Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [194]
In an earlier context, the producer George Avakian spoke of a contrast he observed at a 1946 Sinatra recording session: when Frank sang a couple of heavily orchestrated ballads, Avakian said, he seemed tense; yet late in the session, when laying down a couple of “pleasant throwaways” with a jazz trio, the singer was utterly relaxed.
So it was on the “Life Is So Peculiar” session. Even though this band was fourteen pieces rather than three, Sinatra was clearly comfortable with the jazz context and, even more important, with the triviality of the tune itself, which he would soon refer to, in an interview, as “a cute little novelty song.” But he sounds (if a bit husky around the edges) just great, easy and swinging. And most remarkably, his voice, imbued with a new maturity, actually harks ahead to the great Capitol sessions he will do two and a half years later, in a new, unimaginable lifetime.
And further: there’s a positively eerie moment at the end of the second chorus as Frank sings:
Life is so peculiar, but as everybody says,
That’s life!
The rascally lilt he gives to those two very familiar last words harks ahead two lifetimes, across the Capitol years and deep into the Reprise era, to the turbulent year in which Sinatra’s wedding to the twenty-one-year-old Mia Farrow would be bookended by two disastrous physical altercations, signaling the singer’s deeply disquieted state of mind. Frank was angry when he recorded “That’s Life” in October 1966, angry at a world that was starting to pass him by and angry at a record producer who’d just told him that his previous take of the song had been … well, not so interesting. (His audible anger made the final take very interesting.) In August 1950, of course, he was simply having fun.
In the middle of the month Ava returned to Los Angeles, and Frank was there to meet her. Then she vanished. “There’s no sign of life around [Gardner’s] pink stucco house on a mountain top behind Hollywood,” a wire-service report noted, a little plaintively.
Her trunks are in the garage, but the shades are drawn and telegrams are piling up unopened on the doorstep.
She’s cut off her private telephone. And she’s cancelled the messenger service that used to take her calls.
Reports have her hiding away in a tiny cottage in Laguna beach … staying with friends … dining with Sinatra in a secluded beach café … and staging a roaring battle with him at Charley Foy’s nightclub in San Fernando valley.
She wasn’t in Laguna Beach, or staying with friends. In fact, Frank had quietly rented a house on the beach in Pacific Palisades, and she had moved in with him. For the briefest of moments, they had eluded the press.
But not their problems. As soon as Frank and Ava set up housekeeping, he began having his children over on weekends. She didn’t like it, and said so. Often. In front of the kids or not; she didn’t give a good goddamn. The one true piece of the wire-service report was that roaring battle at Charley Foy’s.
Over Labor Day weekend Frank returned to the Steel Pier in Atlantic City, where he had sung as a fresh-faced young pup with Harry James and His Music Makers. He could still draw a crowd, but this time what the people wanted to hear was “Goodnight Irene.” “I don’t think Frank liked it too much, but it was a big hit for him,” Johnny Blowers recalled. “I used to think to myself, How in the world did Mitch ever get him to do this? But anyway, he did it and it was big. It went over.”
Later, though, doing a radio interview with a local disc jockey, Ben Heller (who’d played guitar with Harry James way back when), Sinatra tried pushing the “jazz things” he’d recorded with George Siravo in April: “Bright, with good jump tempos, both to listen to as a vocal and to dance to.” Heller, though, wanted to know what was new.
“We’ve got a new one now that is moving pretty good called, if you’ll excuse the expression, ‘Goodnight Irene,’ ” Frank said.
“Hey, that’s a nice tune,” said Heller.
“You wanna bet?” Frank replied.
After