Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [295]
And everything about this recording was perfect. New high-fidelity recording tape and microphones brilliantly brought out Sinatra’s diction, phrasing, and pitch-perfect tone, not to mention the gorgeousness of the musical background and Nelson Riddle’s arrangement. From the opening fillip—a string passage announcing the melody in a quizzical, slightly off-kilter way that draws the listener in irresistibly—it was clear that a genius was at work. Riddle had brought impressionist sonorities to the American popular song for the first time, as well as a complexity of sexual longing that would infuse the 1950s and provide an antidote to the conventional pieties of the Eisenhower years.
And most to the point, he had brought a new level of art to Frank Sinatra. Once the singer began, it was apparent that Riddle had completely understood Sinatra’s lecture about overbusy orchestrations: the flutes and strings shimmer over the gorgeous glide of Frank’s ever-deepening baritone; underneath lies the deep woof of the trumpetless brass section (featuring, for the first time, the bass trombonist George Roberts). It was vintage Riddle—only the vintage had just ripened.
All at once, Sinatra and Riddle were a team. Frank had never sung this way, and Nelson had never written this way. (The arrangements he’d done for Nat Cole, while superb, were colorless by comparison.) And what he and Frank were doing was inimitable: “Young at Heart” is a wonderful number, but it’s more a great moment than a great song per se—it’s difficult to imagine any other singer, no matter how skilled, ever bringing as much to it as Sinatra brought to it that night, three days from his thirty-eighth birthday.
As with Frank’s acting in From Here to Eternity, his singing on “Young at Heart” told the world that he truly had returned from the dead. But as would be the case with the movie, the real fruits of the recording would be delayed until the new year.
The last song of the night, recorded in the wee small hours of December 10, never became nearly as well-known as “Young at Heart,” but the Jimmy Van Heusen number, with lyrics by Carl Sigman, was ravishing all the same—and, as with all Sinatra’s great ballads, a little too close to home for comfort:
I could have told you she’d hurt you …
But you were in love, and didn’t want to know.
38
Spain, May 1950. Jimmy Van Heusen shows Ava how to use his camera while Frank and an expatriate couple named Frank and Doreen Grant look on. Ava would take shelter with the Grants over the hard Christmas of 1953, as Sinatra futilely tried to win her back. (photo credit 38.1)
The press was omnipresent in Sinatra’s life: a third party in his marriage, a constant kibitzer on every aspect of his career. He could never completely tune it out, because the reporters and columnists were always checking in. Besides, he needed them as much as they needed him.
Yet even if he’d turned a corner in his professional life, even if he was behaving a little better than he used to, there were still those journalists who felt honor-bound to attack him. Like Maggio, he was an uppity wop, proud even when he’d been beaten to a pulp. It didn’t sit well with much of America—especially Middle America. An early-November editorial in Michigan’s Holland Evening Sentinel read:
The breakup of the sultry love affair of Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner after only two years of what was euphemistically called marriage caused a critic to call the love affairs of the movie world “barnyard romance.” The only trouble with that description is that it is insulting to the respectable domestic animals of the barnyard.
On the other hand,