Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [160]
I remember her as a short, stocky, fanatically devout Irish Catholic with a Boston accent, wiry hair and a grim face. She was hired on as our nurse when I was about eight and quickly became the lord high executioner of all my mother’s rules. The instant one was broken she went running off to Mom or, more and more frequently, took care of the punishment herself by going after us with wire coat hangers.
“When Bing realized what a monstrous thing she had made of the home,” Giddins said, “he fired her, and Frank immediately hired her.”
In the process of his research, Giddins tried to draw Nancy junior out about Hardwick: “She said, ‘Well, yes, she worked for us. She was part of the family.’ Long pauses. I finally said, ‘Look, this is what I heard about her.’ There was a long pause, and she said, ‘All I’ll say is, she was very, very—tough.’ That was the end of the interview.”
Without lectures, without words, Georgie … transformed me into an unspoiled child.
Leaving the “quietly, gently” open for discussion.
In February, Frank sat down with Metronome’s George T. Simon—the very man who seven and a half years earlier had had to be sweet-talked into writing up the brand-new singer in the magazine—and did some serious venting about the state of American popular music.
“Right now certain conditions in the music business really have him down,” Simon wrote. “Chances are that he can’t stand Your Hit Parade any more than most of us can … But his biggest gripe of all right now is the terrible trash turned out by Tin Pan Alley.”
In fact, Sinatra was more than down—he was hopping mad:
Frank was a pretty weary guy when he sounded off during a short break on a recording date … but it seems that when you’re really pooped you relax more, you lose your inhibitions, and you say what you want to say. Some of the stuff Sinatra passed along was so libelous that it’s not printable, but all the rest is something The Voice feels just as strongly about, even though the language may be more pianissimo.
“About the popular songs of the day,” pet-peeves Frankie, “they’ve become so decadent, they’re so bloodless. As a singer of popular songs, I’ve been looking for wonderful pieces of music in the popular vein—what they call Tin Pan Alley songs. You can not find any. Outside of production material, show tunes, you can’t find a thing …
“I don’t think the music business has progressed enough. There are a lot of people to blame for this. The songwriter in most cases finds he has to prostitute his talents if he wants to make a buck … The publisher is usually a fly-by-night guy anyway and so to make a few fast bucks he buys a very bad song, very badly written. And the recording companies are helping those guys by recording such songs. I don’t think the few extra bucks in a song that becomes a fast hit make a difference in the existence of a big recording company or a big publishing firm. If they turned them down, it wouldn’t do any harm and it would do music some good [italics mine].
In a very short time, of course, Sinatra would be turning down very little himself.
The subject he was dancing around was the root causes of the change. Was the music business really leading the public, or was it the other way around? The one possibility the singer couldn’t stand admitting, to the press or to himself, was that America’s tastes had simply changed.
The novelist William Maxwell once told me, when I asked, starry-eyed, what it had been like to be alive during the Roaring Twenties, that it had been a terrible time, a time of giddiness, shallowness, escape. Much the same kind of mind-set was prevalent after World War II. The country wanted to forget the terrible near past and the deeply troubling present. America was jumpy. We wanted our pleasures quick, and we wanted them simple: they shouldn’t trigger any problematic emotions. We got what we wanted.
The Miracle of the Bells premiered the day before St. Patrick’s Day. RKO, having filled