Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [191]
Instead of an apology, he tried for a molecule of levity, at his own expense: he wished her happy Mother’s Day.
She just stared at him. He averted his eyes again.
He had gone over in the early evening so the kids would still be awake, wanting to see them but also knowing that his wife wouldn’t make a scene in front of them. He was disappointed to find Tina, the baby (she was about to turn two), asleep.
He offered to come back in the morning.
She considered it. Then nodded.
Sinatra and Bob Hope. Hope gave Frank a guest spot on his TV show—Sinatra’s first television appearance—soon after his voice came back, when no one else wanted to employ him. (photo credit 25.2)
He returned the next morning—two visits in twenty-four hours! Little Nancy, thinking this might mean Daddy was home for good, ran and jumped into his arms; Frankie hung back and stared. Tina clung to her mother’s leg. Frank picked the baby up with his other arm, held both his girls at once. The little one didn’t seem quite sure who he was. In the years to come she would have no memory of this visit, nor of many others.
That night he flew back to New York with Bob Hope, who, miraculously enough, had given him a job.
26
The Frank Sinatra Show. “Bad pacing, bad scripting, bad tempo, poor camera work and an overall jerky presentation,” Variety said. The broadcast limped along from late 1950 to early 1952, often sponsorless, until CBS pulled the plug. (photo credit 26.1)
Sinatra’s savior at this juncture was his hardworking lawyer Henry Jaffe, who—since MCA was sitting on its hands where Frank was concerned—had been pestering Hope’s people for months to hire his client for the comedian’s new television variety show. TV was new and scary territory for Bob Hope, but he had to try: his NBC radio show, a mainstay of his career since 1937, was rapidly losing listeners to Crosby, Jack Benny, and Arthur Godfrey. Accordingly, when General Motors offered Hope a five-show contract (at $150,000) for a television broadcast to be sponsored by Frigidaire, Ski Nose jumped at it.
The medium was barely out of its infancy: programmers were making it up as they went along. Sid Caesar’s frenetic, wildly inventive Your Show of Shows, which had premiered on NBC in February, was doing brilliantly. Bob Hope’s Star Spangled Revue (the title was the frightened era’s equivalent of a flag lapel pin) debuted on NBC on Easter Sunday, and did not fare as well. Hope, who had to share the stage with refrigerators, seemed to think it sufficient to put on a vaudeville show in front of the camera. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Dinah Shore played along gamely, but the music-hall pacing, in the given context of early TV—live and uncut—was less than galvanizing, and reviews were less than ecstatic. The second show had to be better.
Hope’s choice of guests for that broadcast was interesting. Beatrice Lillie, an old pal from his London music-hall days, was funny and eccentric; Peggy Lee was ascendant, and sexy; but the best you could say about Frank Sinatra (besides the fact that until a couple of months earlier he could sing) was that he certainly was in the papers a lot.
One place Frank had never been, though, was in front of a TV camera. Acknowledging the fact, Hope introduced him a little nervously: “It takes real courage to get your feet wet in television. I’m really glad this chap decided to take the plunge. I’m thrilled to introduce Mr. Frank Sinatra.”
Yet if Bob Hope was tentative, his first guest was anything but. “Sinatra, astoundingly thin, balletic in his movements, and dazzling with his smile, showed no nerves about appearing on the tube,” writes Peggy Lee’s biographer Peter Richmond. “He nailed ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’ with a suggestion of cockiness that was in equal parts annoying and appealing. His absolute composure, performing live in front of an audience