Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [229]
Johnnie Ray wasn’t just that season’s sensation but a game changer: a skinny, androgynous, half-deaf, sob-singing white soul singer who pounded the piano and writhed on the bench—even sometimes on the floor—while he performed. Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis were in the wings. Just four months earlier, Ray had been all but unknown, but then along came “Cry,” his million-selling 45 on the Columbia subsidiary Okeh. The lyrics, by the one-hit-wonder composer Churchill Kohlman, were sheer schmaltz:
If your sweetheart sends a letter of goodbye
It’s no secret you’ll feel better if you cry
and Ray’s vocalizing was appropriately sappy. He had a theatrical way of hanging on to syllables (“but it’s on-lyy fal-se ee-motions-uh that you feel-l-l”), and something about his whole sound—that Great Plains accent (he was an Oregonian, half Native American) and keening voice, that big echo behind him—chimed with the era’s taste for emotional bombast (Mario Lanza; Laine) and pointed toward a growing American predilection for countrified songs and singers such as Brenda Lee, Teresa Brewer, Patti Page, and, of course, the great Hank Williams himself. We were still a spread-out, lonely nation in those blue-highway days, and something about those high, lonesome sounds struck home in ten thousand back-roads burgs—and, maybe, served as welcome counterpoint to such urban (and ethnic) sensations as Uncle Miltie, Your Show of Shows, and Martin and Lewis, not to mention Sinatra himself.
Under the headline JOHNNIE’S GOLDEN RAYS DAZZLE MUSIC BUSINESS, Down Beat wrote that Ray had “most certainly established himself as the phenom of the music-record business of the second half of the century.” Big words—there were many phenoms still to come. But the point was made: Bing and Frank, those sensations of the century’s first half, were old news. Even Earl Wilson succumbed. “Do you folks suffer, too, from juke box jitters, or Johnny [sic] Rayitis?” the columnist wrote in March. “Well, you will. They call Johnny Ray ‘the Heat Ray’ and he’s the wildest, craziest, looniest, goofiest, weirdest singer since Frankie Swoonatra … He has this broken-hearted voice and … when he opens soon at the Copacabana, we expect to hear crying all over town, especially at the other night clubs.”
With Ava in tow (she’d finally come to New York, so the fighting and making up could commence afresh), Frank attended Ray’s Copa premiere in early April—more on his wife’s say-so (and of course to be seen) than because he really wanted to be there. When Earl Wilson asked him what he thought of the new sensation, Frank said, “I’d like to tell you, but my girl won’t let me.”
His girl was behaving as singularly as ever. One night at the Paramount, Johnnie Ray returned the favor and came backstage to meet Sinatra, entourage in tow. According to eyewitnesses, Frank was gracious, introducing Ava to one and all and making amiable chitchat. Then he was called out of the room on a business matter. While he was gone, Ava climbed onto Ray’s lap and began stroking his hair and cooing to him. Frank returned while she was still at it. After an awkward moment, he grabbed his unrepentant wife’s arm, yanked her off the fruity upstart’s lap, and hustled her out of the room.
On April 1, CBS finally pulled the plug on Sinatra’s TV show. Ratings had continued to erode (introducing an act on Texaco Star Theater, Berle smirked, “These people have never been seen on TV before—they were on the Sinatra show last week”). Ekco had dropped its sponsorship in early January. Since then, except for fifteen minutes of the Valentine’s Day broadcast underwritten by Elgin watches, The Frank Sinatra Show had been entirely sustaining, a straight cash drain to the network of $41,500 a week. Word around the industry was that CBS had taken a million-dollar hit on the program.
Frank was now reduced to booking himself, and the only engagements he could scrape up were a couple of concerts in Hawaii. He mulled it over for