Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [226]
Sammy Cahn’s then wife, Gloria Franks, recalled a dinner she and Cahn had early on with Frank and Ava and the Axel Stordahls. “It was like we were sitting on cracked eggs,” Franks said. “You never quite knew if it was going to be pleasant or there were going to be verbal daggers, or if she was not in a good mood. And Frank was so subservient to her. He was insane about that woman. I thought, ‘My God, look at him.’ He’d hold the door, pull the chair out, that kind of thing. I used to think, ‘God, I don’t remember seeing him do that with Nancy.’ It was a whole other Frank. He was a different person around Ava. And she was … Ava.”
It was hard work being married to Ava Gardner. It was hard work being married to Frank Sinatra, too, but there is evidence that he did the heavy lifting in the relationship. “Neither gave an inch, though I must say Frank worked harder on the marriage than she did,” a friend of Ava’s once said. “She’s a very selfish girl.”
Well, she was a movie star. And classically, show-business marriages involve one high-maintenance partner, usually the better-known spouse, and one maintainer. Frank was being pushed into the latter role. God knows he could be high-handed with friends and lovers and underlings, but Ava had a unique power over him—and all the more so as his own power waned. As a foulmouthed and dominant facsimile of Dolly (certified by Dolly), she wielded the metaphorical baton. (Jimmy Van Heusen, who when out of Frank’s earshot could be scathing about all things Sinatra, took to calling her “The Man.”) As a sexual volcano, she ruled him in bed. And to top it all off, she was paying the bills.
The combination was corrosive. Sinatra’s voice was delicate in the best of circumstances, and now he was spending sleepless nights worrying about his career, taking downers and uppers, reading obsessively at From Here to Eternity, dog-earing pages, marking up the Maggio sections. He was ragged and irritable during the day, and when he snapped at Ava, she snapped right back. At a point when even getting to make love with his wife involved a lot of preliminary yelling, it was a wonder he could sing a note at all.
Yet just a week into the new year, he went into Columbia’s Hollywood studio and recorded three songs in gorgeous voice and high style. Axel Stordahl arranged and conducted, and for the first time Bill Miller was sitting at the piano. The first number, Rodgers and Hart’s “I Could Write a Book,” marked a new artistic peak. Singing with beautiful simplicity and perfect diction, Frank sounded like the artist he was fated to become after he had crossed the valley of the shadow of death. He made a great song sound so believably brand-new (it had debuted on Broadway in Pal Joey in 1940) it practically glistened with dew. Then, after the forgettable “I Hear a Rhapsody” (schmaltzily written, beautifully sung), he belted out the utterly charming (and little-known) “Walkin’ in the Sunshine,” a romping, brassy, bluesy jump, growling and winking his way through in a wham-bam style that looks ahead to the best of his late-1950s collaborations with Billy May:
Just so you know, dear, I’m gonna tell ya
Your smile’s my golden umbrella.
Unfortunately, the world outside the studio wasn’t listening. Frank urgently needed to get something going. He was, according to his old pal, the Paramount Theater manager Bob Weitman, “knockin’ on doors.”
It was February; Weitman was down in Miami, getting a tan. Someone handed him a poolside phone. The voice on the line was unmistakable. Frank wanted to know when Bob was coming back. He was in trouble.
Meet Danny Wilson, which had premiered in L.A. and San Francisco in early February, was to open in New York in late March, Sinatra told Weitman; maybe it could premiere