Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [287]
When he left the commission, the reporters were waiting, but it wasn’t gaming licensure they wanted to discuss.
“Frank! Is your marriage to Ava over?”
He squinted behind his sunglasses. “I guess it’s over if that’s what she says.”
“How do you feel about it?”
A long pause while Frank tried to think how he felt about something in whose reality he did not believe. “Well, it’s very sad,” he finally said. “It’s tragic. I feel very badly about it.”
“What about the rumors that you might get back together with Nancy?”
He waved the question off as he might have waved off a pesky housefly. Sanicola opened the car door for him and he got in.
In Los Angeles, at exactly the same time, a United Press reporter who had managed to get the private number at 320 North Carolwood was asking the same question of Frank’s ex-wife.
“There is positively no chance of a reconciliation,” she said. “All the rumors about Mr. Sinatra and me are false.” She slammed down the phone and leaned on the kitchen counter for support, staring out the window for a long time.
Frank flew back to Las Vegas and, that night, hosted a Halloween party at the Sands. The next day, the New York papers carried an Associated Press photograph of the host standing between two chorus girls, wearing a clown costume. If his life was a kind of opera, at the moment it was Pagliacci.
37
Frank, hairline headed north, with the two Eddies: Cantor and Fisher. Colgate Comedy Hour, November 29, 1953. Sinatra’s cuff conceals the bandages on his left wrist, the result of a suicide attempt two weeks before. (photo credit 37.1)
He’d been singing to many audiences, good, bad, and indifferent, over the past six months, but the songs he’d sung had shimmered out into the air and vanished: over that tumultuous period he hadn’t committed a single tune to posterity. This all changed on Thursday, November 5, when Frank returned to Capitol’s Melrose studios, shook hands with Nelson Riddle and Voyle Gilmore, and began recording what would become his first album for the label, Songs for Young Lovers.
There were only eleven musicians in Studio C that night: two reeds, four strings, piano, guitar, bass, drums, and harp. No brass. George Siravo, not Riddle, had written the arrangements, months before, for the even more stripped-down bands (eight players) that accompanied Sinatra at the 500 Club, the Riviera, and the Sands. On this night, Riddle was there only to conduct, a role he never had much taste for. But it was Sinatra, and Nelson was glad to receive Frank’s warm greeting: he was now a known quantity.
Nelson Riddle heard, from the moment he lowered his baton, that something was different—that this was not the same Sinatra he’d recorded with the previous May. During that last session, Frank had sung beautifully but politely over the lushly orchestrated strings, muffling the promise of the great “I’ve Got the World on a String” he’d recorded just two days before. Now he fulfilled that promise. This time, with only half the number of musicians he’d had in May (and just four fiddlers rather than nine), his voice was more exposed. The band was hipper—Allan Reuss’s electric guitar imparted a 1950s-modern sound on some numbers—and the songs were better: two Gershwins (“A Foggy Day” and “They Can’t Take That Away from Me”), a Rodgers and Hart (“My Funny Valentine”), and Tom Adair and Matt Dennis’s lovely (and gorgeously titled) “Violets for Your Furs.”
This time, coming out from the protective cover of the orchestral backing, Sinatra was astonishing. On the first song, “A Foggy Day,” he established dominance. The voice was as magnificent as ever, but now he showed a rhythmic ease, a sense of play, that he hadn’t shown since he’d recorded the jazz-trio throwaways “That’s How Much I Love You” and “You Can Take My Word for It, Baby,” and his great “Sweet Lorraine,” with the Metronome All-Stars, in 1946. His tossed-off, Hoboken-bratty lyrical improvisations (“I viewed the morning with much alarm/The British Museum—it lost its charm”) showed the world that