Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [162]
Hedda Hopper summed up the feelings of pretty much every reviewer in the country when she called The Miracle of the Bells “a hunk of religious baloney.” And then, more shame. In a wrap-up of the previous year’s movies, Life chose Frank’s cameo in the Metro musical Till the Clouds Roll By as “the worst single moment” in any picture: “MGM struck a high point in bad taste when Frank Sinatra stood on a fluted pillar and crooned ‘Ol’ Man River,’ including the line ‘You and me, we sweat and strain …,’ wearing an immaculate white suit.”
With The Kissing Bandit in the can (and every bit as bad as he suspected it to be), and his recording career at a standstill, Sinatra didn’t have much to look forward to in the middle of 1948—with one exception. In the early hours of June 20 (the anniversary of Bugsy’s death), as Frank and Nancy played charades at Toluca Lake with the Jule Stynes and a few other couples, Nancy went into labor. Frank bundled her into the Cadillac convertible and—with great pleasure; just let them try to stop him—ran every red light between the Valley and Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. As it turned out, the haste was justified: Christina Sinatra (she would be called Tina, after Nancy’s sister) was born just minutes after Nancy was brought into the maternity ward. Frank kissed his wife and new baby daughter and drove back to Toluca Lake and jumped right back into the charades, which were still going strong. He mimed an hourglass to signify it had been a girl and held up fingers to indicate her weight. It was early Sunday morning, Father’s Day. It was the first time he had been in town for the birth of one of his children.
On the next day, June 21, 1948, at a press conference at the Waldorf-Astoria, the Columbia Recording Corporation announced, with great fanfare, a startling technological innovation: the long-playing 33⅓-rpm phonograph record. At a simultaneous dealer conference in Atlantic City, a Columbia executive gave a speech lauding the new invention to the accompaniment of an entire movement of The Nutcracker Suite. The record played on a phonograph with a mirror mounted overhead so the audience could see there was no trickery. At the end of the eighteen-minute side—four times as long as one side of a 78-rpm disc—the assembled record dealers leaped to their feet applauding. The future had arrived.
The LP was the brainchild of Columbia’s president, Ted Wallerstein, who had first conceived of it a decade earlier as the ideal medium for classical music. In addition to Tchaikovsky and Beethoven, one of the label’s first pressings was a ten-inch LP reissue of 1946’s The Voice of Frank Sinatra. The album sold well, but not nearly as well as the original: for one thing, few people had the equipment to play it. In October, Columbia brought out a Sinatra Christmas album that did a little better: it lasted a week on the charts, rising just to number 7.
His next hit album wouldn’t come for five years—an eternity.
Four months after the Simon interview, one week after Tina’s birth, Frank stood at the radio microphone at CBS and, with disbelief in his voice, introduced the latest addition to the hit parade: “The Woody Woodpecker Song.” As the show’s vocal group, the Hit Paraders, went into the supremely annoying number, which revolved around the cartoon character’s supremely annoying laugh, Frank could be heard in the background, telling the studio audience: “I just couldn’t do it!”
Meaning, he couldn’t bring himself to sing it. That was June 26. On July 10, he no longer had any choice.
“Well, I guess I better keep my hat on, ’cause look who’s here in spot number one,” Sinatra told Mr. and Mrs. America—and then, as though he had lost a bet, unbelievably went into that Woody Woodpecker laugh: “Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh! Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh!”
It’s a perfectly ghastly sound. To call it a desecration of Frank Sinatra’s voice is no exaggeration. He got through the rest