Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [80]
But Frank endured. He became, for better and worse, a kind of god, and it’s particularly interesting to observe him in the celluloid guise of a bashful young swain. The role, of course, was just a slight variation of the role he played when he sang. Watching Higher and Higher (in which Sinatra also gets to perform five numbers7), you can understand why the girls went bonkers: the guy was gorgeous and magnetic and achingly vulnerable. Quite simply, he was phenomenal—way too much so for little RKO Radio Pictures, a fact of which Frank Sinatra, doubtless, was sharply aware. Surely he had his people working frenziedly on contingency plans to extricate him from the studio even as he wrapped his first film with them. After all, contracts, seven-year and otherwise, were only pieces of paper.
Another contract, one that grew progressively more irksome as Sinatra’s earnings skyrocketed, was the onerous severance agreement he had signed with Tommy Dorsey. Having initially boasted he would simply stiff the steely-eyed bandleader, Frank now decided to toss Tommy a bone: reportedly, about $1,000 in commissions. Predictably, this was not an amount that made Dorsey happy—and he grew increasingly unhappy hearing Sinatra brag to the press how much he was raking in.
In response, Sinatra, under the brilliant aegis of Evans, was turning the dispute into a cause célèbre, having his radio writers inject comic jabs at the bandleader into his sketches (at the sound of a few out-of-tune bars of “I’m Getting Sentimental over You”: “It’s Dorsey, coming to collect his commission!”) and paying bobby-soxers to carry picket signs (“Dorsey Unfair to Our Boy Frankie!”) outside Tommy’s show in Philadelphia, while eager newspaper photographers immortalized the event.
Battered in the public arena, Dorsey would have been down for the count—except for the fact that Tommy Dorsey took no shit from anyone. There was also the fact that Dorsey was represented by that rising giant, the Music Corporation of America (MCA), which was desperate to also represent Frank Sinatra. Despite the imaginative formulations of both Mario Puzo and Sinatra, the whole affair was resolved in the most Byzantine (and peaceful) way possible.
The Godfather, of course, was the vehicle that elevated the whole contretemps to the realm of myth. In the novel, Puzo relates how the fictional bandleader Les Halley pressures the fictional singer Johnny Fontane into an impossibly severe personal-services contract. When Fontane approaches his godfather, Don Corleone, and asks him to intervene on his behalf, the don goes to Halley and offers him $20,000 to release Fontane from the contract. Halley refuses to play ball. Even after Don Corleone ominously drops his offer to $10,000, the bandleader won’t budge.
The next day [Puzo writes] Don Corleone went to see the band leader personally. He brought with him his two best friends, Genco Abbandando, who was his Consigliere, and Luca Brasi. With no other witnesses Don Corleone persuaded Les Halley to sign a document giving up all rights to all services from Johnny Fontane upon payment of a certified check to the amount of ten thousand dollars. Don Corleone did this by putting a pistol to the forehead of the band leader and assuring him with the utmost seriousness that either his signature or his brains would rest on that document in exactly one minute. Les Halley signed. Don Corleone pocketed his pistol and handed over the certified check.
Still wincing from his portrayal as the sniveling Fontane, but loftily refusing to acknowledge it, Sinatra took the high road when Sidney Zion asked him in 1986 about the Dorsey contract. “The man who straightened it out was named Saul Jaffe,” Sinatra told Zion. “He’s a lawyer who now is retired. Mr. Jaffe was the secretary of the American Federation of Radio Artists, and Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra would play from hotel [ball]rooms around the country on radio programs. I told [Jaffe] the whole story, and he went to Mr. Dorsey and he said to him, ‘I represent