Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [76]
And what did Manie Sacks think of all these macho goings-on? How did the quiet and Talmudic record executive blend in with the hearty extroverts of the Varsity? No doubt, like many reflective men, he took vicarious pleasure in the company of doers. We do know that by a complicated formula, Sinatra, who detested solitude and surrounded himself with loud talkers and backslappers, took great pleasure in Manie Sacks’s company. And he trusted him. Sacks brought out (as no man ever had before) a better self in Sinatra, a contemplative side at his center that few, with the exception of Nancy, had ever seen. Manie calmed Frank down. It was a valuable skill, and a unique one. The arranger Stordahl was a serene character, yet when things went south during a recording session, he would quietly smoke his pipe (upside down, like the Norwegian sailor he actually was) as Hurricane Sinatra raged and threatened and finally blew itself out.
Manie Sacks was a different ball of wax. From their first meeting, Sinatra seems to have sensed that Manie didn’t just have real business acumen, didn’t just have something Sinatra wanted (a contract with Columbia, the Rolls-Royce of record labels); he also had—for lack of a better word—soul. Manie was honest to the core; he was incapable of disingenuousness. Sinatra, who could wear a half-dozen personalities in the course of a morning, was fascinated by the man’s purity. Like George Evans, Sacks was in his early forties, old enough to feel like a father to Sinatra. But Evans was another extrovert, a man to whom words were verbs. Sacks was deep.
He was small and dark haired, with a long, thin, acne-scarred face and a sizable nose—not homely-handsome, really, but homely-memorable. When he began to spend time with Sinatra, the crazed fans would sometimes mistake the record executive for the recording artist. For a brief time the press, when it had nothing else to write about, would make much of the supposed resemblance between the two. In fact, though, only in the grossest possible details—stature, hair color, face shape—was there a correspondence. Sinatra, for all his facial imperfections, had a wild, Dionysian beauty. Manie Sacks looked like a rabbi.2
“He was a very unusual-looking man,” George Avakian recalled. Avakian first met Sacks in the late 1930s, when, while still a student at Yale, he was starting to produce jazz albums for Columbia. “You got the feeling right away that this was a man who knew what he was doing. He could have a piercing gaze. I don’t mean like Benny Goodman’s famous ray. But he looked you in the eye, and he was very direct in his speech. He didn’t waste a lot of time. He always looked as though he was on the point of doing something very intense. He looked very intense. And he was. Manie I think ended up getting ulcers.”
And Sinatra would have been the one who gave them to him. But at first the relationship was a beautiful thing, even in a difficult time. The American Federation of Musicians strike against the record companies, which had begun in August 1942, was in full swing when Sinatra signed with Columbia Records. Indeed, the first time Frank stepped into a recording studio as a solo artist (Liederkranz Hall on East Fifty-eighth Street; Monday, June 7, 1943), beginning a commercial relationship with Columbia that would last for a tumultuous decade, he saw no musicians, only the eight-person vocal group that had recently accompanied him on the radio, the Bobby Tucker Singers. Sinatra hadn’t made a record in eleven months. Manie Sacks was so desperate to get product out to Frank’s female fan base that he had asked him to sing a cappella.
He was game at first. Listen to his maiden recording, of Hoffman, Lampl, and Livingston’s “Close to You”: You hear Sinatra in fine vocal form, backed by what