Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [69]
Frank was just … the Voice.
Simple. Instantly recognizable. You didn’t have to ask whose. Accept no substitutes. This was it, now and for all time.
Evans lit a cigar; in the sweet cloud of blue smoke came the second idea. He would never admit to what inspired it. Like all Americans, he had listened with fascination to radio broadcasts of the era’s great demagogues, orators who had a hypnotic effect on crowds: Roosevelt, Churchill, the evangelists Aimee Semple McPherson and Father Coughlin. But Evans was especially riveted by the Nazi broadcasts of Hitler whipping the German masses into a frenzy. The rallies were beautifully choreographed, the mass chanting swelled and fell precisely on cue. The dictator was never drowned out. Someone was behind this, Evans knew: someone very skillful.
George would have to be just as skillful in working his new client.
Evans had read how farmers would pay a pilot to go up and scatter certain chemicals on clouds to end a drought—seeding the clouds, they called it. Well, if clouds could be seeded, why not crowds? Rumor had it that Milt Rubin had handed out half-dollars in the Paramount lobby to girls who promised to make a racket during Sinatra’s shows. It was the right idea, Evans felt, but unscientific in approach. In later years he would offer to donate $1,000 (he subsequently raised it to $5,000) to the favorite charity of anyone able to prove that “a kid was given a ticket, a pass, a gift, or a gratuity of any kind in any shape or manner at all to go in [to a Sinatra show] and screech.” But Evans then went on to admit to E. J. Kahn Jr. that “certain things were done. It would be as wrong for me to divulge them as it would be for a doctor to discuss his work.”
It was a self-aggrandizing comparison, but George Evans was in the aggrandizing business, and he was head and shoulders above his competition. “George was a genius,” said Jerry Lewis, who, along with his partner, Dean Martin, was represented by Evans in the late 1940s. “He would audition girls for how loud they could scream! Then he would give each of them a five-dollar bill—no dirty money, just clean new bills; I learned that from him. The agreement was that they had to stay at least five shows. Then he spread them through the Paramount—seven sections. Evans would read the scores of the songs to see where the screaming should come in—the girls could only scream on the high, loud parts, never when it was low and sexy.”
The publicist would even take groups of girls to the basement to rehearse them, giving them precise cues when to yell “Oh, Frankie! Oh, Frankie!”—not just during the loud parts, but whenever Sinatra let his voice catch. Evans also coached the singer. Picking up on Sinatra’s intimate relationship with the microphone, Evans told him: Imagine that mike on its stand is a beautiful broad. Caress it. Make love to it. Hold on to it for dear life.
Sinatra looked impressed: the guy was good. Sanicola and Sevano bobbed their heads eagerly.
The publicist even trained both the singer and his claques in the art of call-and-response. When Sinatra sang “(I Got a Woman Crazy for Me) She’s Funny That Way,” with the lyric “I’m not much to look at, nothin’ to see,” Evans coached one of the girls to yell “Oh, Frankie, yes, you are!” On “Embraceable You,” Evans told Frank to spread his arms beckoningly on the words “Come to papa, come to papa, do.” The girls would then scream, “Oh, Daddy!