Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [104]
Oh boy, had he outdone himself.
A snickering from the crowded room.
Then Sammy cued the piano player, and Sinatra sang the special lyrics to the very familiar tune, a love song now transformed (as the stellar background singers harmonized behind him) into a satirical romp about the star who left the little studio and went to the big one, and the nice studio boss who had been smart enough—or was that gullible enough?—to sign him.
The lyrics were funny, biting, double-edged. The room was roaring with laughter. And as Mayer’s long-suffering (but soon to be replaced) wife, Margaret, leaned over and whispered in her husband’s ear that it was a joke, a funny song, the mogul gave a faint, thin-lipped smile.
Sinatra sings the National Anthem with Lower East Side kids at a UN Day ceremony, 1950. Frank’s commitment to tolerance was genuine and profound. (photo credit 15.2)
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Sinatra and Axel Stordahl, CBS radio broadcast, 1940s. Frank couldn’t read a note of music but knew precisely what he wanted at all times. (photo credit 16.1)
Frank began 1945 by ending his contract for Lucky Strike’s Your Hit Parade. The decision wasn’t his. The show’s producer, George Washington Hill—the flinty-eyed old tobacco peddler whose grand achievement in life had been the marketing of cigarettes to women—had wiped his hands of Sinatra when the troublesome singer had the temerity not only to ask for a raise but also to demand the show be moved to the West Coast. In Frank’s place, Hill hired the opera singer Lawrence Tibbett—at $700 a week more than Sinatra had been earning. Still: no Mediterranean blood; much less trouble.
Sinatra too knew how to wipe his hands of someone. The big drawback of Your Hit Parade had been that he was only the show’s co-star; the chief benefit had been to keep his voice and his name out there. He had plenty of other ways to do that, including his other radio show, Frank Sinatra in Person, which had now switched sponsors from Vimms to Max Factor and was based in Los Angeles.
Then, thank God, there were records again—with musicians. Sinatra spent much of the following year on a white-hot streak of recording for Columbia: an average of one session per month in Hollywood and New York, forty sides in all. The songs ranged from the timelessly sublime (“Where or When,” “If I Loved You,” “These Foolish Things,” “You Go to My Head,” “Why Shouldn’t I?”) to the schmaltzy and quickly dated (“Full Moon and Empty Arms,” “Homesick, That’s All,” “The Moon Was Yellow”) to the merely odd (“Jesus Is a Rock in a Weary Land,” “My Shawl,” “Old School Teacher”). Crosby, too, had experimented with offbeat material, Latin and gospel numbers. It was safe: the golden age of American popular songwriting was still alive. The vein, Frank believed, would never run out.
In August he cut—for the third time in a year!—a somewhat less than golden number, one whose lyrics, legend had it, Phil Silvers had dashed off in twenty minutes at a party and presented to Sinatra as a gift for Little Nancy’s fourth birthday: “Nancy (with the Laughing Face).”
If I don’t see her each day I miss her,
Gee, what a thrill each time I kiss her.
When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. In point of fact, Silvers did dash off just such a lyric at a party, and Jimmy Van Heusen—a great one for sitting down at the piano at parties—came up with a winsome tune to go along with it. But the song was originally titled “Bessie (with the Laughing Face),” in honor of Johnny Burke’s wife, whom Silvers had reduced to giggles with one of his patented one-liners. Upon further consideration, though, Silvers and Van Heusen (who always had a sharp eye for ingratiating himself with