by James Kaplan
Dorsey had a massive rib cage and extraordinary lung power. He could play an unbelievable thirty-two-bar legato. And yet he hopelessly idolized the legendary Texas trombonist and vocalist Jack Teagarden, a great jazz artist, a man who could transform a song into something new and sublime and dangerous. Dorsey didn’t transform: he ornamented; he amplified. It was a quibble, really, but not in Dorsey’s mind. There was something about himself—there were a few things—that he didn’t like. When he thought about Teagarden, the pure artist, he would pour himself another drink, turn mean as a snake, go looking for somebody to punch out.1 But when he blew those glorious solos, measure after silken measure seemingly without a pause for breath, you forgot about jazz: Tommy Dorsey made his own rules.
Still, jazz dominated the mid-1930s. The bad, scared days of the Depression were starting to give way to the optimism of the New Deal; people wanted to dance. The black bands of Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Jimmie Lunceford were wildly swinging and innovative, and Benny Goodman—who was soon to break the color barrier by hiring Teddy Wilson, Lionel Hampton, and Charlie Christian—wasn’t far behind.
Then there was Tommy Dorsey, whose theme song, “I’m Getting Sentimental over You,” spoke for itself; he also had a deliciously corny nickname, the Sentimental Gentleman of Swing. For three years he entranced the fox-trotting masses with his long sweet solos. But swing grew hotter as the 1940s approached—even Glenn Miller’s band was starting to sound punchier—and the critics began to carp about Dorsey’s monotonous mellowness. The truth is, Tommy Dorsey was starting to get bored with himself. Any sentimentality that he possessed was buried under layers of toughness and anger. Nor was he—except when the microphone was on—particularly gentlemanly. Before his public grew bored too, the ever restless, insatiably ambitious bandleader decided to make some changes.
And 1939 was a year for change. Dorsey’s first move was his most radical: that summer, he hired away Jimmie Lunceford’s genius arranger, Melvin James “Sy” Oliver. Other white bands had used black arrangers before: Fletcher Henderson was the secret of Benny Goodman’s success. Tommy Dorsey needed some similar magic, and with Sy Oliver he got it. The immediate and dramatic result of the new acquisition, as Peter J. Levinson noted in Tommy Dorsey: Livin’ in a Great Big Way, was that “the Dorsey band … became a magnet for jazz musicians who noticed the difference Oliver’s presence made.”
One of those musicians was the ace trumpeter Zeke Zarchy. Another was the percussively and temperamentally explosive twenty-two-year-old drummer Buddy Rich, who had become a national phenomenon that year while playing for Artie Shaw’s band. Rich had first performed onstage at the age of eighteen months, a percussion prodigy of Mozartean éclat (complete with a pushy, less-talented stage father) known as Traps, the Drum Wonder. The famously temperamental Shaw and the volatile, egomaniacal Rich were bound to clash, and clash they did, when Shaw accused Rich—of all things—of not being a team player. Of course Buddy Rich wasn’t a team player: he was a force of nature, a law unto himself, a hard-drumming whirlwind who could give Gene Krupa a run for his money anytime. In November, Rich magnanimously accepted Dorsey’s offer of $750 a week—a fortune then—and joined the band at its engagement at the Palmer House in Chicago.
Buddy Rich loved Tommy Dorsey’s playing (“the greatest melodic trombone player that ever lived. Absolutely”) and detested him personally. Many others felt the same way. Dorsey was really more a dictator than a leader, a martinet who ran an almost militarily rigid organization, enforcing proper dress and decorum, fining or firing violators for drinking or smoking marijuana. (Dorsey’s own heavy drinking and womanizing—he had a wife at home in New Jersey, but was carrying on an affair with his girl singer, Edythe Wright—were theoretically beside the point.) Physically powerful and fearless, he had literally thrown offenders off the band bus. The object wasn’t petty discipline but tight playing and—always—commercial success. He was renowned for firing his entire trumpet section (somehow it was always the trumpet section) if their playing didn’t come up to snuff. His musicians, most of them in their twenties, called him the Old Man. In November 1939, Tommy Dorsey had just turned thirty-four.
In his own way, Jack Leonard was another part of the musical storm forming around the Dorsey band in the late fall of 1939. Over the years, it has become accepted wisdom that Dorsey’s silky-voiced young baritone had grown restless and wanted to go out on his own. In fact Leonard was restless with his domineering boss. Dorsey had learned a cold and cutting wit from his tough family, and was free with it on and off the bandstand. His musicians learned to take it when he dished it out. But one night at the Palmer House, Jack Leonard, who had been with the band since he was nineteen, who had crisscrossed the country many times, his bladder ready to burst (it was rumored Dorsey didn’t have one) in the ice-cold or baking-hot band bus, who had dutifully laid down the workmanlike vocals on forty-two Dorsey recordings, who had felt the Old Man’s occasional warmth, but—more often—suffered his tongue-lashings, had simply had it. He walked off the bandstand, took a deep breath—free!—and left for good.
It wasn’t easy: at times, Dorsey had been like a father to him. They’d had one of their warm moments a couple of months before, as leader and singer drove out to Dorsey’s country house in New Jersey after a gig at the Hotel Pennsylvania roof in Manhattan. Basking in the Old Man’s presence, late at night in the car, Leonard felt expansive. He asked Dorsey if he’d happened to catch Harry James’s new boy singer on the radio—each afternoon, before the evening gig at the Roseland, the Music Makers were broadcasting from the World’s Fair, out in Flushing. “They’ve got this new kid, Tommy, singing ‘All or Nothing At All.’ Have you heard him?”
At the wheel, Dorsey shook his head. “Uh-uh.”
“Well,” Leonard said, “this kid really knocks it out of the park. In fact, if you want to know the truth, he scares the hell out of me. He’s that good.”
Dorsey had cause to remember the conversation soon after Leonard walked out. One night in Chicago, the bandleader was having dinner with a pal named Jimmy Hilliard, the music supervisor for CBS, and bemoaning his boy-singer problem. “Have you heard the skinny kid who’s singing with Harry James?” Hilliard asked. “He’s nothing to look at, but he’s got a sound! Harry can’t be paying him much—maybe you can take him away.”
Dorsey had quickly filled the breach caused by Leonard’s departure with a baritone named Alan DeWitt. But DeWitt was merely adequate, and Tommy Dorsey wasn’t interested in adequacy.
Then he heard Sinatra for himself.
The band was filing through the lobby of the Palmer House when a radio playing stopped Dorsey in his tracks. The song was “All or Nothing At All.” He beckoned to his clarinetist, Johnny Mince. “Come here, Johnny, I want you to hear something,” Dorsey said. “What do you think?”
The next night he sent his manager, Bobby Burns, to Mayor Kelly’s Christmas party to hear the Music Makers. After the performance, Burns slipped Harry James’s boy singer a note scribbled on a strip torn from a sandwich bag. Frank Sinatra’s heart thumped hard when he saw the pencil scrawl on the grease-spotted brown paper: the note indicated Dorsey’s suite number at the Palmer House and the time Frank should show up. Sinatra saved that scrap of paper for a long time.
It was a careful dance, the kind of unspoken minuet men do when approaching each other on a matter of importance. Sinatra had been aware, with each mile Harry James’s rickety band bus traveled eastward, of Dorsey’s looming presence in Chicago: it was like entering the gravitational field of an enormous dark star. And Dorsey, always calculating, had registered something when Jack Leonard made his offhand comment that night in the car on the way to Bernardsville. The something moved a click when Jimmy Hilliard mentioned Sinatra, then clicked into place when Dorsey heard that song on the radio: he had already met this kid once.
Sinatra, of course, remembered the occasion intimately, as one of his great gaffes, like spilling a drink on a pretty girl’s
dress or calling someone important by the wrong name: he had frozen up in the great man’s presence. It was one thing to be trying out for a new band—Bob Chester was a nice kid—it was quite another to have Himself walk in. He could freeze you with a stare, that cold puss of his. Sinatra still blushed just thinking about it.
This would be Frank’s one and only chance to set things right, his one and only second chance with the great man, and it must, it must go right. There would be no third chance. He slept barely at all that night, for thinking of Tommy Dorsey’s tough face and his perfect suits and, most of all, his gorgeous sound, those long, beautiful melody lines that backed a singer the way the purple velvet in a jewel box backed a diamond bracelet …
At 2:00 p.m. on the dot, Dorsey greeted Frank at the door of his suite, wearing a silk dressing gown over suit pants, shirt, and a tie. He exuded a manly whiff of Courtley cologne. His square gold cuff links were engraved TD.
Sinatra felt weak in the knees.
A strong handshake and that icy stare, from slightly above, with the very faintest of smiles. “Yes, I remember that day when you couldn’t get out the words.”
And damned if it didn’t almost happen again: Frank’s mouth fell open, and for a second nothing came out. He had to clear his throat to get his heart started again, and with that sound, miraculously, a sentence emerged.
Well, he’d been pretty nervous that day. He was pretty nervous today, too.
The smile warmed just a degree or two.
Dorsey told Frank to call him Tommy. He told him he’d like to hear him sing. Did Frank think he could manage that?
He had a few of the boys waiting up in the ballroom, Dorsey said. Did Frank know “Marie”?
Frank had only heard Jack Leonard sing it about a million times with that band behind him, had only imagined himself in Leonard’s place about a million times. And Sinatra knew he could leave Jack Leonard in the dust. If he could get the words out.
And that was what Tommy Dorsey heard that afternoon in the Palmer House ballroom, as Sinatra stood by the piano, not nervous at all now, but as excited to be following Dorsey’s dazzling trombone lead-in as he had ever been excited by a widespread pair of silky thighs … And you can hear it too, if you listen, back-to-back, to Jack Leonard performing “Marie” on disc 2 of the Tommy Dorsey Centennial Collection and Frank Sinatra singing the number with the Dorsey band on disc 5 of The Song Is You. First comes Leonard’s strictly serviceable, utterly forgettable vocal, a pallid instrument among more interesting instruments, a lead-in, really, to the main event, Bunny Berigan’s astonishing trumpet solo.
Then comes Sinatra. Or rather, first comes Dorsey’s trombone chorus, and then the rather startling sound of the bandleader’s waspish voice speaking a corny intro: “Fame and fortune. [Fame and Fortune was the name of the NBC radio show on which the song was being broadcast.] One simple little melody may turn the trick. I know—for you’re listening to the tune that had a great deal to do with sending us on our way to fame. And here to bring you a listening thrill is Frank Sinatra, to sing the ever-popular ‘Marie.’ All right, Frank, take it.”
Frank takes it. Crooning the melody against the rollicking background of the band’s chanted antiphony (“On a night like this/We go pettin’ in the park … Livin’ in a great big way/Oh, mama!”), a background that would have overwhelmed a lesser artist, Sinatra sings with superb authority and subtle swing, having his sweet way with the rhythm and generally making you feel as if he were letting you in on a story he might have just made up then and there.
Dorsey nodded, almost smiling, as Sinatra sang his audition; seeing his reaction, Sinatra smiled and sang even better.
When Frank was done, Tommy told him he wanted him to come sing with the band. If Harry would let him go. Dorsey couldn’t pay him a lot to begin with—just seventy-five a week—but they could talk later.
Sinatra didn’t even hear the figure. He only registered the first sentence: I’d like you to come sing with the band. The Dorsey band. He called Nancy from a phone booth in the Palmer House lobby. The distant phone rang, then Nancy answered, far away. She sounded alarmed to hear his voice—but it was good news, he told her. The best.
What about Harry? she asked.
And of course she was right. Nancy, ever practical and straightforward, was always right. And he was wrong so much of the time … except about what he knew he needed.
Harry was in his hotel room with the door open, sitting back in an easy chair reading Metronome, his long legs resting on the bed. His socks had pictures of clocks on them. Sinatra walked right in. A room-service tray full of dirty dishes sat on the table. Through the bathroom door, Frank noticed—though Louise was still on the road—a pair of nylons hanging on the shower-curtain rod. The bandleader turned the pages of the magazine and chewed his Black Jack gum, not looking up. Frank stood for a moment, then walked out in the hall and came back in. No response. He left, counted to twenty, and entered again.
Finally, James put down the magazine and asked his singer what was eating him.
Sinatra told Harry that he’d rather open a vein than say what he was about to say. Then he said it.
James whistled, soft and low. He reached out a bony hand. Sinatra took it. James smiled and told Frank he was free. “Hell, if we don’t do any better in the next few months, see if you can get me on, too.”
It was a bittersweet moment. At not quite twenty-four, Harry James was nothing like the father figure Dorsey was to Dorsey’s band—to Sinatra, he was more like a brother. Still, the singer, who always had vast respect for musical talent, and was voraciously open to musical influences of all kinds, “learned a lot from Harry,” Louise Tobin said many years later. “He learned a lot about conducting and a lot about phrasing.”
He’d also learned a lot about jazz, and how to sing up-tempo numbers. But Sinatra also knew—as he would his whole life—precisely when to move on.
There was one final gig with the Music Makers, two weeks in late December and early January at Shea’s Theatre in Buffalo (also on the bill were Red Skelton and Sinatra’s co-star-to-be in From Here to Eternity, Burt Lancaster, a grinning young acrobat at the time, half of a trampoline act, dreaming of being in the movies someday). And even though Frank Sinatra had learned what he could from Harry James, and even though by some accounts Frank had been a loner on the Music Makers bus (“he dozed, read magazines, and seldom said anything,” one bandmate recalled)—despite all this, in later years Sinatra would recall his parting from the band with nostalgia and regret. “The bus pulled out with the rest of the boys at about half-past midnight,” he said. “I’d said goodbye to them all and it was snowing. There was nobody around, and I stood alone in the snow with just my suitcase and watched the taillights disappear. Then the tears started, and I tried to run after the bus. There was such spirit and enthusiasm in that band, I hated leaving it.”
It’s a beautiful description, snow and taillights and tears. For whom, and about what, precisely, was he crying?
Dry-eyed and with an entourage yet, Sinatra joined the Dorsey band on the road just a few days later. Accompanying him were his old pal Hank Sanicola, to play rehearsal piano and swat off pests, and his Hoboken friend named Nick Sevano, to lay out Frank’s clothes and run for coffee. How the singer could afford not one but two hangers-on at $75 a week is an almost theological question, answered nowhere in the vast body of Sinatriana—did Christ pay the disciples? And as to whether Sinatra met up with his new boss in (as has variously been reported) Minneapolis or Sheboygan or Milwaukee or Rockford, Illinois, there is no consensus. This much is universally agreed, however: he knocked the socks off of all who were fortunate enough to be present.
“The first time I heard him, we were on stage in Milwaukee, and I had not even met him,” Jo Stafford recalled. “Tommy introduced him and he came out and sang ‘South of the Border.’ ”
Her visitor was perplexed. Many accounts said the number was “Star Dust.”
Stafford, th
ough a very old lady now, shook her head vigorously. “ ‘South of the Border,’ ” she insisted.
Almost seventy years earlier, at twenty-two, she had helped form Tommy Dorsey’s perfect storm. It began for Stafford during the summer of 1938, when Dorsey tried out a young singing octet called the Pied Pipers on his radio show in New York. The lead singer and the group’s only girl, Stafford had the purest soprano Tommy had ever heard. But the show’s sponsor, an Englishman, threw a hissy fit when the kids sang a slightly risqué Fats Waller number called “Hold Tight (Want Some Sea Food, Mama!),” and fired them on the spot. Still, that girl’s amazing voice stayed with Tommy. And so in December 1939, in Chicago, having hired Sy Oliver and Zeke Zarchy and Buddy Rich, and now Sinatra, Dorsey phoned Jo Stafford at home in California and told her he wanted the Pipers back.
“The only problem, Jo, is, I can’t afford eight singers,” he said.