Frank: The Voice (48 page)

“I’m proud to be in that family, sir,” Sinatra said.

The studio chief gave him a look that would have done Benny Goodman proud.

The MGM conduct police went into overdrive, piling the pressure on Frank and especially on Lana, the more vulnerable of the pair. Turner’s morals clause, unlike Sinatra’s, was in full effect, and where Mayer was concerned, Lana Turner’s morals were always suspect. “
The only thing you’re interested in,” the studio chief had once told her in an office meeting, “is this.” He pointed at his groin.

It would certainly have appeared that way. Turner was never a proponent of monogamy, serial or otherwise. Even as she was carrying on with Sinatra, she was also conducting a torrid affair with the also married Tyrone Power. Yet Turner appears not to have been a mere sex addict. In later, more contemplative years she wrote that sex itself had never been that interesting to her. What seems to have been much more compelling was company, and action, and drama. Turner was a deeply needy woman, in love with the idea of being a movie star. She was an actress playing herself, her daughter wrote in her memoir; she was unable to step out of character. Private life and public life were all of a piece.

The solemn injunctions of Louis B. Mayer held extraordinary power for her. And soon Lana was tearfully reading from a new script. “
I am not in love with Frank, and he is not in love with me,” she told Louella Parsons. “I have never in my life broken up a home … I just can’t take these accusations.”

Parsons played the good cop—“
I think Frank has done his best to be a good family man and still remain the glamorous figure he’s been in the public eye,” she wrote in her column—and Hedda Hopper, the bad. Hopper took Sinatra to task in print and in person, warning him when she encountered him at a reception “that he was public property, and that part of that public property was Nancy and his children.”

Sinatra didn’t scare easily; normally, he would have shrugged off the admonition. But pressure was coming from all sides: after publicly (and somewhat contradictorily) musing, “You know, Frank has had a lot of career for one man, and he hasn’t had much time for home life. I think they’ll get it straightened out,” the relentless Evans even sent Manie out to L.A. to try to reason with him.

And on October 23, Frank caved. The occasion was Phil Silvers’s opening at Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom’s nightclub on Beverly Boulevard, and this time Sinatra’s stooge act was in dead earnest.

He attended the opening as a friend, and also to contribute to Silvers’s show in much the same way he had in New York. But this time the fix was in: Nancy was present, all dolled up and sitting at Jule Styne’s table. Midway through the show, Rosenbloom—a former prizefighter who had turned to playing tough guys in the movies—asked Sinatra for a song.

Frank rose and asked the band to play “Going Home.”

A very odd selection, given that the lugubrious spiritual was best known at the time for having been played at Franklin Roosevelt’s funeral. But it was the title, not the song, that was the point: when Sinatra was through, Silvers—who after all had written the words to the song about Nancy—grabbed Frank in a bear hug and steered him over to his wife’s table. Through tears, Frank asked Nancy (she was also crying) how the kids were. Fine, she told him. They missed their daddy. He had to clench his teeth to keep from bawling.

You could’ve heard a pin drop in Slapsie Maxie’s. Then Frank asked his wife to dance, and the place went nuts.

Frank and Nancy didn’t go home that night. She wanted to see his apartment, to feel its illicit thrill—and to make it her own. And so at the end of an evening of dancing at Slapsie Maxie’s, they got in a cab and rode to Sunset Tower and went up to his penthouse and made a baby.

Despite the reconciliation, he continued to do exactly what he wanted.
It Happened in Brooklyn
was limping to a close amid further delays by the star; Sinatra and the director were barely speaking.

One of the problems was the rate at which Frank kept on recording that fall. He was privately gratified to hear that Dick Haymes’s sales were beginning to drop. That was what happened, he thought, when
you didn’t keep pushing in all directions. There was a radio show Sinatra badly wanted to do in early November, George Burns and Gracie Allen’s, and so he informed Whorf that he, Frank, needed to wrap up his work on the picture before then. Whorf refused. And so, as the MGM production memo for November 7 notes tersely, Sinatra “
left at 2:30 to appear on Burns & Allen broadcast.”

The camel’s back was stressed to full curvature. Mayer called a conference with his production executives, then fired off a telegram to the recalcitrant star:

The studio chief was sufficiently upset to have the story leaked to MGM’s unofficial mouthpiece Louella Parsons, who wrote in her column of November 14:

The song—“Time After Time”—was just one of many issues. Sinatra didn’t call Evans; he didn’t call Keller. He called Western Union and fired off a wire to Parsons:

When the Los Angeles
Daily News
columnist Erskine Johnson had the nerve to chide Sinatra for his temperamental behavior, he got a telegram, too:

On hearing that Johnson weighed two hundred pounds and was eager to mix it up with him, Sinatra decided not to press the issue any further.

Only a year earlier, Frank had been the press’s hero, the humanitarian in chief, the noble and reasonable star of
The House I Live In
. Now, much to the chagrin of his handlers, the Hollywood Women’s Press Club voted him Least Cooperative Star, in a landslide vote. Suddenly he was a bad boy again. And seemingly eager to prove it at every opportunity.

First, however, there was a certain amount of penance to do. He was a married man: it appeared he was going to have to pay some attention to that part of his life. Frank was returning to the Wedgwood Room at the Waldorf after Thanksgiving, and so he decided to take Nancy and the children with him. It was his idea.

And that wasn’t all. He bought Nancy a glorious pearl necklace, three strands, at Tiffany, and presented it to her before they went out for a family dinner at the Stork Club. She opened the big light blue box—bigger than the box the diamond bracelet had been in—with glistening eyes; she put the necklace on immediately. Evans made certain a photographer was at the restaurant to record the occasion: pretty mommy and handsome daddy, all dressed up, in between their adorable little boy and girl with identical fat cheeks and floppy bows at their necks.

Daddy was busy. He had rehearsals, business at Columbia and elsewhere, three packed shows a night at the Wedgwood (about which the joke was, If they could wedge any more paying customers in, they would). His schedule was so jammed that he barely got to see Nancy and the kids. Time was so tight that a recording session had to be scheduled for a Sunday, an unprecedented event.

George Avakian remembers the day well: December 15, 1946. Avakian, twenty-seven at the time, was a junior producer at Columbia; his boss, Manie Sacks, had asked him to come in to supervise the second half of the session, which would consist of two numbers Sinatra wanted to record with the Page Cavanaugh Trio, a jazz combo. Sacks himself supervised the first half, as he did with all Sinatra’s important—that is, commercial—recording sessions. The first two songs were Irving Berlin’s “Always” and something called “I Want to Thank Your Folks,” a contemporary tune that Sacks felt had selling potential. Axel Stordahl arranged, and conducted the thirty-five-piece orchestra.

“Always” is fine: Sinatra is in good voice, and it would be hard for him not to do a good job on the great standard. At the same time, there’s something slightly stilted and airless about his rendition: he’s
articulating beautifully, yet doesn’t convey the song’s passion. The problem is compounded on “I Want to Thank Your Folks,” which, with its unexceptional tune and dreary lyrics (“I want to thank your folks for making you as sweet as you are/How else can I express how I feel, confess and reveal my love?”), against the sound of a sappily tinkling celeste, is the kind of schmaltz that gives 1940s music a bad name.

The recording session changes dramatically once the classical musicians have packed up their instruments, put on their scarves and overcoats, and bustled out of Liederkranz Hall. Axel and Manie have also left the building. Now that Frank is alone with the jazz guys (the trio’s guitarist was the great Al Viola, who would continue playing for Sinatra for many years), the atmosphere shifts. With “Always” and “I Want to Thank Your Folks,” Avakian recalls, Frank “
was relatively tense because they were ballads. The other two songs were just pleasant throwaways. He’s taking a drink and singing the song without worrying about it.”