Alaskan Range: Claques
...“Frank,” James Kaplan’s biography of Sinatra states the already wildly-popular singer “hired the best publicist in show business, George Evans” who “saw that the crowds were hysterical, but not choreographed so he took it upon himself to take Sinatra’s crowds to a new level.”...
Columnist and librarian Greg Hill tells of crowd manipulation.
It’s nice to know some things endure, like good teachers and good vocabularies. My high school theater history teacher, Ray Overton, is still teaching me. For example, we both delight in wordplay, literature, dramatic arts and things humorous. He recently emailed me about the term “claque,” “a group of people hired to applaud at a performance.”
Mr. O wrote, “I get several ‘word-a-day’ newsletters, and this was today’s word on one of them. The word ‘claque’ I always taught as part of the Roman Theatre unit in theater history, because, as far as I know, that’s when people were first paid for the job. Friends and relatives who do the job for free are not usually called claques.”
“Claque” come from the French term “claquer, to clap,” according to Anu Garg at Wordsmith.com, who notes “Although a claque is usually hired to applaud, sometimes it is also used to heckle at a rival’s performance.” Garg mentioned claque-meister George Evans, an innovative publicist, who Frank Sinatra hired to train him and his claques how to get crowds worked into frenzies.
“Frank,” James Kaplan’s biography of Sinatra states the already wildly-popular singer “hired the best publicist in show business, George Evans” who “saw that the crowds were hysterical, but not choreographed so he took it upon himself to take Sinatra’s crowds to a new level.”
First, Evans attended four consecutive Sinatra performances at New York’s Paramount Theater and noticed “that not every show was successfully hysterical. Sometimes there were odd lulls in the tumult; sometimes the crowd got in its own way, and the singer’s, just screaming, creating a massive wall of sound.”
Evans had read how clouds can be seeded to induce rainfall, and he knew Sinatra’s previous publicist gave half-dollars to girls waiting to see their idol who were willing to scream uncontrollably. He figured this was “an unscientific approach,” that could be improved.
According to Jerry Lewis, another 1940s-era George Evans client, “he would audition girls for how loud they could scream. Then he would give each of them a five-dollar bill ... The agreement was that they had to stay at least five shows. Then he would spread them through the Paramount ... Evans would read the scores of the songs to see where the screaming should come in — the girls could only scream on the high, loud parts, never when it was low and sexy.”
Evans didn’t stop there; he’d “even take groups of girls to the basement to rehearse them, giving them precise cues when to yell “Oh, Frankie! Oh, Frankie!’ not just during the loud parts, but whenever Sinatra let his voice catch.”
Sinatra was coached by Evans to “Imagine that mic on its stand is a beautiful broad. Caress it. Make love to it.”
Sinatra also learned how to use call-and-response. “On ‘Embraceable You,’ Evans told Frank to spread his arms beckoningly on the words ‘Come to papa, come to papa, do.’ The girls could then scream, ‘Oh, Daddy!’ After which Frank would murmur into the mic, ‘Gee, that’s a lot of kids for one fella.’
Evans even trained some of the girls to faint in the aisles, others to moan loudly in unison. He hired an ambulance to park outside the theater and issued ushers bottles of ammonia ‘in case a patron feels like swooning.’”
Some things are so popular claques aren’t needed, like our public library. More than half the borough’s population has public library cards they’ve used in the last two years, and that doesn’t include the scores of families who all use the same card, or the thousands who regularly use the library’s resources inside its walls, reading books, watching movies, using computers, attending meetings and programs, and on and on.
These patrons understand and appreciate how their public library brightens the community. Even those who don’t use the community’s libraries or schools benefit from living around people who do.
A better educated, more informed, community with strong resources for increasing their knowledge base makes for a wealthier, more vibrant community all around. There’s lot to enjoy at the library right now, for that matter. “Come to papa, come to papa, do.”
