Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [261]
“Surely your lawyers and accountants are working with the government, aren’t they?” I asked. Frank said they were, so I went back and called all the reporters. “Mr. Sinatra asked me to tell you the following: ‘My lawyers and my accountants are working with the government lawyers and accountants, and if it takes From Here to Eternity, I’m going to pay it all back.’ ” I later told Frank that I had to publicize the picture first and him second, but he thought that was brilliant.
Frank and Monty. The two men had enormous respect for each other. By example and through the advice Sinatra eagerly sought from him, Clift raised Frank’s acting to a new level. (photo credit 33.2)
Tax troubles and Ava troubles weren’t his only distractions that month. “Isn’t Frank Sinatra switching soon from Columbia records to RCA-Victor?” Earl Wilson wrote in early March. Not exactly, as it turned out.
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Nelson Riddle and Frank. The genius arranger and the genius singer had much in common: a New Jersey background, domineering mothers, solitary natures, restless sexual drives. (photo credit 34.1)
Of course, since Columbia had dropped him months earlier, Frank couldn’t “switch” to any record label. And he especially wasn’t switching to RCA Victor, where Manie Sacks, despite all his power and influence as head of A&R, had tried more than once, with no success, to sell the washed-up singer to his sales force.
William Morris, too, was trying to peddle Sinatra: What good was a singer who didn’t record? (And what good was a client earning a mere thousand a week?) Sam Weisbord, the president of the agency and the man who’d sewn up the From Here to Eternity deal for Frank, rang every record company’s phone off the hook until he finally reached Alan Livingston.
Livingston, Capitol’s vice president in charge of creative operations, had started at the fledgling label at the end of the war, fresh out of the Army and wet behind the ears. As low man on the totem pole, the boyish-looking ex-GI had been given the theoretically unenviable assignment of creating a children’s record library: he responded by inventing Bozo the Clown. Together with Livingston’s other brainstorm, the read-along record, Bozo sold millions of units and brought in huge merchandising revenues. Almost overnight, Alan Livingston achieved boy-wonder status. Seven years later, still just in his mid-thirties, he was hungry for a grown-up coup.
“Alan, we’ve just taken on representation of Sinatra,” Weisbord told him.
“Really?” Livingston said. The response was more than polite; the record man was actually intrigued by what sounded, at that point, like a contrarian notion.
“Yes,” the agent said. “Would you be interested in signing him?”
“Yes,” Livingston said at once.
“You would?” Weisbord said.
It had popped out involuntarily: not an attitude that laid the foundation for a strong bargaining position. But bargaining wasn’t the point at this stage of Sinatra’s career; getting him a foothold was.
Capitol was more of a natural for Frank than Weisbord had imagined. The label had recently signed Axel Stordahl, who’d been telling everybody who would listen, “Frank’s singing great again.” A house producer named Dave Dexter, formerly a critic for Down Beat, was similarly vocal about his enthusiasm for Sinatra.
Weisbord took Frank in to meet with Livingston. Livingston recalled:
He was meek, a pussycat, humble. He had been through terrible times. He was broke, he was in debt … I was told he had tried to kill himself on occasion. He was at the lowest ebb of his life … Everybody knew it.
Frank and I talked, and I signed him to a seven-year contract, one year with six options, which is as long as you can sign anybody. I gave him a standard royalty of five percent and gave him a scale advance. He was glad to have a place to make records. And that’s how I signed Sinatra.
Maybe Frank’s humility was genuine; maybe he was employing some of the acting skills he was learning