Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [206]
Herron and Wolf had given him a lyric sheet, and Sinatra, as always, had studied it carefully, trying to absorb the words into his bloodstream. But when the orchestra started to play, Frank sang lyrics that were subtly but emphatically different from those that Wolf had written. Joel Herron, still alive in the mid-1990s, when Will Friedwald interviewed him, confirmed that Frank had changed the words but, enigmatically, refused to be drawn out on exactly how. “I asked him specifically, and he evaded the question,” Friedwald recalls.
Sinatra sang just one take—a take for the ages—and then, as the legend has it, fled the recording studio, unable to go on. In this case the legend rings absolutely true. “I’m a Fool” may not be a great song, but Sinatra’s shattering performance of it transcends the material. His emotion is so naked that we’re at once embarrassed and compelled: we literally feel for him.
“That’s a heartbreaking performance,” said George Avakian, not ordinarily a fan. “And the lyric, which I understand Sinatra contributed largely to, is very powerful. Psychologically, it’s very much a part of Sinatra. The fact that it’s a song that reflected his life at the time always intrigued me. There aren’t too many occasions when a record comes out of a person’s life so directly.”
Mitch Miller disagreed sharply on the autobiographical interpretation. “That’s bullshit!” he said. “Because what he’s drawing is the emotion from your personal life. He’s saying it for you.”
But then, Miller was always an ornery cuss—especially in later years, when critics constantly assailed him for supposedly ruining Sinatra’s career. In this case, his irritability probably trumped his better judgment: never before or again would Frank sing so transparently from the heart.
The change from Wolf’s original lyric was marked enough that “when they played us the side, I freaked out,” Herron recalled. “When the session was over, we were with Ben Barton and Hank Sanicola, and Jack and I went off by ourselves and said, ‘He’s gotta be on this song!’ We invited him in as a co-writer.” There are clues to what Sinatra created. Lyric writing, in the great era of American popular song, was an extremely precise art, marked by concision and consistency of style. And at two junctures in this lyric, the style veers ever so slightly, first in the expressively awkward “A love that’s there for others too” and then in the metrically inconsistent “Pity me, I need you,” with its incorrect use of a word—“pity”—whose first syllable must be emphasized, throwing off the rhythm.
Bolstering the case for making these two lines the culprits is their emotional relevance: Frank did indeed worry constantly—and justifiably—about the “others” in Ava’s life. And pity was something he sought constantly throughout his life, but never more so than during the near death of his career in the late 1940s and early 1950s: a period that coincided more or less precisely with his Ava years.
MGM had started test screening Show Boat, and the response cards were coming back with almost unanimous raves for Ava Gardner. She had entered that rarefied realm where she could do no wrong. Accordingly, when she asked Dore Schary if she could take some time off to go to New York, the production chief told her to enjoy herself.
With Frank, as always, everything at first was sweetness and light. Ava was feeling grand. She prevailed on him to take her to visit Dolly and Marty in Hoboken, even though Frank, driven to distraction by Dolly’s incessant demands for money, hadn’t spoken to his mother in nearly two years. Dolly answered the door and greeted Ava like a long-lost daughter, reaching up to embrace her, then giving her wayward son a Look. He was still too fucking thin.
Great to see you too, Ma.
The house smelled delicious—Dolly had prepared a tremendous meal: antipasto with cold cuts (especially Genoa salami, Frank’s favorite); veal piccata;