Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [150]
You can practically see the wheels turning in the story department at MGM: The war’s over; it’s time to get Frank out of uniform. How about some laughs? How about a satire on Zorro? Sinatra plays Ricardo, a college boy who returns from Boston to Old California and takes over his father’s spot as the titular bandit. The laughs are supposed to come from Ricardo’s timidity—once again Frank is playing awkward and shy—and his physical clumsiness. (He falls off his horse a lot.) There’s campy fun in the film, and the Technicolor is gorgeous, but from the first scene the star’s discomfort is palpable. His ears and his Hoboken accent both stick out a mile. (In subsequent pictures, Frank’s ears would be taped back; the movies would learn to live with the accent.) He tries hard to look adorable: he does that lower-lip twitch. But something has misfired badly. Sinatra is clearly not liking himself in this part, which makes it hard to like him.
He can hardly be blamed for his uneasiness. Each morning, while the hair and makeup people labored over him, studio lawyers were trying to figure out how to make the Lee Mortimer affair go away. Between anticipating the verdict of the Beverly Hills District Court and having to stay out of trouble, Frank was not in buoyant spirits that spring and summer.
Still, he always managed to find outlets. If he couldn’t keep Lana Turner (he finally dropped her over the phone, sending her into a rage: she was the one who did the dropping), he was going to throw himself into his marriage. This meant keeping his hijinks low profile, but most important it meant making a grand gesture. In May, wearing a yachting cap and licking an ice-cream cone, he walked into the Palm Springs office of a young architect named E. Stewart Williams and said, as Williams later recalled, “I wanna house.”
And not just any house. Frank wanted a Georgian mansion, he told Williams, and he wanted it pronto: by Christmas. Christmas was very important. Nancy was going to get a present she wouldn’t forget.
Six days after Benny Siegel was gunned down, on June 26, Frank was in the studio recording Christmas songs. In 1947 he recorded as he never had before: a total of seventy sides in all. Let Old Gold drop him; let Lee Mortimer sue him; let the Hearst papers rake him over the coals: he would show them all.
There was reality—complicated, thorny, less hospitable every minute—and there was Frank in a yachting cap with an ice-cream cone. He strutted; he kept up appearances; he would keep believing in himself till there was no other alternative. His agents had gone out and done battle for him and got him a new radio show, really a return to an old one: Your Hit Parade, still sponsored by Lucky Strike. The good news was that for the first time since the show’s inception in 1935, a single star would be at its center, singing the tunes and doing many of the commercials himself.
The bad news was that—gradually, then all at once—it wasn’t really Frank’s show. He wouldn’t get to sing his own songs, unless his songs happened to be on the hit parade, an occurrence that seemed less likely with every passing week. Even as Hearst kept snapping at his heels, the public’s musical tastes were changing. Suddenly Sinatra’s record sales were dropping; his concert and nightclub bookings had declined. His yearly income had dropped below $1 million for the first time since 1942. Nobody was feeling very sorry for him.
On the first broadcast of his second Your Hit Parade run, on Saturday, September 6, Frank introduced Axel Stordahl, who had replaced Mark Warnow as bandleader, and, as co-star for the show’s first two months, Doris Day. From Sinatra’s first song, it was clear that something was deeply wrong.
The song was called “Feudin’ and Fightin’,” a novelty number about life down in the holler, Hatfield-and-McCoy style. It was the kind of faux-folksy trifle