Frank: The Voice (32 page)

And there were plenty of crashes: wartime production was so breakneck that quality control was haphazard. Test piloting was a dangerous business. “
I was at Lockheed more than two and a half years and I was scared shitless all of the time,” Jimmy later said. But he never told Sinatra.

It was Eat, Drink, and Be Merry time: the Wilshire Tower suite quickly became a twenty-four-hour free-for-all of poker, booze, and sex. The hookers paraded in and out while Cahn and Crane and Silvers sat around the card table, cracking wise, and Stordahl puffed serenely
on his pipe. Once, all jaws at the table dropped when Frank walked in with his arm draped over the shoulder of none other than Marlene Dietrich. Forty-two years old, and dazzling as ever. Hello, boys, she said, in that German accent. And then, bold as brass, to Sinatra: Well, Frank? She took his hand, smiling, and they closed the bedroom door behind them. Just like that. The poker continued—but not before Sammy Cahn, ever the P.S. 147 wiseacre, stage-whispered what he’d heard about Dietrich’s sexual specialty.

Phil Silvers gave him a look. Hearing was as close as Sammy was gonna get.

Soon afterward Sinatra brought another visitor, the dark, entrancingly beautiful starlet Skitch Henderson had introduced him to at MGM in 1941. As in one of those romantic comedies, Ava Gardner and Frank kept bumping into each other around town. The funny thing was that when he brought
her
up to the Tower, it turned out to be for a cup of coffee only. She was a smokingly sexy kid—but she
was
a kid, and she had a certain dignity to her; her heels weren’t round. She appeared to be ambivalent at best about what every other girl in town was obsessed with: getting ahead at any cost. Therefore, there was no leverage, and in a funny way this was perfectly fine with Sinatra. He was content to stare at those cheekbones, those shy and haughty green eyes.

George Evans had his hands full in New York—he had other clients besides Sinatra, hard as that was to believe sometimes. So he deputized a West Coast pal, a firecracker of a young publicist named Jack Keller, to ride herd on Frank in Hollywood, a more than full-time job. The twenty-eight-year-old Keller was a character: a hard-drinking, chain-smoking, impeccably tailored former pro golfer who looked like Jackie Gleason. He had a fierce work ethic and a ferocious loyalty to his clients, both of which were good things where Frank Sinatra was concerned. After dropping by the Wilshire Tower suite once or twice,
Keller quickly realized he had his work cut out for him. Some wholesome diversion was called for, to throw Hollywood snoops like Hedda Hopper and Lolly Parsons off the trail of any potential scandal.

Sunshine and fresh air
, Keller thought. And then … softball!

Some of the movie stars had an informal league that played Sunday afternoons in a field behind the Hollywood Bowl. It was good for a few laughs and plenty of wholesome publicity photos—there were lots of nice shots of suntanned hunks and pretty girls in tight cheerleader shirts (real girls didn’t play ball in those days).

Sinatra, Keller decided, would start a softball team. It would be called—but of course—the Swooners.

Evans agreed it was pure genius. He had hired the right man.

Keller had uniforms made up, and for a few Sundays, till Frank got bored (which never took very long), the Swooners took the field. Styne and Cahn and Sanicola and Crane played (Phil Silvers, not much of an athlete, preferred to kibitz from the sidelines), along with a couple of Frank’s new movie pals, Anthony Quinn and Barry Sullivan. At 119 pounds, Sinatra didn’t cut much of a figure in a baseball uniform—but the same couldn’t be said of the Swooners cheerleaders in their official T-shirts: Lana Turner, Virginia Mayo, Marilyn Maxwell, and, oh yes, Miss Gardner.

Who was on deck? In play? You needed a scorecard to figure it all out.

Just a few days after his son was born, Frank performed at a benefit for the Jewish Home for the Aged, at the Roosevelt Hotel. It was an unusual cause for Sinatra: maybe he was thinking of his dear old babysitter Mrs. Golden—or maybe his new agents at MCA, Messrs. Friedman and Wasserman, convinced him that the men who ran the town would eat it with a spoon.

After the interminable pious speeches, amid the red-velvet drapery and clink of coffee cups and crystal, Sinatra, stick thin in his monkey
suit, stared out at the spotlight with moist eyes and gave them a giant ladleful: his version of “Ol’ Man River,” with a brilliant correction—Oscar Hammerstein’s offensive phrase from the 1927 verse, “
Niggers all work on de Mississippi,” changed to the clunky, but patently uncontroversial, “
Here we all
work on the Mississippi.”

Out in the audience, the emotional eyes of the most powerful man in Hollywood, the tiny, rectitudinous Louis B. Mayer, also grew moist. The former scrap-metal salvager from Minsk who had created a white-picket-fence vision of America (and had had amphetamine-laced chicken soup fed to Judy Garland to keep her thin and peppy) thrilled to what he was hearing. As Sinatra’s magnificent voice soared to the final “just keeps rollin’ along,” Louie B. turned to an aide and stage-whispered, “
I want that boy
.”

He got him, of course. And it cost him, of course. In February—just as
Step Lively
was wrapping—Lew Wasserman and Harry Friedman sat down with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s lawyers and, over the next three months, hammered out one of the sweetest movie deals in history. The five-year, $260,000-per-annum contract would allow Sinatra to make one outside picture a year and sixteen guest appearances on the radio; it would give him the publishing rights to the music in every second film he made with the studio. As a final fillip, MCA got MGM to relax the terms of its famously strict morals clause.
³

As for the seven-year contract he’d signed with RKO just six months earlier … well, thanks to MCA’s iron fist, velvet glove, and fast-dancing legal tap shoes, it was more or less movie history. With the exception of one short subject (
The House I Live In
, 1945) and two loan-out features, one bad (
The Miracle of the Bells
, 1948) and the other worse (
Double Dynamite
, 1951), Sinatra wiped his hands of Radio-Keith-Orpheum. And, as with Dorsey, there was never any uncertainty about who wound up with the sweet end of the deal. True, RKO wouldn’t languish without Sinatra: the studio rode out the 1940s on a spate of B pictures and star loan-outs from other studios. But
B
was the key initial for RKO Radio Pictures, Inc., and A plus was the
only grade Frank Sinatra was interested in. MGM was the top of the heap, and now so was he.

Except—with Sinatra there was always an except—there was a fly in the ointment. His fame was still based on his records, and since July 1942 he hadn’t cut a single side—V-Discs excepted—with an orchestra. As the American Federation of Musicians strike dragged on, vocal backgrounds were getting monotonous and annoying. Stordahl’s arrangements for the radio orchestra were more beautiful every week: imagine the records he and Sibelius could cut together!

Even more annoying was the fact that other record labels, Bing Crosby’s Decca in particular, had signed agreements with the AFM. Der Bingle was back in business—as were Eberly, Haymes, and Como. Sinatra was losing ground, artistically at any rate. He was nervous, and when he was nervous, he grew testy.

On February 10, 1944, Manie Sacks sent a letter to Frank:

Sinatra’s typewritten reply to Manie, dated February 18, 1944, was warm, almost conciliatory. Frank understood that Manie was upset. If he had told anyone that he wasn’t going to record anymore—and he didn’t quite admit that he had—“
it was in complete innocence, believe me!” If he had spoken, he had spoken impulsively, he insisted. He would never hide an opinion from Manie.

On the other hand, Frank wrote, he was genuinely distressed about having to use the vocal backgrounds. He understood record sales had been good, “but, being very much an artist rather than a financial genius or a cold businessman,” didn’t see why he had to be artistically hamstrung just because Columbia couldn’t strike a deal with the musicians. But, he said, he realized the situation was immutable, so he would stay disgruntled.

Having lodged his complaint, Frank sent along his best to Columbia president Ted Wallerstein and vice-president Goddard Lieberson, and signed—assertively, in blue fountain pen—with love and kisses.

It’s a remarkable letter: articulate and affectionate and disingenuous and blunt, all at once. And exceedingly practical. Frank was wise enough to vent his anger only indirectly at his esteemed friend the warmhearted Manie.

While a truly cold businessman, the ice-blooded Wasserman, hammered away at RKO and MGM on his behalf, Sinatra traveled east to attend his son’s christening. It was a joyous occasion, but not a happy trip. First the priest gave him a hard time about naming a Jew—Manie, who else?—as little Frank’s godfather. Sinatra simply stared the watery-eyed old cleric down. Nancy was another matter.

His housebound wife, effectively a single mother, had built up a
lot of unhappiness she couldn’t express on a staticky and expensive transcontinental phone call (with God knows what starstruck operators listening in). The moment she saw her wandering husband, she let loose. Even though she knew she was on a tightrope, that they had had this baby to try to save what was left of their marriage, Nancy also knew that she was still Frank’s wife, and still Mike Barbato’s daughter. She would say whatever the hell she wanted to say. She did not intend to raise their children alone—what were his intentions?