Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [117]
Columbia stood firm. Yet despite the label’s refusal to change its policy on paying for music copying, conducting, or arrangements, Sinatra would remain there for seven more years. Manie Sacks was another story. Disillusioned and unwell, he would leave the company almost three years before the man he’d once thought was his best friend.
On October 17, Ava Gardner, the gorgeous MGM B-film player Sinatra kept running into all over town, married Artie Shaw in Beverly Hills. Gardner was not quite twenty-three. It was her second marriage (she had divorced Mickey Rooney two years before), and Shaw’s fifth. Shaw kept company with artists and intellectuals and tried to get Ava to start reading. Instead, she began drinking. The marriage would be over by the following fall.
Frank would test Manie’s patience even further that autumn. In November the singer returned east for a three-week stand at the Paramount, then another engagement at the Wedgwood Room, and, in between, further recording sessions at Liederkranz Hall. But that wouldn’t be all: Frank would turn thirty on December 12, and he wanted to end the year in style.
Success had intensified his cravings for class. Playing the Wedgwood Room helped: Cole Porter once again rode the elevator down from his Waldorf Towers suite to catch Sinatra’s act. All that was gratifying, but ultimately, as Porter had written, merely massage.
One of the first things Frank had discovered as a recording artist was the difference between New York and Los Angeles studio musicians: West Coast instrumentalists, though every bit as virtuosic as their eastern counterparts, were far more relaxed, accommodating, showbiz savvy. Most of them made a good living playing movie scores. They knew how to adapt, take orders, work well with others.
Their Big Apple brethren, on the other hand, tended to be temperamental and egotistic classical artistes. The record producer George Avakian, who worked at Columbia in the mid-1940s, said, “They were tough-minded, insular people who were protective of their own positions—even which chair you were going to sit in.” Many of the musicians initially looked down their noses at Sinatra. And since the singer already had huge respect for musical virtuosity, and a fine sense for clubs that didn’t want him as a member, he courted their admiration.
But one of their number, substantially more ambitious than the rest, sought Frank out. Mitchell William Miller—Mitch for short—was a short, chin-bearded, energetic careerist from upstate New York, a brilliant classical oboist who had a deep love for jazz and popular music. A child prodigy, Miller had graduated at twenty-one from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, where he’d formed an abiding musical friendship with his fellow student Alec Wilder—a.k.a. the Professor, the very man who had arranged and conducted Sinatra’s musicianless Columbia sessions with the Bobby Tucker Singers.
Sinatra had been intrigued by Wilder’s effortless musical intelligence, his rumpled academic quality, his endlessly digressive sentences, and (most of all) by the fact that unlike virtually everybody else the Professor seemed to have zero interest in kissing up to him. That was classy. When Miller pushed forward to introduce himself to Sinatra after a recording session, he also pushed his friend Wilder. Alec wasn’t just an arranger and a conductor, Mitch said, but also a composer in both the popular and the classical idioms.
“He’s got a few things I think you should listen to,” Miller told Sinatra. The singer liked