Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [223]
He’d give them something. He gestured with his fist as he opened the car door for Ava. Then he got in the backseat and slammed the door in their faces.
SNARLING FRANK, GIGGLING AVA BACK, the Daily News headline ran, over an unflattering photo of the newlyweds (unflattering, mostly, of him: it was hard for her to take a bad picture).
His surliness was getting old, fast. As another tabloid headline around the same time put it, pointedly: WHAT A BORE IS FRANKIE.
“Frank Sinatra evidently craves privacy,” the Hearst columnist George Sokolsky wrote.
When these theatrical folk are on the make, they curry favor and seek notices and hire publicity men to spread interesting and exciting tales about them, true or untrue. Then they try the gag of seeking privacy, which some believe is of human interest. If it is privacy that Frank Sinatra wants he should be kept out of the public eye permanently. Perhaps the day might come when he would like to be remembered.
Soon enough, though, the press would have another tidbit to play with: Frank had had the very sizable bill for the chartered Beechcraft, along with the tab for the rest of the honeymoon, sent to Ava’s financial manager in Los Angeles. Nancy had cleaned him out.
Not only was Frank without bookings, but the press was knocking his new records. Down Beat wrote: “By every ordinary standard, ‘London by Night’ and ‘April in Paris’ are poorly sung. Frank sounds tired, bored, and in poor voice, to boot.”
Sinatra is slightly rough around the edges in those recordings, which had been made the previous fall, but in truth the writers were just kicking him when he was down. He was an easy target in the autumn of 1951.
And he fired back, laying the blame squarely on Mitch Miller. While playing the Desert Inn in September, Frank had gone into another one of his diatribes about the generally downward trend in popular song, singling out Rosemary Clooney’s recently released Columbia single, “Come On-a My House.” It was a zany, fast-moving novelty number with a goofily lecherous lyric by, of all people, William Saroyan (“Come on-a my house, my house/I’m gonna give-a you candy”), set to, of all things, a hard-swinging harpsichord obbligato that presaged rock ’n’ roll. Miller had been proudly responsible for the whole concept, and the record—which Clooney made under protest—sold like hotcakes.4
Frank had nothing bad to say about Clooney. He reserved his venom for Mitch. Word got back and Miller exploded. In November, Billboard noted a “long smoldering feud” between the singer and the producer, continuing: “Chief beef hinges on Sinatra claim that he isn’t getting a fair shake on song material.” The report quoted Frank as saying he was in talks with RCA and Capitol Records.
In fact, this was sheer invention on his part, a ploy to try to stir up some action where there was none at all. Manie Sacks had already informed Frank, with great regret, that he couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for him at Victor. And as for Capitol (the only West Coast–based label), it was doing just fine with Nat “King” Cole, Dean Martin, and Peggy Lee. Who needed Sinatra?
On the November 13 broadcast of The Frank Sinatra Show the guests were Jack Benny and ten-year-old violinist Charles Castleman. Benny’s presence helped Sinatra to garner a good review for a change. “Kidding each other’s known idiosyncrasies for laughs,” Variety wrote, Jack and Frank “sparked the show into one of the better ones [Sinatra has] done this season.”
But it was faint praise: the show was sinking fast, and everyone involved knew it. When the host requested that the broadcast be relocated to Los Angeles, CBS agreed, perhaps feeling that a change of venue might slap some life into the enterprise.
Frank’s return to Hollywood didn’t stir up much excitement—his only real currency in that toughest of company towns was as the husband (“Mr. Gardner,” the latest mean joke had it) of its hottest female star. As far as the movies were concerned, he was all but