Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [72]
And George Evans was succeeding beyond even his expectations—so much so that in early 1944 Billboard gave him an award for “Most Effective Promotion of a Single Personality,” an occasion that inspired him to pronounce (a little indiscreetly) to the Chicago Tribune News Service, “Frankie is a product of crowd psychology … Understand, it was the Sinatra influence that provided the initial impetus. But it was I, Evans, who saw the possibilities in organized and regimented moaning … It’s a big snowball now, and Frankie’s riding to glory on it.”
I, Evans. The publicist may have been a popinjay, yet he was a very successful one, and there is no evidence that Sinatra resented his ego—as long as that ego was doing good things for him. And Evans was more than just a publicist: he was a father figure, the third in a series of such figures in Frank Sinatra’s life, after Tommy Dorsey and Manie Sacks. While Sinatra invariably found a way to pry away the intimacies that complicated his life, with the father surrogates things were even more complex, and ultimately explosive. It was as if he had to kill the old man again and again. And each of the father substitutes was—as Sinatra’s actual father of course was not—a considerable figure. Then again, to loom large in Sinatra’s life at this point, a man had to be.
George Evans’s genius went beyond mere publicity. He took a strong hand with his new client, the main issue being Sinatra’s marriage, which was increasingly troubled. There was no deep psychological underpinning to this: it was simply that the more famous Frank Sinatra got, the more women there were who wanted to go to bed with him, and he saw no reason not to oblige as many of them as possible. Covering up the evidence was rarely his first priority. In the quaint era when there was still such a thing as bad publicity, this was one of the worst kinds: in 1940s America, a man—and especially a public exemplar—was nothing if he was not a family man. And if George Evans had anything to do with it, Frank Sinatra would, by God, be a family man—whatever the reality was.
Evans undertook a three-pronged offensive. The first was positioning, or what might today be called spin: the pictures of Frank mowing the lawn and dandling Baby Nancy.
The second was active interdiction. With Sinatra, the women gathered like flies, came in over the transom and through the emergency exit doors. Whenever possible, Evans headed them off, but he couldn’t always be present to look out for his client’s best interests. So whenever news of the singer’s latest indiscretions reached him, the publicist started working the phones—to Sinatra, to the girl, to her folks in Oshkosh, if need be: anything to stamp out the brush fire. And there were a lot of brush fires.
Evans was earning his fat salary, and it was fine with Sinatra. He liked George, liked the fact that the older man was unafraid of him. He smiled when the publicist grabbed him by the elbow to steer him from trouble, smiled even when he stamped out another brush fire. There were always more fires to be lit.
The third prong of the offensive turned out, surprisingly, to be Nancy Sinatra herself. From the moment he met her, George Evans saw that she was a remarkable woman, direct and intelligent, with a quiet dignity and a real beauty behind a physically unconfident exterior. Her liquid brown eyes searched and questioned. And suffered. Evans immediately saw that Nancy was well on her way to becoming one of those Italian peasant ladies you saw sitting on apartment stoops—heavy, fiercely plain, all browns and blacks, coarse fabrics and unplucked hairs. As a married man himself, he understood how women battled with weight, and as Frank Sinatra’s publicist he understood that Nancy was on the verge of giving in: there was simply too much competition.
For the longest time she had been grappling on her own with her position, and it was