Frank: The Voice (58 page)

“
When Bing realized what a monstrous thing she had made of the home,” Giddins said, “he fired her, and Frank immediately hired her.”

In the process of his research, Giddins tried to draw Nancy junior out about Hardwick: “She said, ‘Well, yes, she worked for us. She was part of the family.’ Long pauses. I finally said, ‘Look, this is what I heard about her.’ There was a long pause, and she said, ‘All I’ll say is, she was very, very—tough.’ That was the end of the interview.”

Without lectures, without words, Georgie … transformed me into an unspoiled child
.

Leaving the “quietly, gently” open for discussion.

In February, Frank sat down with
Metronome
’s George T. Simon—the very man who seven and a half years earlier had had to be sweet-talked into writing up the brand-new singer in the magazine—and did some serious venting about the state of American popular music.

“
Right now certain conditions in the music business really have him down,” Simon wrote. “Chances are that he can’t stand
Your Hit Parade
any more than most of us can … But his biggest gripe of all right now is the terrible trash turned out by Tin Pan Alley.”

In fact, Sinatra was more than down—he was hopping mad:

In a very short time, of course, Sinatra would be turning down very little himself.

The subject he was dancing around was the root causes of the change. Was the music business really leading the public, or was it the other way around? The one possibility the singer couldn’t stand admitting, to the press or to himself, was that America’s tastes had simply changed.

The novelist William Maxwell once told me, when I asked, starry-eyed, what it had been like to be alive during the Roaring Twenties, that it had been a terrible time, a time of giddiness, shallowness, escape. Much the same kind of mind-set was prevalent after World War II. The country wanted to forget the terrible near past and the deeply troubling present. America was jumpy. We wanted our pleasures
quick, and we wanted them simple: they shouldn’t trigger any problematic emotions. We got what we wanted.

The Miracle of the Bells
premiered the day before St. Patrick’s Day. RKO, having filled its coffers under the watchword of “Entertainment, not genius,” was still saving money by cranking out B pictures. When it made the odd A feature, it borrowed stars from other studios.
Miracle
, with Sinatra on punishment leave from MGM and Fred MacMurray loaned out from Paramount, was an attempt, right down to its reverberating title, to cash in on the success of Bing Crosby’s holy-Joe pictures
Going My Way
and
The Bells of St. Mary’s
. The difference was that Crosby had Leo McCarey to direct him, and Sinatra had Irving Pichel. And then there was the fact that Bing, the sly old genius, could play quite a charming and credible priest. Frank, at this stage of his life, had too much sexual vanity and too many internal conflicts to believably act such a role. Maybe he could have pulled it off ten years later, when he was more manly and battle scarred and able to make fun of himself on-screen.

But the movie’s problems didn’t begin with its star. Ben Hecht, who co-wrote the screenplay with Quentin Reynolds, apparently took the job on the condition that he not be forced to read the sappy popular novel he would be adapting.
²
And then there was the picture’s glum setting, a Pennsylvania mining town, and its generally dark tone. “
Pompous and funereal,” Bosley Crowther wrote of the finished product. And while Crowther was reliably stuffy, in this case he had a point. The story concerned a young actress who died—just like Camille, of a hacking cough—after starring in her first film. The cynical press agent (MacMurray) who lifted her from the burlesque house to movie stardom takes her body back to her Pennsylvania hometown for burial. Miracles occur.

The dark and dazzling Alida Valli played the actress: even
The Third Man
, the following year, would not be enough to resuscitate her
career after this stinker. And as Father Paul, Sinatra, in his first drama, was subdued to the point of seeming depressed. (“
Frank Sinatra, looking rather flea-bitten as the priest, acts properly humble or perhaps ashamed,”
Time
wrote.) The best that can be said about him in this role is that, as would not be the case in
The Kissing Bandit
, he didn’t sink the movie. It did that all by itself.

Sinatra was ashamed—not just of
The Miracle of the Bells
, but of the whole year. He was singing junk on the radio. He was losing his audience, his prestige, his hair. And with Sinatra, as we have seen, shame quickly changed to rage. When the movie’s producer, the Hollywood institution Jesse Lasky, reminded the star that he was contractually obliged to attend the San Francisco premiere, Frank bullied the old man until Lasky was forced to plead for his presence. Sinatra went to San Francisco, but in full Monster mode. Ensconced in the biggest suite at the Fairmont hotel with Jack Keller, Bobby Burns, and Jimmy Van Heusen, Frank ordered eighty-eight Manhattans from room service. Up came several waiters pushing carts full of clinking glasses: Sinatra told them to leave the drinks in the entry hall, and there the eighty-eight Manhattans sat for three days, untouched. Unable to sleep at 4:00 a.m., he ordered a piano to be sent to his suite. A store manager had to be awakened, and a delivery-truck driver paid triple time to deliver the instrument. The next night Frank took twenty people out on the town, then brought them back to the suite for a party that didn’t break up till 7:00 a.m. Two hours later, still revving, he took Keller, Burns, and Van Heusen to a swanky haberdasher and bought each man $1,200 worth of cashmere sweaters, ties, shirts, and socks—all of it charged to Sinatra’s suite at the Fairmont, which of course was on the studio’s dime.

Frank slept through the afternoon, then behaved perfectly at the premiere that night. The next morning, though, he decided he had to get to Palm Springs—instantly. Unfortunately, a thick fog had settled in over San Francisco during the night, and the airlines weren’t flying. Sinatra ordered Van Heusen, the pilot, to charter a plane. No planes were to be had. In the end, Frank and Jimmy took a limousine from
San Francisco to Palm Springs—a five-hundred-mile trip—at a cost of over $1,100. Multiply all figures by nine to get the present-day equivalent. So much for cost cutting at RKO.

Hedda Hopper summed up the feelings of pretty much every reviewer in the country when she called
The Miracle of the Bells
“
a hunk of religious baloney.” And then, more shame. In a wrap-up of the previous year’s movies,
Life
chose Frank’s cameo in the Metro musical
Till the Clouds Roll By
as “
the worst single moment” in any picture: “MGM struck a high point in bad taste when Frank Sinatra stood on a fluted pillar and crooned ‘Ol’ Man River,’ including the line ‘You and me, we sweat and strain …,’ wearing an immaculate white suit.”

With
The Kissing Bandit
in the can (and every bit as bad as he suspected it to be), and his recording career at a standstill, Sinatra didn’t have much to look forward to in the middle of 1948—with one exception. In the early hours of June 20 (the anniversary of Bugsy’s death), as Frank and Nancy played charades at Toluca Lake with the Jule Stynes and a few other couples, Nancy went into labor. Frank bundled her into the Cadillac convertible and—with great pleasure; just let them try to stop him—ran every red light between the Valley and Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. As it turned out, the haste was justified: Christina Sinatra (she would be called Tina, after Nancy’s sister) was born just minutes after Nancy was brought into the maternity ward. Frank kissed his wife and new baby daughter and drove back to Toluca Lake and jumped right back into the charades, which were still going strong. He mimed an hourglass to signify it had been a girl and held up fingers to indicate her weight. It was early Sunday morning, Father’s Day. It was the first time he had been in town for the birth of one of his children.

On the next day, June 21, 1948, at a press conference at the Waldorf-Astoria, the Columbia Recording Corporation announced, with great fanfare, a startling technological innovation: the long-playing
33⅓-rpm phonograph record. At a simultaneous dealer conference in Atlantic City, a Columbia executive gave a speech lauding the new invention to the accompaniment of an entire movement of
The Nutcracker Suite
. The record played on a phonograph with a mirror mounted overhead so the audience could see there was no trickery. At the end of the eighteen-minute side—four times as long as one side of a 78-rpm disc—the assembled record dealers leaped to their feet applauding. The future had arrived.