Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [78]
This is disingenuous. In fact, Sinatra’s true goal on that summer Wednesday was not eluding the crowds but meeting them, and the waiting throng—probably closer to a few hundred than five thousand—had been lured by a radio “whisper” of the singer’s arrival. As the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Super Chief pulled in to the little Mission-style depot, a loudspeaker was blaring “All or Nothing At All.” The whole event had been carefully orchestrated by the Evans office (Margaret Divan, Los Angeles representative), working in league with the West Coast Sinatra fan clubs and the RKO publicity department. Another photograph taken that day shows Sinatra standing on a ladder in the midst of an enthusiastic but notably restrained throng; a couple of female hands are proffering autograph books, but none are ripping at his clothing. The ladder is clearly stenciled “RKO GRIP DEP’T.”
His fans weren’t the only ones thrilled to see him. RKO executives were hoping Sinatra could help lift Radio-Keith-Orpheum Pictures out of the financial trough into which another young genius, Orson Welles, had sunk it with his brilliant but money-losing epics Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons.5
It was astonishing: Frank was about to sign a seven-year movie contract, and nobody really even knew whether he could act. He had appeared, very briefly, in three motion pictures to date: Paramount’s Las Vegas Nights (1941), MGM’s Ship Ahoy (1942), and—released earlier in 1943—a Columbia musical with the perky, patriotic title Reveille with Beverly. In Las Vegas Nights and Ship Ahoy, Sinatra had been a mere singing extra, the male vocalist for Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra, and while he was featured in Reveille, it was only as the singer of one number, “Night and Day” (accompanied by six female pianists).
Still, whether he could play Hamlet was hardly the point. He had been playing one role, brilliantly, for almost ten years. He didn’t have to act. He was Frank Sinatra.
The staid Chandler family’s Los Angeles Times gave front-page treatment to the new star’s arrival. SECRET OF LURE TOLD BY CROONER—IT’S LOVE, read the two-column headline. The story reported that Sinatra had come not only to start his movie career but also to play a concert with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl. L.A. classical music aficionados were outraged, the paper said, even though Sinatra’s appearance promised to give the orchestra, and the bowl, a badly needed financial boost. One of the naysayers had been the Times’s distinguished music critic, Isabel Morse Jones, a portly old-guard Angeleno who ventured bravely out to that besieged garage in Pasadena. It wasn’t just the howling fans Ms. Jones was nervous about; it was Frank himself. “My objections to swooner-crooner singing in sacred precincts [had recently] hit the wires and reached him in New York,” she wrote. But Sinatra smiled that smile at her, and practically from the moment she opened her reporter’s notebook, Isabel Morse Jones was a goner. Frank knew just how to play the ladies, young and pretty or middle-aged and plump. And if the lady in question was a distinguished classical music critic, why, all the better. He spoke softly, and she listened carefully.
“I expect to get the thrill of my life Saturday night,” he told Ms. Jones. “Oh, yes, I can be just as enthusiastic about classical music as those kids out there are about my kind. What do you suppose I have 500 albums of symphonies and so on for?”
Five hundred albums of symphonies … One can see the music critic’s eyes widening, her features softening… “It’s the words of a song that are important,” Sinatra went on. “I pick my songs for the lyrics. The music is only a backdrop. I sing love songs and mean them. They’re meant for two girls, both named Nancy. One is my wife, aged 24, and not jealous and the other is my three-year-old.