Sinatra

by Anthony Summers

  Once Frank took over the wheel of the bus and announced that he intended to pass Dorsey, who was driving in front of them in his car. “At first everyone yelled at him that he was nuts,” Bobby Burns recalled. “Then they began to laugh. We rocketed along that road.” Frank did manage to pass and Dorsey responded good-humoredly, even after learning that the engine of the bus needed expensive repairs.

  Frank called the bandleader “the old man,” and said he had been “almost like a father to me.” Dorsey was a night person, as was Frank. “I’d sit up playing cards with Tommy until maybe 5:30 every morning,” Sinatra remembered. “He couldn’t sleep ever: he had less sleep than any man I’d ever known. I’d fall off to bed about then, but around 9:30 A.M. a hand would shake me awake and it’d be Tommy saying, ‘Hey pally— how about some golf?’ So I’d totter out on to the golf course. Tommy bought a baby carriage one time, filled it with ice and beer and hired an extra caddie to wheel it around after us. We’d have a beer after each shot. After nine holes, imagine—we were loaded.”

  Both men had humble origins and minimal schooling. Dorsey sought out people who had an education, as would Frank. Both had rambunctious, protective mothers. Dorsey loved puerile pranks, as would Frank in the future. The bandleader would leave water-filled sponges on musicians’ seats, or turn a garden hose on them from the wings. He would squirt seltzer down a female singer’s cleavage.

  Both men favored Courtley cologne. Both used Dentist Prescribed toothpaste. Dorsey collected elaborate toy trains, as would Frank. Both sought perfection and control over those around them. Both were ruthless toward perceived enemies. And the two men were in harmony on what mattered most to them, their music. Frank, Dorsey said, “sang a song like he believed every word of the lyrics. . . . I’ve had other singers in my band, perhaps many of them knew more about the technical part of music, but no one ever sang like Frank did. No one ever put into a song what he did.”

  Though Dorsey offered barely any coaching as such, Sinatra was to say that “Tommy taught me everything I know about singing.” He ascribed to Dorsey his grasp of elocution and diction, which in his songs rarely betrayed his New Jersey upbringing. Frank learned most of all, though, from the way Dorsey played the trombone. He could hold a musical phrase for an extraordinarily long time, prolonging the mood of a musical moment, seemingly without needing to take a breath. If a singer could master the same degree of breath control, Frank thought, he could minimize the need to interrupt the sense of a song’s lyrics. “I used to watch Tommy’s back, his jacket, to see when he would breathe,” he said. “I’d swear the sonofabitch was not breathing. I couldn’t even see his jacket move. . . . I thought, he’s gotta be breathing some place— through the ears?”

  Dorsey eventually shared his secret. “He showed me,” Sinatra said, “that he was breathing in the corner of his mouth so he could catch a breath. . . . But in holding the instrument he covered his mouth with his hand. . . . It made it seem like he played ten to twelve bars without breathing.”

  A singer could hardly cover his mouth, but Frank continued to focus on the problem not least because of a newfound enthusiasm that would have astonished many of the youngsters in his audience. A chance invitation to a concert at Carnegie Hall sparked in him a lasting love of classical music—Debussy, Brahms, Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Wagner. The violin of the Russian virtuoso Jascha Heifetz, whom Frank made a point of seeing often, strengthened his feeling that, for a singer, breath control was of paramount importance.

  “Every time he came down with the bow,” Frank said, “there was hardly any perception at all that it was going back up again. . . . You never heard a break. . . . I thought, If he’s doing that with the bow, why can’t I do it better than I do it now as one who uses my breath? . . . It was my idea to make my voice work in the same way as a trombone or a violin.”

  Frank set out to improve his breathing. “I did lots of exercises, breathing exercises. I did running and that kind of stuff.” He used to swim “mostly underwater to keep the bellows as strong as I can.” The physical training, Joe Bushkin reckoned, enabled Frank to increase his range by three notes. Sammy Cahn watched him at work with Dorsey and marveled. “Frank can hold a tremendous phrase,” he said, “until it takes him into a sort of paroxysm—he gasps, his whole person seems to explode, to release itself.”

  Frank returned to his old singing coach, John Quinlan, to practice “calisthenics for the throat.” Quinlan convinced him of the importance of vocalizing, singing without words, every day, a discipline to which Sinatra would adhere all his working life. Whenever possible before appearances, Frank rehearsed over and over, with Hank Sanicola playing piano.

  Two years earlier, at the Rustic Cabin, another singing waiter had said he thought Frank was a bel canto singer. Now, with success beckoning, Frank decided bel canto might be the “something different” he needed. The Italian phrase, which dates back to the Middle Ages, simply means “beautiful singing.” Articulating the full meaning of bel canto to laymen, however, tends to elude even the experts. The music writer Albert Innaurato has called it “never-never-land stuff . . . that impossible balance between word and tone . . . simultaneous sound and sense emerging from powerful emotion.”

  Innaurato thought Sinatra mastered the skills of bel canto, usually aspired to by opera singers, without pretending to operatic power. Both he and Ella Fitzgerald, he wrote, “have opera houses in their throats, and the breath of life courses through their voices . . . getting our souls to vibrate in response.” Luciano Pavarotti thought the mature Sinatra came “very close to Italian bel canto.”

  Less sophisticated listeners, a music critic pointed out, may have heard Frank’s singing technique and thought it sounded like “moaning and mooing.” Even Connie Haines, who also made the move from Harry James’s band to Dorsey’s, was at first nonplussed. “I didn’t know if I cared for it,” she remembered. “We had real ‘trained voices’ before that, you know. But Frank believed in the words, like an actor. He delivered the message. As a young singer I didn’t understand. But when I hear him now I think he was the greatest singer in the business—ever.”

  Within three months of joining Dorsey, Frank was winning converts. A trio of musicians, including Frank’s predecessor with the band, Jack Leonard, went to hear the “new kid” at a New York performance. “We all were sure he was gonna fall on his ass,” pianist Joel Herron remembered, “but when he started to sing, I sunk down in my seat. I felt humiliated for the guy who was sitting next to me—Leonard—who had just become the oldest kind of news that there was in the world.”

  In May 1940, the Dorsey band played the nightclub at the Astor Hotel, near Times Square. A famous bar was reopening that night, and the place was filled with celebrities. When Frank sang “Begin the Beguine,” Joe Bushkin recalled, “the place went bananas.” When he followed up with “Polka Dots and Moonbeams,” he remembered, “the people were still going nuts.” That posed a problem, for the band had no more solo songs for Frank in its repertoire. “Just sing whatever you want to with Joe,” Dorsey said, then Frank and Bushkin managed to get through several unrehearsed songs. Bushkin was thrown, though, when Frank called for “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” “If you know the tune,” Bushkin said, “you know you can really get lost in the middle. . . . I’m right out there without bread and water, man. . . . I couldn’t find the chord change. Next thing I know, Frank was out there singing it all by himself.” So helpless did Bushkin feel that for a few moments he actually walked away from the piano.

  Yet Frank never lost the audience. That was the night, Bushkin thought, that “Frank Sinatra happened.” Crowds flocked to the Astor, and the band’s engagement was extended. The place was jam-packed all summer.

  FRANK WAS ANXIOUS to make records, and with Dorsey he had ample opportunity. In the era before long-playing records, Frank recalled, the trick was to churn out “three hard-thrill minutes of commercial music” as often as possible. Eighty-four songs featuring Sinatra were released in th
e nearly three years he was with the band, more than forty of them in the first year alone. One of them was “I’ll Never Smile Again.”

  The song was written by a young woman pianist mourning the death of her husband. It came to Dorsey as a demo record, but for some time he did not bother to listen to it. When he and colleagues finally did so, in his office at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, they thought the song had obvious commercial appeal. Dorsey rushed to record it, but was dissatisfied with the result. Then he tried again with the Sentimentalists, a group consisting of Frank as lead singer and the Pied Pipers quartet. He urged them to sing “real easy, like five people sitting around a piano in the living room.” Dorsey’s trombone and a tinkling keyboard sustained the melancholy:

  I’ll never smile again, Until I smile at you.

  The song topped the charts for twelve weeks, beginning in mid-July 1940, receiving endless play on the radio and on jukeboxes across the country. Though Frank was credited on the record’s label, his contribution earned him only a $25 bonus. Yet everyone involved knew that he had made a breakthrough, that “I’ll Never Smile Again” was a career milestone.

  Soon came more Dorsey-Sinatra hits focusing on loneliness: “Everything Happens to Me,” the lament of a fellow whose girl has told him goodbye, “Stardust,” and “I Guess I’ll Have to Dream the Rest,” a song of romance unfulfilled. Countless future Sinatra songs played on the same theme. Loneliness was to be his stock-in-trade.

  Music programs aside, the radio was full of news about the war. Edward R. Murrow, broadcasting from London for CBS, brought the thud of exploding bombs and wailing sirens into American living rooms. Winston Churchill was promising resolute defiance of Hitler “until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue.” Though more than a year was to pass before the United States entered the war, the mood was established. In October 1940, President Roosevelt announced that 16 million American men were to register for the draft. Frank, who was one of them, filled out a Selective Service questionnaire stating that he had “no physical or mental defects or diseases.”

  Thousands of those already involved in the war were by now listening to Frank. “Young man,” Churchill told him years later, “you belong to my people as well as your own. For yours was the voice that sang them to sleep in that infamous summer of 1940.”

  In the fall, when the band was performing at the Palladium ballroom in Los Angeles, they were recruited to appear in an undistinguished Paramount movie called Las Vegas Nights. Frank got to sing “I’ll Never Smile Again” for an extra’s fee of about $15 a day. The band members’ fantasy, Bobby Burns remembered, was that their Hollywood sojourn would mean “lying in that warm sun, eating avocados, and walking with beautiful starlets in the moonlight.” Frank lived the dream. He set himself up in a luxury suite, charging the bill to Dorsey, and installed in it a blond actress, Alora Gooding. Their affair continued for some time. Nick Sevano thought Gooding was Frank’s “first big love away from home. . . . She was his first brush with glamour, and he was mad for her.”

  Nancy found out about the other woman, and had special reason to feel betrayed. Four months earlier she had given birth to a daughter, named Nancy after her mother. Frank had been excited by the news, and dubbed her “Miss Moonbeams.” His song “Nancy” (with the laughing face)—not his idea but a colleague’s several years later—would become a favorite among GIs. On the surface, the Sinatras’ marriage appeared solid. In fact it had been shaky from the start, and all the more so now because of the infidelities of a young man constantly away from home.

  Joe Bushkin, who liked Frank, watched him play the field from the vantage point of his piano. “Frank would tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Check the action out!’ Some gal with a lot of booze in her would be shaking it up on the dance floor. . . . Whenever he could take a shot at a woman he would.”

  Taking a shot cannot have been difficult. “I used to stand there on the bandstand so amazed I’d almost forget to take my solos,” Dorsey said. “You could feel the excitement coming out of the crowds when that kid stood up to sing. He was no matinee idol. He was a skinny kid with big ears. Yet what he did to women was something awful.”

  The columnist Liz Smith, then a seventeen-year-old in Fort Worth, Texas, savored the memory. “I looked up at him in the flesh and sighed,” she remembered. “Our local boyfriends were livid that we looked over their shoulders longingly, failed to hear what they were saying.”

  Peggy Maley, a future actress, saw Frank at the Astor Roof while home from convent school. “There was this thin gentleman singing with this fantastic voice. His throat qui-i-i-ivered like . . . like . . . I was spellbound. I fell in love with his voice.”

  Shirley Kelley, a fan who heard Frank in Montreal, thought it was “the way he caressed the song, phrasing the words so that each of us felt: He’s singing to me. Half hypnotized, we paused and we swayed, drawing closer to the stage and to him. . . . I still cannot evoke anything about the young man who took me dancing on my first big date. When I try, what I remember is the powerful charisma of a young Frank Sinatra.”

  “I can have every dame I want,” Frank said on a trip to Hoboken, according to his friend Joe D’Orazio. “I just can’t help myself. I don’t want to hurt Nancy. I just don’t want to sleep with her no more.”

  In a conversation with Sammy Cahn, Frank made it clear the marriage was in trouble. “A short time after we had little Nancy,” he admitted much later, “I knew our marriage was going badly. We should have been very happy, but we weren’t.” As Bushkin put it, the woman Frank had married was “neighborhood serious,” but Frank had quit the neighborhood.

  On tour with Dorsey, Frank wrote his wife a letter freighted with contrition. She might doubt his sincerity, he wrote, “because of past happenings” but he promised to do better.

  As the marriage continued its slow collapse, Frank collaborated with Hank Sanicola on a song called “This Love of Mine,” one of only two to which he contributed lyrics over the years. He sang it in the style of “I’ll Never Smile Again,” and the words were painfully appropriate to his wife’s situation:

  I cry my heart out—it’s bound to break, Since nothing matters, let it break.

  Nancy preferred the song, Frank said, over all his early work.

  “NOTHING MEANT ANYTHING to him except his career,” Nick Sevano said. “He had a drive like I’ve never seen in anybody.” Dorsey had said repeatedly that Frank should take his lead from only one singer, Bing Crosby. By 1940, though, Frank remembered thinking, maybe the world didn’t need another Crosby.

  During the shooting of Las Vegas Nights, Crosby had stopped by the studio and listened to Frank as he sang “I’ll Never Smile Again.” “This Sinatra,” he said to Dorsey afterward, “very good, Tommy. I think you’ve got something there.”

  In the spring of 1941, six months and several hits later, Frank was picked as number one male singer in a survey of college students. By year’s end, all three major music magazines would give him their top rating. Crosby’s crown was no longer secure, and Frank was his closest rival. Americans passionately debated the two singers’ relative merits.

  Metronome critic George Simon, who saw a lot of Frank around this time, thought he had become “unbearably cocky.” Frank told Sammy Cahn, as he had Harry James, that he expected to be “the best singer in the world.” He said much the same thing during an encounter at a New Jersey ballroom with the show business writer Earl Wilson.

  Frank was taking on airs and graces. “He didn’t like me because I was from down south and wasn’t New York–sophisticated like he thought he was,” said Connie Haines. “He called me ‘cornball,’ ‘squaresville.’ He would be talking behind me while I was doing the jitterbug and singing. I would run off stage sometimes in tears. He got furious one time and said: ‘I’m not going to sing on the same mike as her. I want two mikes.’ ”

  Dorsey, who slapped down Frank on that occasion, remembered how he cou
ld “sulk like a kid.” He was also prone to violent outbursts— a trait he had displayed in his days at the Rustic Cabin. “I was changing into another gown in the dressing room,” Lucille Kirk recalled, “when he came rushing in angry about something. He picked up a makeup mirror and just threw it. It broke, and he rushed out again. He had some temper.”

  Sometimes Frank went looking for a fight. When Harry James’s drummer Ralph Hawkins made a sarcastic remark about singers, he had wanted to settle the matter with his fists. If a drunk in the audience became a nuisance, Frank would attack him. When a customer threw popcorn onto the stage, Jo Stafford remembered, he “flew off the bandstand . . . ready to tear him to pieces.” “The trouble with hanging around with Frank,” said Milton Berle, who met him in 1940, was that “I always seemed to end up in fights.”

  Frank’s spats with drummer Buddy Rich led to violence. Both were brilliant musicians endowed with colossal egos and hair-trigger tempers. They were friends—rooming together, sitting alongside each other on the tour bus—but then they began bickering. It started over trivial things, but the real conflicts were professional ones. Rich felt that the band’s concentration on soft, Sinatra-style ballads gave him little chance to showcase his skills. As a star in his own right, he resented the fact that Frank got more prominent billing than he did. He found ways to irritate Frank, drumming too loud or at the wrong tempo, or talking in a raised voice when Sinatra was singing.

  One night, during a quarrel backstage, Frank exploded. “Buddy was behind me screaming at Frank,” Jo Stafford recalled. “Where Frank was standing there was a big tray with those old-fashioned pitchers full of ice water. . . . The next thing I knew there was this tremendous crash above my head. Frank had picked up one of those pitchers and had thrown it at Buddy. If it had hit him, it would have severely injured him and maybe even killed him.” Sinatra and Rich began punching each other, then were separated by colleagues.