Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [262]
If he was superstitious, he wasn’t thinking about it when he agreed to meet Livingston for lunch on Friday, March 13, 1953, at Lucey’s,1 a celebrity watering hole on Melrose, right across the street from the Paramount gate and Capitol’s recording studios. The food smelled delicious, and Frank was in great good spirits—he felt hungry again. As his witness, Livingston had brought along his girlfriend, the actress Betty Hutton, a square-jawed blonde who liked to laugh: there were plenty of laughs. Sinatra had brought Sanicola and Frank Military, a music-publishing pal who screened songs for him. Livingston waited till the drinks had arrived before unsnapping his briefcase and taking out the papers. He raised his glass to a great association.
The toast was seconded by all. Frank clinked his glass with the executive’s, then took a long pull of Jack Daniel’s. Livingston handed him a fountain pen; Frank regarded the papers on the table. He knew well what Capitol’s option clause specified: the label could drop him in a year if things didn’t work out. March 1954. Who knew where anybody would be in March 1954? But things would work out, if he had anything to do with it. He scratched his signature on the contract.
It was a long, pleasant lunch, yet the proceedings were of little note to the outside world. The next morning, a tiny wire-service item on page two in many of the nation’s papers carried the news, buried beneath articles about a UFO sighting over New Mexico’s Kirtland Air Force Base and the illness of the president of Czechoslovakia. “Frank Sinatra was signed to a Capital [sic] recording contract today, terminating his long association with Columbia records,” it read, not quite accurately.
The next week, Alan Livingston flew to Capitol’s annual sales convention in Estes Park, Colorado. “We had every salesman in our distributing company there, every branch manager, every district manager, every promotion man,” he recalled. “There must have been a couple of hundred people. And I got up and talked about future artists and recordings, and I announced that we had just signed Frank Sinatra.”
Everyone in the room groaned.
Livingston raised his hands to quiet them. “Look,” he told his sales force, “I can only judge on talent. I can’t judge what people did in the past. I only know talent, and Frank is the best singer in the world. There’s nobody who can touch him.”
Still, that groan stayed with him. The past was exactly what Sinatra had to get away from.
“Hey, do me one favor and do yourself a favor,” Livingston told Frank when he got back to town. The executive said he had a great young arranger he wanted to team Frank with. But Sinatra shook his head practically before the executive had finished speaking.
“I’ve worked with Axel for practically my whole career,” he said. “I can’t leave Axel.”
Livingston asked Frank just to hear him out. The arranger was amazingly talented. His name was Nelson Riddle.
Frank shrugged—never heard of him. Practically nobody had. Riddle, a former trombonist and arranger with Tommy Dorsey in the post-Sinatra period, seemed to specialize in working anonymously. When Livingston told Sinatra about all the sides Riddle had arranged for Bing Crosby, Nat Cole, Mel Tormé, and Billy Eckstine, Sinatra shook his head again. Why hadn’t he heard of this guy?
They hit on an agreement: Frank would do a session with Stordahl, Capitol would put out the record, and they would see what ensued. If the cash registers rang, fine. If not, Frank would give what’s-his-name a shot.
“All hair restorers having failed,” Erskine Johnson confirmed on March 16, “Frank Sinatra has