Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [184]
The total of this is going to run to about $120,000. This, as accompaniment costs, with certain limitations, are advances against royalties; therefore, practically the biggest problem we have in the pop field is to get some big-selling records out of Sinatra …
Please push this continuously while I am away.
Manie, Frank’s ultimate protector, had been the one behind the big advances. With Manie gone, and RCA surging, a cold wind was blowing at Columbia. Wallerstein had already given Mitch Miller the same message he’d sent Lieberson: “Mitch, we’ve got to make this money back.”
The head of the pop-singles department knew exactly what he had to do. Before this, Frank’s ratio of rhythm numbers to ballads had been about one to ten; Mitch Miller decided to try the reverse. The producer’s exquisite ear and classical background never got in the way when it came to commercial matters. “What makes you want to dig in your pocket and buy a record?” he mused many years later. “It’s got to be something you want to play over and over again. You look for qualities to make somebody buy it. I was trying to put stuff in records that would tighten the picture for the listener.”
For Miller’s first collaboration with Sinatra, the producer brought the singer an up-tempo Arthur Altman, Hal David, and Redd Evans tune, “American Beauty Rose”:
Daisy is darling, Iris is sweet,
Lily is lovely, Blossom’s a treat.
With a bouncy Dixieland-style arrangement by Norman Leyden, who’d pepped up Glenn Miller’s and Tex Beneke’s bands, “American Beauty Rose” bounds out of the gate at a breakneck tempo and never lets up. (Miller himself conducted.) The astute Will Friedwald calls the number “irresistible,” and Sinatra’s rendition “joyous,” but to my ears the song just sounds fast and mechanical, a vapid counterpart to Como’s “A—You’re Adorable.” Frank is in great voice, but there’s no smile in his voice. He sounds as if he’s just watching Mitch’s relentlessly waving baton and going through the motions.
The heartbreaking thing is that Miller knew exactly what he was doing: America wanted vapid novelty numbers in 1950. It just didn’t want Sinatra very much—“American Beauty Rose” charted, but only made it to number 26, and only for two weeks. At this point, Frank’s name was plastered all over the newspapers every day of the week as a family deserter and a has-been. You didn’t have to be officially declared persona non grata on the Senate floor, the way Ingrid Bergman had been, to be counted out by the American public.
But Mitch Miller had set the new tempo, and Frank had to keep dancing faster and faster. Not only was he playing three shows a night at the Copa and broadcasting the frenetic Light Up Time five evenings a week from the NBC studios at Rockefeller Center, but he was cranking out new records at a brisk new clip in hopes of generating the hits that would pay back Columbia (not to mention the IRS). In April alone, he did three recording sessions and eight new songs—almost a third as many as he’d recorded in the entire previous year. All eight were up-tempo numbers.
Almost all the new songs were arranged by George Siravo, the same man who’d been arranging fast-paced numbers for Frank throughout the 1940s and who had collaborated with Sy Oliver on the July 1949 session that produced the joyous versions of “It All Depends on You” and “Bye Bye Baby.” But the differences between July 1949 and April 1950 in Sinatra’s life and spirit were profound. The previous July, he’d been in the first flush of his grand affair with Ava. Now the affair had entered a complex second phase. Siravo’s new arrangements were lively and inventive, but Sinatra was subtly dragging them down. As with “American Beauty Rose,” he was singing well enough, but joylessly. On “You Do Something to Me,” he hit some outright clams, flat notes that seemed to mirror his mood.
None of the