Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [79]
“He is just naturally sensitive,” Isabel Morse Jones wrote, her fingers flying over the typewriter keys, when she got back to the office. “He is a romanticist and a dreamer and a careful dresser and he loves beautiful words and music is his hobby. He makes no pretensions at all.”
Another one bites the dust.
He handled his first meeting with Louella Parsons, a few days later, with equal skill. Here was another small, pudgy female columnist, except that this one was a real dragon lady: a personal favorite of her employer, William Randolph Hearst, and the most feared woman in Hollywood. Her forty million readers gave her tremendous power. Yet even Lolly Parsons’s knees wobbled in Sinatra’s presence. She wrote that he had, “Noah Webster forgive me, humility. He was warm, ingenuous, so anxious to please.” He would grow less eager to please as his own power grew. Parsons and Sinatra would have a love-hate relationship over the years, until her clout waned and he decided he didn’t need her anymore. Long afterward, she would reflect: “Sinatra couldn’t have been so boyishly unspoiled, so natural and considerate. But I have to admit he was. After I met him, I was enrolled in the Sinatra cheering squad. And I stayed in a long, long time.”
Two days after Sinatra’s arrival in Pasadena, a radio listener in San Jose wrote a letter to the FBI:
Dear Sir:
The other day I turned on a Frank Sinatra program and I noted the shrill whistling sound, created supposedly by a bunch of girls cheering. Last night as I heard Lucky Strike produce more of this same hysteria I thought: how easy it would be for certain-minded manufacturers to create another Hitler here in America through the influence of mass-hysteria! I believe that those who are using this shrill whistling sound are aware that it is similar to that which produced Hitler. That they intend to get a Hitler in by first planting in the minds of the people that men like Frank Sinatra are O.K. therefore this future Hitler will be O.K. As you are well aware the future of some of these manufacturers is rather shaky unless something is done like that …
Crazy as it was, the letter was notable for one reason: it was the beginning of what would become a 1,275-page FBI dossier on Sinatra.
He rented a bungalow at the Garden of Allah, where the parties never stopped. Five years earlier, Sheilah Graham had moved Scott Fitzgerald out of the complex so he could get some work done. Sinatra, who had come to Hollywood not only to start a movie career but also to have some serious fun, had picked his new residence deliberately. He took some vocal coaching from his new neighbor Kay Thompson. And he commuted to Culver City to make Higher and Higher.
The picture was a trifle, the kind of silly B fluff the studios cranked out by the ton in the 1930s and 1940s. The upstairs-downstairs comedy, such as it is, is set in motion when the wealthy Drake family loses its money and Mr. Drake conspires with the servants to marry the scullery maid off to the rich boy next door … Who, in an unconsciously inspired bit of casting, is played by none other than the Hoboken Kid, as himself. His first line, ever, in the movies, to the maid who opens the Drakes’ door: “Good morning. My name is Frank Sinatra.” (The maid faints.)
The big surprise about Sinatra in Higher and Higher is not how well he can hold a big screen, but how beautiful he is. Not handsome—any Joe Blow can be handsome. The twenty-seven-year-old Frank Sinatra, shot in rich black and white by cinematographer Robert De Grasse, is resplendent. Lovingly lit, photographed in slightly soft focus (and largely from the camera’s left, his right, to avoid the bad profile), he glows through his every scene, all cheekbones and wide, wide eyes. He’s like Bambi with sex appeal.
As for his acting—it scarcely matters: you simply can’t take your eyes off the guy. A great deal has to do with the undismissable fact that this is Frank Sinatra. Had he been killed in a plane crash in 1947, or had his career come to an end (as it almost did) in 1950 or thereabouts, maybe