by James Kaplan
The sour-faced Bowes actually gave a half smile. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess ’cause they’re so happy.”
And with that as their cue, Fred, Skelly, and Pat skipped out onto the giant stage like schoolboys on holiday, Frankie trying his best to walk along behind them.
The Major greeted them. Why not introduce themselves and tell the folks where they worked? This last, of course, was key to establishing their amateur status. Frankie saw Tamby taking charge, doing all the talking, but didn’t hear the words that were coming out. All he was aware of was the roar of blood in his ears and the voice in his head: What, in Christ’s name, could Tamby say about him?
Nothing, as it turned out. After a deadly second of dead air, suddenly ten thousand eyes were staring at little Frank Sinatra.
“What about him?” the Major said.
“Oh, he never worked a day in his life,” Tamby said.
4
The Hoboken Four on Major Bowes’s Original Amateur Hour, circa 1935. Left to right: Fred Tamburro, Pat Principe, Bowes, “Skelly” Petrozelli, Frank. (photo credit 4.1)
And then they sang, thank God, for that was one thing Frank knew how to do. Or thought he did: while the other three tootled along, doing their best Mills Brothers imitation, Frankie, trying to keep the smile fixed on his lips, jumped in with the nearest thing to Bing’s improvising he could muster:
Just because—my hair is curly
Just because—my teeth are pearly.
And yet, more clearly than ever, he realized that what Crosby made sound like falling off a log was in fact nigh unto unattainable: the absolute ease and richness of the voice, the effortless skipping around the beat, never ever putting a foot wrong.
It simply wasn’t Frank. Ease wasn’t his to feel or feign; singing was an urgent matter. A personal matter. Vocalizing in chorus was possible, though not desirable. Skipping around the beat was somebody else’s idea of fun.
He did his best.
Which, miraculously, was all right. The gong never sounded! And when the four of them finally finished, the gigantic beast out in the dark—ten thousand eyes, ears, hands—exploded with delight, sending the needle on the big onstage applause meter far over to the right and keeping it there. The Major looked pleased. He kept nodding, like the old snake-oil salesman he was. These fellows had “walked right into the hearts of their audience.”
Amazingly enough, they had. They had won the contest. The radio-audience votes out in America agreed with the meter: the night of September 8, 1935, belonged to the Hoboken Four. Which entitled them to become a cog in the great Bowes machine. Entertainment colossus that he was, the Major ran a small army of Original Amateur Hour companies, conglomerations of acts that had succeeded on the show, whom he then signed to crisscross the nation by bus and train, entertaining burgs large and small, generating a steady river of cash, and keeping the Bowes brand name ever fresh. It was a brilliant idea, allowing the Major to stay close to the home office in New York while he raked in the hundreds of thousands. Fifty simoleons per week of which, apiece, now went to the Hoboken Four—meals, accommodations, and travel included. One week after their radio performance, they joined the Major Bowes Number Five tour unit, a motley troupe of bell ringers, jug blowers, harmonica players, yodelers … hard-r’d characters from out in the country someplace, among whom four Italian boys from Hoboken, New Jersey, might as well have come from—well, from Italy.
Which was not necessarily a bad thing, at least in Frankie’s case. After a couple of stops he learned to tell people—girls especially—that Hoboken was really, basically, the same thing as New York City. It was a big, wide, lonely country in those days, a poor one too, and folks out in the hinterlands were starving for any diversion from their stifling, peeling-wallpaper-and-coal-stove lives. New York was magic; New York was the theater and radio, men in tuxedos and women in clinging white silk. Frankie may not have looked like Gary Cooper or Dick Powell—he looked like he could use a meal, and a hug. But he was from New York.
And he could sing. Even the original Flashes finally had to admit that: the farther they got on this cockamamie bus-and-train tour—Des Moines and Wichita and Oakland and Vancouver and Bellingham, Washington—the farther they got, the more comfortable Frankie became with his voice, and the more they realized he really should be the one in front. He felt what he sang, he had a way of getting inside it—which translated, once the evening’s entertainment was over, into a way of getting into the pants of the hick girls that gathered down at the front of the orchestra.
Oddly enough, this was all new to Frank. He may have lost his cherry to some girl on a Hoboken roof or on the beach down the shore in Long Branch, but he had certainly never had intercourse with a woman in a bed before. Now he was having a lot of it, in a lot of beds, with a lot of women—young ones mainly, but some older ones too, including married ones whose husbands happened to be out during the day. Now and then he thought about Nancy—with whom he’d gone just a little way down this road—but her image was quickly dimming. He was getting a rapid education in the wide range of female sexual response and emotional variability. There was just one common denominator: they all liked him, a lot.
He wasn’t much to look at—beyond the facial scars, he was still plagued with fairly severe acne—but his mouth, with its slight up curve at the corners and its extravagantly rich and wide, slightly jutting lower lip, was beautifully formed, and his eyes—those eyes!—were a little bit wild. None of the boys in Des Moines or Oakland or Bellingham looked like that.
The question of his body must also be addressed, now being as good a time as any.
Naked, Frank Sinatra stood five feet seven and a half inches tall. This was his full adult stature; he would never grow even a quarter inch more, though in later years he would give his height variously as five nine, five ten, even five eleven—the maximum he could stretch the truth without pretending to a patently absurd six feet. In later years, he wore lifts in his shoes that got him up to five nine or so; his fearsome presence, and the intense reluctance of the world at large to challenge him on any matter, made up the difference.
In an era when the average height of an adult male was five nine, there was nothing very wrong with five feet seven and a half inches. But he was also skinny, so skinny, with the kind of metabolism—as a young man, at least—that made it difficult to keep weight on, let alone gain it. He was not especially broad shouldered. He was also narrow at the hips, and his gluteus maximus was minimus—he was completely flat fannied. (And, throughout his young manhood and early middle age, self-conscious about it.) His hands and feet were well formed; in fact his hands—unlike, say, Mike Barbato’s—were soft, padded, artistic-looking: most definitely not made for manual labor. Clean, always. Sometimes they grew chapped from the many times he washed them throughout the day. His fingernails, throughout his life, were always exquisitely manicured.
Naked, Frank Sinatra was a fairly unexceptional specimen. Except.
It is literally central, an integral part of the lore, beginning with the frequently disinhibited Ava Gardner’s legendary comment (so good that she must have said it—or someone improved it along the way)—“There’s only ten pounds of Frank, but there’s a hundred and ten pounds of cock”—and continuing, in later years, with the graphic and admiring testimony of Sinatra’s valet, George Jacobs, who revealed in his charming memoir that the thing was so big, Mr. S. had to have special underwear made to keep it in check.
Macrophallus is the medical term: a peculiar condition, ostensibly enviable. Every man has witnessed it at one time or another: that college acquaintance, say, a small and skinny and otherwise totally unprepossessing fellow, emerging quite startlingly from the shower in a dorm bathroom …
By some evidence, Sinatra was proud of his extraordinary endowment: he is even said to have called his penis Big Frankie. (Unlike the little Frankie it hung from.) On the other hand, much testimony suggests that throughout his life, he was ambivalent at best abou
t his physical self. His height. His flat behind. His facial scars. His receding, then vanishing, hairline. “I hate your husband,” he once told the actress Betty Garrett, who was married to the actor Larry Parks. “He has what I call a noble head. I’ve got a head like a walnut.”
He may have had similarly mixed feelings about Big Frankie. After all, the special underwear cited by George Jacobs was a cosmetic as well as a physical accommodation: Sinatra didn’t want to attract undue attention while wearing close-cut tuxedo trousers.
Sinatra’s lovers, too, may have had mixed feelings: contrary to the worries of insecure men (in other words, most men), not every woman is crazy about the idea of a big member, which, even if visually stimulating, can be an impediment to lovemaking. History itself is indecisive on the subject. None of the Don Juan stories seem to be anatomically specific. Greek myth, on the other hand, rarely holds back—the god Priapus is said to have had a penis so large that no woman wanted to sleep with him. On the other hand, Petronius’s Satyricon tells of a rural youth so well-endowed that the locals revered him, literally tripping over each other to touch it for good luck.
Oh, Frankie …
But Frankie had something more than physical presence: when he was onstage, every one of them, every last one, believed, to the core of her being, that he was singing to her and her alone.
The Hoboken Three, the original Flashes, didn’t like that very much. They weren’t liking Frankie Boy too much in general, if the truth be told. Especially Tamby and Skelly. Patty Principe, just five one in his shoes, was cheerful and even tempered. But Freddie Tamburro and Skelly Petrozelli were bruisers, truck drivers both of them, and not at all bad-looking, either. What was the skinny runt with the pizza face doing outshining them on the stage and getting all the tail afterward? They took to laying a beating on him now and then, just to show him who was boss. Once, Tamby knocked him out cold. So much for Marty’s boxing lessons.
And Frankie—you could hardly blame him—didn’t enjoy it at all. In fact he was pretty damn sick of the Number Five tour unit: of living in YMCAs and cheap rooming houses and fleabag hotels, of eating lunch-counter food for dinner. He liked all the sex just fine, but the beatings pretty much counterbalanced that.
And another thing: the original Flashes weren’t doing too much for him professionally anymore. He knew (and the audiences’ reactions, especially the women’s, confirmed it for him) that he had more talent in his left pinkie than all three of them put together. They could beat him up all they wanted, but they couldn’t beat that out of him.
In mid-December, soon after his twentieth birthday, he left the tour in Columbus, Ohio, and went back home to Hoboken. Just in time, once more, for Christmas.
It wasn’t a defeat but a strategic withdrawal. For four years he had been chasing after far lesser musicians like a pesky mascot. Now—in his mind, at least—the shoe was on the other foot.
His homecoming this time was a good deal more subdued. He was back, he was twenty, and he was unemployed—a potentially volatile situation, as we’ve seen, at 841 Garden Street. Dolly was moderately impressed by his run with Bowes, but What Have You Done for Me Lately? could have been the woman’s middle name. That big mortgage still needed paying, there was still a depression on, and everyone on the premises still had to pull his weight, and then some. As for Marty, what he thought (as far as anybody could tell) was: radio or no radio, the kid continued to stand a good chance of turning into a bum.
Amazingly, Frankie would live under his parents’ roof for three more years.
But he wasn’t malingering—quite the opposite. Motivated as much by anxiety as ambition, he shifted into high gear, exploring every conceivable singing opportunity in North Jersey, paid and unpaid—and in the process, staying out of the house as much as possible. He did $2-a-night gigs at the Elks; he worked again at the Cat’s Meow and the Union Club (whose owners could now advertise “Major Bowes Radio Winner”1); he took his mike and sparkly speaker to political rallies and weddings; he dragged Matty Golizio back to WAAT in Jersey City.
But, most important, he now had the maturity and knowledge to begin his assault on Manhattan. If the years 1935 through 1937 were, as Sinatra later said, his “panic period,” they were also a time of intense connection—the kind of connection that simply wasn’t possible on the left bank of the Hudson. Jersey certainly had talented musicians, but the Big Apple was a different universe, and Tin Pan Alley, just north of Times Square, was the red-hot center of it.
It was also a moment of intense transition for the music business: a business that, for over half a century, had been built upon the sale of sheet music—the content of the day—to the piano-playing, parlor-singing American public. Now, with the rise of radio and phonograph records, power had shifted to the bandleaders who conveyed the content—and, still to a lesser extent in the 1930s, the band singers. Few, if any, important vocalists were out on their own yet. The music publishers of Tin Pan Alley employed singer–piano players (the so-called song pluggers, most of them themselves aspiring songwriters) to sell the publishers’ songs to the performers.
Sinatra was barely a performer. In the universe of the music business, he was just a cosmic speck, one of the hundreds of “kolos”—the term of art in those days for wannabe singers and musicians—who haunted Tin Pan Alley music publishers, hoping to latch onto hot new material. In the usual food chain of the business, kolos pestered song pluggers, and song pluggers looked over the kolos’ shoulders for somebody really important. But here was a kolo who acted as if he already were important, strutting around announcing to one and all that whatever the current reality, he was going to be the next big singer.
Two pluggers in particular were impressed. One, a short, stocky kid from the Bronx with a prematurely receding hairline and the arms of a blacksmith, was named Hank Sanicola. The other, a tall kid from upstate New York with a brilliant keyboard technique and an equally recessive hairline, had the improbable moniker of Chester Babcock. His nom de piano was Jimmy Van Heusen.
Both, like Sinatra, were in their early twenties; each would become central in the singer’s life. Sanicola was a salt-of-the-earth character, a workmanlike aspiring songwriter who knew enough about music to understand his limitations, and to recognize real talent when he heard it. Van Heusen had real talent.
Edward Chester Babcock, of Syracuse, was a paradox: foul-mouthed, obsessed with sex and alcohol, but a songwriter of deep and delicate gifts, verging on genius. Some of the melodies that would one day make his reputation had been in his head since puberty. Meanwhile, he bided his time trying to sell other men’s tunes at Remick and Company, the music publisher.
While Van Heusen watched for his shot as an in-house songwriter, he sat at his piano facing a daily tide of would-be bandleaders and vocalists. One of the latter was this starved-looking kid from Hoboken, so cocky he walked around in a yachting cap in imitation of his idol Bing Crosby. Van Heusen listened to the kid, and liked what he heard. He liked Frank Sinatra, period. The two young men (Jimmy was about three years older) had much in common: an eye for the ladies, a night-owl disposition, a sardonic sense of humor. Soon Chester (as Jimmy’s close friends called him) was running with Sinatra and Sanicola.
Physically speaking, either Hank or Chester could have snapped Frank in two, could have wiped the floor with him the way Tamby and Skelly had, if they felt like it. But they didn’t feel like it.
Instead, they listened to him, smiled when he barked. The guy was a pussy magnet, it was as simple as that.
Manhattan in those days was a hotbed of great jazz: Jimmy Dorsey at the New Yorker Hotel, Tommy Dorsey and Artie Shaw at the Manhattan Room of the Hotel Pennsylvania. You could stroll down Fifty-second Street at 2:00 a.m. and pop into Leon and Eddie’s or the Famous Door or the Onyx Club, and see, and hear, Fats Waller, Art Tatum, Count Basie, Louis Prima. This was Sinatra’s Moveable Feast, a time and place he would remember forever.
The jazz was thrilling, but what he loved most were
the singers. The clubs on Fifty-second Street, most of them small and intimate, featured them heavily. He heard the great Ethel Waters, who could break your heart with a ballad or scat like Louis Armstrong; there was a young black Englishwoman named Mabel Mercer who spoke the lyrics more than sang them, and with such beautiful diction. And then there was Billie Holiday. Just twenty, only eight months older than Sinatra, she was—quite unlike him—an astonishingly mature artist, with a fully formed style. Barely out of her teens, she sang like a woman who had been around awhile, and in fact she had: her history made Sinatra look like the spoiled rich boy he almost was. She had been born out of wedlock to a thirteen-year-old mother impregnated by a sixteen-year-old banjo player, had been brought up in a Baltimore slum, been raped twice before the age of fifteen, had worked as a prostitute and done jail time. She began singing for tips in Harlem clubs; in 1933, the Columbia Records artists and repertoire man John Hammond discovered her at one of them, and immediately started her recording with Benny Goodman. She was eighteen. Two years later, when Sinatra first saw her, probably at the Famous Door, she was singing with Jimmy Van Heusen’s idol the great pianist Teddy Wilson. Chester boasted he could play almost as well as Teddy.
Frankie wished he could sing like Billie. He gazed at her. She was extraordinary-looking: slim and straight, with honey-colored skin, high cheekbones, something Indian around the flashing eyes. Dark lipstick and white white teeth. Perhaps by merging with her, he could somehow take in her sorcery. Even more than Waters or Mercer, she lived in the lyric, made you ache its ache, while skipping around the music’s beat like some kind of goddess of the air, landing just where she pleased. And as was not the case with Ethel Waters or Mabel Mercer, Billie Holiday brought sex—painful, longing sex—into every syllable of her songs.