Frank: The Voice (96 page)
Authors: James Kaplan
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #General, #United States, #Biography, #Composers & Musicians, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #Singers, #Singers - United States, #Sinatra; Frank
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All hair restorers having failed,” Erskine Johnson confirmed on March 16, “Frank Sinatra has now taken to wearing hats.”
A week or so later, Sinatra had yet another on-set visitor at Columbia: the syndicated columnist Harold Heffernan, whose prose style was as clunky as his byline. “
Salient factors that keep the pugnacious Frank Sinatra’s career from wallowing are a dogged tenacity and an enthusiasm about whatever he attempts,” Heffernan thesaurused, in his April 2 column.
No one could be more hopeful about a movie role than the bean-pole singer is over his non-warbling, unromantic part in Columbia’s “From Here to Eternity.”
“I play Montgomery Clift’s pal,” explained Frank on the set. “No girls for me. I just adore this fellow, and eventually give up my life, indirectly, for him. It’s a complete change from anything I have ever done.”
It would have occurred to nearly anyone who read Heffernan’s piece that Thursday that Sinatra hadn’t done much warbling in a while. This day was to be different. All morning and afternoon Frank worked hard on his scenes at the Columbia-Gower studios, then he showered and put on a dark suit and grabbed a quick bite with Monty at the Naples. At about 8:30 p.m., Sanicola picked him up, and they took the
short drive over to Capitol’s recording facility, KHJ studios, a former radio station next to Paramount.
Excited, Frank walked into Studio C, where Stordahl, Livingston, and a putty-faced, high-pantsed producer named Voyle Gilmore were waiting for him. Record producers ran the gamut from control freaks like Mitch Miller to mere knob turners: the soft-spoken Gilmore fell somewhere in the middle. He knew how to get a good sound from a session, but also knew that Sinatra had a thorough understanding of what did and didn’t work for him. Gilmore was also aware that Alan Livingston had originally picked Dave Dexter to run the control room that night, and that Frank had vetoed him. In fact, at the mention of Dexter’s name, Frank had frozen, his phenomenal memory for slights and insults having instantly clicked onto a mildly critical review in
Down Beat
that Dexter had written years before.
2
Gilmore was an amiable and gentle man, as quiet and thoughtful as Stordahl. Frank saw other friendly faces there: the reedman Skeets Herfurt and the trumpeter Zeke Zarchy, old pals from the Dorsey days; Bill Miller at the piano. In fact, he knew almost every musician in the room, since most of them had worked on Hollywood sessions for Columbia. Total pros, all of them. He was in good hands.
Frank sang happily that night, recording four songs: “Lean Baby,” an infectiously jivey Billy May blues about a skinny girlfriend; a sappy ballad called “I’m Walking Behind You” and an equally sappy waltz, “Don’t Make a Beggar of Me”; and one standard, Johnny Mercer and Rube Bloom’s great “Day In, Day Out.”
It was an odd session. Sinatra was in excellent voice, but the material didn’t quite rise to the occasion. True, “Lean Baby”—arranged not by Stordahl but by his (and the bandleader May’s) musical deputy Heinie Beau, in the bright and brassy Billy May style—was thoroughly charming. And “Day In, Day Out” was magnificent, if somewhat sedate—but Sinatra, for reasons of his own, would eventually decide not to release it. Of greatest concern were the middle two numbers, “Walking” and “Beggar,” both of them outright dogs.
But he was recording again, and he was pleased. After the session, Livingston took Sinatra across the street to Lucey’s for a celebratory drink. Sanicola lagged a few paces behind. The record executive noticed that Frank was walking taller, looking more alert, smiling. “
It was late and we were sitting in the bar having a drink,” Livingston recalled.
Nobody else was in the place except for a man who was sitting across the bar. Frank and I were talking. I said, “Why don’t you take it easy? Get a better image.” He said, “Alan, I don’t do anything.” All of a sudden, the man says [to Livingston], “What are you doing, buying a drink for your leech friend?”
Frank said, “Knock it off.” The guy said, “Knock it off, knock it off …” And Frank didn’t do a thing, but his kind of a bodyguard went up and grabbed this guy—I thought he was going to kill him—and threw him out of the restaurant. Frank said, “See? That’s the trouble I get in. It’s not my fault.”
Sometimes, miraculously enough, it wasn’t. But the image of Sinatra as an aggrieved innocent to whom trouble came unbidden was no truer, then or later, than the image of him as a thug. He was more complicated than that, even if the world didn’t know it yet.
Astonishing to think that only a couple of months before, he’d been languishing in Africa, cooking spaghetti and sweating bullets. Now he was back in action—not quite clicking on all cylinders, but busy. Hedda Hopper spotted him dining with Judy Garland and Sid Luft. “
Could they have been talking about getting Frank to play opposite Judy in the musical version of ‘A Star Is Born’?” the columnist wondered. (If indeed that’s what they were discussing, Frank might have found the role of the alcoholic fading movie star Norman Maine a little too close for comfort.) The television columnist Hal Humphrey noted
that “
Sinatra appears to be almost set to star in a TV series to be produced by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. The story would deal with the trials and tribulations of a musician and is called ‘Blue in the Night.’ ”
Also a little too close to the bone.
Frank was talking to all kinds of people. Amazingly, given the state of his finances, not to mention his situation with the IRS, it was reported in March that he was seeking a Nevada gambling license and a 2 percent share in the brand-new Sands Hotel & Casino, in Las Vegas, at a price of $54,000. Where did a man who barely had a pot to make pasta in intend to get $54,000? A lot of people, including the Nevada Tax Commission, were interested in that one. “
The singer said in his application that the money would come from his own assets and that he has no liabilities,” reported the Associated Press. “But the tax commission said it wants to investigate, among other subjects, Sinatra’s federal tax status.”
The seventh casino on the Strip, which had opened on Frank’s thirty-seventh birthday, December 12, 1952, was a natural foothold for Sinatra. With its ultramodern Googie-style architecture by the Desert Inn designer Wayne McAllister, its seventeen-story main tower looming in lonely splendor over Route 91, the Sands was a signpost of the new Vegas, a spaceship that would transport the town from its spurs-and-tumbleweed past into a neon-bright future. A big-time Houston gambler named Jakie Freedman had founded the place, but unlike the Flamingo’s Billy Wilkerson and the DI’s Wilbur Clark, who had run out of money while constructing their dream palaces and had to let the Mob muscle in, Freedman came to town loaded (after it got too hot for the quasi-legal casino he owned in his native Houston) and stayed loaded. Freedman was also connected. He had important friends in Vegas, and in New York and Miami, friends who were eager to tap into the cash cascades that were flowing from the Sands, but shy about seeing their names in cold type in the newspapers and on legal documents.
Sinatra and Freedman had friends—or, as the expression went,
friends of friends—in common. Possibly some of the men who had looked kindly on Frank from the beginning were now extending him a favor, fronting him the money to buy into a dream? Or was he being asked to return a favor, by putting his name to a contract in their stead?
Suffice it to say that Frank had nothing like $54,000 lying around, that the money he wasn’t sending straight to Nancy’s lawyers he was paying to William Morris, and that Las Vegas—and the Sands in particular—had suddenly become a very friendly place. Jakie Freedman had even persuaded the guy who’d been running the Copacabana for its real owner to bring a little New York west and run the Sands for him. Jack Entratter was the guy’s name: a former bouncer—a big, heavyset fellow with dark slick hair and a ready grin on his tough moon face. In honor of Jack (and of Frank Costello, too), Jakie decided to name the main showroom at the Sands after the Copa. It was a room Sinatra would soon own a piece of, then more than a piece.
On the evening of Monday, April 6, Fred Zinnemann and the stars of
From Here to Eternity
flew to Hawaii for two weeks of location shooting. Burt Lancaster recalled the flight:
Deborah Kerr and me and Frank and Monty are sitting up in the front of the plane. And he and Monty are drunk. Monty, poor Monty, was this kind of a drinker—he’d chug-a-lug one martini and conk out. And Frank was, I believe, having a few problems, and so, when we arrived, these two bums were unconscious. They were gone! Deborah and I had to wake them up.
Harry Cohn, who had already taken up residence at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, met them at the airport, all but tapping his wristwatch. Perhaps, he told Zinnemann, one of the night scenes could be shot right away—maybe that thing with Burt and Deborah on
the beach? Zinnemann took Cohn aside and told him gently that there were tides and other logistics involved; it wasn’t a scene that could just be dashed off. Besides, he asked (as Lancaster discreetly helped his two groggy co-stars into a car), mightn’t everyone do better with a day to get acclimated? Cohn grumbled. Zinnemann gave him a Viennese smile. Production began on Wednesday morning the eighth.
The work went fast and mostly smoothly. Frank was still completely engaged, but Zinnemann had stumbled upon an unusual challenge in shooting the scenes between Maggio and Prewitt:
Sinatra was at his best in the first or second take of a scene: in later takes he was apt to lose spontaneity, whereas Clift would use each take as a rehearsal to add more detail so that the scenes gained in depth as we went on. It was an interesting problem when they did a scene together: how to get the best performance from them both in the same take.
As the actor Robert Wagner recalled, “
Frank was very conscious of his lack of [acting] training; he was never sure that he would be able to reproduce an effect more than once or twice because he had to rely on emotion more than craft.” But Zinnemann’s account shows that it wasn’t just about temperament: Sinatra knew what really worked for him.
He and Monty labored diligently during the day, but as had been the case the previous month, the evenings were another story. “
Every night, after work, we would meet in Frank’s room,” Lancaster recalled.
He had a refrigerator and he would open it and there would be these iced glasses. He would prepare the martinis with some snacks while we were getting ready to go to an eight o’clock dinner. We’d sit and chat about the day’s work and he would try his nightly call to Ava, who was in Spain. In those days in Spain, if you lived
next door
to your friends you couldn’t get
them on the telephone, let alone try to get them on the phone from Hawaii. He never got through. Not one night. When you finished your martini, he would take your glass from you, open up the icebox and get a fresh cold glass, and by eight o’clock he and Monty would be unconscious. I mean really unconscious. Every night. So Deborah and I would take Frank’s clothes off and put him to bed. Then I would take Monty on my shoulders and we would carry him down to his room, take
his
clothes off and dump
him
in bed. And then she and I and the Zinnemanns would go out and have dinner.
