Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [199]
Was she banging him?
She was never one to flinch, not even for a second. How about Marilyn Maxwell—was he still screwing her?
His voice rose. What about Artie Shaw?
She gave as good as she got. What about his wife? Was he ever going to leave her, or was that going to go on forever?
The puppy cowered. Then came more screaming, and breaking dishes, and slamming doors—followed, of course, by the absolutely stupendous making up. After which she nestled sweetly in his arms, and they swore never to fight again.
Then he was back off to New York again.
September 1950: Nancy, beautiful in distress, wins her separate-maintenance suit in Santa Monica Superior Court. She dabbed away “a tear or so,” the Los Angeles Times reported, as Judge Orlando H. Rhodes awarded her “the Holmby Hills home, its furnishings and effects, a 1950 Cadillac, 34 shares of stock in the Sinatra Music Corp. and one-third of Sinatra’s annual gross earnings on the first $150,000 and 10% of the next $150,000.” (photo credit 26.2)
27
Frank and Ava with Dolly and Marty at the premiere of Meet Danny Wilson, November 1951. Dolly, who constantly clashed with Nancy, was crazy about Ava. (photo credit 27.1)
One night in January, as Frank walked into the Columbia recording studios, he passed a group of teenage girls, who noticed him at once. They giggled. As he smiled expectantly, they called out in unison: “We like Eddie Fisher!”
Frank shrugged, chastened. “I do, too,” was all he could come up with.
Edwin Jack Fisher was a nice Jewish boy from Philadelphia with a handsome face, a thick head of dark hair, a soaringly confident tenor voice, and no sense of musical tempo whatsoever. “You had to tell him when to start,” said the record producer Alan Livingston. “It was amazing.” Fisher had started singing on the radio in high school, had been discovered by Eddie Cantor, and had signed with RCA Victor in 1949, at twenty-one. And in June 1950, an appearance on Milton Berle’s Texaco Star Theater, the biggest show on television, had turned Eddie into a national sensation.
Fisher was the first popular singing idol created by the new medium, which was growing by the month beyond anyone’s ability to calculate. The new stars of TV—Berle, Sid Caesar, Jackie Gleason, Martin and Lewis—were riding the crest of a tremendous wave, and by 1950 Eddie Fisher was riding along too. Days after the Texaco appearance, his agent booked him into Ben Miller’s Riviera, an elegant nightspot atop the Palisades in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and over the span of a two-week gig Fisher came into his own not just as a pop phenomenon but as an important American entertainer—the clubs were still a key cultural component in those days. It was a feat akin to the one Sinatra had pulled off at the Astor roof ten years earlier. Earl Wilson wrote, “Singer Eddie Fisher … is merely wonderful. There’s no reason he shouldn’t become a big star.” And in the Daily Mirror, Frank’s old nemesis Lee Mortimer raved, “The cash customers cheer and beg for more, indicating the lad is the song find of the year.” Variety, Time, and the New York Times printed similar plaudits.
“I became the hottest act in show business,” Fisher recalled many years later. He was twenty-two.
Within weeks I was performing before sold-out audiences at the best clubs in the country … Every variety show on television wanted me as a guest … By the end of the year I had been named America’s Most Promising New Male Vocalist in Billboard’s annual disc-jockey poll, as well as Discovery of the Year and Male Singer of the Year.
All the major motion-picture studios begged me to take a screen test. I began receiving thousands of pieces of fan mail every day, and fan clubs were organized around the country.
Then, in February 1951, Fisher played the Paramount:
Few entertainers have ever experienced the kind of adulation I received when I opened at