Frank: The Voice (28 page)

Manie Sacks was a different ball of wax. From their first meeting, Sinatra seems to have sensed that Manie didn’t just have real business acumen, didn’t just have something Sinatra wanted (a contract with Columbia, the Rolls-Royce of record labels); he also had—for lack of a better word—soul. Manie was honest to the core; he was incapable of disingenuousness. Sinatra, who could wear a half-dozen personalities in the course of a morning, was fascinated by the man’s purity. Like George Evans, Sacks was in his early forties, old enough to feel like a father to Sinatra. But Evans was another extrovert, a man to whom words were verbs. Sacks was deep.

He was small and dark haired, with a long, thin, acne-scarred face and a sizable nose—not homely-handsome, really, but homely-memorable. When he began to spend time with Sinatra, the crazed fans would sometimes mistake the record executive for the recording artist. For a brief time the press, when it had nothing else to write about, would make much of the supposed resemblance between the two. In fact, though, only in the grossest possible details—stature, hair color, face shape—was there a correspondence. Sinatra, for all his facial imperfections, had a wild, Dionysian beauty. Manie Sacks looked like a rabbi.
²

“
He was a very unusual-looking man,” George Avakian recalled. Avakian first met Sacks in the late 1930s, when, while still a student at Yale, he was starting to produce jazz albums for Columbia. “You got the feeling right away that this was a man who knew what he was doing. He could have a piercing gaze. I don’t mean like Benny Goodman’s famous ray. But he looked you in the eye, and he was very direct in his speech. He didn’t waste a lot of time. He always looked as though he was on the point of doing something very intense. He looked very intense. And he was. Manie I think ended up getting ulcers.”

And Sinatra would have been the one who gave them to him. But at first the relationship was a beautiful thing, even in a difficult time. The American Federation of Musicians strike against the record companies, which had begun in August 1942, was in full swing when Sinatra signed with Columbia Records. Indeed, the first time Frank stepped into a recording studio as a solo artist (Liederkranz Hall on East Fifty-eighth Street; Monday, June 7, 1943), beginning a commercial relationship with Columbia that would last for a tumultuous decade, he saw no musicians, only the eight-person vocal group that had recently accompanied him on the radio, the Bobby Tucker Singers. Sinatra hadn’t made a record in eleven months. Manie Sacks was so desperate to get product out to Frank’s female fan base that he had asked him to sing a cappella.

He was game at first. Listen to his maiden recording, of Hoffman, Lampl, and Livingston’s “Close to You”: You hear Sinatra in fine
vocal form, backed by what sounds at first like a heavenly choir, trilling along in close harmony.
³
Unfortunately, the heavenliness quickly turns cloying. The effect is pretty, but … crowded. Too many voices in the room, when there should be only the Voice.

He would record nine of the instrumentless singles between June and November 1943, and the fans would dutifully buy them (five of the numbers hit the
Billboard
best-sellers chart), but none of the records had anything like the impact of a disc that Sinatra had cut an eon ago, with Harry James—and that Manie Sacks had the good sense to reissue on June 19. The song was “All or Nothing At All.” Only eight thousand people had bought the record when it was first released in June 1940. This time it sold a million.
⁴

Since Axel Stordahl was an orchestra arranger, and organizing the voices of a small chorus so they would sound something like a band of actual instruments was a highly specialized problem, Sacks brought in a new man to arrange and conduct Sinatra’s Bobby Tucker sessions. His name was Alexander Lafayette Chew Wilder—Alec for short. He was an upstate New Yorker, thirty-six years old, and a genuine American eccentric: a self-taught composer who wrote both serious music and popular songs, Wilder lived alone in the Algonquin Hotel, passed his days doing crosswords and jigsaw puzzles, and spent his evenings drinking, smoking, drinking some more, and dazzling New York’s best and brightest with his encyclopedic knowledge of more or less everything. “
He is acutely aware of what is happening in the world and why it happens,” read the liner notes to an album of Wilder’s orchestral music released several years later—an album that would loom large in Sinatra’s life. “He is passionately fond of living in hotels, riding on trains, and reading detective stories; he is equally enamored of sitting still in a small town, attending to a garden, and talking to children.” Wilder was mustached and handsome in an old-money way, with a beetling brow and a distracted, kind of sideways, manner. The first time Sinatra laid eyes on him, he called him by the only possible nickname: the Professor.

Working with Sinatra would have been a big deal for Wilder, if
Wilder hadn’t been above caring about such matters. But oddly enough, working with Alec did feel like a big deal to Frank. In Sacks and Wilder, Frank Sinatra was rubbing elbows with a new caliber of talent. Manie may have hung with the crew, have smiled at the hijinks, but ultimately he kept himself to himself. His integrity was inviolable. And as charmed as Alec Wilder was with Sinatra—and as bowled over by his musical gifts—he had absolutely no interest in joining the Varsity, or any fraternity at all. He might, out of anthropological curiosity, tag along to a Friday-night prizefight; he might, just as likely, spend the next evening drinking with Alexander Woollcott and Dottie Parker.

Both Sacks and Wilder had that ineffable quality that Frank Sinatra thought of as Class. He wanted the same thing of those who had it that those who lacked it wanted of him. Class didn’t necessarily have anything to do with wealth: the rich stiffs who flocked to see him at the Riobamba mostly lacked the elusive quantity entirely, as far as he could see. (Though in later years, cleverer stiffs, primarily in Hollywood and Palm Springs, would gain access to Sinatra by assuring him that their money was no greener than his.) It was easy to feel superior to some jackass with dough; Sinatra never, for one second, felt superior to Manie or the Professor. If anything, it was quite the opposite. Which made things kind of complicated sometimes, but never stopped him from longing for just a little bit of what they had.

On August 11, 1943, Frank Sinatra made his grand entrance to Hollywood—except that it wasn’t Hollywood. It was Pasadena. Nancy Sinatra writes, in
Frank Sinatra: An American Legend
, “
Traveling by train to Los Angeles, Dad tried to avoid the waiting crowds by deboarding [
sic
] in Pasadena, but it was no use: A huge throng of bobby-soxers mobbed the station, and he was rushed by police to the safety of a nearby garage. ‘They converged on our car and practically picked it up,’ Dad recalls. ‘There must have been 5,000 kids mashed against the car. It was exciting, but it scares the wits out of you, too.’ ”

This is disingenuous. In fact, Sinatra’s true goal on that summer
Wednesday was not eluding the crowds but meeting them, and the waiting throng—probably closer to a few hundred than five thousand—had been lured by a radio “whisper” of the singer’s arrival. As the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Super Chief pulled in to the little Mission-style depot, a loudspeaker was blaring “All or Nothing At All.” The whole event had been carefully orchestrated by the Evans office (Margaret Divan, Los Angeles representative), working in league with the West Coast Sinatra fan clubs and the RKO publicity department. Another photograph taken that day shows Sinatra standing on a ladder in the midst of an enthusiastic but notably restrained throng; a couple of female hands are proffering autograph books, but none are ripping at his clothing. The ladder is clearly stenciled “RKO GRIP DEP’T.”

His fans weren’t the only ones thrilled to see him. RKO executives were hoping Sinatra could help lift Radio-Keith-Orpheum Pictures out of the financial trough into which another young genius, Orson Welles, had sunk it with his brilliant but money-losing epics
Citizen Kane
and
The Magnificent Ambersons
.
⁵

It was astonishing: Frank was about to sign a seven-year movie contract, and nobody really even knew whether he could act. He had appeared, very briefly, in three motion pictures to date: Paramount’s
Las Vegas Nights
(1941), MGM’s
Ship Ahoy
(1942), and—released earlier in 1943—a Columbia musical with the perky, patriotic title
Reveille with Beverly
. In
Las Vegas Nights
and
Ship Ahoy
, Sinatra had been a mere singing extra, the male vocalist for Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra, and while he was featured in
Reveille
, it was only as the singer of one number, “Night and Day” (accompanied by six female pianists).

Still, whether he could play Hamlet was hardly the point. He had been playing one role, brilliantly, for almost ten years. He didn’t have to act. He was
Frank Sinatra
.

The staid Chandler family’s
Los Angeles Times
gave front-page treatment to the new star’s arrival.
SECRET OF LURE TOLD BY CROONER—IT’S LOVE, read the two-column headline. The story
reported that Sinatra had come not only to start his movie career but also to play a concert with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl. L.A. classical music aficionados were outraged, the paper said, even though Sinatra’s appearance promised to give the orchestra, and the bowl, a badly needed financial boost. One of the naysayers had been the
Times
’s distinguished music critic, Isabel Morse Jones, a portly old-guard Angeleno who ventured bravely out to that besieged garage in Pasadena. It wasn’t just the howling fans Ms. Jones was nervous about; it was Frank himself. “My objections to swooner-crooner singing in sacred precincts [had recently] hit the wires and reached him in New York,” she wrote. But Sinatra smiled that smile at her, and practically from the moment she opened her reporter’s notebook, Isabel Morse Jones was a goner. Frank knew just how to play the ladies, young and pretty or middle-aged and plump. And if the lady in question was a distinguished classical music critic, why, all the better. He spoke softly, and she listened carefully.

“I expect to get the thrill of my life Saturday night,” he told Ms. Jones. “Oh, yes, I can be just as enthusiastic about classical music as those kids out there are about my kind. What do you suppose I have 500 albums of symphonies and so on for?”

Five hundred albums of symphonies …
One can see the music critic’s eyes widening, her features softening… “It’s the words of a song that are important,” Sinatra went on. “I pick my songs for the lyrics. The music is only a backdrop. I sing love songs and mean them. They’re meant for two girls, both named Nancy. One is my wife, aged 24, and not jealous and the other is my three-year-old.”
⁶

“He is just naturally sensitive,” Isabel Morse Jones wrote, her fingers flying over the typewriter keys, when she got back to the office. “He is a romanticist and a dreamer and a careful dresser and he loves beautiful words and music is his hobby. He makes no pretensions at all.”

Another one bites the dust.

He handled his first meeting with Louella Parsons, a few days
later, with equal skill. Here was another small, pudgy female columnist, except that this one was a real dragon lady: a personal favorite of her employer, William Randolph Hearst, and the most feared woman in Hollywood. Her forty million readers gave her tremendous power. Yet even Lolly Parsons’s knees wobbled in Sinatra’s presence. She wrote that he had, “
Noah Webster forgive me, humility. He was warm, ingenuous, so anxious to please.” He would grow less eager to please as his own power grew. Parsons and Sinatra would have a love-hate relationship over the years, until her clout waned and he decided he didn’t need her anymore. Long afterward, she would reflect: “Sinatra couldn’t have been so boyishly unspoiled, so natural and considerate. But I have to admit he was. After I met him, I was enrolled in the Sinatra cheering squad. And I stayed in a long, long time.”