Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [188]
He opened his mouth to sing after the band introduction and nothing came out. Not a sound. I thought for a fleeting moment that the unexpected pantomime was a joke. But then he caught my eye. I guess the color drained out of my face as I saw the panic in his. It became so quiet, so intensely quiet in the club—they were like watching a man walk off a cliff. His face chalk white, Frank gasped something that sounded like “Good Night” into the mike and raced off the floor, leaving the audience stunned.
It may have been tragic and terrifying to Skitch and Frank, but to the newspapers it was a source for gloating:
BALI TOO H’AI; VOICE VOICELESS
Frank Sinatra’s voice deserted him Tuesday and his doctor said it was because the crooner tried to make it do the impossible—hit a soprano note.
Dr. Irving Goldman explained that Sinatra’s normal range is two octaves in the baritone-tenor class. When Frank tried to hit too high a note in the song “Bali H’ai,” the physician said, his left vocal chord [sic] dissented.
In medical terms, Sinatra suffered what the doctor called a “submucosal hemorrhage.”
Doctor Goldman ordered ten days of silence for “The Voice,” who has been appearing at New York’s Copacabana night club. Sinatra is due to open an engagement in Chicago May 12, and if he is to make it, said the doctor, he must keep mum until then—no talking or singing.
Sinatra’s friends said that to keep the ban of silence, Frank will go to a vacation hideaway.
The hideaway was Charlie Fischetti’s mansion on Allison Island in Miami, an establishment where hoarse monosyllables would not be at all out of place.
On May 12, Sinatra was tanned and rested, his voice much improved. But instead of heading to the Chez Paree in chilly Chicago, he was waving to reporters, pointing to his throat, and boarding a flight to sunny Spain with Van Heusen. “Yes, I’ll probably see Ava,” he croaked to the reporters. “But we’ll be as well chaperoned as at a high-school dance.”
“Even if he has to hire sixteen duennas,” Chester piped up.
Frank was, of course, bearing gifts: Ava had said she was missing her gum and her favorite soft drink, so he carried along a carton of Wrigley’s Spearmint and a six-pack of Coke. And a $10,000 diamond-and-emerald necklace.
The suits at MCA were grim faced at the news that he had blithely canceled the Chicago engagement (though the owners of Chez Paree, where the Fischettis had a special table, were quite understanding). But Frank had to reestablish contact with Ava. She had been gone for over a month now—anything could have happened. Knowing her, plenty probably had.
If he was pining for her, the reverse did not seem to be true, as a production assistant on Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, Jeanie Sims, recalled. “I remember one time we were shooting a scene of Ava by herself,” Sims told Lee Server.
She was supposed to be lost in some deep thought about the man she was in love with. And she couldn’t sort of get it right for [the director, Albert Lewin] … Al finally went over and said to her, “Ava, is there some one person in your life who you love or have loved more than anyone else on earth?” And she answered him so quietly I could not hear her. And he told her to think of that person and it was just the impetus she needed, and she got it perfect on the next shot. And afterward I was a bit curious, and I asked Al what she had said, who she had loved more than anyone, and Al said, “The clarinet player—Artie Shaw.”
Ava, though, was living for the present. She took her pleasures as she found them, and she found them everywhere. With a kind of beauty that comes along once in a hundred years—not just in her lush and haughty face but also in her long-limbed body, her smoky voice, her feline walk—she transfixed men and women alike. She had never been out of the States before, and Europe, still depressed after the war, was stunned at the sight of her.
“A very, very wild spirit,” recalled her Pandora co-star Sheila Sim. On a quick sightseeing and shopping