by James Kaplan
And his whole band—which, after all, was his true instrument, a sixteen-piece extension of his towering personality—needed to be up to the task. The saxophonist Arthur “Skeets” Herfurt recalled: “Tommy sometimes used to make the whole orchestra (not just the trombones) play from the top of a page clear down to the bottom without taking a breath. It was way too many bars! But I sure developed lung power … Everybody in the band would learn to play like Tommy did.”
Clever as he was, Sinatra instantly realized he would have to raise his game vocally. Even if, as his first recordings with the band show, he began rather pallidly, trying to fit in and generally hold his own, he was watching and learning every second.1 Tommy Dorsey was a superstar (even if that vulgar word hadn’t yet been coined), and Sinatra was, by God, going to be one too. Even bigger. But copying Dorsey’s breath control was a far more powerful statement than copying the cologne or toothpaste he used. Sinatra had heard other singers, even very good ones, take a breath in the middle of a phrase, and he thought it sounded lousy. It showed artifice, just like the hoked-up accents and stuffy styles of most vocalists in those days. It said, This is a singer, singing a song. Most of those guys—even the very good ones—never sounded as if they felt what they were singing, as if they really believed it. Singing the phrase straight through showed he really understood, and meant, the words.
A message that was not lost on his listeners. He saw the way the girls stared at him as he sang. He was telling them something, a story of love, and they were listening. (He could continue the story whenever he wanted, on or off the stage.) They didn’t stare at Bing that way.
No one ever told the Sinatra story better than Sinatra himself. And one of the great chapters was the account of how he had developed powers of breath control even more legendary than those of the short-lived Dorsey (who—with horrible irony—died of asphyxiation, choking to death on his own vomit in his sleep after a heavy meal at age fifty-one, in 1956). After Dorsey mentioned offhandedly that he’d built up his lung capacity by swimming underwater, Sinatra decided that he too, by God, would swim laps underwater at the Stevens Institute’s indoor pool—and let the world know about it. Not only that: he would also run laps on the Stevens track. It has the feeling of a Hollywood montage (and the Stevens theme must have been meaningful for a boy who had so gravely disappointed his father by failing to become an engineer). You can practically see the big varsity S on Sinatra’s sweatshirt as he pounds the cinders of that Stevens quarter mile.
And yet, while Sinatra doubtless did some underwater swimming and ran some laps, it’s hard to imagine an inveterate night owl and hedonist, fully engaged in the grueling existence of a touring swing band, taking on any sort of concentrated training regimen.
Jo Stafford insisted that all the mythic accounts of underwater swimming were just that: mythological. The true story, she said, was anatomical. “You can have a big enough rib cage to take a deep breath,” she said. “And also, know how to let it out. You can sing a note and use half as much breath as most people do. I think that if you want to learn to do that, you can. Frank certainly could. I could. Tommy also.”
Another chapter in the Sinatra-phrasing saga hinges on a Carnegie Hall classical concert that he attended, on a whim, in early 1940. The program consisted of Brahms, Debussy, Rachmaninoff, and Ravel; Jascha Heifetz was the soloist. “I was never a great fan of the classical music,” Sinatra told Sidney Zion. “I enjoyed hearing the pretty parts of it; didn’t understand most of it.” This time, for some reason, he was ready to hear it. He was especially fascinated by Heifetz’s violin technique. He could “get to the end of the bow and continue without a perceptible missing beat in the motion,” Sinatra recalled. “I thought, ‘Why can’t I do that? If he’s doing that with the bow, why can’t I do it even better than I’m doing it now, as one who uses my breath?’ I began to listen to his records. I couldn’t afford many at the time, but I got some of them. I sat and listened to them and it worked. It really worked.”
Soon he was listening to the above-mentioned composers as well as Ralph Vaughan Williams and Delius and Glazunov and Fauré. His ear expanded with his lung capacity.
Maybe Frank did have an extra-large rib cage; maybe, once the band came east from Chicago in February 1940 (to start a New York stand that would continue through the summer), he simply shifted into a new gear, swimming and running and listening to classical music. He was twenty-four, after all: starting to leave adolescence behind at last. As soon as he got back to New York, he returned to his old voice teacher Quinlan and practiced “calisthenics for the throat,” resuming the “Let us wander by the bay” exercise that he would thenceforth practice for the rest of his career. He was gathering a huge new power, a kind of sexual supercharge. Sammy Cahn recalled watching Sinatra sing with Dorsey: “Frank can hold a tremendous phrase, until it takes him into a sort of paroxysm—he gasps, his whole person seems to explode, to release itself.”
Zeke Zarchy could see it from the trumpet section. “The audience wouldn’t let him off the stage,” he recalled. “This scrawny kid had such appeal. I had never seen a vocalist with a band go over like that. He had a certain quality. Jack Leonard was a good singer, but a band singer … I could sense [Sinatra] knew that also.”
Now, with the rocket booster of the Dorsey band behind him, Frank was going farther, faster—in fact, he was approaching escape velocity.
The rest of the band knew something was up, though they hadn’t a clue how far it would really go. John Huddleston of the Pied Pipers (then Jo Stafford’s husband) said, “He had something. He sure knew it. I could sense that he was going to do whatever he wanted.” And Zarchy further observed, “When I say he was standoffish, it’s not because he felt that he was better than anybody else. He knew that he was going to be a star because he wanted to be a star … And I didn’t blame him one bit and neither did anybody else because we saw what his appeal was.”
This last isn’t entirely true. The band’s first date after it returned from Chicago was at one of the biggest clubs in the East, Frank Dailey’s Meadowbrook, on Route 23 in Cedar Grove, New Jersey. “It was at the Meadowbrook,” Peter J. Levinson writes, “that Dorsey first gave Sinatra, rather than to Buddy Rich, featured billing. Buddy immediately expressed his anger to Tommy but to no avail. In retaliation, he speeded up the tempo on slow ballads behind Sinatra or played loudly behind him.”
Things would escalate from there. But Rich was fighting a losing battle—and he knew it, which riled him up even more. He felt gypped: he had signed on with Dorsey to propel jazz, and now the ballads (totally boring to keep time to), and the ballad singer, were taking over. And no matter how blazing a drummer’s solos, he sits at the back of the band; the singer stands in front. Literally and figuratively, Frank Sinatra was beginning to stand in front of everyone else.
Everyone.
Tommy Dorsey would have laughed in the face of anyone who told him that his boy singer, this pain-in-the-ass little guinea, was single-handedly bringing the primacy of the big band to an end and ushering in the age of the solo vocalist. The Dorsey empire was running smoothly, its ruler a superb businessman as well as a great bandleader. His band hit the ground running when it reached the Big Apple. Not only were they booked into the Paramount for four weeks in March and April, but they also began a blazing streak of New York recording sessions that would continue through August and result in almost forty of the eighty-three studio numbers that Sinatra eventually cut with Dorsey.
And Frank’s confidence grew with every tune. He began a practice he would continue to the end of his career. “I take a sheet with just the lyrics. No music,” he told the casino mogul Steve Wynn many years later. “At that point, I’m looking at a poem. I’m trying to understand the point of view of the person behind the words. I want to understand his emotions. Then I start speaking, not singing, the words so I can experiment and get the right inflections. When I get with the orchestra, I sing the words without a microphone first, so I can a
djust the way I’ve been practicing to the arrangement. I’m looking to fit the emotion behind the song that I’ve come up with to the music. Then it all comes together. You sing the song. If the take is good, you’re done.”
The first number he recorded in New York was one that had been written by his old drinking buddy from the hungry years (just three years earlier), the brilliant former Remick and Company song plugger Jimmy Van Heusen. The number, co-written with the lyricist Eddie DeLange, was called “Shake Down the Stars.”
Sinatra had a gift for seeing talent and allying himself with it. Both Sammy Cahn and Van Heusen were coming into their own in 1940, Van Heusen in a spectacular way: he would write sixty songs that year. Chester had already been wooed by Bing Crosby’s lyricist Johnny Burke, and would move to Hollywood that summer (flying his own plane, a two-seat Luscombe-Silvaire, cross-country) to start collaborating with Burke on movie tunes for Bing.
But it was Sinatra—“Junior,” as Crosby would soon refer to him—who would make hits of two Burke–Van Heusen numbers that year. The first was “Polka Dots and Moonbeams,” which he recorded on March 4, and which became Frank’s very first charting song, reaching number 18 in Billboard for the week of April 28, 1940.
For the whole month of March he headlined at the Paramount, the crème de la crème of big-band venues. The girls were so gaga for him that they would line up hours ahead of time for the first show at 9:00 a.m. and then, when that show was over, refuse to leave, staying for five more. Sinatra came up with the brilliant publicity stunt of bringing out a big tray of food after the first show, to tide over his increasingly fanatical public. At the end of the day, he had to be escorted by the police to the Hotel Astor, just a block south on Broadway. The last time he had been escorted by police, they had escorted him to jail.
The band was putting up at the Astor; Nancy was staying with her parents in Jersey City. A big wide river lay in between. What with six shows a day followed by 9:00 p.m. rehearsals (crazy Dorsey felt that a band simply couldn’t be too tight), plus recording sessions, Frank didn’t have much time to get home. Nor was his ever-heavier wife much inclined to schlep over to the Paramount and listen to young girls scream for her husband.
Meanwhile, a little blast from the recent past arrived in the form of Connie Haines, whom Harry James had had to let go for financial reasons the previous August, but whom Tommy Dorsey could very much afford. Unlike the Pied Pipers, who, as splendidly as they sang, were strictly background, Haines was a star, a pint-sized nineteen-year-old with big eyes, a perky figure, a thick Savannah, Georgia, accent, and a big voice. She could really sing, and swing, and audiences ate her up (and Dorsey, a great showman, knew it). And Sinatra hated her thunder-stealing guts. He was the show. “Go ahead, do your thing, cornball,” he would snarl at her as she jitterbugged, grinning, around the big stage.
But he would soon have the spotlight all to himself. Beginning in May, the band was booked to play the Astor’s gloriously posh roof garden—it had a thousand-foot tree-lined promenade, with lights twinkling like stars among the branches. For New York’s glitterati, the Dorsey stand was a much-anticipated event. Sinatra too was all aflutter. The Astor was Class with a capital C, and the singer, who from an early age craved class just about as much as he craved sex (but found it much more unattainable), was more nervous than he had ever been about a gig. It was one thing to play the Paramount, with its great sea of undifferentiated faces; it was quite something else to entertain the rich at close hand. He could depend on a certain number of swooning teenage girls (it was prom season), but the audience at the Astor would mainly consist of grown-ups—wealthy, arrogant, jaded grown-ups. With an exquisitely calibrated social sense born of deeply held feelings of inferiority—Italians had risen in the American public’s estimation since Marconi and Toscanini, but not much—Sinatra felt an entirely reasonable fear of what he was up against.
Still, fear got him excited. And on opening night, Tuesday, May 21, 1940, he got the Astor excited. The band’s first number featured Sinatra and the Pied Pipers, and—as was distinctly not the case when he shared the stage with Haines—his respect for his co-performers led him to vocalize selflessly and beautifully. It was yet another string to Sinatra’s bow. “When you sing with a group, it takes a certain amount of discipline, and Frank was excellent at it,” Jo Stafford said. “You can’t wander off into your own phrasing. You’ve all got to do exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. Very few solo singers can do that. He could. When he sang with us, he was a Piper, and he liked it, and did it well. I don’t know any other solo singer, solo male singer especially, that can do that.”
Of course he wasn’t like other singers. And on the next number, the hypnotically beautiful “Begin the Beguine,” the stage, and the song, were all his. And, as the twenty-three-year-old pianist Joe Bushkin, who’d just joined the band in April, recalled: “He wound it up with a nice big finish, and the place went bananas!” The formerly jaded crowd, which had stopped dancing to listen, was screaming for an encore—but “Begin the Beguine” was the only solo feature Sinatra did with Dorsey at the time.
Canny showman that he was, Dorsey put his own ego on hold and stopped the band. If they wanted an encore, they’d get one. “Just call out the tunes,” he told Sinatra, “and Joey will play ’em for you.”
This went fine for three or four numbers, Bushkin said—until Sinatra turned around and said, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” The lovely Kern-Harbach tune has a notoriously tricky middle section, a chord modulation that looks great on paper but can be hell to pull from memory. Under pressure, Bushkin simply blanked. “Next thing I know,” he said, “Frank was out there singing it all by himself … a capella. I was so embarrassed. I mean, Jesus, all the guys were looking at me, so I just turned around and walked away from the piano!”
The cream of New York society—gents in dinner jackets; dames in gowns; a few hundred fancy prom kids, all dressed to the nines—stood hushed, craning their necks to see, while the skinny boy with the greasy hair filled the big room with song, all by himself.
“And that is the night,” Joe Bushkin said, “that Frank Sinatra happened.”
Just two days later, Dorsey, and a stripped-down core unit that he called the Sentimentalists, went into the RCA recording studio in Rockefeller Center and took another stab at a number they had tried, without much success, a month earlier. The song, a mournful ballad written by a pianist named Ruth Lowe in memory of her late husband, was called “I’ll Never Smile Again.” The May 23 version moves at a dreamy-slow tempo. It begins with a piano intro, followed by the perfect five-part harmony of the four Pied Pipers, plus Sinatra, singing the first stanza and a half—“I’ll never smile again, until I smile at you/I’ll never laugh again”—and then Sinatra comes in alone: “What good would it do?” he sings, aspirating the initial “wh” of “what” with such plummy, Quinlan-esque precision that it comes out “hwat,” a pronunciation that would not have sounded amiss to any of Cole Porter’s society swells.
It sounded just great to America. When the record came out five weeks later, it quickly shot to number 1 on the Billboard chart—the first number 1 on the first Billboard chart—and stayed there for twelve weeks, turning Frank Sinatra into a national star. Meanwhile, on the strength of Frank’s éclat, the Dorsey band’s initial booking of three weeks at the Astor was extended to fourteen.
Did Tommy Dorsey come up with more solo ballads for Sinatra to sing? You bet he did. Just like that, the cart was pulling the horse.
Frank with Dorsey and the band in his first MGM musical, Ship Ahoy. Buddy Rich is on the drums, Tommy leads, Jo Stafford and her fellow Pied Pipers are behind the piano. (photo credit 8.2)
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“Hey, Bing, old man. Move over. Here I come.” Recording with Dorsey’s musicians, but, pointedly, no Dorsey. Frank is the star on this session. Los Angeles, January 19, 1942. (photo credit 9.1)
Meanwhile. On a Saturday evening, June 8, Nancy Sandra Sinatra was born at
the Margaret Hague Maternity Hospital in Jersey City. “Dad was in Hollywood with the band,” Nancy Sinatra writes in Frank Sinatra: An American Legend. In fact, Dad was not in Hollywood with the band—he was at the Hotel Astor with the band, Broadway and Forty-fourth Street, six miles as the crow flies from Jersey City, a million miles as the native son flies.
“I hated missing that,” Sinatra told an interviewer years later, sounding as strangely cold-blooded—that—as if he were talking about missing a certain cocktail party. “It was just a taste of things to come, man. When I think of all the family affairs and events I would miss over the years because I was on the road.”
If that last sentence looks incomplete, it’s because Sinatra didn’t finish the thought.1
Frank and Big Nancy, as she would now forever be known, named Tommy Dorsey as Baby Nancy’s godfather. Of course, it was Frank’s idea.
Four nights later, on an NBC radio broadcast from the Astor roof, Sinatra sang “I’ll Never Smile Again” to another houseful of upper-crusters. The air check of the number reveals a small but striking difference from the recording: on the radio version’s out-chorus (the last words sung in the song), as Sinatra sings “Within my heart, I know I will never start/To smile again, until I smile at you,” he uses the vocal trick he’d discovered back at the Rustic Cabin, a breathy little catch in his voice, in this case before the initial h of “heart.” It’s a small thing, a showman-like touch that would have made no sense on a recording but all the sense in the world before a live crowd—a naked play for the hearts of the rich girls in the audience. Calculated, and thoroughly effective.
They watched him, and he watched them. Taking five during the fast numbers, standing by the piano, “Frank would tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Check the action out!’ ” Joe Bushkin recalled. “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.”