Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [288]
He’d been loose in 1946 and he was loose now, but with a new component added: maturity. This year Frank had been through the crucible, emotionally and professionally. His “Foggy Day,” from pensive verse (“I was a stranger in the city …”) to joyous chorus, is an autobiography in miniature, a masterpiece of phrasing forged from Sinatra’s inseparably intertwined life and art.
Frank had always been in impatient command in a recording studio—even with Mitch Miller. Nelson Riddle recalled: “If I wasn’t conducting the orchestra to his liking, he’d shove me out of the way and take over. If he asked for diminuendo from the orchestra and didn’t get it immediately, he’d take things into his own hands and you can believe that they damn well played softer for him than they did for me.”
On “World on a String,” Frank had brought a new kind of authority to the music itself. On “Foggy Day,” he once more took charge, but with a chastened undertone. “Ava taught him how to sing a torch song,” Riddle would say later. In this “Foggy Day,” you can feel Frank and Ava’s actual agonies and ecstasies in the real London, just three months before. His voice has such a plaintive tremolo that you worry for his emotional well-being. On the song’s ultimate line, “and in foggy London town the sun was shining everywhere,” Frank sings the word “shining” not once, not twice, but five times in a row—sings it so passionately that you can feel the deep dark in back of the sunlight.
The next night he recorded four more songs, and one of them, the first—a pretty Burke–Van Heusen tune called “Like Someone in Love”—had been arranged by Riddle. Siravo’s charts were lovely, but this orchestration, with its Debussy/Ravel-esque flute passages (the flute would soon become a Riddle signature), was something special: a gift from one lover of impressionism to another, and a promise of more complex beauty to come.
Saturday night, November 7, wasn’t just the loneliest night of the week, as Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne’s great song had it, but the loneliest of Sinatra’s life: his second wedding anniversary, with his wife nowhere in sight. Accordingly, when Jimmy Van Heusen—Frank’s master of revels, and the champ at getting him to Forget—picked him up at Beverly Glen, he announced in his wry voice that they were going to get Frank laid. But good. He was as good as his word.
The next night Chester accompanied Sinatra to the El Capitan Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, where Frank was to do a guest spot on The Colgate Comedy Hour, with his old pal Jimmy Durante. If Frank was suffering over Ava, he hid it well, clowning it up with the Schnozzola, who kept interrupting him whenever he tried to sing—especially when he tried to sing “From Here to Eternity.” The two did a musical quiz-show skit together; they sang a duet about how all comedians want to be singers and all singers want to be comedians. Frank even warbled the Halo Shampoo jingle, “Halo, Everybody, Halo.”
Maybe he was able to feign good spirits so convincingly because he’d found a pleasant distraction: while he sang the jingle, a blond twenty-two-year-old beauty-pageant winner from North Dakota named Angeline Brown Dickinson smiled and showed off her silky tresses for the camera. Later, she and Frank—and then she and Frank and Jimmy—struck up a conversation backstage. Angie Dickinson was very young and, as she remembered vividly many years later, “bursting with awe” at being in Sinatra’s presence. She had a humorous, easygoing presence about her that he liked a lot. She was witty, but not caustic; she knew how to talk, but she knew how to listen, too. It turned out she was married in an informal sort of way, yet she was also an extremely practical girl, and her sights were set firmly on Hollywood. Chester asked her for her number—for Frank, of course—and of course she gave it to him.
Ava was still wrangling with MGM over The Barefoot Contessa. The studio was demanding an exorbitant fee from Mankiewicz for her services—and proposing stingy terms for her