Frank: The Voice (83 page)

Meet Danny Wilson
, which had premiered in L.A. and San Francisco in early February, was to open in New York in late March, Sinatra told Weitman; maybe it could premiere at the joint, with him singing onstage?

Weitman shook his head. It wasn’t a Paramount picture.

Frank knew, but couldn’t Bob make an exception this one time? It was a nice movie—it had a lot of nice songs and a pretty good story. And it’d been getting pretty good write-ups. Frank thought it, and he, could do business.

Weitman put the question to Paramount’s chairman, Barney Balaban. A long silence on the phone line. Then old Balaban growled: “
What are you starting up with that guy again for?”

Weitman mulled it over and decided to go ahead anyway. “Frank was a friend and we knew he had talent,” he told Earl Wilson years later. “We took a chance on him for two weeks with Frank Fontaine, June Hutton and Buddy Rich.”

Ava, though, had plans of her own.

Metro had loaned her to 20th Century Fox for one picture,
¹
an adaptation of the Hemingway short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” “Adaptation” is putting it extremely loosely. The script, as conceived by the producer Darryl F. Zanuck and the screenwriter Casey Robinson, took the downbeat, stream-of-consciousness tale of a writer dying of an infected wound in the shadow of the African mountain and turned it into a Hemingway extravaganza, replete with grafted-on characters and story elements from
The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls
, and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” (“
I sold Fox a short story, not my complete works,” the author later complained.) In addition, the movie’s writer-hero and Hemingway surrogate, Harry Street, played by Gregory Peck, would live, rather than die, at the end of the story. But then, that was big-studio moviemaking in the 1950s.

Legend has it that Papa Hemingway himself, who apparently had seen Ava in
The Killers
and liked what he’d seen, nominated her to play the love of Harry’s life, “
Cynthia, from Montparnasse, a model with green-gray eyes and legs like a colt, who lit a fire in Harry Street that could only be quenched by
 … The Snows of Kilimanjaro
,” as the hard-breathing ad copy put it. The whole Technicolor mess was shot on the Fox back lot—a gigantic cyclorama painting of snowcapped Kilimanjaro was erected on Stage 8—and not in Kenya, as some Sinatra books have reported. However, it might as well have been Africa as
far as Frank was concerned: production on the movie was scheduled to run from mid-February through the third week in April, and he badly wanted his wife with him for his Paramount premiere on March 26, about which he was much more nervous than he was letting on.

At first Frank refused, explosively, to let Ava do the movie at all. She told him to fuck himself. Complicated negotiations ensued. In the end, Zanuck, Robinson, and the director, Henry King, worked out a formula by which all her scenes could be shot in ten days, freeing her to get to New York in time for Frank’s big show.

It didn’t work out. On her tenth day of shooting, technical problems developed during a big Spanish civil war scene, outdoors, involving hundreds of extras. Rather than go into costly overtime, King approached Ava, hat in hand, and asked: Could she possibly give him one more day of work?

Ava burst into tears. Frank had been phoning her every day from New York, worrying that she wouldn’t finish shooting in time. She’d kept reassuring him: Everything was going fine. What was she supposed to tell him now? Finally she worked up the courage to call Frank—who promptly blew up at her. She blew up right back. Three thousand miles apart, they couldn’t even make up properly.

Later that week, in a report headlined
SINATRA SCRAMBLES TO RECOVER FRIENDLY PUBLIC HE ONCE HAD, the old Hollywood hand Wood Soanes wrote that
Danny Wilson
had flopped so badly at its San Francisco premiere that exhibitors had demoted it to the second half of a double-feature bill in Oakland. Frank’s troubles were beginning to snowball. Universal International elected not to proceed with the second film in Sinatra’s two-picture deal. “And the crowning blow,” Soanes wrote, “came in a decision of Music Corporation of America to withdraw as his agent.”

Jules Stein and Lew Wasserman, long irritated at Sinatra in general, and long embroiled with him in a dispute over $40,000 in back
commissions the agency said he owed, finally decided to cut their losses. And not quietly: MCA took out full-page ads in
Variety
and the
Hollywood Reporter
to trumpet the divorce.

Frank was devastated. (He wouldn’t speak to Wasserman for years.) On the advice of his publicists, he had gone to New York ten days in advance of the Paramount premiere to try to mend fences with the press. But by this point he couldn’t even manage a good entrance. Stepping off the plane, he obligingly offered to pose for pictures—and then, when Joan Blondell came down the stairs right after him, the photographers ditched him en masse. Two of them, though, paused for a moment in front of Sinatra. “Fuck you,” they told him in unison.

On the advice of his New York PR men, Frank agreed to suck it up. He sent a note to the National Press Photographers Association. “
I’ll always be made up and ready in case you want to take any pictures of me,” he wrote, rather pathetically. He got no takers. He even lowered himself to a practice he had abandoned long ago, dropping in on disc jockeys to sweet-talk them into spinning his latest record—in this case, “I Hear a Rhapsody,” with “I Could Write a Book” on the flip side, from the January session.

In Sinatra’s new upside-down world, all journalists were welcome. When the jazz columnist George Frazier, freelancing for
Cosmopolitan
, interviewed him backstage during rehearsals at the Paramount, the writer had the nerve—and the leverage at that point—to inform Frank that he might not write a completely complimentary piece. Frank’s first reaction came straight from the heart: he winced, then gave Frazier a long, angry stare. Then he remembered the fix he was in. “
Nodding, he became amiable again,” Frazier wrote.

Earl Wilson did all he could, up to and including papering the house, to try to ensure a successful Paramount premiere for Frank. “
As one of his surviving and loyal friends in the press, I tried to create excitement for him,” Wilson recalled.

Maybe he was blowing his nose. After all, a claque was just a claque, no matter how high the star wattage. The rest of the crowd, while enthusiastic, were dry-eyed. After the
Times
reviewer gave his kind word about
Meet Danny Wilson
, he reflected on the “
somewhat subdued” crowd, noting: “Perhaps it is the beginning of the end of an era.”

A feature article in the
New York World-Telegram and Sun
was far less genteel.
GONE ON FRANKIE IN ’42; GONE IN ’52, read the three-column headline. And to put a finer point on it, the subhead: “What a Difference a Decade Makes—Empty Balcony.” The article was cast in the form of an open letter from the reporter Muriel Fischer. Fischer was young and ambitious, and her tone was snarky. “I saw you last night. But I didn’t get ‘that old feeling,’ ” she wrote.

Johnnie Ray wasn’t just that season’s sensation but a game changer: a skinny, androgynous, half-deaf, sob-singing white soul singer who pounded the piano and writhed on the bench—even sometimes on the floor—while he performed. Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis were in the wings. Just four months earlier, Ray had been all but unknown, but then along came “Cry,” his million-selling 45 on the Columbia subsidiary Okeh. The lyrics, by the one-hit-wonder composer Churchill Kohlman, were sheer schmaltz:

and Ray’s vocalizing was appropriately sappy. He had a theatrical way of hanging on to syllables (“but it’s on-lyy fal-se ee-motions-uh that you feel-l-l”), and something about his whole sound—that Great Plains accent (he was an Oregonian, half Native American) and keening voice, that big echo behind him—chimed with the era’s taste for emotional bombast (Mario Lanza; Laine) and pointed toward a growing American predilection for countrified songs and singers such as Brenda Lee, Teresa Brewer, Patti Page, and, of course, the great Hank Williams himself. We were still a spread-out, lonely nation in those blue-highway days, and something about those high, lonesome sounds struck home in ten thousand back-roads burgs—and, maybe, served as welcome counterpoint to such urban (and ethnic) sensations as Uncle Miltie,
Your Show of Shows
, and Martin and Lewis, not to mention Sinatra himself.

Under the headline
JOHNNIE’S GOLDEN RAYS DAZZLE MUSIC
BUSINESS,
Down Beat
wrote that Ray had “most certainly established himself as the phenom of the music-record business of the second half of the century.” Big words—there were many phenoms still to come. But the point was made: Bing and Frank, those sensations of the century’s
first
half, were old news. Even Earl Wilson succumbed. “
Do you folks suffer, too, from juke box jitters, or Johnny [
sic
] Rayitis?” the columnist wrote in March. “Well, you will. They call Johnny Ray ‘the Heat Ray’ and he’s the wildest, craziest, looniest, goofiest, weirdest singer since Frankie Swoonatra … He has this broken-hearted voice and … when he opens soon at the Copacabana, we expect to hear crying all over town, especially at the other night clubs.”

With Ava in tow (she’d finally come to New York, so the fighting and making up could commence afresh), Frank attended Ray’s Copa premiere in early April—more on his wife’s say-so (and of course to be seen) than because he really wanted to be there. When Earl Wilson asked him what he thought of the new sensation, Frank said, “
I’d like to tell you, but my girl won’t let me.”

His girl was behaving as singularly as ever. One night at the Paramount, Johnnie Ray returned the favor and came backstage to meet Sinatra, entourage in tow. According to eyewitnesses, Frank was gracious, introducing Ava to one and all and making amiable chitchat. Then he was called out of the room on a business matter. While he was gone, Ava climbed onto Ray’s lap and began stroking his hair and cooing to him. Frank returned while she was still at it. After an awkward moment, he grabbed his unrepentant wife’s arm, yanked her off the fruity upstart’s lap, and hustled her out of the room.