Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [173]
Then Lana woke up one morning, picked up the newspaper, and read that Frank had changed his mind and gone back to Nancy for good. It was the old Catholic arrangement: wife and family come first. Nancy had almost made a theme song out of it: “Frank always comes back to me.”
I really liked Lana. She was a nice girl, and she felt neither anger nor malice toward Frank and me. She just thought I ought to know. I told Lana gently that Frank and I were in love, and that this time he really was going to leave Nancy for good. If I’m in love, I want to get married: that’s my fundamentalist Protestant background. If he wanted me, there could be no compromise on that issue.
That cataclysm, along with a number of others, was close at hand.
The roster of Sinatra’s activities that autumn was strikingly sparse. His daughter Nancy, usually the most assiduous (and relentlessly upbeat) of chroniclers, can come up with only two events between the summer and December. “October 30, 1949: Dad returned once again to The Jack Benny Show,” she notes. And, “November 6, 1949: He performed on Guest Star, a radio show for the U.S. Treasury Department.” (Trying to butter up the IRS? Or the FBI?) Frank wasn’t shooting a movie, and he was barely recording: between September and the end of the year, he cut just eight songs, in three sessions. (In all of 1949, despite the end of the musicians’ strike, he laid down only twenty-seven sides, compared with seventy in the pre-strike year of 1947.) He did Light Up Time every weekday afternoon, but the quarter-hour show was rushed and frequently superficial. Stordahl’s absence didn’t help, nor, due to NBC budgetary constraints, did the absence of a string section.
As Frank had noted in his pained September letter to Manie, others—even at Columbia—were recording the same songs he was. And selling better. There was a new Italian boy on the scene, with a husky tenor voice so dramatic that some listeners thought he was black. To add insult to injury, he also called himself Frankie—Frankie Laine. (He had been born Francesco Paolo LoVecchio.) He could sing torch songs, spirituals, and up-tempo rip-roarers, and he could crank out gold records (“That’s My Desire”; “Mule Train”). Laine’s career was being shepherded by a brilliant, fiercely ambitious A&R man at Mercury named Mitch Miller—the same Mitch Miller who had turned Sinatra on to the classical compositions of Alec Wilder.
But the king that year was Perry Como. “Anodyne,” with its dual meanings of pain relief and insipidness, applied perfectly to the smooth-voiced, smooth-faced former barber from Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. Times change; the culture shifts. Yearning was out of fashion, and Sinatra was now just part of a big pack of popular singers. Billboard ranked him number 13 at the end of the year; the Down Beat poll put him at number 5. He was officially yesterday’s news. Lee Mortimer all but jumped up and down with glee. “The Swoon is real gone (and not in jive talk),” he wrote, in his Daily Mirror column, noting that all the hysteria over Sinatra had merely been “an unhealthy wartime phenomenon.”
Emotionally, Frank was as busy as it is possible for a human being to be: he was in love. And not sweetly and contentedly in love, but in the throes of a grand passion, one whose DNA was stamped with wildness, violence, contradiction, pain. In Ava Gardner he had literally met his match. In a woman of spectacularly sensuous beauty he had found a soul whose turbulence equaled his own. Like Frank, Ava knew herself to be a kind of royalty, but still harbored profound feelings of worthlessness. In each, this duality fueled volcanic furies. “Both Frank and I,” Ava wrote in her memoir, “were high-strung people, possessive and jealous and liable to explode fast. When I lose my temper, honey, you can’t find it anyplace. I’ve just got to let off steam, and he’s the same way.”
Frank had found a true partner in the opera that was his life. All his other women had been supporting players; Ava was a diva. Like Frank, she was infinitely restless and easily