Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [205]
His voice wasn’t right. He sipped hot tea, he joked with Sibelius and the musicians, he tried to keep smiling, but all of it—the late nights on the phone with Ava, the bad calls at odd hours from Little Nancy, the cigarettes and whiskey and the fucking subpoena—all of it was starting to get to him, scratching away at his confidence and at his instrument itself.
Yet even though “Hello Young Lovers” took not three or four or even ten but twenty-two takes, Frank smiled; he sipped his tea, happy to keep going however long it took. It was Rodgers and Hammerstein; it was Stordahl. He was, for the moment anyway, in the best possible hands.
Of course the mood couldn’t last. While MCA was busy attending to its important clients—in a groundbreaking precedent, Lew Wasserman had recently secured Jimmy Stewart profit participation in his pictures—Sinatra was screaming at Henry Jaffe to get him a goddamn movie, fast.
Offers were not pouring in. But then the screenwriter and Sinatra drinking buddy Don McGuire came up with a hard-hitting scenario he thought might be right up Frank’s alley, a story about a hot-tempered saloon singer who gets a career boost from a mobster and regrets the consequences. It was a little close to the bone, but Frank liked it anyway. Here was a chance to put Clarence Doolittle and all those sailor suits behind him, to do the kind of gritty movie he could have done with Knock on Any Door, if they’d let him do it. To be, at last, a man on-screen. As for the subject matter: Let the goddamn public think whatever they wanted, he thought; they were already thinking it anyway. The screenplay was called Meet Danny Wilson.
Jaffe managed to sell the script, and Frank as the star, to Universal International, a studio that was making its big money from Abbott and Costello and Ma and Pa Kettle and Francis the Talking Mule. Universal offered Sinatra a flat fee of $25,000 to do the picture. It was almost an insult, but things being what they were, he jumped at it.
In the meantime, Ava’s fortunes were skyrocketing. MGM was thrilled with her performance in Show Boat, convinced it had a major new star on its hands. Her contract was soon up for renewal, and there was serious talk of a big increase, something in the neighborhood of $1 million a year. She soft-pedaled the money when she spoke with Frank on the phone, but he could hear the excitement in her voice. Some part of him was happy for her—he did love her—but naturally enough, he also felt belittled. He knew all about career trajectories. There were times, at four and five o’clock in the morning (and who could he tell about this?), when he felt like the lowest of the low.
He and Axel and many of the same musicians were back in the Thirtieth Street studio to record three more songs on the night of March 27. The first was another number from The King and I: a cute thing called “I Whistle a Happy Tune,” with a typically inspirational Hammerstein lyric about coping with fear by pretending not to be afraid. And Mitch Miller, who was in the control room that evening, had come up with a cute idea—Frank himself would do the whistling parts. Sinatra gave the tune a charming, convincing performance, which made the next number he recorded all the more shattering.
The song, composed by Joel Herron, the former musical director of the Copacabana, and the lyricist Jack Wolf, was called “I’m a Fool to Want You.” It was a big, melodramatic ballad, much in the style of “Take My Love,” another melodramatic ballad Herron and Wolf had previously sold to Ben Barton, who ran Sinatra’s publishing company, Barton Music Corporation. Frank’s recording of “Take My Love,” which turned a perfectly honest theme from Brahms’s Third Symphony into an outright weeper, sold like the dog it was. “I’m a Fool to Want You,” however, was something else. Yes,