Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [268]
He was what?
He was beginning a TV show. With Eddie Fisher.
The last three words might as well have been a carving knife plunged into Sinatra’s chest. There was a long silence.
Apparently, Axel hadn’t heard what Frank had said. They had a recording session at Capitol on Thursday night.
Stordahl said he couldn’t be there. He had a contract.
Another deep silence.
The arranger began to elaborate, but then he realized the line had gone dead.
Frank called Alan Livingston and let him have it. Livingston was ready for him. He listened patiently, counted to five, and then almost instantly defused Sinatra’s anger by telling him he’d secured Billy May to lead the session. May was a top-drawer bandleader, one of the hippest arrangers and conductors around (and also an old Livingston cohort who’d done the music for the Bozo the Clown records). A big, hearty guy, tough but cheerful. Livingston knew Frank couldn’t object, and he didn’t.
In fact, though, the executive was playing a shell game with the singer. Livingston had known for a while that Stordahl was leaving—he’d encouraged it. It was time for Sinatra to move on. Axel was wonderful, but those somnolent strings of his were a relic of Frank’s Columbia past. Livingston had made big hits with Nelson Riddle and Nat “King” Cole, and now he wanted to make more big hits with Riddle and Sinatra. Riddle wanted in, too, but Riddle was an arranger’s arranger, a studio man who’d never led a band or made a splash. Livingston would have to work a minor subterfuge.
The morning after his climactic scene, Frank was on an airplane back to Los Angeles. His movie work was done, his fate was in the hands of a thousand imponderables—Hollywood, in other words—and it was time to get back to what had made him great in the first place. To what he could, to a great degree, control.
Just after 8:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 30, an unseasonably cool and rainy day, Frank got out of his car, flicked his cigarette into the gutter, and strode into Capitol’s KHJ studios at 5515 Melrose Avenue. Studio C, down the hall on the first floor, was warm and pleasantly crowded, once again full of familiar faces—Skeets, Zarchy, Miller, Alvin Stoller, Conrad Gozzo—and a couple of unfamiliar ones. One was a sad-eyed trombonist with a jutting lower lip: his name was Milt Bernhart. Frank, who had specifically requested Bernhart after hearing his beautiful solo on a Stan Kenton number called “Salute,” looked right through the newcomer, more concerned with another stranger standing on the podium, right where Billy May should have been. Sinatra turned to a producer he knew, Alan Dell, and with a sideways jerk of his head indicated the serious-looking, chubby-cheeked, V-hairline character with the baton in his hand.
“Who’s this?” he said.
“He’s just conducting the band,” Dell said quickly. “We’ve got Billy’s arrangements.”
May, Dell explained (Livingston had prepped him), had had to leave town unexpectedly to do a gig in Florida. But his arrangements were golden, and what’s-his-name on the stand—Sinatra didn’t catch the name—was very capable.
Frank reviewed the song list: Ted Koehler and Harold Arlen’s “I’ve Got the World on a String,” Koehler and Rube Bloom’s “Don’t Worry ’Bout Me,” a bouncy old Harlan Thompson–Harry Archer tune, “I Love You” (not to be confused with the Grieg-inspired “I Love You” he’d recorded for Columbia, or the Cole Porter “I Love You” he wouldn’t get around to recording for a few more years), and his Dorsey standby “South of the Border.” He’d been singing the last one since he was a kid, and the second two for years. As for “String,” he’d only put it on his repertoire for club dates during the past year, partly in ironic tribute to his troubles, also from a sincere wish that things might actually go his way again, soon. In any case, it was a great song. He liked to perform it at medium tempo, a semi-ballad cadence: ballads were still his home base.
From the moment the nervous-faced guy on the podium signaled the downbeat, Frank knew something was up. Stoller clashed a pair of cymbals;