Frank: The Voice (79 page)

Sinatra was the top of the bill: after him came the comedian-magician Jay Marshall, also known as “The Funny Bunny Man”; Ruby Ring, “Dancer Extra-Ordinary”; and the Arden-Fletcher Dancers. The Singing MC was Gene Griffin, and the orchestra was led by Carlton Hayes.

If Frank closed his eyes, he could remember the Major Bowes Number Five tour unit.

Sinatra’s shows sold out. He ran Carlton Hayes and his musicians through their paces, belting out “My Blue Heaven,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” and “That Old Black Magic,” singing his heart out and working hard to make his audience—never mind that they weren’t café society—feel he was singing to them alone. He worked a little too hard for Ava’s taste. Sitting ringside with Axel Stordahl and his new wife, June Hutton, “
Ava was chatting away happily,” Stordahl recalled, “and then suddenly she said, ‘Let’s get out of this trap.’ She thought Frank was looking at a girl in the audience a little longer than necessary. They ended up throwing books and lamps at each other after the show, and Frank walked out in the middle of the night.”

Jealousy, of course, was their aphrodisiac. Rosemary Clooney, who was working at the Thunderbird while Sinatra played the Desert Inn, remembered how Ava would come in to catch part of her act (perhaps having just walked out on Frank), telling Clooney afterward how much she loved the singer’s rendition of the Gershwins’ “They Can’t Take That Away from Me”: “
Every time I get a chance, I’m going to come down here and listen to you sing it, even though the old man doesn’t like it much.” Clooney finally figured out why: Artie Shaw had had a hit with it.
²

Jimmy Van Heusen flew up from L.A. for the whole Desert Inn stand—because Frank expected him, and because he loved to fly, loved the desert, and loved the whores who, even in Vegas’s early days, could be found there in such great numbers and variety. In between shows,
Chester took to wandering the inn’s halls, looking for fresh talent. One night he was drawn into the Skyroom by the sound of a tasty jazz trio playing his own “Polka Dots and Moonbeams.”

It wasn’t just his own music that Chester was admiring but the way it was being played. The man at the baby grand—cadaverously pale and thin, with a thick head of straight greasy hair, pointed shoulders, and long, spidery fingers darting over the keys—had a hauntingly spare technique, with rich sonorities tossed off like afterthoughts. And, amazingly, he swung.

During the break, Chester went up and introduced himself: “
I like the way you play.”

“I like the way you write,” the piano player replied.

His name was Bill Miller, and as Van Heusen squinted in vague recognition, Miller reminded him that he had worked the big bands for a long time, playing for Red Norvo and Charlie Barnet until the mid-1940s.

“
Sinatra’s my pal, God help me,” Van Heusen said. “I’m in Vegas to cheerlead—and get laid, of course.”

Frank with his greatest accompanist, Bill Miller, early fifties.
(photo credit 28.2)

Miller grew animated—for him. “
Speaking of getting laid,” he said. “In the summer of 1940 I was working with Barnet at the New York World’s Fair, and I was dating a showgirl.” He gave that crooked smile. “One night we were driving back into the city, and the car radio was on, and Harry James was playing ‘All or Nothing At All,’ behind this boy singer. And my girlfriend said, ‘Hey, listen, doesn’t that sound good? That’s Dick Haymes.’ I said, ‘No, it’s not Dick Haymes. Dick Haymes doesn’t sing that good.’ Turned out the singer was someone named Frank Sinatra. I’d never heard of him before, but I thought he was great.”

“He still is,” Chester said. “He’s still a pain in the ass, too. He doesn’t deserve the shit he’s been getting, though.” He paused for a second. “He’s also looking for a piano player.”

“Well, hell, now that you’ve built him up.”

“Listen—he’s still the best singer there is. And he’s only a pain in the ass to his friends. He likes musicians. Especially good musicians.”

“Then why doesn’t he have a piano player?”

“Why the hell do you think? He’s broke!”

Miller grinned. “Now I’m really interested.”

“He’s got a television show, though. And CBS isn’t broke.”

Later that night, having been sold on Miller by Chester, Sinatra accompanied the songwriter up to the Skyroom. The pianist struck up a solo version of “Polka Dots and Moonbeams,” lightly swinging, with sparse tasty chords—the dancers on the floor barely had to break stride—and both Frank and Jimmy couldn’t help smiling.

After a short medley of other Sinatra hits, each played so perfectly that Frank’s vocal cords twitched sympathetically as he listened, Miller took a break and Sinatra walked over to the piano.

“How’d you like to work with me, kid?” he asked.

Miller, who was almost a year older than Sinatra, pursed his lips, then nodded. “Okay,” he said.

Wedding day, November 7, 1951. Their bliss was short-lived, as bliss always was for Frank.
(photo credit 29.1)

F
rank hadn’t recorded since July, the same month the sponsors pulled the plug on his radio show. (He would go into the recording studio only once more that year, in mid-October, to wax a studio version of his
Meet Danny Wilson
duet with Shelley Winters, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Due to lack of interest, the record was never released.) There were no future bookings. His six-week Nevada residence was up on September 19, but as he prepared to file for divorce, his attorney
got word from Nancy’s attorney that to better protect the children, she planned to contest Frank’s action and secure a prior California divorce. The property settlement in the separate-maintenance agreement was no longer acceptable, Nancy and her lawyer said: Frank owed her back alimony—$40,805, to be exact.

With the checks from the Riverside and the Desert Inn going straight to Nancy, Frank barely had $400, let alone forty thousand. Knowing this, she sent her lawyer to court to obtain a levy against Frank’s office building at 177 South Robertson.

Frank and Nancy were at a standoff: he didn’t want to pay her all he owed her until she gave him his freedom; she didn’t want to give him his freedom until he paid all he owed her.

He flew to New York to rehearse for the TV show, but even as he stood in CBS Studio 50, a cardboard cup of coffee in one hand and a Camel in the other, he got word that the L.A. law firm that had been representing him in the divorce proceedings was suing him for $12,250 in unpaid legal fees. The firm had slapped a lien on the already-levied 177 South Robertson building and, for good measure, on Twin Palms as well.

He drew on the cigarette and exhaled. Fuck ’em.

There was more bad news. Bulova had pulled out of
The Frank Sinatra Show
. The only sponsor the network was able to attract was Ekco, the housewares company, for just the first fifteen minutes of the sixty. And CBS had moved the show from Saturday night to Tuesday, opposite another TV behemoth, Mr. Television himself, Milton Berle, on
Texaco Star Theater
.

Fuck ’em.

On October 3, at the Polo Grounds, the New York Giants’ Bobby Thomson hit the most famous home run in baseball history to win the National League play-offs against the Brooklyn Dodgers. The game was all the more dramatic because play-offs were the exception rather
than the rule in those days: the Giants, after trailing the Dodgers by thirteen and a half games in mid-August, had surged back and tied Brooklyn on the final day of the season. The teams had split the first two games of the play-offs, and betting was heavy on the rubber match. One of the biggest bettors was Sinatra’s friend Willie Moretti, who laid thousands on the Dodgers.

Willie discovered later that day what it took the rest of the world decades to find out: The Giants had stationed a coach with a telescope and a buzzer in their centerfield clubhouse. With the telescope, the coach was able to pick up the Dodgers catcher Rube Walker’s signs to the pitcher Ralph Branca; with the buzzer, the spy sent a signal to the Giants dugout, whence a hand signal to Thomson told him to expect a fastball.

Willie Moretti decided that all bets were off.

The next day, Moretti went to lunch at his favorite restaurant, Joe’s Elbow Room, a block from the Hudson in Cliffside Park, New Jersey. He left his cream-colored Packard coupe at the curb, walked in, and found four friends waiting for him at a table. The men chatted amiably for a few minutes, and then, when the waitress on duty went into the kitchen, the man on Moretti’s right leaned over and in a low voice began to tell him a dirty story. As Willie smiled expectantly, the man on his left took out a .38 revolver and shot him twice in the head.

The four men departed in such haste that two of them left their hats on the table (and $2,000 in Moretti’s pants pocket). The image of Willie’s body on the white-tile floor in a widening pool of blood, snapped by a news photographer, quickly gained wide circulation. In death, Willie became as celebrated as he had recently been in life, the short, fat, jolly mobster who had wisecracked his way through the televised Kefauver hearings. “
Everything is a racket today,” Moretti had told the amused senators. “Why not make everything legal?” When Kefauver himself asked Willie how he operated politically, Moretti said, “I don’t—if I did, I’d be sitting where you are now.”

It was funny to everyone except Moretti’s partners in crime, who hated Kefauver, hated loose talk under any circumstances, let alone
on national television, and knew that Willie, in the grips of syphilis, couldn’t help himself. But blabbing was one thing; welshing on sports bets, another matter entirely. Though Moretti had been a marked man for months, he had fast-tracked his own elimination, and Sinatra lost yet another father figure at a time when he needed all the friends he could get.