Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [228]
Jules Stein and Lew Wasserman, long irritated at Sinatra in general, and long embroiled with him in a dispute over $40,000 in back commissions the agency said he owed, finally decided to cut their losses. And not quietly: MCA took out full-page ads in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter to trumpet the divorce.
Frank was devastated. (He wouldn’t speak to Wasserman for years.) On the advice of his publicists, he had gone to New York ten days in advance of the Paramount premiere to try to mend fences with the press. But by this point he couldn’t even manage a good entrance. Stepping off the plane, he obligingly offered to pose for pictures—and then, when Joan Blondell came down the stairs right after him, the photographers ditched him en masse. Two of them, though, paused for a moment in front of Sinatra. “Fuck you,” they told him in unison.
On the advice of his New York PR men, Frank agreed to suck it up. He sent a note to the National Press Photographers Association. “I’ll always be made up and ready in case you want to take any pictures of me,” he wrote, rather pathetically. He got no takers. He even lowered himself to a practice he had abandoned long ago, dropping in on disc jockeys to sweet-talk them into spinning his latest record—in this case, “I Hear a Rhapsody,” with “I Could Write a Book” on the flip side, from the January session.
In Sinatra’s new upside-down world, all journalists were welcome. When the jazz columnist George Frazier, freelancing for Cosmopolitan, interviewed him backstage during rehearsals at the Paramount, the writer had the nerve—and the leverage at that point—to inform Frank that he might not write a completely complimentary piece. Frank’s first reaction came straight from the heart: he winced, then gave Frazier a long, angry stare. Then he remembered the fix he was in. “Nodding, he became amiable again,” Frazier wrote.
“Look,” he said, “I won’t mind if it pans me just as long as it helps me correct the things I’ve been doing wrong” … It was the first time I ever heard him concede that Sinatra is only human. For the first time, he seems skeptical of his own infallibility … He no longer takes the view that he is a law unto himself. His sullenness has given way to an authentic eagerness to be pleasant and cooperative.
Earl Wilson did all he could, up to and including papering the house, to try to ensure a successful Paramount premiere for Frank. “As one of his surviving and loyal friends in the press, I tried to create excitement for him,” Wilson recalled.
The Paramount gave me a couple of rows of seats for VIPs whom I got out for the opening on March 26, 1952. Jackie Gleason, Phil Silvers, Ted Lewis, Jimmy Durante and the columnists stood up in the audience and sang out greetings to Frankie, and I reported it in the papers: “Jule Styne reached for his handkerchief when Frank sang ‘The Birth of the Blues.’ ”
Maybe he was blowing his nose. After all, a claque was just a claque, no matter how high the star wattage. The rest of the crowd, while enthusiastic, were dry-eyed. After the Times reviewer gave his kind word about Meet Danny Wilson, he reflected on the “somewhat subdued” crowd, noting: “Perhaps it is the beginning of the end of an era.”
A feature article in the New York World-Telegram and Sun was far less genteel. GONE ON FRANKIE IN ’42; GONE IN ’52, read the three-column headline. And to put a finer point on it, the subhead: “What a Difference a Decade Makes—Empty Balcony.” The article was cast in the form of an open letter from the reporter Muriel Fischer. Fischer was young and ambitious, and her tone was snarky. “I saw you last night. But I didn’t get ‘that old feeling,’ ” she wrote.
I sat in the balcony. And I felt kind of lonely. It was so empty. The usher said there were 750 seats in the second balcony—and 749 were unfilled … Later I stood outside the stage entrance. About a dozen people were waiting around. Three girls were saying “Frankie” soft and swoonlike. I asked, “How do you like Frankie?” They said, “Frankie Laine, he’s wonderful.” I heard a girl sighing, “I’m mad