Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [171]
The trombone problem rectified, Sinatra, now in the booth, turns his attention to the rhythm section. He inquires of drummer Terry Snyder: “You got enough pad on the bass drum? It booms a little bit.” Then, without the slightest hesitation, he turns to the studio prop men. “Would you put in a small piece of carpet, enough to cover the entire bottom of the drum?” Satisfied, he addresses the pianist. “Say, Johnny Guarneri, would you play something, a figure or something, and have the rhythm fall in? We’d like to get a small balance on it.” Guarneri begins an impromptu riff on the melody, as bassist Herman “Trigger” Alpert, drummer Snyder, and guitarist Al Caiola join in. After a few moments, Sinatra’s directions continue. “Bass and guitar: Trig, can you move in about a foot or so, or you can pull the mike out if you wish. And the guitar—also move in a little closer. Just a shade—uh, uh, uh—that’s enough.”
This was no mere voice: this was a great artist in full command of his powers and the means required to convey his art.
And yet the public mostly failed to pay attention.
The malaise seemed to be catching: as Sinatra flatlined, Columbia sputtered. Dinah Shore and the producer and arranger Mitchell Ayres defected to Como’s label, Victor, which had come out with a record format to compete with the LP, the 45-rpm microgroove single. The two formats, and their labels, dueled for a couple of years, and at first things didn’t look good for Columbia Recording Company.
On Labor Day, September 5—exactly a week after the Russian A-test—Sinatra began Light Up Time. The NBC program, broadcast from Hollywood, aired every weeknight at 7:00 p.m. (on the East Coast) for just fifteen minutes: its format and time slot were copied directly from another NBC show, Chesterfield Supper Club. As a sign of Sinatra’s still existing but rapidly waning power, the Chesterfield show—hosted by Perry Como on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and by Jo Stafford and Peggy Lee on Tuesdays and Thursdays, respectively—was bumped to 10:00 p.m. in the East. Frank’s co-star on the new broadcast was the Metropolitan Opera soprano (and fellow New Jerseyan) Dorothy Kirsten. The jam-packed format featured two solos by Sinatra, one by Kirsten, and one duet wedged between commercials. Every show began—it seems impossible to imagine in these days of fifteen-second TV ads—with a two-minute commercial for Luckies.
Frank was earning $10,000 a week for the show. Newsweek wrote, “The sometimes unruly crooner, whose exuberance over rapid fame has left him in staggering financial debt, could look to the show as a good boost back up the money trail.” Could—but didn’t. Ten thousand a week was a grand salary for the era, but it was a per-broadcast comedown from Your Hit Parade, and a drop in the bucket as far as his fiscal woes were concerned.
He was on a treadmill. With the breakneck pace of arranging for a five-day-a-week show, Stordahl was unable to conduct the Light Up Time orchestra: a further erosion of his relationship with Frank. His replacement, the choral director Jeff Alexander, went into the recording studio with Sinatra in mid-September in Sibelius’s stead, arranging and conducting three numbers, including an Italianate piece, lush with mandolins, accordion, and Stordahl-esque strings, called “Stromboli”:
On the island of Stromboli
Recklessly I gave my heart.
The too-apt tune was the title song for a romantic movie of the same name, directed by Roberto Rossellini and starring Ingrid Bergman. The film had just wrapped in Italy. In the course of making the picture, Rossellini and Bergman, who was married and the mother of a ten-year-old daughter, had fallen in love and conceived a child. The affair became a monumental scandal—unimaginable in the present era of casual celebrity couplings. Soon after Bergman gave birth, she would be denounced on the floor of the U.S. Senate and effectively driven out of the country.