His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [93]
“Jaffe was sitting in the NBC executive’s office and they were discussing the fifteen-minute show. While the executive was considering the possibility of using Sinatra on the show, he phoned Sonny Werblin of MCA and turned the intercom on so that Jaffe could hear the conversation between him and Werblin. Werblin, of course, did not know that Jaffe was sitting in the office hearing the entire conversation. When the executive suggested the possibility of using Sinatra on the show, Werblin attacked Sinatra vigorously, saying that he was no good, that he would not draw flies, and that the executive ought to drop the idea.
“After he hung up, the NBC executive turned to Jaffe and said, ‘How can I hire Sinatra to do a show for me when his own agent thinks he is dead?’ Jaffe was incensed. He went straight to George Heller of AFTRA (American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) and complained about MCA’s double cross of Sinatra. Heller caught fire, and within a couple of days he had induced AFTRA to pass a resolution that MCA no longer be recognized as a talent agent for any of AFTRA’s members. In effect, MCA was out of business for at least a day.
Werblin and Wasserman were panic-stricken. Werblin called Jaffe and said, ‘Kid, what are you doing to us? Why are you cutting our throat?’ After Jaffe had made clear why he was taking the position, Werblin went to work and got MCA to cancel an indebtedness of some thirty thousand dollars that Sinatra owed to MCA for living expenses. …”
But there were no movie offers, and there were not many requests for personal appearances either. Frank still had his Lucky Strike radio show, Light Up Time, and through Joe Fischetti he was booked into the Chez Paree in Chicago. He also had another opening at the Copacabana, but the future looked bleak. He talked to Ava in Spain every day but could not promise her a wedding because Nancy, who had been “temporarily” awarded all property, a Cadillac, custody of the children, and most of Frank’s available cash, remained convinced that he would come back home eventually and refused to give him a divorce.
“She has no plans for divorce,” said her lawyer. “The separate maintenance suit is just her way of making Frank save his money. She’ll put it all away as a nest egg. Then when nobody else wants him, she’ll take him back, and they’ll have something to live on.”
Ava, impatient with the delays, retaliated with her co-star, Mario Cabre, a Spanish bullfighter, whose proclamations of love soon became international news, driving Frank into jealous frenzies.
“The understatement of the year would be to say that he was difficult,” said Skitch Henderson, who was working as Frank’s accompanist and conductor at the Copa. “Frank, you know, has always respected sidemen, so when the band played badly, he’d get hacked at me instead of them. He was bugged, too, because he couldn’t get a hit record while a harmonica group had a million-copy seller in ‘Peg o’ My Heart.’ One night, when the band was especially horrible, it all boiled over, and he turned to me and muttered very sarcastically, ‘If I’d tried a little harder, maybe I could have gotten the Harmonicats to back me.’ It cut me deeper than anything that has ever been said to me.”
Frank’s voice faltered, forcing him to cancel five days of his Copa booking. On the sixth day, he crawled out of bed only because he knew that Lee Mortimer had bet Jack Entratter one hundred dollars that he would never complete the engagement. That night, April 26, 1950, during the third show, he started to sing but no sound came forth. He had been struck by hysterical aphonia, an affliction that strangles the vocal cords.
“It was tragic and terrifying,” said Skitch Henderson. “He opened his mouth to sing after the band introduction, and nothing came out. Not a sound. I thought for a fleeting moment that the unexpected pantomime was a joke. But then he caught my eye.