Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [325]
23 “a darling of”: Kuntz and Kuntz, Sinatra Files, p. 40.
24 “FRANK SINATRA, well known”: Ibid., p. 45.
25 “they called Shirley Temple”: Summers and Swan, Sinatra, p. 12.
26 “I don’t like Communists”: Kelley, His Way, p. 110.
27 “We’re bigger than”: Moquin and Van Doren, American Way of Crime, p. viii.
28 “Phil and Frank were”: Kelley, His Way, p. 111.
CHAPTER 17
SOURCE NOTES
1 “August 1, 1945”: Columbia Records Archive, Sony Music Corporation.
2 “Dear Frank. For the past six”: Ibid.
3 “Dear Frank: I received”: Ibid.
4 “They were tough-minded”: George Avakian, in discussion with the author, Oct. 2006.
5 “These should be recorded”: Friedwald, Sinatra! p. 176.
6 “We don’t have enough”: Ibid.
7 “Sinatra gave us”: Ibid.
8 “I don’t know the first thing”: Ibid.
9 “That was a very strange”: Avakian, discussion.
10 “Sinatra was then”: Friedwald, Sinatra! p. 176.
11 “Sinatra wasn’t so bad”: Avakian, discussion.
12 Frank Sinatra Conducts: Frank Sinatra Conducts the Music of Alec Wilder (Columbia Records, 1946).
13 “If you don’t know”: Columbia Records Archive, Sony Music Corporation.
CHAPTER 18
1. Although, as Will Friedwald points out, the long American Federation of Musicians strike, during which the big bands couldn’t record, deprived the bands of vital revenue.
2. Technically, Sinatra was beaten to the punch by the great Lee Wiley, who, beginning in the late 1930s, made a series of limited-edition, one-composer (Gershwin, Porter, Rodgers and Hart) albums for New York’s Liberty Music Shops, which catered exclusively to Manhattan’s first-nighting and cabaret-going elite.
3. The bureau continued watching the Mafia closely, but doing little about it, until J. Edgar Hoover’s death in 1972. Officially—since the Mob was aware that Hoover was a deeply closeted cross-dresser and a passionate racetrack bettor who may have financed his gambling habit in unorthodox ways—the director was of the opinion that the Mob was an exaggerated problem.
SOURCE NOTES
4 “How sweet the way”: Lyrics from “One Love,” words by Leo Robin, music by David Rose (Sydney: Chappell, 1946).
5 “As Shaw put it”: Friedwald, Sinatra! p. 155.
6 “I take great pride”: Ibid., p. 156.
7 “I was working”: Ibid., p. 153.
8 “The day after our marriage”: Summers and Swan, Sinatra, p. 124.
9 “If I had as many”: Kelley, His Way, p. 471.
10 “Yes, light an Old Gold”: Songs by Sinatra, radio broadcast, Jan. 2, 1946, transcript at emruf.webs.com/sinatra.htm
11 “featured songs for the ages”: Friedwald, Sinatra! p. 160.
12 “As a symptom”: Kuntz and Kuntz, Sinatra Files, p. 25.
13 “I got a break”: Kelley, His Way, p. 126.
14 “Company had early”: Ibid., p. 127.
15 “Frank was born”: Shaw, Twentieth-Century Romantic, p. 74.
16 “The New York Office”: Kuntz and Kuntz, Sinatra Files, p. 28.
CHAPTER 19
1. Pablo Picasso felt much the same way: see John Richardson’s superb biography.
2. This unique but completely successful meeting with jazz immortals occurred at a particularly significant juncture in the history of America’s single indigenous art form, while the young titans Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker were in the process of creating jazz’s version of cubism, bebop. A few months later, twenty-one-year-old Mel Tormé, having heard Ella Fitzgerald sing scat syllables on “Lady Be Good,” would begin trying it out himself, with great success. Sinatra, however, would keep being Sinatra (he could do nothing else), developing in parallel to jazz, never in its thrall. He was a representational artist to his core: abstraction never tempted him.
3. A recent biography quotes Avakian as saying the singer and his henchmen walked down the hall “like five diamonds” (Summers and Swan, Sinatra, p. 86). Which makes no sense at all until you realize what the producer was actually saying: that they resembled the playing card the five of diamonds.
4. Hilliard would also later co-write the great Sinatra anthem about the other end of the day, “In the Wee Small Hours.”
5.