Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [120]
Nancy, struck by an attack of shyness, mostly hovered around the kitchen, seeing to it that the food was served properly. She felt comfortable around the servants. Now and then she stuck her head out to catch a song or a sketch. She watched the beautiful women watching Frank, watched their gleaming eyes and avid smiles, and felt sick with worry.
Then she shook her head in bewilderment at the sight of sweet-faced Marilyn Maxwell, sitting next to her handsome husband, John Conte, watching Frank sing with that look in her eyes. When Marilyn reached up to push aside a few strands of that perfect blond hair, the way women do when they’re attracted to a man, there it was, glittering unmistakably, like the palest chips of ice. Her bracelet. And at that moment, Nancy literally had to hold on to the doorway for support: the earth had spun off its axis.
Frank clowns at a CBS rehearsal, circa 1944. Joking aside, however, the man who couldn’t read music really could conduct. (photo credit 17.2)
Act Four
ICARUS
“Let me welcome you to the MGM family.”
“I’m proud to be in that family, sir.”
—Louis B. Mayer and Frank Sinatra, on the radio show
Old Gold Presents Songs by Sinatra
18
Frank and the two Nancys, 1945. “Daddy was … a voice on the radio most of the time,” Nancy junior wrote, years later. “A figure composed of a bow tie and two black patent leather shoes, who was always going away.” (photo credit 18.1)
She felt as if someone had smacked her in the face. Then she collected herself, straightening her shoulders, and walked across the room. She leaned over and took the woman’s wrist—the wrist with the bracelet—and looked Marilyn Maxwell in the eyes.
She would have to leave. At once.
Marilyn just stared at her, saying nothing, admitting everything.
It was all done quickly, quietly, efficiently, so the all-important party could come to its triumphant conclusion. For all anyone knew, there had been a minor family emergency of some sort. The couple simply got up and left. Frank, trouper that he was, continued the song even as he watched what was going on in front of him. He got a big hand.
Afterward, in the bedroom (he wouldn’t share it that night), he tried, as best he could, swearing she didn’t mean anything to him.
His wife looked at him coldly.
It was a long, slow climb back toward civility, beginning with a week of silent penance and followed by a full floral offensive, bouquet after gigantic bouquet, all of which she loftily ignored. Frank stayed uncharacteristically close to home in the beginning of 1946, not even venturing into the recording studio until early February, then bringing Nancy, as tribute, a test pressing of one of the day’s four cuts, a sappy something called “One Love” (“How sweet the way you play upon my heartstrings/How strange when you’re away, you give my heart wings”).
She ignored him, but she didn’t smash the record.
Maybe she should have. At this point in his career, Sinatra was doing what he would continue to do until the end of the line: look for hits. But this process was dicey, subject as the singer was to the whims of the marketplace and the tenor of the times. And in those days the times were tricky. The mid-1940s brought two paradoxical trends to American music: the rise of the singer at the expense of the big bands, and the decline of popular songwriting. Frank himself had much to do with the former,1 but was powerless to change the latter. Times change; tastes change: the war’s end had brought a kind of giddiness to the American zeitgeist, the result of post-traumatic stress and new fears. The longing wartime ballads that had made Sinatra’s reputation were suddenly uncongenial to the national ear. Cheesy novelty