His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [41]
“Tommy held on to Frank so fiercely,” said Nick Sevano. “He cherished him like a son. When he realized that Frank was finally serious, he called me, crying, ‘Please, Nick, talk him out of it. Please talk him out of it.’
“But you couldn’t talk Frank out of anything. Ever. He was a driven man in those days. He was relentless, so ambitious. He was like a Mack truck going one hundred miles an hour without brakes. He had me working around the clock. ‘Call Frank Cooper. Do it now. Don’t wait until tomorrow,’ he’d say. ‘Send my publicity photos to Walter Winchell.’ ‘Get my records to the Lucky Strike Hit Parade.’ ‘Call Columbia Records and tell them I’ll be singing such and such.’ Frank knew so much about promotion and how to hype himself. He learned it from Tommy. He was wining and dining disc jockeys when no one else was paying any attention to them. He knew that was the way to get his records played on the radio. He bought drinks for reporters all the time and took columnists out to dinner and was always buying them presents or sending them flowers. He never once let up—not for a minute.
“We’d be walking out of the theater at two in the morning after working all day and he’d say to me, ‘Did you talk to So-and-So? You didn’t call, did you?’ ‘Yeah, yeah,’ I’d say, ‘I’m on it.’ Of course, I’d have forgotten all about it, but Frank didn’t.”
Once he had a recording commitment from Manie Sacks, Frank wanted to make his move. He asked Axel Stordahl to go with him to do his arrangements. After seven years with Dorsey, Stordahl was reluctant to leave, but Frank agreed to pay him $650 a month, five times what Dorsey paid him. As angry as he was about his taking Stordahl, Dorsey still offered to advance Frank $17,000 if he would sign a contract pledging Dorsey 33 1/3 percent of his gross earnings over $100 a week for the next ten years. The contract also called for Frank to pay an additional ten percent to Leonard K. Vannerson, Dorsey’s personal manager, as a commission for bringing Frank to the attention of Columbia Records.
Frank needed the advance because he no longer would have a steady salary. He had to hire men and he wanted to buy a new house for his wife and baby daughter. Besides, he always needed money because he spent so heavily. So, in August 1942, he signed eagerly.
But a year later, he was sorry. He had given Dorsey only one thousand dollars under the contract, and now was refusing to pay anything further. He complained bitterly to the press about the financial hammerlock Tommy had on him, and his fans started boycotting Dorsey’s performances.
“You can quote Sinatra as saying that he believes it is wrong for anybody to own a piece of him and collect on it when that owner is doing nothing for Sinatra,” Frank told the New York Herald-Tribune. “Sinatra will fight this foreclosure or whatever it is to the last ditch.”
“It all sounds like a black-market meat-slicing affair to us,” said an editorial in Metronome.
Piqued at being portrayed as something short of an extortionist, Tommy sued. “I thought the lug would think the price too high,” he said. “I didn’t want him to quit, but he did. I never tried to collect, but when he gave out with interviews about how I had him all cut up, it made me sore.”
In August 1943 Frank’s lawyer, Henry Jaffe, flew to Los Angeles to meet with Dorsey’s lawyer, N. Joseph Ross, to try to settle the matter. In the end, MCA, the agency representing Dorsey and courting Sinatra, made Dorsey a $60,000 offer that he accepted. To obtain Frank as a client, the agency paid Dorsey $35,000 while Sinatra paid $25,000, which he borrowed from Manie Sacks as an advance against his royalties from Columbia Records. MCA agreed that