Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [274]
Frank was looking for the exit. From performing, from Ava, from everything. Then he pulled the plug.
FRANK SINATRA
HAS COLLAPSE
STOCKHOLM, Sweden, June 1, UP—Crooner Frank Sinatra today was reported suffering from a severe case of “exhaustion” and/or bad press.
His manager, John Harding, said Sinatra probably will call off his Swedish tour because he is “completely exhausted” and “needs going over very thoroughly.”
Harding admitted that the criticism in Sweden has been rough, but said Sinatra’s real trouble is “complete exhaustion.”
Ava was due back in England on June 7 to start shooting Knights of the Round Table, at $17,500 a week. Frank’s wallet was all but empty. It didn’t improve matters between them.
On May 16, precisely as the Naples audience was stamping, booing, and yelling for Ava, “I’m Walking Behind You” hit number 7 on the Billboard chart. It was Frank’s first hit since “The Birth of the Blues” had charted at number 19 the previous November—his longest drought in ten years. The problem was that Eddie Fisher’s version of “I’m Walking Behind You” was number 1.
It was not to be a great year for Sinatra sales. Paradoxically, “Walking” would be Frank’s biggest hit for 1953, though Alan Livingston knew in his bones that the Stordahl-arranged song represented the singer’s past, not his future. But even the present looked iffy. When “I’ve Got the World on a String” hit the charts on the Fourth of July, it was only at number 14, and it stayed there for just two weeks.2 Nineteen fifty-three was a year for Fisher and Perry Como (who had two number-one hits) and Patti Page, with her monster Columbia hit “Doggie in the Window,” conducted and arranged—complete with barking—by Mitch Miller.
In many ways it seemed as though 1953 might not be Sinatra’s year at all. He had little to show but bruises for his Continental tour. He could dimly remember having thrown heart and soul into From Here to Eternity; but back in England (where Ava had rented a big flat in St. John’s Wood), in the days when overseas really was overseas, he’d only heard second-and thirdhand about the excited rumors—about both the film and his performance—flying around Hollywood. He was cast up on foreign shores, with little to back up his confidence, least of all his wife’s esteem. “We came back to London under a terrible cloud,” Ava recalled. In truth, she was sick of him. In a photograph of the two of them at a prizefight in early June, their bodies aren’t quite touching. (At one point, during a lull in the action, Frank called out, “Why don’t ya fight, ya bums, ya!” Ava rolled her eyes.)
Still, his manager had been able at the last minute to throw together a tour of Great Britain: from June till early August, Sinatra would scramble from London to Bristol back to London up to Birmingham and back to London, then up to Glasgow and Dundee and Edinburgh and Ayr, then down to Leicester and Manchester and Blackpool and Liverpool, then back to London. Ava, busy playing Guinevere (and perhaps also busy with her co-star and old flame, Robert Taylor), would not accompany him.
Then a successful June show on the BBC buoyed Frank’s morale. The Brits, having just crowned a new young queen, were in correspondingly good spirits. They didn’t come out in huge throngs to hear Frank, but the crowds who did come applauded appreciatively as he sang old songs (“Night and Day,” “Sweet Lorraine,” “You Go to My Head”) and new ones (“The Birth of the Blues” and “I’ve Got the World on a String”) and sipped tea between numbers. His voice gained strength with every stop. “Sinatra is still the greatest male singer in pop music,” the New Musical Express said. “His range and power seem greater than ever.” And his cheekiness (“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Odeon or whatever this joint’s called,” he said at the Blackpool Opera House) rubbed the Brits the right way. They knew all about bloody-mindedness.
Harry Cohn used to say that he could tell whether a movie was any good depending on whether his fanny squirmed