Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [58]
And then she turned and walked down the studio street and around a corner, and was gone.
Meanwhile, the big crowds kept coming to the Palladium, the movie stars in the VIP section watching with amusement as the teenage girls—the message had somehow traveled across the country, an unseen impulse of the kind that moves herds of reindeer or schools of fish—as the girls screamed Frankie’s name and swooned. Out of the crowd one night, between sets, came a familiar face: a carved-out, acne-scarred countenance, on the young side of middle age, similar in some ways to his own, only Jewish where his was Italian, hesitant and thoughtful where his was mercurial and expressive.
His name was Emanuel Sacks—Manie (pronounced “Manny”), for short. He had been a talent agent with MCA, and he had come to the Rustic Cabin around the same time Harry had, and told Frank just what Buddy Rich had told Frank: I like the way you sing. Sinatra had instantly liked this serious, shyly smiling fellow—he ran across so many creeps and phonies, drunks and blowhards in nightclubs, and this guy was clearly none of that, he was clearly a smart Jew, a serious businessman, classy, and he’d given Sinatra his business card. Which Frank had put someplace and forgotten about.
Until tonight. He instantly remembered the guy, whose homely, sensitive features were totally out of place amid the beautiful, hysterical faces at the Hollywood Palladium. They shook hands, and after a moment of small talk Frank asked him what he was up to. Still with that agency?
Not anymore. He was manager of popular repertoire at Columbia Records.
Frank stared. At Columbia?
Sacks smiled, shy but proud.
Not shy, Sinatra looked Manie right in the eye and asked how he’d like to record him as a soloist.
Coming from almost anyone else short of Crosby, it would have been, in late 1941, an absurdly presumptuous suggestion. Singers sang with bands. Bands made singers. Where was the singer who could make it on his own?
Yet Sacks looked back at him with complete seriousness. And more—Sinatra felt it: respect. Sacks said he’d like nothing better in the world than to record Sinatra as a soloist. But wasn’t he still with RCA, with Tommy?
Frank smiled. Things change.
Sacks smiled back. His teeth were crooked and stained. He was ready anytime Frank was. He took a small leather case out of his breast pocket, handed Sinatra a business card.
Sinatra took it and grinned: he would keep this card in a very safe place.
Two days later, Down Beat, in its annual poll, named Frank Sinatra Male Vocalist of the Year. The winner of the poll for the previous six years straight had been Bing Crosby.
Lion and cub. Bing and Frank, around 1940. (photo credit 9.2)
10
Newly married, and still in love. Frank and Nancy, circa 1940. (photo credit 10.1)
December 6 was a Saturday, the biggest night of the week at the Palladium. At about 2:00 a.m., after the band had left the stand and the musicians packed up their instruments and sheet music, a select crew, Tommy and Buddy and Frank among them, got into their big black cars and drove down Sunset to a large Tudor house on a quiet side street in Brentwood. No civilian could ever understand what it was like to finish a gig, your head still buzzing, your blood pumping. You could never just go to bed. You had to keep going—drink, smoke, drug, talk, get laid. Maybe all at once.
The Tudor house’s owner, just twenty years old, had been in the star-studded crowd at the Palladium that night, hovered over by this square-jawed, tan-skinned actor and that, but she’d only had eyes for the bandstand. She was petite, bottle blond, and deliciously curvy, with a haughty, sultry, heart-shaped face that made her look older than her age. Lana Turner had been around enough—she was a veteran of four hard years in Hollywood—to know that actors were nice to look at, but she really loved musicians. Most actors were a hell of a lot more fascinating on-screen than in real life, and a lot of the handsomer ones were interested in other men.