Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [181]
Another man might have called and mended fences; Frank just called. Out of the blue, after a year and a half.
“Sam, Frank.”
“Hey, Frank.”
“Sam, you got a moment? I’m opening at the Copa.”
“Hey, not only did I know that you were opening at the Copa, but I’ve been thinking, if we were speaking, what would I have written?”
“Will you come to New York?”
“Yes, I will.”
So Sammy took the Super Chief to Chicago and the Twentieth Century Limited from Chicago to Grand Central—three thousand miles, two and a half days; writing the whole way.
The night of the opening, Sinatra paced his tiny dressing room, unable to stop sweating. He had to shower and change his shirt twice. Ava was sitting with him, her brow wrinkled with concern. She could be awful, but when he was really in trouble, she could be wonderful.
She stroked his hand and looked into his eyes. She hated to see him this way. She would call the doctor and get Frank something for his nerves.
While she dialed, he stared at Nancy’s good-luck telegram on the mirror.
When the doctor arrived, Ava went out to the table at ringside—there was a stir when the other customers spotted her, incandescent in a black off-the-shoulder dress—and sat down with Dolly and Marty, Sammy Cahn, Phil Silvers, Manie Sacks, Joe Fischetti, and Willie Moretti. The house was packed, the place vibrating with excitement. Then Frank bounded out and went into his opening number, Cole Porter’s “I Am Loved”:
I’m adored, I’m adored,
By the one who first led my heart astray.
The crowd went nuts. They ate it up when he did Sammy’s special material, putting on a coonskin cap, snapping a whip, and blowing a duck call as he sang bawdy new lyrics to Frankie Laine’s “Mule Train” and “The Cry of the Wild Goose.” They roared when he ripped the press: “My voice was so low the other night singing ‘Ol Man River’ that I got down in the dirt, and who do you think I found throwing mud down there? Two Hollywood commentators! They got a great racket. All day long they lie in the sun, and when the sun goes down, they lie some more!”
He was a smash hit. “After the opening, he got great reviews,” Sammy Cahn recalled. “I was so proud, I was so happy.”
But Cahn’s memory was rose-colored: the show-business crowds loved Frank; the critics weren’t so sure. “Whether temporarily or otherwise, the music that used to hypnotize the bobbysoxers—whatever happened to them anyway, thank goodness?—is gone from the throat,” the Herald Tribune’s reviewer wrote. “Vocally, there isn’t quite the same old black magic there used to be when Mr. Sinatra wrenched ‘Night and Day’ from his sapling frame and thousands swooned.”
Sammy wasn’t the only one with a forgiving memory. “Frank was nervous before he went on, which was unlike him,” Ava Gardner wrote in her autobiography, “but he sang like an angel, especially ‘Nancy with the Laughing Face,’ a song written about his daughter, not his wife. I’ve always thought it was a beautiful song, and contrary to what everyone seems to believe, it was never the reason for a single quarrel between us.”
Another account has it somewhat differently. “Did you have to sing that fucking song?” Ava is said to have asked Frank, after the Copa audience snickered during the number. “It made me feel like a real fool.”
That wasn’t the only thing she was unhappy about. As she loyally stayed for night after night of the Copa stand, MGM pelted her with telegrams reminding her she was overdue to start filming in England. And night after night she found herself in the company of some of Frank’s less classy friends, including the Fischetti brothers and Frank Costello. She was bored, feigning smiles. She and Sinatra were starting to squabble.
Meanwhile, Artie Shaw was in town.
Her own Svengali was back from one of his periodic sabbaticals from the music business, playing a gig at Bop City on Fifty-second Street. Shaw had a beautiful apartment on Central Park West. He was getting some interesting people together: Would Ava and Frank like to come