Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [105]
Some wonder why Frank recorded this number three times in the space of a year. He may have done it out of extreme love for his daughter and wife (for, after all, the song could be construed both paternally and amorously); he may have been trying to perfect it; or there might have been another reason. On that hot August afternoon in Hollywood, Sinatra might have been recording the song as an act of atonement, for he was behaving very badly that year and things were not going at all well at home.
He was in love. In fact, he was always in love. He could barely sing a song without feeling that giddy feeling for one girl or another. (In truth, the feeling itself counted far more than the girl.) This time, though, it was pretty serious. Sinatra had known Marilyn Maxwell since 1939, when he was with Harry James and she was an eighteen-year-old singer (alongside Perry Como) with the bandleader Ted Weems, using her real first name, Marvel. She and Frank ran into each other all over the map as their respective bands crisscrossed the country; she was one of the first people to advise him to go out on his own.
As for her given name, it was corny, but only slightly. She was a marvel: a stunning, corn-fed Iowa girl, bottle blond, with a body to kill for, a real brain in her head, and a truly sweet disposition. Marilyn was nice, and that was what made it so hard when she and Frank reconnected at Metro (where she had just wrapped Lost in a Harem, with Abbott and Costello). In Hollywood he picked up and threw away girls like Kleenex, and this one simply wasn’t disposable, something about her genuineness got him where he lived.
At 1051 Valley Spring Lane, where various Barbato relatives were trooping in and out at all hours of the day, little romantic was happening. Nancy’s sister Tina was still in residence, answering fan mail, and now the other sisters and their families had moved west, too, as had Mike and Jennie Barbato, who were in the process of building a house in Glendale. Somebody was always around, having a meal, a cup of coffee. It was all-Barbato, all the time, and Frank had had it. His wife had company, fine; but he had no wife. Between recording and seeing his agents and taking meetings at the studio and going out on the town, he barely appeared at the house. When he did, it was to stalk in at four or five or six in the morning, sleep till 1:00 p.m., have his breakfast served by the maid, then stalk out again. On the rare occasions when he and Nancy did have an extended conversation, it was either about his business (to which she paid close attention) or about her family (to which he objected strenuously). It seemed they were fighting all the time these days.
The hell of it was that she was still in love with him. She knew him: to her, he was still the boy with the ukulele who had courted her down the shore so long ago. Every once in a while, when the clouds lifted for a second and he smiled, she could see that boy. She knew about the other women, and she hated it, but what could she do? She had asked Frank to be discreet, but now they were in Hollywood, capital of indiscretion, where the night and the day had a thousand eyes. He was so cold lately: she knew exactly what was going on.
But what could she do about it?
It went without saying that when Frank went out, he went out without her. Once he left the house, he never wanted for company. Sanicola and Silvani were with him at all times, to fend off the riffraff; and he could always summon the posse—Cahn, Stordahl, Styne, Silvers, Chester. Other stars might create a stir when they walked into a joint, but no one else walked in with such a retinue. One blossom-heavy night in May 1945, Sinatra and company stopped by Preston