Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [187]
Then after it was over, I said, “When your voice is back …” We’d come in crazy hours, in a locked building, so no union representative could come in. Then when Frank came in, say, at midnight, we would play the disc. He would put earphones on and he would sing, just the way they do now. And we would remix it. He did them very well after that, and the whole orchestra was perfect on it.
It sounds simple, but it couldn’t have been. Sinatra, who revered musicians and always insisted on doing right by them, knew he was taking money out of his musicians’ pockets, not to mention depriving himself of the pleasure of working directly with them. The pleasure of being with the musicians was central to Sinatra as an artist, and it infused all his best recordings. Indeed, even as recording technology advanced and tracking (today known as overdubbing) became almost universal, Sinatra did not like to record separately—and when he did, the music was always the worse for it. The renowned sound engineer Lee Herschberg, who supervised most of Frank’s Reprise sessions in the 1960s, noted that unlike most other singers, Sinatra couldn’t bear to sing behind sound-absorbing isolation panels—gobos. “You couldn’t do that with him, because he wanted to hear the piano, number one,” Herschberg said. “He’d stand right behind Bill Miller, or whomever.”
Frank wanted the intimacy. He’d stand right behind Miller and tease him, and Miller, or whoever, would joke back, and the studio would start to take on a kind of glow. “Sinatra wasn’t like some of the other people you would record,” Herschberg recalled. “When he walked in, it was special. Because there was an air in the studio that something special was going to happen. He always had the best arrangers and he had the best players, and everybody was having such a good time and was so happy to be there, and it really made him give what he had to give.”
That was in the 1960s. In 1950 it was a very different story: good times were in short supply; Sinatra was sinking fast. During the day he was stripping the gears—and obsessing over Ava. “Every day,” writes Gardner’s biographer Lee Server, “he would send off a heartfelt cable and then telephone her in the early evening in New York, late night in Spain, and try again sometime after midnight, early morning [at the location] in Tossa de Mar.”
But long-distance telecommunication in Catalonia was still erratic at best. Sometimes hours of transatlantic operator assistance were necessary only to be told again that the lines were down or that no one was answering. When at last he would reach her, the connection was often filled with static and her voice a maddeningly faint and broken echo. Conversations would end with his frantic declaration of love and anguished hope that he had correctly heard Ava declare the same.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that you can hear the disconnect in the records he made during that grueling April: As Mitch Miller triumphantly noted, the orchestra was perfect. Frank, however, was merely good. And the main thing was that he and the orchestra didn’t sound good together.
Then, at the Copa dinner show on May 2, Sinatra reached for a high note on South Pacific’s “Bali H’ai.” The note wasn’t there. He somehow managed to finish the show—then rushed back to his bed at the Hampshire House, where he sat in his pajamas, weakly calling for hot tea and honey. As Frank rested, feeling deeply sorry for himself, Hank Sanicola let slip a rumor that had been making the rounds in midtown: Lee Mortimer had bet Jack Entratter $100 that Sinatra would never finish out the Copa engagement.
That was all he needed. At 2:00 a.m., strictly against Dr. Goldman’s orders, Frank was back at the club, dressed and ready for the last show of the evening. He cleared his throat and dedicated “I Have But One Heart” to Ava. He sang it all the way through. Then Skitch Henderson kicked the band into gear for “It All Depends on You.