Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [231]
There were any number of bones of contention, not least of them the fact that Frank didn’t want Mitch around when he was recording. The headstrong executive, as brilliant and domineering in his own way as Sinatra, tended to march in and take over all aspects of a session, even the recording engineer’s role of manning the dials in the control room. “Frank didn’t want you turning dials,” recalled the drummer Johnny Blowers.
But Mitch did [turn them], and then all of a sudden one day Frank had as much as he could stand. Quietly, he looked in the control room, pointed his finger, and said, “Mitch—out.” When Mitch didn’t move, Sinatra turned to Hank Sanicola. “Henry, move him.” To Mitch, he said, “Don’t you ever come in the studio when I’m recording again.”
Now Mitch was back. And while Frank had decided to make the best of a bad situation and go ahead with the session, Miller was bent on showing him who was boss. Columbia’s West Coast A&R man Paul Weston, who was nominally producing, stood aside and let Miller take over.
One of the songs Mitch had high hopes for—and let us remember that Sinatra had the right of refusal—was a twangy piece of nonsense called “Tennessee Newsboy.” To give the tune the right country-and-western-flavored sound, Miller had hired a steel guitar player named Wesley “Speedy” West, who, as Weston recalled, “was known for making the guitar sound like a chicken. Frank sang the vocal, and Mitch rushed out into the studio, and everybody thought he was going to congratulate Frank for getting through, because he did it well. Instead, he rushed right past Frank, and embraced Speedy West, because he’d made a good chicken noise on the guitar. Frank was disgusted.”
Nothing Frank recorded that night became a hit, but “The Birth of the Blues,” orchestrated by the clarinetist, saxophonist, and arranger Heinie Beau, was every bit as brassy as January’s “Walkin’ in the Sunshine,” and much tougher. Sinatra’s singing had a forward-looking, microphone-cord-snapping authority, the same kind of authority he would wield in Vegas ten years later. And his little vocal snarl at the end was certainly directed at the goateed tormentor behind the control-room glass.
He was still booking himself, scrounging whatever gigs he could, running around the map. Meanwhile, Ava was sitting at home, nursing a grudge. “Today is our seventh anniversary,” she told Modern Screen that spring. “Seven months. You want to see your husband, and where is he? Playing the Chez Paree in Chicago! Then he’s hitting St. Louis … it’s rough.”
In late May, despite feeling lousy, she’d done her noble-wife bit by attending Frank’s opening at the Cocoanut Grove in L.A.—and then he went and ignited their usual tinderbox by winking at some broad in the audience. Afterward, having drunk too much for a change, they started going at it, then he gave her a hard slap that sent her reeling. She tripped over a table and landed on the floor, and suddenly she was bleeding.
An ambulance rushed her to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, where Dr. Leon Krohn, a gynecologist and friend of Frank’s, discovered that Ava had suffered a miscarriage. She honestly hadn’t known she was pregnant—or perhaps she’d just tried to pretend she didn’t know.
When the Hollywood columnist Harrison Carroll interviewed her a week later, she was still hurting—and still mad. Would Ava accompany Frank to his engagement at the Chez Paree in Chicago? “I don’t know,” she replied coldly. “It will depend on how I feel.”
It wasn’t just Frank’s anger, and the lost pregnancy, that ate at her; there was also her continued tenancy in MGM purgatory.
This she tried to brazen out. Carroll wrote:
Under present conditions, Ava isn’t anxious to get off suspension. “I believe,” she says, “that the studio has given me a series of bad parts and has showed a lack of interest in my career.”
The truth was that she was as undecided about her own