I finally caught up with James Kaplan's ring-a-dingdingally good Frank: The Voice and, once again, became intrigued by the two Sinatras; one, a singer of remarkable sensitivity able to communicate in thoroughly entrancing fashion, the other an often highly immature, nasty, selfish oaf who fraternized with hoodlums in an apparent attempt to further a reputation for being tough.
The book, of more than 700 pages, while largely a re-write of many of the tomes about the entertainer, is a penetratingly good one comprehensively researched. Like Gary Giddons' examination of Bing Crosby (A Pocketfull of Dreams), it takes the reader up to the break-through moment in the life of a musical sensation. The Crosby book ended with his entry into films having concentrated on his development as an artist in addition to stories of palship with such notables as Hoagy Carmichael, Bix Beiderbecke, the Rhythm Boys and other members of the Paul Whiteman Orchestra who enjoyed a drink or ten. Unlike, Sinatra, Crosby was regarded favorably by the public thanks to astute public relations and The Groaner's ability to confine his shortcomings largely to the home. He was, by nearly all accounts, a complete antithesis of the merry, nice guy next-door screen presence. Kaplan devotes considerable space in the Sinatra book to Crosby and for good reason. It was Sinatra's worship of Crosby that inspired a career built on a lot of talent buoyed by intense determination.
Kaplan takes a warts and all approach to the finger-snapping singer from Hoboken, NJ in a kind of hip, semi-wise guy fashion--particularly when telling of gangster connections, piggish behavior and insensitive endings of relationships with women including Ava Gardner. Yes, Ava is there along with Lana Turner, Marilyn Maxwell and women of less notoriety. Actually, Ava, according to Kaplan, drove Sinatra up a lot of walls including one time in Palm Springs when the two of them had serious spat #187 (or whatever) with Sinatra taking off for the desert community presumably to resume a relationship with Turner. Gardner, a good friend of Turner, beat Sinatra to Palm Springs as another Hollywood tale unfolded. Good reporter Kaplan takes us through a number of versions of that overly-reported story including Kitty Kelley's His Way. A bibliography of 127 suggests how much digging the author did to come up with what is, above all, a fair look at a most complicated performer.
Many of the musicians who played roles in Sinatra's early days as a band singer are there. Jo Stafford and the Pied Pipers, Jack Leonard (he preceded The Voice as the boy singer in Tommy Dorsey's band), Harry James & The Music Makers, song writer Jimmy Van Heusen (worth a book himself), Dick Haymes, Alec Wilder (the vastly underrated, eccentric, self-taught composer) and drummer Buddy Rich, a Sinatra nemesis whether it was women or tempos. Anecdotes of musicians and their lives on the road are particularly effective while providing enormous insight. The reader gets a vivid sense of what the Rustic Cabin was like when Sinatra waited on tables in the New Jersey joint and sang for his supper while learning his craft before discovery by James.
One of the book's delights involves the circumstances of some of the 1,300 songs recorded by Sinatra. Kaplan is particularly adroit at analyzing Sinatra's style revealing small but significant differences between the live and recorded singer. "Four nights later, on an NBC radio broadcast from the Astor Roof, Sinatra sang 'I'll Never Smile Again' to another houseful of upper-crusters. The air check of the number reveals a small but striking difference from the recording: on the radio version's out chorus (the last words sung in the song) as Sinatra sings 'Within my heart, I know I will never start/To smile again, until I smile at you,' he uses the vocal trick he'd discovered back at the Rustic Cabin, a breathy little catch in his voice, in this case before the initial h of 'heart.' It's a small thing, a showman-like touch that would have made no sense on a recording but all the sense in the world before a live crowd--a naked play for the hearts of the rich girls in the audience. Calculated, and thoroughly effective."
A fan of the Pied Pipers, I once sat next to Jo Stafford on the dais of a Kansas City Advertising Club luncheon where Stafford was a special guest, not the main speaker she should have been. What a delight. She was funny, a great teller of stories, totally engaging and the best lead singer of vocal groups I ever heard. We spoke of Sinatra and her comments about him were almost word-for-word what Kaplan got from her some 50 years later. "When you sing with a group, it takes a certain amount of discipline, and Frank was excellent at it," Stafford said. "You can't wander off into your own phrasing. You've got to do exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. Very few solo singers can do that. He could. When he sang with us, he was a Piper, and he liked it, and did it well. I don't know any other solo singer, solo male singer especially, that can do that."
Some of Sinatra's not so supporting players come off worse than others. Hardly surprising, Louis B. Mayer is his usual suspicious, small and vindictive self while being critical of his MGM singer/actor property during a period when Mayor's mistress was former Kay Kyser singer, Ginny Simms. Simms, vivacious and appealing, was something less than beautiful and some thought her a bit horse faced. Sinatra had fun with that one. Seated one day in the MGM commissary, someone threw him a provocative line: "Hey, did you hear about L.B.'s accident?" Not missing a beat, Sinatra replied: "Yeah, I hear he fell off of Ginny Simms." The incident immediately preceded the actor's leaving the studio.
Earl Wilson, whose Sinatra: An Unauthorized Biography gets heavy usage by Kaplan, comes off as a guy desperately wanting to be considered a Sinatra intimate. His column items reflecting various stages of the singer's career--particularly the seemingly never-ending series of Gardner/Sinatra fights--suggests he asked a lot of dumb and self-serving questions.
A typical Wilson/Gardner scene occurred shortly before the actress filmed "Mogambo." She and the columnist met "in a large eatery run by a large eater" (probably Toots Shor's) and the column item suggests an editor had complainted about Wilson plugs for "eateries." Continue Wilson, "I happened to mention her Herculean husband whom she considers has negleted her, which--if it's true--makes him this century's man of iron." Wilson then asks if he can be an intermediary and the onslaught of drivel continues.
There has always been an understandable disconnect between segments of the public and artists whose personal lives are less than exemplary. There's the Charlie Chaplin of all his cinematic triumphs and The Tramp's suggested but never proven communist sympathies. The right's disenchantment with Hollywood goes back to Chaplin. He was the first movieland "enemy" and it wasn't long before McCarthyism began doing damage to a bunch of people who didn't deserve it. Kaplan's telling of the Sinatra saga includes the singer's early liberalism but, because the book ends with the career-changing Best Supporting Oscar for his role in From Here to Eternity (1954), we don't learn of his switch to conservatism because of what he felt was a social slight by John F. Kennedy.
Mitch Miller, who produced Sinatra's largely disappointing recordings at Columbia Records, comes off better than expected. It was Miller who tangled with the singer over such fare as "Mama Will Bark." The recording, possibly the worst of Sinatra's career, was done at the depths of his career. The "Mama" on the record was Dagmar (her straight name was Virginia Ruth Egnor) whose description as a "tall, eye-poppingly buxom West Virginia blonde" is not nearly sufficient. According to Kaplan, Sinatra did not squawk when Miller broached the tune. The author also reveals that Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, Stafford and others had to pay for their own recording sessions.
If there's a hero in the book, it's George Evans, a brilliant PR guy who guided Sinatra's career through nearly all the time covered in the book. Evans was enormously creative, far seeing, loyal, and of tremendous energy. It was Evans who gave Sinatra the tag that never left him: The Voice. Evans invented the bobby sox hysteria that provided the singer such overwhelming attention which, nevertheless, brought a great deal of grief to the publicist; Sinatra was not an easy going employer. Evans, more than a savvy PR practitioner, somehow worked his success in a quaint era where such a thing as bad publicity actually existed; he painted the singer as mostly a family man in spite of reality's red flags. No one thus far has been named the inventor of spin, but George Evans' name has to be right up there should such a determination be pursued.
While there is little new in Sinatra: The Voice, the writing is crisp and the research exhausting. James Kaplan has succeeded in giving us a much better understanding of an American icon who dramatically changed popular culture.
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