by James Kaplan
Frank on the edge. The Copacabana, spring 1950, just before his voice gave out. He wears a coonskin cap and snaps a whip to lampoon Frankie Laine; meanwhile, he’s taking “pills to sleep, pills to get started in the morning, and pills to relax during the day.” (photo credit 24.2)
Whatever really happened that night, the episode speaks to Frank Sinatra’s deeply divided nature. He is a thirty-four-year-old man, famous and brilliant and deep voiced and well-endowed and sexually voracious, certainly by many measures the big stud Artie Shaw makes him out to be. Yet his behavior throughout this singular evening is oddly childlike, especially when it comes to the faked suicide. That pale little smile when Ava—on top—finally gives him his sought-after, maternally consoling embrace; that cartoonish “Oh, hello.” It’s like the climax of a game of hide-and-seek.
Artie Shaw’s story about Ava’s sexual confession (“It’s like being in bed with a woman”) may be half-true; it certainly shows Shaw to best advantage, and Sinatra to worst. But it chimes oddly with the incident at the Hampshire House. Sinatra certainly had a hysterical side, and was nothing if not hypersensitive. And Ava was all things to him, siren and drinking buddy and mother surrogate, and great artists have polymorphous souls. Even her private name for him, Francis, sounded (perhaps purposely) androgynous. Picasso, who was every bit as macho as Frank, said, “Every artist is a woman and ought to be une gouine [a dyke].” In any case, if Ava was looking for a man who would dominate her, she was, as would become increasingly evident, betting on the wrong horse.
25
Frank and Mitch Miller rehearse in Columbia recording studio, circa 1951. The tension between the domineering singer and the domineering producer is palpable. (photo credit 25.1)
Now that Manie had left the picture, Columbia, too, was starting to wonder about Sinatra. From virtually carrying the company, he had become a major liability. (As soon as Sacks arrived at RCA, he tried to sell his colleagues on signing Sinatra: no one was interested.) On March 30, 1950, Columbia Records’ president, Ted Wallerstein, sent a memo to his next in command, Vice President Goddard Lieberson:
As you know, we got rid of a very bad Sinatra deal some six months ago by a new agreement under which we advanced him $50,000 and agreed, at the same time, to pay the income tax on this original $50,000 the following year, and the tax on the tax the third year.
The total of this is going to run to about $120,000. This, as accompaniment costs, with certain limitations, are advances against royalties; therefore, practically the biggest problem we have in the pop field is to get some big-selling records out of Sinatra …
Please push this continuously while I am away.
Manie, Frank’s ultimate protector, had been the one behind the big advances. With Manie gone, and RCA surging, a cold wind was blowing at Columbia. Wallerstein had already given Mitch Miller the same message he’d sent Lieberson: “Mitch, we’ve got to make this money back.”
The head of the pop-singles department knew exactly what he had to do. Before this, Frank’s ratio of rhythm numbers to ballads had been about one to ten; Mitch Miller decided to try the reverse. The producer’s exquisite ear and classical background never got in the way when it came to commercial matters. “What makes you want to dig in your pocket and buy a record?” he mused many years later. “It’s got to be something you want to play over and over again. You look for qualities to make somebody buy it. I was trying to put stuff in records that would tighten the picture for the listener.”
For Miller’s first collaboration with Sinatra, the producer brought the singer an up-tempo Arthur Altman, Hal David, and Redd Evans tune, “American Beauty Rose”:
Daisy is darling, Iris is sweet,
Lily is lovely, Blossom’s a treat.
With a bouncy Dixieland-style arrangement by Norman Leyden, who’d pepped up Glenn Miller’s and Tex Beneke’s bands, “American Beauty Rose” bounds out of the gate at a breakneck tempo and never lets up. (Miller himself conducted.) The astute Will Friedwald calls the number “irresistible,” and Sinatra’s rendition “joyous,” but to my ears the song just sounds fast and mechanical, a vapid counterpart to Como’s “A—You’re Adorable.” Frank is in great voice, but there’s no smile in his voice. He sounds as if he’s just watching Mitch’s relentlessly waving baton and going through the motions.
The heartbreaking thing is that Miller knew exactly what he was doing: America wanted vapid novelty numbers in 1950. It just didn’t want Sinatra very much—“American Beauty Rose” charted, but only made it to number 26, and only for two weeks. At this point, Frank’s name was plastered all over the newspapers every day of the week as a family deserter and a has-been. You didn’t have to be officially declared persona non grata on the Senate floor, the way Ingrid Bergman had been, to be counted out by the American public.
But Mitch Miller had set the new tempo, and Frank had to keep dancing faster and faster. Not only was he playing three shows a night at the Copa and broadcasting the frenetic Light Up Time five evenings a week from the NBC studios at Rockefeller Center, but he was cranking out new records at a brisk new clip in hopes of generating the hits that would pay back Columbia (not to mention the IRS). In April alone, he did three recording sessions and eight new songs—almost a third as many as he’d recorded in the entire previous year. All eight were up-tempo numbers.
Almost all the new songs were arranged by George Siravo, the same man who’d been arranging fast-paced numbers for Frank throughout the 1940s and who had collaborated with Sy Oliver on the July 1949 session that produced the joyous versions of “It All Depends on You” and “Bye Bye Baby.” But the differences between July 1949 and April 1950 in Sinatra’s life and spirit were profound. The previous July, he’d been in the first flush of his grand affair with Ava. Now the affair had entered a complex second phase. Siravo’s new arrangements were lively and inventive, but Sinatra was subtly dragging them down. As with “American Beauty Rose,” he was singing well enough, but joylessly. On “You Do Something to Me,” he hit some outright clams, flat notes that seemed to mirror his mood.
None of the new sides charted.
In the meantime, Ava had finally heeded MGM’s importuning and flown with Bappie to London. For all the sweet sorrow of parting with Frank—they wept as they embraced—she felt nothing but relief as she boarded the BOAC Stratocruiser. She would be going to Europe for four months—four months without hate mail, American newspapers, the Legion of Decency. Whether she and Frank would be seeing each other during that time was left up in the air.
“Oh, God,” Ava wrote in her autobiography, “Frank Sinatra could be the sweetest, most charming man in the world when he was in the mood.”
But being with him, she thought, was what it must be like to have a particularly demanding child.
In addition to three shows a night at the Copa, five radio broadcasts a week, recording sessions, and the usual fun and games with the Varsity, toward the end of April Frank opened a one-week stand at the Capitol Theater, where he had drawn less than sensationally in 1947. This time there were even more empty seats. He had been in show business half his life, and he was tired: his eyes bloodshot, his face drawn and thin. The rumors that he was having voice problems persisted—he had a cold that wouldn’t go away. And now there was new gossip: Ava, shooting in Spain, had taken up with a bullfighter. Frank’s stomach hurt at the thought, but he knew just where to look for consolation: sweet Marilyn Maxwell was in town, glad to listen to his troubles and not as worried about being sloppy seconds as, perhaps, she should have been. Then there were the Copa Girls, four of them—imagine the possibilities. The long nights melted into blue dawns, then he slept a little and woke to the brazen light of Manhattan afternoons …
Coughing. He would light a cigarette before he got out of bed, and when he was through shaving, he would light another. Then whoever had shared his bed would have to get the hell out of there, because he had to get ready for the show.
Meanwhile, in Santa Monica on Ap
ril 26, Nancy filed a suit for separate maintenance. Her lawyer was Gregson Edward Bautzer—Greg to his friends, of which he had many, mainly female. The dashing, hard-drinking Bautzer was renowned in Hollywood for having taken Lana Turner’s virginity (she didn’t seem to have enjoyed the experience very much), and his specialty was representing beautiful women in their divorce cases: Turner; Ginger Rogers; Ingrid Bergman. These days he was seeing Rogers, when he wasn’t seeing Joan Crawford. Maybe he was also seeing Nancy?
Her suit alleged that Frank had treated her with “extreme cruelty” and caused her “grievous mental suffering” without provocation on her part. “She estimated the crooner’s 1949 income at $934,740,” said the Associated Press, “and the value of their community property at $750,000.” She also asked for custody of their three children.
There was a crowd of reporters outside the courthouse: they wanted to know if the couple were getting a divorce. Nancy, dignified in a gray dress and the three-strand pearl necklace Frank had given her, said quietly that no divorce action was contemplated. Both she and her husband were Catholics, she said, and “neither of us wants one.”
Two days later, Frank was in the news again: MGM had let him go.
Frank Sinatra, cast loose romantically when sued for separate maintenance by his wife, Nancy, last week, was a free lance in his profession as well today.
Breaking another tie of years of standing, the singer asked for and was given a release from his $5,000-a-week contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Saturday.
The parting, effective immediately, was described as friendly.
A joint statement by the studio and Sinatra’s agent, Music Corporation of America, pointed out:
“As a free lance artist, Sinatra is now free to accept unlimited important personal appearances, radio and TV offers that have been made to him.”
His contract with MGM restricted him in all of those respects and particularly with regard to television. The studio does not permit its stars to work in that medium.
While it was true that Sinatra wanted to work in television, and equally true that in 1950 the movie studios were increasingly paranoid about the hot new medium, Frank’s separation from Metro came at the studio’s request, not his—and in particular at the request of Louis B. Mayer, who had a very specific grievance. A couple of months earlier, after a horseback-riding accident, the boss had been pushed into work in a wheelchair, a cast on his leg. While Sinatra sat with some pals at lunch in the MGM commissary, someone said, “Hey, did you hear about L. B.’s accident?” And Frank said instantly: “Yeah, he fell off of Ginny Simms.”
Ginny Simms, a former band singer with Kay Kyser and now a wannabe movie star, was Mayer’s mistress.
Frank’s remark got a big laugh at the table. He could be funny when he wasn’t trying too hard, though, as with Dolly, his jokes usually had a stiletto concealed—or not concealed—about them. In this case, the blade was double-edged: Simms, while vivacious and appealing, was no beauty. To put a finer point on it, she was a bit horse faced.
The remark got back to Mayer.
Frank made the long trudge into the inner sanctum. The old man was ominously calm. He was even smiling a little.
“So,” he said. “I hear you been making jokes about my lady friend.”
Frank winced. “I wish I could take that back, Louis. I’m so sorry. I wish I’d never said anything so stupid.”
“That’s not a very nice thing to do,” Mayer said. “I want you to leave, and I don’t ever want you to come back again.”
That had been in February. Mayer had been genuinely offended by Frank’s remark, but he was also a businessman. The gaffe had given him a perfect pretext to unload damaged goods. By the end of April, MCA was finished working out the severance: Sinatra would receive a final payment of $85,000. Greg Bautzer instantly called MGM and slapped a restraining order on the check until Nancy and Frank settled the separate-maintenance suit.
Meanwhile, Frank was doing big business at the Copa, thanks to the cognoscenti, who, heedless of his troubles, continued to roll in night after night. But every dime he made, and then some, was going straight out the door. He went to MCA’s chairman, Jules Stein, for a loan; Stein all but laughed in his face. Those “unlimited important personal appearances, radio and TV offers” mentioned in the press release were in fact extremely limited: Frank Sinatra was a drug on the market.
Not to mention a king-sized pain in the ass. He treated everyone at the agency like a servant, including his chief representatives, Lew Wasserman in Hollywood and Sonny Werblin in New York. MCA might have stood for this behavior if he’d been bringing in money. As it was, Sinatra’s agents had effectively cut him loose: by 1950, they were no longer working actively on his behalf.
Worse, he was losing what was most precious to him: his voice. Many years later, Mitch Miller recalled:
Listen, Sinatra had a marvelous voice, but it was very fragile. There were certain guys like Gordon MacRae who could stay up all night and drink and sing the next day—he could sing underwater. But if Frank didn’t get enough sleep or if he drank a lot the night before, it would show up. And Frank was a guy—call it ego or what you want—he liked to suffer out loud, to be dramatic. There were plenty of people, big entertainers, who had a wild life or had big problems, but they kept it quiet. Frank had to do his suffering in public, so everyone could see it. And this was a time he was having trouble with Ava, she was in Spain, and it showed in his work. He would come in to record, and he couldn’t get through a number without his voice cracking.
Every time Frank’s voice went, Miller would have to start the session over again, racking up studio fees and musicians’ overtime. (Which, as per Sinatra’s unique contract with Columbia, were the label’s responsibility.) But thanks to the new technology of tape recording, Miller was able to come up with a simple fix:
I can say this now: I could have been kicked out of the musicians’ union because tracking was not allowed. There were a lot of musicians involved. So what I did, to save the session, I just shut off his mike and got good background tracks. Didn’t even tell him.
Then after it was over, I said, “When your voice is back …” We’d come in crazy hours, in a locked building, so no union representative could come in. Then when Frank came in, say, at midnight, we would play the disc. He would put earphones on and he would sing, just the way they do now. And we would remix it. He did them very well after that, and the whole orchestra was perfect on it.
It sounds simple, but it couldn’t have been. Sinatra, who revered musicians and always insisted on doing right by them, knew he was taking money out of his musicians’ pockets, not to mention depriving himself of the pleasure of working directly with them. The pleasure of being with the musicians was central to Sinatra as an artist, and it infused all his best recordings. Indeed, even as recording technology advanced and tracking (today known as overdubbing) became almost universal, Sinatra did not like to record separately—and when he did, the music was always the worse for it. The renowned sound engineer Lee Herschberg, who supervised most of Frank’s Reprise sessions in the 1960s, noted that unlike most other singers, Sinatra couldn’t bear to sing behind sound-absorbing isolation panels—gobos. “You couldn’t do that with him, because he wanted to hear the piano, number one,” Herschberg said. “He’d stand right behind Bill Miller, or whomever.”
Frank wanted the intimacy. He’d stand right behind Miller and tease him, and Miller, or whoever, would joke back, and the studio would start to take on a kind of glow. “Sinatra wasn’t like some of the other people you would record,” Herschberg recalled. “When he walked in, it was special. Because there was an air in the studio that something special was going to happen. He always had the best arrangers and he had the best players, and everybody was having such a good time and was so happy to be there, and it really made him give what he had to give.”
That was in the 1960s. In 1950 it was a very different story: good times were in short supply; Sinatra
was sinking fast. During the day he was stripping the gears—and obsessing over Ava. “Every day,” writes Gardner’s biographer Lee Server, “he would send off a heartfelt cable and then telephone her in the early evening in New York, late night in Spain, and try again sometime after midnight, early morning [at the location] in Tossa de Mar.”
But long-distance telecommunication in Catalonia was still erratic at best. Sometimes hours of transatlantic operator assistance were necessary only to be told again that the lines were down or that no one was answering. When at last he would reach her, the connection was often filled with static and her voice a maddeningly faint and broken echo. Conversations would end with his frantic declaration of love and anguished hope that he had correctly heard Ava declare the same.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that you can hear the disconnect in the records he made during that grueling April: As Mitch Miller triumphantly noted, the orchestra was perfect. Frank, however, was merely good. And the main thing was that he and the orchestra didn’t sound good together.
Then, at the Copa dinner show on May 2, Sinatra reached for a high note on South Pacific’s “Bali H’ai.” The note wasn’t there. He somehow managed to finish the show—then rushed back to his bed at the Hampshire House, where he sat in his pajamas, weakly calling for hot tea and honey. As Frank rested, feeling deeply sorry for himself, Hank Sanicola let slip a rumor that had been making the rounds in midtown: Lee Mortimer had bet Jack Entratter $100 that Sinatra would never finish out the Copa engagement.
