Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [88]
Sunshine and fresh air, Keller thought. And then … softball!
Some of the movie stars had an informal league that played Sunday afternoons in a field behind the Hollywood Bowl. It was good for a few laughs and plenty of wholesome publicity photos—there were lots of nice shots of suntanned hunks and pretty girls in tight cheerleader shirts (real girls didn’t play ball in those days).
Sinatra, Keller decided, would start a softball team. It would be called—but of course—the Swooners.
Evans agreed it was pure genius. He had hired the right man.
Keller had uniforms made up, and for a few Sundays, till Frank got bored (which never took very long), the Swooners took the field. Styne and Cahn and Sanicola and Crane played (Phil Silvers, not much of an athlete, preferred to kibitz from the sidelines), along with a couple of Frank’s new movie pals, Anthony Quinn and Barry Sullivan. At 119 pounds, Sinatra didn’t cut much of a figure in a baseball uniform—but the same couldn’t be said of the Swooners cheerleaders in their official T-shirts: Lana Turner, Virginia Mayo, Marilyn Maxwell, and, oh yes, Miss Gardner.
Who was on deck? In play? You needed a scorecard to figure it all out.
Just a few days after his son was born, Frank performed at a benefit for the Jewish Home for the Aged, at the Roosevelt Hotel. It was an unusual cause for Sinatra: maybe he was thinking of his dear old babysitter Mrs. Golden—or maybe his new agents at MCA, Messrs. Friedman and Wasserman, convinced him that the men who ran the town would eat it with a spoon.
After the interminable pious speeches, amid the red-velvet drapery and clink of coffee cups and crystal, Sinatra, stick thin in his monkey suit, stared out at the spotlight with moist eyes and gave them a giant ladleful: his version of “Ol’ Man River,” with a brilliant correction—Oscar Hammerstein’s offensive phrase from the 1927 verse, “Niggers all work on de Mississippi,” changed to the clunky, but patently uncontroversial, “Here we all work on the Mississippi.”
Out in the audience, the emotional eyes of the most powerful man in Hollywood, the tiny, rectitudinous Louis B. Mayer, also grew moist. The former scrap-metal salvager from Minsk who had created a white-picket-fence vision of America (and had had amphetamine-laced chicken soup fed to Judy Garland to keep her thin and peppy) thrilled to what he was hearing. As Sinatra’s magnificent voice soared to the final “just keeps rollin’ along,” Louie B. turned to an aide and stage-whispered, “I want that boy.”
He got him, of course. And it cost him, of course. In February—just as Step Lively was wrapping—Lew Wasserman and Harry Friedman sat down with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s lawyers and, over the next three months, hammered out one of the sweetest movie deals in history. The five-year, $260,000-per-annum contract would allow Sinatra to make one outside picture a year and sixteen guest appearances on the radio; it would give him the publishing rights to the music in every second film he made with the studio. As a final fillip, MCA got MGM to relax the terms of its famously strict morals clause.3
As for the seven-year contract he’d signed with RKO just six months earlier … well, thanks to MCA’s iron fist, velvet glove, and fast-dancing legal tap shoes, it was more or less movie history. With the exception of one short subject (The House I Live In, 1945) and two loan-out features, one bad (The Miracle of the Bells, 1948) and the other worse (Double Dynamite, 1951), Sinatra wiped his hands of Radio-Keith-Orpheum. And, as with Dorsey, there was never any uncertainty about who wound up with the sweet end of the deal. True, RKO wouldn’t languish without Sinatra: the studio rode out the 1940s on a spate of B pictures and star loan-outs from other studios. But B was the key initial for RKO Radio Pictures, Inc., and A plus was the only grade Frank Sinatra was interested in. MGM was the top of the heap, and now so was he.