Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [67]
It was true enough. But the phrase itself sounded like something that would have rolled off the stentorian tongue of some radio announcer of the 1920s or 1930s. And here in January 1943—one of those hinges in time that come along periodically, a moment when everything simply vaults forward—Frank Sinatra, a radically new American product, needed drastic repackaging, and somebody new to do it.
The coiner of the slogan was another of Sinatra’s agents at the time, a soon-to-be-forgotten figure named Harry Kilby. The publicist who convinced the powers that be at the Paramount to affix the tired-sounding strapline to the bottom of the marquee was one Milt Rubin, a Times Square hack and the willing slave of the Emperor Winchell—Walter, of course. Sinatra had hired Rubin in the fall of 1942, soon after leaving Dorsey, on a tip from the all-powerful columnist, and had quickly come to regret it. The PR man treated Frank like just another act, no more important than anyone else on his C-list roster of ventriloquists, acrobats, and female impersonators. Meanwhile, Rubin hovered around Winchell’s table at Lindy’s, laughing at the great man’s jokes and begging for scraps. There were times Sinatra—admittedly a high-maintenance client—couldn’t reach his $50-a-week publicist on the telephone. Nancy, who wrote the checks, began ignoring Rubin’s bills. This got his attention, though not in a good way: the publicist initiated legal proceedings against his client.
Manie Sacks of Columbia, Sinatra’s new rabbi, had the solution: George Evans was Frank’s man. The best in the business—the best there ever was.
This was manifestly true. Between Rubin and Evans, there was simply no comparison. A glance into the former’s fusty Times Square office would have made it clear: a cluttered couple of rooms behind a frosted-glass transom door, an old broad in a snood doing her nails at the reception desk while some sweaty guy with a Chihuahua cooled his heels. In George B. Evans’s clean and modern Columbus Circle suite, on the other hand, there were three assistants fielding calls from clients like Mr. Glenn Miller, Mr. Duke Ellington, and Miss Lena Horne.
Evans was forty, in the prime of his life, and he was a dynamo, with a thrusting determined jaw and a ravening look in his piercing dark eyes. Lightly balding, bespectacled (tortoise-shell frames were his trademark), handsome in his way, he dressed well, spoke fast and crisply, came straight to the point. And he had a good opinion of himself, with reason: he lived for his clients, and his clients did well by him. Their joys were his joys; their sorrows were his, too. If they needed solace at 4:00 a.m., he picked up the phone, no questions asked. He was as expert at making trouble go away as he was at whipping up excitement.
In return he was choosy about whom he wanted to represent. Where this Sinatra boy was concerned, Evans was skeptical at first, Manie Sacks’s laudatory call notwithstanding. Singers were a dime a dozen, and what was a singer, anyway, without a band? The bands made news; the bands brought the crowds. And the bandleaders were gods. Glenn, Duke: God, just the thought of these brilliant, elegant, authoritative men gave Evans chills. In some sense, representing them made him feel he was taking on their qualities.
But a boy singer! This one might even be different from the rest—from what he had heard on records and the radio, Evans was willing to grant that. It was a pleasant voice, nicely expressive. Still, George Evans didn’t quite see what all the fuss was about.
Then he went, and he saw. Nick Sevano, Sinatra’s Hoboken homeboy and soon-to-be ex-gofer (one too many tantrums about starch in the shirts; life was too short—except that Sevano would spend the rest of his very long life trading, like so