premiere in early April—more on his wife’s say-so (and of course to be seen) than because he really wanted to be there. When Earl Wilson asked him what he thought of the new sensation, Frank said, “I’d like to tell you, but my girl won’t let me.”

  His girl was behaving as singularly as ever. One night at the Paramount, Johnnie Ray returned the favor and came backstage to meet Sinatra, entourage in tow. According to eyewitnesses, Frank was gracious, introducing Ava to one and all and making amiable chitchat. Then he was called out of the room on a business matter. While he was gone, Ava climbed onto Ray’s lap and began stroking his hair and cooing to him. Frank returned while she was still at it. After an awkward moment, he grabbed his unrepentant wife’s arm, yanked her off the fruity upstart’s lap, and hustled her out of the room.

  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 t
ent. 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.

  But Mitch did [turn them], and then all of a sudden one day Frank had as much as he could stand. Quietly, he looked in the control room, pointed his finger, and said, “Mitch—out.” When Mitch didn’t move, Sinatra turned to Hank Sanicola. “Henry, move him.” To Mitch, he said, “Don’t you ever come in the studio when I’m recording again.”

  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:

  Under present conditions, Ava isn’t anxious to get off suspension. “I believe,” she says, “that the studio has given me a series of bad parts and has showed a lack of interest in my career.”

  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.”

  “Ava had a reckless look about her,” Nancy junior wrote, remembering her first rapt impressions, as a twelve-year-old, of her father’s new wife:

  She didn’t bother with her hair or makeup—it was sort of haphazard. No matter. Her hair was naturally curly. On my first weekend with them in Palm Springs she was wearing her hair short. She would dive into the pool, looking like a goddess on the diving board, swim a few lengths, throw on a terry robe, come inside, kneel down in front of the wall heater, turn on the fan, dry her hair with a shake and a few rubs with her fingers, and be a goddess again. No makeup, perfect skin, and a wonderful voice …

  She had the magnetism that few stars possess … At last, in my preteenage wisdom, I had some understanding of why Daddy had left us.

  This was what MGM was attempting to deal with. It was the quicksilver essence of stardom, all the more potent for its ambivalence.2 As for the studio’s lack of interest in her career, to a certain extent it was simply repaying her in kind. She had turned down work, disobeyed directives, been generally careless. And the movies were a tough business. In theory, MGM had every interest in furthering her career, but in those studio days, as now, good parts came along when they came along, and actors kept working if they wanted to keep getting paid. Metro had given her Show Boat—then it had given her Lone Star. With nothing else lying around, the studio had loaned her to Fox. What else was new? Bette Davis, whom Ava idolized, followed All About Eve with … Payment on Demand. An actor worked. And just then, Ava wasn’t working.

  Frank was—barely. At the Chez Paree, which could seat 1,200, one night he drew 150 customers. At the Desert Inn, he sang to half-full houses of wildcatters and cattle ranchers, and suffered from Vegas Throat. Ava flew up on the weekends, and complained the whole time.

  But then, as she’d predicted, Metro came crawling back. In truth, her agent Benton Cole saved her bacon, reasoning with Eddie Mannix: She was a big star. Metro was a big studio. They needed each other. For its part, the studio agreed to halt the suspension and reinstate her salary, effective immediately—she would even get back what she’d been docked. Furthermore, it was contract time, so MGM offered her a new seven-year, multipicture deal, with compensation graduating from $90,000 to $130,000 a film.

  Her agent was happy. Ava wasn’t.

  She wanted (or Frank wanted) a clause written into her contract stipulating that she and her
husband could work together. The project they had in mind was an adaptation of a 1946 musical called St. Louis Woman, with a book co-written by Countee Cullen, music by Harold Arlen, and lyrics by Johnny Mercer. The show had been a middling success on Broadway, but it had a great pedigree, and MGM wasn’t averse to it per se.

  What it was averse to was Frank Sinatra.

  The studio lawyers stroked their chins for a minute, and came back with a codicil titled “Services of Frank Sinatra”—or, as it came to be known around Metro, the Frank Sinatra Clause. It read:

  a) Should we buy the rights to and produce a photoplay based on “St. Louis Woman,” we agree that she will be assigned to do this picture and we further agree that we will employ Frank Sinatra to appear in the photoplay.

  b) Should we not acquire the rights to “St. Louis Woman” or produce a photoplay based on this property, then we agree that at some time prior to the expiration of her contract, we will do a picture with her in which Frank Sinatra will also appear.

  The clause wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. It didn’t oblige MGM to make St. Louis Woman, and as for hiring Sinatra somewhere down the line, well—seven years was a long time.

  But the addition satisfied Ava, and, even more important at that sensitive moment, it satisfied Frank. She signed.

  In return, Metro sent her to hell.

  She was to report to work immediately on Ride, Vaquero! yet another dog of a Western, to be shot largely on location in Kanab, Utah, in the hottest part of the summer. It was the foothills of the Rockies, a hundred dusty miles from civilization of any kind: “the asshole of creation,” recalled her co-star Howard Keel. “Beautiful territory, but we were out there for about, oh, Christ, a month, and there was nothing there and nothing to do there. Nothing.”