Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [122]
The nod to Crosby was intentional. Bing had made hit recordings of “Ghost of a Chance” and “Tenderness” in the 1930s, and had also been first with “Paradise.” He was still number 1 on the charts to Sinatra’s number 2. Frank was paying tribute, but he was also throwing down the gauntlet. He was Picasso to the older singer’s Matisse, coming on fast and strong.
And the market responded. Just over two weeks after The Voice’s release on March 4, it entered the Billboard Top 5 chart, and soon it hit number 1, a position it would hold for seven weeks. The album simply exploded onto the American consciousness, fixing Sinatra’s reputation as not merely a crooner but a singer. “I was working in a record store,” recalled the music publisher Frank Military, “and Dean Martin came in every day to see me. And one day The Voice album came in, and it sold like hotcakes. I didn’t know Frank, and Dean didn’t know Frank, but the two of us just sat there listening to all four 78s over and over.”
They were something to hear. Sinatra had purposely chosen the July 30 and December 7 sessions not just because they contained great songs but because of their beautifully spare settings: in each case, a nine-piece string, woodwind, and rhythm ensemble highlighted his voice perfectly. These small-group tracks sounded brand-new and special. Even the two lesser numbers, “I Don’t Know Why,” of fateful Paramount memory—music to get egged by—and “Paradise,” were quietly ravishing, in the former case because of George Van Eps’s restrained and lyrical guitar work, and in the latter because of Mitch Miller’s sublime oboe.
The singing was exquisitely tender and exact and assured and, most important, it was Sinatra. At thirty, he had cast off all influences and become, completely, himself. If he had ever sounded like Bing, he didn’t anymore. If he had ever wanted to be Bing, he didn’t anymore. And he wasn’t Frankie anymore, either. Now he was just Frank.
Three days after the release of The Voice, Sinatra, along with the producer Frank Ross and the co-producer and director Mervyn LeRoy, attended the Oscar ceremonies at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, where they received their special Academy Awards for The House I Live In. Nancy accompanied her husband. A photo taken of them afterward at Ciro’s shows them together like the cutest couple in Hollywood. Frank is in black tie; Nancy is wearing a strapless evening gown. Her hair is up; she wears a pearl choker; her creamy décolletage is lovely to behold. She is a beautiful young woman; he is a handsome young man. Their shoulders are touching.
And yet it is a strange picture: The two of them seem both intimate and distant. Frank is ardently admiring his Oscar; Nancy is smiling at someone across the table. A real couple sitting this close would be holding hands, or at least touching fingers. Yet he holds the statuette in his left hand, and rests his right, with its big pinkie ring, on the table, almost willfully distant from her. Nancy’s left hand, the one closest to Frank, also lies awkwardly on the table. And on her left wrist is what looks very much like a diamond bracelet.
What goes on behind any couple’s bedroom door is one of the great mysteries, but history can say with some certainty that he was outside that door for several weeks after New Year’s, and then, one night, he was back in again. There were conditions, there were strictures and continued reproaches, but he was back in again.
Did she believe him? Naturally she wanted to; at the same time, she wasn’t a fool. She knew that their life as a couple was anything but simple. Yet she needed his promises, not merely to hear the words, but for the sake of her dignity. She needed Frank to remember that he had made this commitment—that whatever he did elsewhere, he would be thinking about her.
As spring lit Hollywood in a blaze of jacarandas and azaleas, Sinatra was making movies again, once more commuting