Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [294]
And out came Frank, to big From Here to Eternity applause, looking painfully thin in his tux. But if, as he walked onstage, he felt any hangover from the last ten terrible days, he lost it the instant he flared his nostrils and went into his own, all-Arlen medley: “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “I’ve Got the World on a String,” and Mercer and Arlen’s “That Old Black Magic.” This was, quite simply, a master class in American popular song, and Fisher, the perpetrator of “Oh, My Papa”—who was always deferential to Sinatra’s infinitely greater gift—stood openmouthed in the wings. Frank was in magnificent voice, and his passion (“ev’ry time your lips meet mine, darling, down and down I go; round and round I go”) was palpably, almost embarrassingly, real, blazing out sun-like from the little black-and-white screen.
Watching the old, scratchy kinescope and taking note of the way he seemed to favor his left arm, holding it slightly awkwardly at times, one can’t help but wonder: Was he still wearing the bandages? Was that long tux-shirt cuff taped to prevent his accidentally revealing them?
SINATRA ADMITS HURTING WRIST BUT LAUGHS OFF SUICIDE RUMOR, ran the wire-service headline.
Crooner Frank Sinatra admitted Tuesday he had “bruised and scratched” his wrist, but laughed off as gossip the rumors he had attempted suicide.
The tempestuous singer, who recently reached a parting of ways with Ava Gardner, said he did not remember when or where the accident occurred.
Rumors that Sinatra slashed his wrist started when a photograph taken during a conversation with Eddie Cantor revealed a mark on the singer’s left wrist.
Hollywood gossips immediately connected it with his recent hospitalization in New York.
Still feverishly plotting how he might win her back, he went into the Capitol studios again on two late nights in early December. For the first session, on the eighth, he recorded three swingers, trying to pick up the mood from the meditative note he’d ended on in November—and perhaps pick up his own mood as well. Most of all, though, he was trying to notch his first big hit for the label. But while Riddle’s writing for the horns had all the wonderful lightness and sass of “World on a String,” the songs themselves (“Take a Chance,” “Ya Better Stop,” and “Why Should I Cry over You?”) were strictly grade-B stuff—a reminder to keepers of the pieties that Sinatra plus Riddle does not always equal magic.
The next night, though, singer and arranger returned to the studio with a string section and laid down three ballads, the second of which would turn into pure gold.
According to Nelson Riddle, Carolyn Leigh and Johnny Richards’s “Young at Heart” had been floating around various record companies for a while without attracting a vocalist. Nat Cole had passed on it. “I think it’s a good song,” Riddle told Sinatra, “but nobody wants to do it.”
“Let’s do it,” Frank said—according to legend (his), not even asking to hear it first. In fact, he had asked Jimmy Van Heusen for his opinion, and Chester had responded in his most clinical fashion that he thought “Young at Heart” could be a hit for Frank.
And so, on the night of December 9, Frank recorded it.
Sinatra, Riddle, and Gilmore convened at the KHJ studios at 8:30 p.m. They wrapped up at 1:00 in the morning—ninety minutes overtime, by the rules of Local 47 of the American Federation of Musicians. This meant that the costs for the studio time and the fees for the twenty-five players—costs that came out of Frank’s pocket—doubled from $1,072.50 to $2,145 (some $17,000 today).
Clearly, Sinatra felt it was worth his while.
A great vocal recording of a popular song is an inseparable weave of words and