Frank: The Voice (42 page)

No doubt Frank was nervous. Both Crosby and Harry James were outperforming him on the
Billboard
charts, and he was in a tight race with Perry Como. Dick Haymes was nipping at his heels. Manie Sacks was just learning some hard lessons about his protégé: First, friendship and sincerity weren’t even on the same page with success where Sinatra was concerned. Second, when Sinatra made up his mind to do something (right or wrong, as witness the Frank Garrick clash), that was precisely what he would do. And third, life would permit him to get away with it for another full half century.

Columbia stood firm. Yet despite the label’s refusal to change its policy on paying for music copying, conducting, or arrangements, Sinatra would remain there for seven more years. Manie Sacks was another story. Disillusioned and unwell, he would leave the company almost three years before the man he’d once thought was his best friend.

On October 17, Ava Gardner, the gorgeous MGM B-film player Sinatra kept running into all over town, married Artie Shaw in Beverly Hills. Gardner was not quite twenty-three. It was her second marriage (she
had divorced Mickey Rooney two years before), and Shaw’s fifth. Shaw kept company with artists and intellectuals and tried to get Ava to start reading. Instead, she began drinking. The marriage would be over by the following fall.

Frank would test Manie’s patience even further that autumn. In November the singer returned east for a three-week stand at the Paramount, then another engagement at the Wedgwood Room, and, in between, further recording sessions at Liederkranz Hall. But that wouldn’t be all: Frank would turn thirty on December 12, and he wanted to end the year in style.

Success had intensified his cravings for class. Playing the Wedgwood Room helped: Cole Porter once again rode the elevator down from his Waldorf Towers suite to catch Sinatra’s act. All that was gratifying, but ultimately, as Porter had written, merely massage.

One of the first things Frank had discovered as a recording artist was the difference between New York and Los Angeles studio musicians: West Coast instrumentalists, though every bit as virtuosic as their eastern counterparts, were far more relaxed, accommodating, showbiz savvy. Most of them made a good living playing movie scores. They knew how to adapt, take orders, work well with others.

Their Big Apple brethren, on the other hand, tended to be temperamental and egotistic classical artistes. The record producer George Avakian, who worked at Columbia in the mid-1940s, said, “
They were tough-minded, insular people who were protective of their own positions—even which chair you were going to sit in.” Many of the musicians initially looked down their noses at Sinatra. And since the singer already had huge respect for musical virtuosity, and a fine sense for clubs that didn’t want him as a member, he courted their admiration.

But one of their number, substantially more ambitious than the rest, sought Frank out. Mitchell William Miller—Mitch for short—was a short, chin-bearded, energetic careerist from upstate New York,
a brilliant classical oboist who had a deep love for jazz and popular music. A child prodigy, Miller had graduated at twenty-one from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, where he’d formed an abiding musical friendship with his fellow student Alec Wilder—a.k.a. the Professor, the very man who had arranged and conducted Sinatra’s musicianless Columbia sessions with the Bobby Tucker Singers.

Sinatra had been intrigued by Wilder’s effortless musical intelligence, his rumpled academic quality, his endlessly digressive sentences, and (most of all) by the fact that unlike virtually everybody else the Professor seemed to have zero interest in kissing up to him. That was classy. When Miller pushed forward to introduce himself to Sinatra after a recording session, he also pushed his friend Wilder. Alec wasn’t just an arranger and a conductor, Mitch said, but also a composer in both the popular and the classical idioms.

“He’s got a few things I think you should listen to,” Miller told Sinatra. The singer liked the oboist’s nerve, which went well with his sweet playing.

The first couple of things, it turned out, were songs, one by Wilder and one by a quirky writer of rustic Americana named Willard Robison. Both, tellingly, had the word “old” in the title: “Old School Teacher,” by Robison, and Wilder’s “Just an Old Stone House.” The two numbers, similar tonally and thematically, couldn’t have been more different from the love ballads Frank Sinatra was recording in the mid-1940s. They were art songs, with melodies that wandered and twined and landed in unexpected places. It was brave and imaginative of Sinatra to want to record them, and it was nervy, even for him, to push Manie for studio time and musicians, musicians to be conducted not by Stordahl but by Mitch Miller. But Frank pushed, and Manie yielded. Sinatra and Miller recorded the songs.

When it came to Sinatra’s next high-art initiative, though, Sacks drew the line. Frank, whose ears were opening up to all kinds of classical music, listened raptly to an air-check disc Miller had given him, containing two of Wilder’s serious orchestral compositions. Sinatra
played the record three or four times, then picked up the phone and tracked down the Professor. “
These should be recorded,” he said. He called Manie first thing in the morning and told him the same thing.

Manie begged to differ. He pleaded wartime shortages: “
We don’t have enough shellac to even press the stuff from our own artists.”

“
Sinatra gave us the bad news,” Miller recalled. “So I came up with an idea. I said, ‘Why don’t
you
conduct them? Then he can’t refuse you—if your name is on it.’ And Frank agreed, although he had never conducted.”

Never conducted? He couldn’t read a note of music! It was a crazy idea, but to his eternal credit Frank went at the project—which, as Miller had predicted, Manie was forced into okaying—with grace, dignity, and even a kind of humility.

“Listen,” he told the studio full of tough New York musicians gathered to play Wilder’s airs for oboe, bassoon, flute, and English horn, as well as two other pieces. “
I don’t know the first thing about conducting, but I know this music and I love it, and if you’ll work with me, I think we can get it down.”

“
That was a very strange session,” recalled George Avakian. “I thought to myself, ‘My God, Sinatra isn’t a musician; this will be a disaster.’ But it wasn’t. He really did conduct. Alec, of course, rehearsed the orchestra thoroughly, and they were also all crack musicians. In fact, I think Mitch Miller played oboe on that.”

He did indeed, but Miller—never one to hide his light under a bushel—also claims to have been in charge of the whole show. “
Sinatra was then at the Waldorf [Wedgwood Room],” Miller said, “and he would finish at one in the morning. All the top musicians were there with us at the old Liederkranz Hall on Fifty-eighth Street. And I rehearsed all the stuff and got it ready, and Frank came in and he waved the stick. And he didn’t get in the way.”

One of the musicians who played on the session, the flutist Julius Baker, was more charitable. “You know,” he said long afterward, “
Sinatra wasn’t so bad as a conductor.”

Frank Sinatra Conducts the Music of Alec Wilder
, the cover of Columbia Masterworks Set M-637 declared, when it was released the following spring. Sinatra’s name was in considerably larger type than Wilder’s, a fact Frank protested, but Columbia, Manie explained, had to sell
something
. The album cover was a black-and-white photo of a skeletally thin Sinatra, on a field of yellow, tieless, his white shirt buttoned to the neck, a belt tightly cinching the twenty-eight-inch waist of his pleated pants. He was raising his arms, his mouth open, his eyes closed as if in transport. His head was highlighted in a white circle, like the halos on medieval icons.

Columbia Masterworks Set M-637 was an album in the old sense: a cover with contents. Heavy contents. Inside the album were three twelve-inch shellac 78-rpm records, green labeled, each with one Wilder composition per side, six in all: Air for Oboe, Air for Bassoon, Air for Flute, Air for English Horn, Slow Dance, and Theme and Variations. Goddard Lieberson wrote the delightfully forthright liner notes:

Frank finished up the second and final session for the Wilder album late on the night of December 10, and the following Monday, after the stand at the Wedgwood was over, flew back home. There was a New Year’s Eve party to prepare. And a girl he’d been missing a lot.

He had bought her a diamond bracelet at Tiffany while he was in Manhattan, a ridiculous outlay, almost half a week’s take from the Paramount, but he was a man in love. They’d talked on the phone almost every day while he was away—not easy, between his work schedule, her work schedule, and her husband. Not to mention the long-distance operators: it had forced them to speak in a kind of code, which was frustrating, but also kind of romantic.

They didn’t dare write.

Sinatra had had John the butler leave the Cadillac convertible at the airport, so he could drive himself home. He thought of the bracelet when he was a half mile from home. The robin’s egg blue box was under clothes in his suitcase, and Nancy always unpacked his bags. He couldn’t put it in his pocket; he was about to be hugged. He opened the car’s glove compartment and hid the box as best he could.