Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [103]
Frank Sinatra had put a stick into a bee’s nest and given it a good hard stir. Further results were to follow.
In December, Frank flew back to the Coast, reading all the way. He smiled when he stepped out of the shiny-skinned DC-3 into the bright kerosene-tinged air. The East had been fun and involving and politically passionate, but the East was serious. It was playtime again.
Back to the beautiful house by the lake, with its merrily splashing fountain on the terra-cotta-tiled front terrace and its big pots of blazing flowers and its sweet California smells. His well-spoken black butler, John, greeted him at the door, then came both Nancys, the little girl skipping with glee and leaping into his arms, his wife trailing behind and giving him that look.
He freed an arm and embraced both at the same time, but even after he had kissed Big Nancy’s soft and not entirely yielding lips, she was still training the lie detector on him.
He gave her a look back. It was wonderful to see her too.
She smiled and shook her head at him. She always was a sucker for his nonsense.
A few days later, at the CBS recording studio in Hollywood, he sang the slightly weary-sounding “(I Got a Woman Crazy for Me) She’s Funny That Way,” which contained the line:
Though she’d love to work and slave for me every day,
She’d be so much better off if I went away.
He thought of her as he sang that—thought of Nancy even as he smiled at the gorgeous Marilyn Maxwell in her gorgeous sweater, staring steadily at him through the soundproof glass.
There was another song he’d recently sung in Anchors Aweigh, its emotionally didactic but all too telling lyric custom-written for him by his attentive hanger-on Sammy Cahn:
I fall in love too easily,
I fall in love too fast.
They had moved all their furniture from the East and they had bought more, but still the new house felt empty. The big rooms echoed. Nancy was doing her very best to make it nice with chintz curtains and pillows and flowers, but still the rooms echoed. The living room was enormous, with long white wooden beams across the ceiling, like a rec hall at a Catskills resort. It gave Frank an idea. They would give the new place a proper housewarming, with a New Year’s Eve party. And not just any party—a show! He called his studio musicians; he called Sammy Cahn and told him to start writing special lyrics. He phoned the MGM properties department and ordered them to bring over some bolts of cloth that could be hung at the front of the room as stage curtains. (Bemused at Sinatra’s curt directive, the head of the properties department kicked the request straight up the line to Mayer—who, fortuitously, had just received his invitation. Of course! Nothing’s too good for our boy!) Dozens of folding chairs were rented; flowers were bought, and (of course) cases and cases of champagne. As always, no expense was spared. (Dizzying sums of money were coming in every week, and, as Nancy knew all too well, equally dizzying sums were going out. They had almost nothing in the bank.)
The big night was a Sunday, December 31, 1944. The war was winding down, but not easily. In the Pacific, Leyte had been secured, and the terrible fight for the islands was on. In France and Belgium, during the coldest winter in decades, the Battle of the Bulge raged; thousands of untested infantrymen, pressed into service to replace the dead and the wounded, died in the snow under withering German artillery fire. In Frank Sinatra’s Toluca Lake living room, as Gene Kelly and Judy Garland and Phil Silvers