His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [95]
Nancy clung to every delaying tactic she could in hopes of outlasting Ava Gardner and bringing Frank back home. “What can she do for him in bed that I can’t do?” she asked plaintively.
“She’s miserable about all his gallivanting, but she’s still very much in love with him,” said her lawyer Gregson Bautzer, who was making Frank’s life miserable.
“I’m the one responsible for that,” said singer Kitty Kallen. “I’m the one who got Greg as Nancy’s attorney. She was my best friend, and I was staying with her at the time while I was appearing at the Mocambo. Frank definitely wanted a divorce, and Nancy didn’t know any attorneys. So I called Greg, and he got her such fantastic terms throughout the negotiations that when Frank found out I was the one who brought in Greg, that did it! I was on his list. He kept me from doing Jackie Gleason’s television show and I didn’t work Vegas for a long time. In fact, I didn’t work for almost five years because of Frank’s anger at me over that business. He didn’t speak to me again for ten years, and then it was only because I was a friend of someone closely associated with the [Kennedy] White House.”
Frank had agreed to pay Nancy $2,750 a month in temporary support. Later, he wanted so much to be free that he signed an agreement to pay her one-third of his gross income up to $150,000, and ten percent of the gross above that figure until her death or remarriage, with the payments never to fall below one thousand dollars a month. In addition, Nancy kept the Holmby Hills home, stock in the Sinatra Music Corporation, their 1950 gray Cadillac, and custody of the children. Frank kept the Palm Springs house, a 1949 Cadillac convertible, and all his musical compositions and records.
Without his salary from MGM, his financial resources plummeted. He had occasional club dates, but his record royalties were dwindling. He received six thousand dollars a month from Columbia Records, although the company was no longer selling ten million Sinatra records a year, as it had in 1946. His mentor, Manie Sacks, had gone to Capitol recently, leaving him under the direction of Mitch Miller, who nurtured such singers as Johnnie Ray, Frankie Laine, Jimmy Boyd, Jerry Vale, Patti Page, Tony Bennett, and Rosemary Clooney. With Manie Sacks gone, Frank was just another singer—a balladeer whose slow, sad songs were no longer selling.
“It was pathetic,” recalled Harold Chapman, a Columbia Records engineer. “Sinatra would open his mouth and nothing would come out but a croak. Usually, when a singer is in bad shape, we can help him by extending his notes with an echo chamber. But Sinatra was one of the meanest men we ever worked for, so we engineers and musicians just sat on our hands and let him go down.”
Frank was so financially strapped by the monthly payments to Nancy that he borrowed $200,000 from Columbia to pay his back taxes after MCA refused to lend him the money. From January 1 to June 30, 1951, he earned $328,050, of which Nancy claimed $67,805. When he paid her only a part of that amount, her lawyers quickly moved against his office building at 177 South Robertson Boulevard, where he was living, and forced him to sell.
Meanwhile, Columbia Records, which no longer could issue a new Sinatra record every month as it had in the past, instructed Mitch Miller to do everything possible to recoup their investment.
“I was flailing myself trying to get something that would work,” said Miller. “I had made all these great records with him—‘Nevertheless,’ ‘You’re the One,’ ‘Love Me,’ and ‘I’m a Fool to Want You’—but they just weren’t selling. We couldn’t give them away. So I racked my brain trying to come up with something commercial. Frank’s contract gave him full approval over all his songs, and he would not always record my suggestions. Once I met him at LaGuardia and brought him into the studio to hear two songs that I had arranged for him. I had his keys and had them arranged for him with chorus, orchestra, and French horns. It was the night before he was leaving for Spain to see Ava, and I wanted him