Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [193]
When he reunited with Ava, it was as a man who’d gotten his mojo back. He was a cock of the walk again, and she liked him that way.
He in turn devoured the adulation. One night, Ava’s co-star Sheila Sim and her husband, Richard Attenborough, picked up Ava and Frank to take them to the premiere of a new Noël Coward musical. Crowds were gathered outside Ava’s flat, and when she emerged, she whisked right through them and hopped into Sim and Attenborough’s car. Frank came out a moment later, a huge grin on his face, and signed every autograph book thrust at him. When he finally got in the car, Ava was furious: they had agreed ahead of time that they would skip all that. Frank just shrugged.
He may have been One-Take Charlie for the movies, but when it came to his music, he was a man possessed. The Palladium was at least the equivalent of the Paramount, and he rehearsed all day, every day, until the opening.
And he didn’t disappoint. Backed by England’s biggest big band, Woolf Phillips and the Skyrockets, Frank knocked them dead. Nancy junior writes:
Sipping tea on stage between songs, he began with “Bewitched,” “Embraceable You,” and “I Fall in Love Too Easily.” When he started singing “I’ve Got a Crush on You,” the screaming started. Saying “Steady now,” he changed the mood with “Ol’ Man River,” followed by a parody, “Old Man Crosby, He Just Keeps Singing Along,” that brought down the house.
The critics loved him too. “I watched mass hysteria,” wrote the New Musical Express’s reviewer. “Was it wonderful? Decidedly so, for this man Sinatra is a superb performer and a great artiste. He had his audience spellbound.” The Sunday Chronicle’s man mustered even less English reserve: “Bless me, he’s GOOD! He is as satisfying a one-man performance as the Palladium has ever seen.”
The deeper thinkers of Fleet Street tried, hard, to analyze Sinatra’s appeal. Most of the results reflected the eternal cultural divide between the two great countries separated by a common language. But the London Sunday Times’s distinguished drama critic, Harold Hobson—later to be a prescient champion of Harold Pinter, John Osborne, and Tom Stoppard—was far ahead of the rest of the world in his penetrating assessment of Sinatra:
People who simply put Frank down as “the Voice” are missing the point. It is not the voice but the smile that does such enormous, such legendary execution … the shy deprecating smile, with a quiver at the corner of the mouth. Here is an artist who, hailing from the most rowdy and self-confident community the world has ever known, has elected to express the timidity that can never be wholly driven out of the boastfullest heart. To a people whose ideal of manhood is husky, full-blooded and self-reliant, he has dared to suggest that under the crashing self-assertion, man is still a child, frightened and whimpering in the dark.
Kissing Ava good-bye—no tears this time; she’d be returning to the States soon—Frank flew back to New York and, on August 2, walked into the Columbia studios to record a number from an upcoming Bing Crosby picture (there was no escaping Crosby!), Mr. Music. The song, written by Bing’s personal tunesmiths Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen (Chester may have traveled with Sinatra, but he was still earning his money from Crosby), was called “Life Is So Peculiar.”
The arranger and conductor was the Canadian-born Percy Faith, who, long before “Theme from A Summer Place” and “Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet,” knew how to swing. Sinatra, backed by a superb small band (including his old pal Matty Golizio on guitar and the great Johnny Blowers on drums) and accompanied by singer Helen Carroll and the vocal group the Swantones, was in a fine mood, and it showed. The number is a trifle,