Frank

by James Kaplan

  It may have been North Jersey light opera, a tempest in a 1930s teapot, but Mike Barbato can’t have failed to notice that his prospective son-in-law was neither a lawyer nor an accountant nor even a plasterer, but, well, a songbird and a perp. (Though Toni eventually dropped these charges as well because, she claimed, she’d found out about Dolly’s arrest record, for abortion.) Nancy Rose might have looked like a terrific match to Dolly, but things can’t have appeared quite so rosy from the Jersey City side. And what did Nancy herself think about all this? Her boyfriend’s stonewalling wasn’t helped by a second arrest, not to mention newspaper headlines.

  But she loved him. And he loved her. It was the God’s honest truth. She knew him to the bottom of his soul, and loved him for it and in spite of it. What’s more, she knew he contained that strangest of all quantities, there among the frame row houses and brownstone tenements of blue-collar, bill-paying Hudson County: greatness. And he loved that she knew it, and he loved that she loved him, and he loved her goodness, her wisdom, and her sweet kisses.

  It was just that he needed so much more …

  It was time to put a cap on things. There were more Tonis out there. Dolly came up with a 1930s solution: against the Barbatos’ grave misgivings, Frank and Nancy would be married. It happened just a little over a month after his second arrest—Saturday, February 4, 1939, at Our Lady of Sorrows Church in Jersey City. A small wedding, in the Barbatos’ territory; few Hobokenites in attendance. The bride’s white dress was as true as the tears that flowed from her eyes as her father, guardedly happy, walked her down the aisle: she did love Frank Sinatra, but now she was joined to him forever, with all that entailed.

  Three weeks later, Dolly was arrested once more, for performing another abortion. This too made the papers. The Sinatras were famous all over Hudson County.

  So the boy left his mother (sort of: he was commanded to visit Garden Street at least once a week—alone, if possible) and settled, uneasily, into married life, in a $42-a-month, third-floor walk-up on Garfield Avenue in Jersey City. As cozy as the little apartment was, the newlyweds didn’t see much of each other. Weekdays, Nancy worked as a $25-a-week secretary at American Type Founders in Elizabeth, rising early to the sight of her skinny young husband still snoring, exhausted from his labors at the Cabin. The club—on-site arrests notwithstanding—had given him a raise to $25 a week. He often spent more than that on clothes. His practical young wife fretted about his predilection for budget-busting $35 Woodside suits. She skimped on her own clothing, made him silk bow ties so he wouldn’t have to spend the money. His wardrobe took up what little closet space they had, and then some.

  She coped. She wanted stability, and a family; she still worried about his mercurial nature. As far as other women were concerned, she knew it was not a question of if, but—Italian men being Italian men—when and how. (Mike Barbato, the tough paterfamilias, the paragon of respectability, was no exception in this regard.) But Nancy loved Frank desperately. He was infinitely sensitive; he could be so sweet and funny. And she knew he loved her. Then the slightest thing—there was no predicting—could set him off. And she had backbone: she would stand up to him. They had some terrible blowouts (the neighbors below banged on their ceiling). Then they made up. That was nice.

  She wanted children. What else was marriage for? He was reluctant at first: they couldn’t afford them yet. She did everything she could to hold him—cooked him spaghetti just the way he liked it, baked him lemon-meringue pies. He loved her meals, and he loved her, but he was elusive. He had important places to go, people to see. He would rise in the afternoon and gather up his Hoboken pal Nick Sevano before getting on the ferry to Manhattan and making the rounds of radio stations and music publishers. Sanicola and Van Heusen would often join him for the evening, along with a new friend, a fast-talking, wisecracking, breathtakingly talented little lyricist named Sammy Cahn. Nobody else in the crew was married. Why were the chicks always drawn to the one that was?

  He felt stalled that spring, a fly trapped in amber. He had married in haste; he wasn’t cut out for it. He loved her so much, but he wasn’t cut out for it. Much of the time—he hated himself for thinking it—Nancy was a millstone around his neck. He wasn’t getting any younger, and his career wasn’t going anywhere. The radio stations still weren’t paying, and nerves caused him to blow two important occasions: Once when he was trying out for a band run by a new leader, a rich kid from Detroit named Bob Chester, Tommy Dorsey stopped by. Tommy fucking Dorsey. Sinatra got so flustered at the sight of that cold Irish puss (he looked like a goddamn emperor or something) that he forgot the lyrics of the song he was singing and froze—literally opened his mouth and nothing came out.

  And the same damn thing happened again one night at the Cabin: almost fifty years later, the horror of it would still live with him. “On a Sunday evening during the summer months, people would come back from the countryside, and stop and have a little nip before they went over the bridge to go back into New York,” Sinatra recalled, at Yale Law School in 1986.

  There were about seven people in the audience, and the trumpet player—we had a six-piece “orchestra”; big sound, beautiful—the trumpet player, named Johnny Buccini, said to me, “Do you know who this is sitting out there?” I said, “No. Where?” He said, “Right out there, you dummy. Look straight ahead.” I said, “Yeah, I know that face.” He said, “That’s Cole Porter.”

  I had been so infatuated with his music that I couldn’t believe he was sitting out in the audience with four or five people. I said to the orchestra leader, “I’d like to do one of Cole Porter’s songs … Let’s do ‘Night and Day’ for them, and I’ll talk about it.” So I said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to sing this song and dedicate it to the greatly talented man who composed it and who is maybe one of the best contributors to American music at this particular time in our lives.” I said that Mr. Porter was in the room, and the orchestra played the introduction—and I proceeded to forget all the words. I swear to God. I couldn’t think. I kept saying “night and day” for fifteen bars!

  But with Sinatra, ambition trumped shame every time. And twenty years later, during the making of High Society, Porter would recall the night, and smile.

  One afternoon that winter, Frankie stopped by the Sicilian Club in Bayonne and found Frank Mane, an alto sax player he knew from WAAT, rehearsing some songs with a ten-piece pickup band. When he asked Mane what he was practicing for, the sax player told him he was trying out for a spot with a Los Angeles outfit, Clyde Lucas and His California Dons. He was going over to Manhattan to make an audition record.

  “Cheech, could I go to New York with you and sing with the band?” Frankie asked.

  Mane shrugged. “Sure, why not?”

  And so on March 18, all atingle, Frankie set foot for the first time in a recording studio—Harry Smith’s, 2 West Forty-sixth Street, a large office tower today. It was a Saturday afternoon: the city was quiet; studio time was cheap. After Mane and his band cut a couple of instrumentals, the musicians took out the sheet music to something called “Our Love”—corny lyrics grafted onto Tchaikovsky’s theme for Romeo and Juliet. Then, with a nod from the guy in the glass booth, the band hit the first notes and Frankie began to sing. He couldn’t help grinning at the freedom and ease, the rightness of it: he was making a record!

  Our love, I feel it everywhere …

  Our love is like an evening prayer.

  A little while later, he was able to listen to a 78-rpm demo platter with his very own voice on it. It was a respectable-enough debut: the sound was a little scratchy, the band’s tempo plodding, but Frankie had sung on key and hit all the high notes. To him it was a miracle: he would have listened to the disc over and over again if Frank Mane had let him, so entranced was he at the sound of his own voice.

  It wasn’t just narcissism. His ear, after all, was part of his genius. He was literally amazed at himself—the voice worked. Technically speaking, there were much better instrume
nts out there: the Eberle brothers, Bob (who spelled it “Eberly”) and Ray; Dick Haymes—all, at that point, could sing circles around him. They had bigger, richer baritones; they sounded like men. He still sounded like a boy.

  But this was what worked for him—he didn’t sound like anyone else. He was a boy, and he was vulnerable (and would remain so, as long as Dolly was alive), and he could carry a tune, in both senses of both words. He made good and goddamn sure that he understood the words to every song he sang, made sure (like Mabel, like Billie) that his audiences knew he was telling a story. And his audiences (and especially the women in them) wanted to hear him telling it.

  The iconic mug shot. Defiance, style, and the astonishing intelligence of the pale, wide-set eyes. A man with full knowledge of his own importance. (photo credit 5.2)

  A woman happened to hear him on the radio one night that spring—the WNEW wire from the Rustic Cabin, the Dance Parade. Her name was Louise Tobin, and she was a band singer herself—young, black haired, gorgeous, and newly married to a freshly minted young bandleader, a tall, rail-thin, hatchet-headed Texas trumpeter named Harry James. Tobin and James were in their room at the Lincoln Hotel, at Eighth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street; Tobin was preparing to catch a late train for a gig in Boston; James was lying on the bed, resting up after his appearance at the Paramount.

  Tobin was standing at the mirror, watching herself putting in an earring, wearing that abstracted look women get, holding the earring post in her mouth, when she heard this kid singing “Night and Day” through the Philco’s cheesy speaker. (This time he knew the words.) The voice stopped her. The kid had something. It wasn’t the most stupendous voice she had ever heard—the earring post didn’t fall from her lips—but he sounded awfully self-assured for however the hell old he was.

  “So,” Tobin recalled many years later, “I woke Harry and said, ‘Honey, you might want to hear this kid on the radio.’ ”

  Act Two

  HARRY

  AND

  TOMMY

  6

  Frank broadcasting with the Harry James Orchestra, August 1940, at the Roseland Ballroom, New York City. Left to right: Frank, unidentified, band manager Pee Wee Monte, Harry James, vocalist Bernice Byers. (photo credit 6.1)

  It was a typical day in the life of a touring swing band: long. Motor down the pike from New York to Philadelphia, play a tea dance at the Benjamin Franklin Hotel, turn around, and head home. On the way out of Manhattan that morning, riding ahead of the band bus in his big Chrysler, Harry James had stopped on Riverside Drive to pick up his new girl singer, a petite seventeen-year-old dynamo from Florida with a big voice, a sparkly personality, and a laughably impossible name: Yvonne Marie Antoinette JaMais. As they rolled south through the Jersey farmlands with the band manager, Pee Wee Monte, at the wheel, James clacked a stick of Black Jack gum and squinted in deep thought at the problem of rechristening her for the stage. Rhymes with Yvonne … In a moment, he had it: Connie!

  Connie what?

  “Connie Haines!” he suddenly crowed. He had a high, squeaky voice and a Texas accent. The bandleader smiled in triumph: it went perfectly with Harry James.

  So Connie Haines it was, and as the Chrysler sped north through the New Jersey night, the newly named singer, exhausted and elated after a successful first engagement with the band, was amazed to see that Harry was still full of beans, bouncing around in the front passenger’s seat, clacking his gum, tapping in time on the dashboard to the staticky song on the radio. Suddenly he turned around, resting his long chin on his long fingers on the back of the seat.

  “Hey, Connie Haines,” he said with a wink. “How you doin’ back there?”

  Fine, she told him. Maybe a little tired.

  That was just what he wanted to talk to her about, he said. He wanted to make one little stop before they crossed the bridge. There was this boy singer he wanted to hear.

  Harry James was the same age as Frank Sinatra—in fact he was three months younger. But even given Sinatra’s tour with Major Bowes, all the gigs in dumps and dives, the radio shows, the women, the arrests—James had done a lot more living in his twenty-three years than Sinatra had in his. To begin with, Harry Haag James was a son of the circus. His mother was a trapeze artist whose specialty (“The Iron Jaw”) was dangling from a wire far above the sawdust by her teeth; his father was a cornetist and bandmaster. Harry himself had started performing as a drummer for the Christy Brothers Circus at age three; at the tender age of five, he became a contortionist known as the Human Eel. At eight he began playing the trumpet, and by the time he was twelve, he was leading the circus’s number-two band. At fourteen, young Harry was drinking hard and taking his pick of the innocent girls who came to gawk at the big top’s spectacles.

  James was a superbly gifted natural musician whom the circus had schooled to play loud, hard blues. It was a style equally apt for the midway and the dawning of the Swing Era in the mid-1930s. By 1935, the nineteen-year-old James was married to the seventeen-year-old Louise Tobin (and cheating on her every chance he could get) and playing with a band led by the Chicago drummer Ben Pollack; by the end of 1936, he had signed with Benny Goodman, the capo di tutti capi of American bandleaders. They made a formidable combination. On the occasion of the great clarinetist’s death in 1986, the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen vividly recalled a Goodman concert of fifty years earlier as “bedlam. Gene Krupa riding his high hat like a dervish. Harry James puffing out his cheeks till surely they must burst, the rhythm always burning and churning and driving you out of your mind, and then, just when you thought nothing could get hotter, Benny’s clarinet rising like a burnished bird out of the tightly controlled maelstrom and soaring to the heavens, outscreaming even the crowd.”

  It was rock ’n’ roll with big-band arrangements. And two years of maximum national prominence with Goodman had turned Harry James into the 1930s equivalent of a rock star. He was itching to fly on his own. At the end of 1938, bankrolled by Goodman, the trumpeter started his own outfit, Harry James and His Music Makers.

  Musical gods were different then. For one thing, teenagers of that era didn’t demand that their musical idols be, or look like, teenagers. By the spring of 1939, Harry James was a very famous, accomplished, and self-assured twenty-three-year-old—and with his hawk nose, piercing blue eyes, pencil mustache, and big-shoulder suits, he didn’t remotely resemble any twenty-three-year-old we would recognize today. At twenty-three he looked as if he were well into his thirties. He had star quality to burn, and when he strode into the Rustic Cabin that blossom-heavy night in early June 1939, the crowd parted before him like the Red Sea before Moses.

  The Cabin’s owner, Harry Nichols, came up, grinning, his cigar hanging from his lower lip, and told James to take any table he’d like. Drinks on the house, of course.

  James winked at him. How about that boy singer his wife had heard on the radio the other night? Was he here?

  Nichols frowned. “We don’t have a singer,” he said.

  James frowned back. “That’s not what I heard.”

  “Well, we do have an emcee who sings a little bit …”

  “This very thin guy with swept-back greasy hair had been waiting tables,” James recalled many years later. “Suddenly he took off his apron and climbed onto the stage. He’d sung only eight bars when I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rising. I knew he was destined to be a great vocalist.”

  This has all the verisimilitude of an MGM musical, and the tin-can ring of hindsight, but Harry James surely heard something that night, especially if, as he later reported, Sinatra really performed Cole Porter’s notoriously difficult, 108-bar epic “Begin the Beguine.” Any twenty-three-year-old who could bring that off would indeed be something special. But in a way it doesn’t matter what Sinatra sang that night—it was the way he sang it, the voice itself, that got Harry James where he lived.

  “It’s an interesting thing,” the singer and musicologist Michael Feinstein says. “You ca
n look at the vibration of somebody’s voice on a machine—whatever the machines are called—and it looks like this; someone else’s voice will look the same. You can match up graphs that look the same, but they don’t sound the same. The point is that there is something that cannot be defined in any way scientifically.

  “You can’t explain what it is about the sound of Sinatra’s voice,” Feinstein says. “I mean, you can try, and you can get very poetic in describing it. But there is something there that is transcendent, that simply exists in his instrument. He developed it, he honed it, he understood it himself, he knew what he could do, and he used it to his best advantage. That was something that people responded to.”

  The voice was still developing in the spring of 1939—it would continue to develop for the next fifty years. It wasn’t as rich as it would be even five years later. But its DNA was there, the indefinable something composed of loneliness and need and infinite ambition and storytelling intelligence and intense musicality and Hoboken and Dolly herself, the thing that made him entirely different from every other singer who had ever opened his mouth.