Sinatra

by Anthony Summers

  “They would scream every time he sang a word like ‘love,’ ” said Al Viola, who later became Frank’s principal guitarist. “I used to think, ‘Oh, here it comes!’ ” Sometimes, though, the fans were “as hushed as if they were in church.”

  Fans fell to their knees in the aisles. Girls lined up to kiss Frank’s picture on billboards, begged for trimmings from the floor of his barber’s shop, snatched the handkerchief from his jacket pocket as he passed. In the hope of forcing him to stop and sign autographs, some flung themselves in front of his car. They gave him teddy bears, heart-shaped flower arrangements, a loving cup, a golden key—said to fit the heart of its sender.

  Soon enough, when somewhat older worshippers joined the fans, female underwear was thrown from the audience, brassieres thrust forward for signing while still on their wearers. A woman got into Frank’s dressing room and opened her coat to reveal she was naked.

  “He was my idol when I was in eighth grade,” Marie Carruba, a former teacher, recalled half a century later. “I had his photos all over my locker at Ansonia High. I worked some days at Gardella’s Ice Cream Shop, and the only way I’d work in the afternoons would be if Mr. Gardella let me listen to Frank on the radio. I knew, of course, that he was singing just to me. We lived in Connecticut, and a girlfriend and I would hop a train down to New York to go to matinees at the Paramount. I went as often as I could, but my mother never knew.”

  “Groups of little girls used to play hooky from school,” said another former bobbysoxer, the journalist Martha Lear, “off to shriek and swoon through four shows live, along with several thousand other demented teenagers. . . . That glorious shouldered spaghetti strand way down there in the spotlight would croon on serenely, giving us a quick little flick of a smile or, as a special bonus, a sidelong tremor of the lower lip. I used to bring binoculars just to watch that lower lip. . . . Before going home we would forge the notes from our parents: ‘Please excuse Martha’s absence from school yesterday as she was sick.’ ”

  The New Republic’s Bruce Bliven thought the devotees at the Paramount were almost all “children of the poor.” E. J. Kahn, in The New Yorker, thought them “plain, lonely girls from lower-middle-class homes.” The Hearst journalist Adela Rogers St. Johns remembered the fans as “unkempt, wistful, neglected.” In March 1943, though, Frank proved his audience was not all juvenile or poor.

  As he ended his first Paramount run, he cast around for a nightclub booking. Several owners turned him down, including Arthur Jarwood, who ran the Riobamba on 57th Street. “Sinatra’s for kids,” he scoffed. With business down because of the war, though, he changed his mind. Privately, Frank fretted about how he would go down with an older, wealthier audience, but as things turned out he upstaged his fellow entertainers and packed them in. “We could hardly get through the crowd who had come to see Frank,” said singer-comedienne Sheila Barrett, who shared the bill. “The club was so crowded the chorus girls couldn’t go on. Nor could a dance team booked first. . . . The crowd was impatient for us to get off. They wanted Frank!”

  The Billboard critic wrote such an effusive review that his editor assumed he had been drunk. Earl Wilson, now writing the New York Post column that was to become an institution, thought it “a wondrous night.” Sammy Cahn, who saw him at the Riobamba, thought it “one of the most cosmopolitan, varied audiences you can imagine— the kept girls, the rich, the famous, the infamous sports figures, hoodlums . . . you name it.”

  “Three times an evening,” Life magazine told readers, “Sinatra steps into the baby spotlight that splashes on to the dance floor. In a come-hither, breathless voice, he then sings such songs as ‘You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,’ ‘That Old Black Magic,’ ‘She’s Funny That Way,’ and ‘Embraceable You.’ As he whispers the lyrics, he fondles his wedding ring and his eyes grow misty. A hush hangs over the tables, and in the eyes of the women present there is soft contentment. The lights go on and Sinatra bows, slouches across the floor and is swallowed up by the shadows.”

  Two weeks into the Riobamba stint, Sheila Barrett and entertainer Walter O’Keefe were dropped. “When I came to this place,” O’Keefe said, “I was the star and a kid named Sinatra was one of the acts. Then a steamroller came along and knocked me flat. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the rightful star—Frank Sinatra!”

  From the Riobamba it was back to the Paramount for another feverish month. Then, rare for a pop singer, he sang at concerts with the symphony orchestras of Washington, Cleveland, New York, and Los Angeles. In Washington, he sang to fifteen thousand people from a floating stage on the Potomac. Most wandered away when the orchestra moved on to Beethoven and Bach. Frank called the musicians of the New York Philharmonic “the boys in the band.” In Los Angeles, high-brows were outraged that a “swing-shift Caruso” was sullying the temples of classical music. Thousands of fans besieged the railroad station when he arrived, though, and conductor Vladimir Bakaleinikoff welcomed Frank warmly. The boost to the orchestra finances outweighed all objections. Classical musicians were often to work with Sinatra in the years that followed, in an atmosphere of mutual respect.

  Frank had gone to Hollywood to make a musical comedy in which he would play himself. In Higher and Higher, he sang five songs and spoke the first line of dialogue of his movie career. “Good morning. My name is Frank Sinatra,” he said on a doorstep, and a housemaid fainted in his arms. The film was forgettable.

  Back in New York, he performed at the Wedgwood Room of the Waldorf-Astoria, for an audience even richer and classier than that at the Riobamba. Between engagements, he sang on national radio shows. He was on Your Hit Parade every Saturday night.

  By the summer of 1944 he was again in Hollywood, to make a patriotic, big-budget wartime movie. Anchors Aweigh featured him improbably as a timorous bookworm and choirmaster who dialed the phone company for a time check when other sailors were calling their dates. Frank learned to dance for the film, with the help of Gene Kelly. “I couldn’t walk, let alone dance,” he recalled. “I was a guy who got up and hung on to a microphone. . . . And one of the reasons I became a ‘star’ was Gene Kelly.” Frank progressed “from lousy to adequate,” Kelly said, by working harder than anyone he had ever known.

  On October 11, opening night at the Paramount in New York, Frank triggered a frenzy unprecedented in the history of music. Girls waited all night in the street to buy tickets. When the doors opened, a capacity crowd crammed into the theater and began chanting his name. The fans totally ignored the movie that was shown and then—when he appeared—their screaming made him virtually inaudible.

  By five o’clock in the morning the next day, a veritable army of young people was already waiting outside and near the Paramount. “I ventured down to Times Square,” wrote Earl Wilson, who had been working through the night at the Post, “and was literally scared away. The police estimated that 10,000 kids were queued up six abreast on 43rd Street, Eighth Avenue, and 44th Street, and another 20,000 were running wild in Times Square, overrunning the sidewalks and making traffic movement almost impossible.

  “Over on Fifth Avenue, a Columbus Day parade was forming. Two hundred cops were taken off guard duty there and rushed over. . . . Eventually there were 421 police reserves, twenty radio cars, two emergency trucks, four lieutenants, six sergeants, two captains, two assistant chief inspectors, two inspectors, seventy patrolmen, fifty traffic cops, twelve mounted police, twenty policewomen and two hundred detectives, trying to control some 25,000 teenage girls. Girls shrieked, fainted—or swooned—fell down, were stepped on and pulled up by their companions and resumed screaming. They rushed the ticket booth and damaged it. Windows were broken.”

  Of the 3,600 fans admitted for the first performance, only a couple of hundred left when it ended. Angry thousands waiting outside swarmed the neighborhood all day, not dispersing until nightfall. There was similar chaos when Frank appeared in Chicago, Boston, and Pittsburgh. The New Republic described it as an “electric contagion of excitement . . . a
phenomenon of mass hysteria that is seen only two or three times in a century.”

  The adulation of Elvis Presley ten years later, or of the Beatles in 1964, perhaps came close. The furor over Frank, though, was the first eruption of youthful idolatry in the twentieth century, and as great as any that has come since.

  YOUNG GIRLS in World War II America were reported to be not just shrieking but swooning over Frank Sinatra. It had started at the first of the Paramount shows, according to the historian William Manchester. “A girl in the twelfth row who hadn’t eaten lunch,” Manchester wrote, “fainted—or ‘swooned.’ ” Another girl “appeared at the theater daily, an unattractive, freckle-faced girl of about sixteen who wore glasses and her hair in pigtails. She could stand just so much of Sinatra’s voice, and then she’d keel over in a faint.”

  “These dames come in night after night,” said a waiter at the Riobamba. “When this guy sings, they actually swoon. We got to bring them water to keep them conscious. It’s plain wacky.” Bruce Bliven watched fans “slump in their seats, either fainting or convincing themselves that they are doing so.” A girl wrote Frank to say that, after four swooning episodes, “I fell out of a chair and bumped my head. I decided to sit on the floor in the beginning when I listen to you.”

  “We loved to swoon,” said Martha Lear. “We would gather behind locked bedroom doors, in rooms where rosebud wallpaper was plastered all over with pictures of The Voice, to practice swooning. We would put on his records and stand around groaning for a while. Then the song would end and we would all fall down on the floor.”

  The hysteria was encouraged by Sinatra’s own people, perhaps started by them. “The whole sobbing business began with a wonderful press agent,” said the actress Celeste Holm, who was playing in Oklahoma!at a nearby theater at the time. “He stood in the back of the house and said ‘How many kids can you round up to come to tonight’s show?’ They said ‘Why?’ and he said, ‘I’ll let you in for nothing and I’ll give you $10 apiece if you’ll do just what you’re doing, only ten times louder.’ That’s how it started.”

  Sinatra’s first press agent, Milton Rubin, is said to have stood in the lobby of the Paramount handing out half-dollars—a more plausible figure than Holm’s $10. He was replaced by George Evans, a master of invention who had represented Russ Columbo, Rudy Vallee, and Glenn Miller. Evans was to concede that “certain things were done. It would be as wrong of me to divulge them as it would be for a doctor to discuss his work.” He denied having induced fans to “go in and screech” and pledged to donate $5,000 to charity should anyone prove otherwise. “I like to keep their wings flapping,” he said of the bobbysoxers.

  That meant, in part, distributing free tickets, stationing an ambulance and nurses near the theater to encourage would-be swooners, and arranging for girls to plant kisses on Frank—leaving him smeared with bright red lipstick. Evans assembled fans in the Paramount basement for coaching on when and how to squeal. According to Nick Sevano, Evans “had someone throw their panties on stage almost every show.”

  Jack Keller, Evans’s assistant, said Frank’s clothes were torn so often and so easily by the fans because he wore “breakaway suits” designed to fall apart if tugged. Keller said girls had indeed been “hired to scream when he sexily rolled a note.” Years later, Evans himself admitted that “The Sinatra hysteria” had been “about 98% synthetic.” Having heard a couple of “teenage honeys” moan, he said, had inspired him to get others to do the same. “Swooning became the newest craze,” he said, “Frank rode to glory on it. . . . It was kind of comical turning this gawky guy into a love god, but I saw that he did have a certain effect on a lot of young girls. All I did was capitalize on it, enhance it a bit, and it worked.”

  Frank affected surprise at the frenetic display, said he disliked the girls’ shrieking. He put it down to loneliness in wartime. “I was the boy in every corner drug store who’d gone off, drafted to the war. That was all.” Yet he would stare into the eyes of individual fans, tease them by sticking his tongue out at them. “I never saw anything like the way he milks ’em and kicks ’em,” a Broadway agent said.

  Psychiatrists and psychologists prattled on about “mammary hyperesthesia,” “mass hypnosis,” speculated both that female fans wanted to mother Frank and be mothered by him, or saw him as a “father image.” One psychologist, who thought Frank performed “a sort of melodic striptease,” perhaps came closer to what was going on. A Daily Variety journalist put it another way: “To femmes of fifteen or thereabouts, he sang intimately, personally, like a guy parked with his girl in Lovers Lane.”

  “The young Sinatra,” the music critic Francis Davis has written, “came across as a boy who might try to sweet-talk a girl into going all the way but wasn’t going to be insistent—unlike the boys the girls knew in real life. . . . Often what young girls want in a boy is another girl, and the girls who swooned over Sinatra pressed him to their hearts as a young man who was as sensitive and, on some level, as self-conscious as they were.”

  “The sex element is the most important in this business,” said Bobby Darin, a teen idol of the late 1950s. “You must sell sex.” Sinatra, Darin thought, had the sort of magnetism that made a girl want to “park her shoes under the entertainer’s bed.” Martha Lear thought the psychologists and their theorizing ridiculous. “What yo-yo’s!” she said. “Whatever stirred beneath our barely budding breasts, it wasn’t motherly . . . the thing we had going with Frankie was sexy. It was exciting. It was terrific.”

  “What is it you’ve got,” the actress Carmen Miranda asked Frank in 1944, “that makes the girls all cry over you?”

  “It’s not what I’ve got, Carmen,” Frank replied, “it’s what they’ve got. Imagination.”

  IT WAS HIS WORK on stage and on radio that had made Frank a star. Two days after the two-year union shutdown of the recording industry ended in 1944, though, Columbia executives rushed him into a studio for the first of several recording sessions. Seventeen songs were put on disc, including “Saturday Night (Is the Loneliest Night in the Week),” “Embraceable You,” and “She’s Funny That Way.”

  The Sinatra juggernaut rolled on and on. Frank had been making $400 a week when he left Tommy Dorsey. Now his agents could reportedly demand some $20,000 ($204,000 today) for an average week. In an especially busy seven-day period, Frank made $30,000. He made almost $1.5 million ($15,000,000 today) in both 1944 and 1945.

  “I couldn’t believe it,” Nancy told the columnist Louella Parsons. “All I could think of was the time, six years before, when we had spaghetti without meat sauce because meat sauce was more expensive.”

  “I now own myself,” Frank had said after extricating himself from the Dorsey contract, and he began to behave accordingly. He bought into a music publishing company, the Barton Music Corporation, and within three years would order construction of a Sinatra office building in Hollywood.

  The Sinatra entourage had expanded. In addition to George Evans there was now a booking agent. Frank had filched Dorsey’s arranger, Axel Stordahl, by more than quadrupling his salary. Stordahl was behind the lush sound and sheer quality that now marked Sinatra’s work. Frank also hired Sammy Cahn and composer Jule Styne, who were to produce hit after hit for years. Jimmy Van Heusen, by now hugely successful in his own right, also wrote for Frank. Hank Sanicola doubled as manager, rehearsal coach, off-stage pianist, and, in Frank’s words, as a sonofabitch who “would go down with the ship.” Frank had fired Nick Sevano, though they would later reconcile. His role as general factotum was for a while filled by another Frank Sinatra, a first cousin from Hoboken who had been raised in the apartment across from the Sinatras’. According to the cousin’s daughter, her father also functioned as a bodyguard. So did Sanicola.

  Sinatra now openly cultivated a pugnacious image. “I’d like to see that guy backstage,” he snarled at a heckler who flipped a penny onto the stage in Philadelphia. “If I can’t lick him, I’ve got a big boy with me who can.” Fred Tamburro,
who had beaten up Frank when they were members of the Hoboken Four, was frightened off by a couple of heavies after pestering Sinatra for a loan. The professional trainer Al Silvani, with whom Frank worked out at Stillman’s “muscle emporium” on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, also became a bodyguard.

  “I was intimidated,” said George Avakian, a producer at Columbia Records. “Two [body]guards would come off the elevator. They’d look right and left. Then Frank would step out, and two other guys would step out, and they’d look right and left. They looked like five diamonds walking up the hall!”

  Frank could also go out of his way to be caring and compassionate, as Peggy Lee discovered when she became ill while working with him at the Paramount. “He was my special nurse,” she recalled. “First he brought me blankets to stop the shivering. Then, when it was possible, a little tea; later, a piece of toast. Meanwhile he was out there singing from six to eight shows a day.” One night Frank shook hands with singer Ray Anthony, whom he knew was out of work, then hurried off. A moment later, Anthony realized he had been given $50. Frank drove out to New Jersey in a snowstorm to tell another hard-up musician about a job opening.

  Such gestures were made without fanfare; others were bound to get attention. He liked throwing his money around. By the mid-1940s he had given three hundred gold cigarette lighters from Dunhill’s— together costing nearly half a million dollars—to friends and acquaintances.

  He sent a gold bracelet from Cartier’s to Jule Styne, a gold watch to the comedian Rags Ragland. Others received gold cuff links. A friendly journalist got only a gold money clip, the same category of gift that Frank allotted to headwaiters. A bodyguard received a key chain, with letters attached spelling “Frank Sinatra” in gold. When Frank learned that the crew of a Navy PT boat had rechristened their ship the Oh Frankie!, he sent gold St. Christopher medals to the entire crew.

  When not on stage Frank himself discarded the boyish sweaters, sports jackets, and “spaniel’s ears” bowties familiar to his fans, and glittered with gold accessories. He favored sharply tailored dark suits and monogrammed shirts custom-made in New Jersey. It was said that he owned fifty suits, twenty-five sports jackets, a hundred pairs of slacks, and sixty pairs of shoes.