by James Kaplan
In the beginning it had been both pretty ones and not-so-pretty ones. He didn’t have to settle so much anymore. They were getting prettier all the time.
“It must have been sometime in 1940,” Sammy Cahn wrote in his memoir. “He told me how unhappy he was being a married man. I gave him the George Raft syndrome. ‘George Raft has been married all his life. Put it this way—you’re on the road all the time, you at least can go home to clean sheets.’ He kind of understood that.”
“Tommy Dorsey came up to see the baby,” Ed Kessler remembered. “I thought my sister was gonna fall out the window.”
Kessler was twelve in the summer of 1940. His family lived in a brown-brick apartment building at 12 Audubon Avenue in Jersey City; Frank and Nancy Sinatra, and now Baby Nancy, lived just upstairs. It was a nice, leafy neighborhood, around the corner from the State Teachers College and just across from Bergen Park.
“They were in a three-room apartment on the third floor,” Kessler said. “We were upscale from them, five rooms on the second floor. My mother was very class-conscious—unless you were Jewish and lived within a certain area of Jersey City, you didn’t count. She thought the Sinatras were low-class.”
The kids disagreed. Kessler’s sister, five years older than Ed, was agog when Sinatra moved in. And while young Eddie hadn’t been entirely sure at first exactly who this singer was, he quickly took note of him. For one thing, there was his car. “About a quarter to a third of the tenants in our building owned automobiles,” Kessler recalled. “Those who owned, owned Chevys, Fords, Plymouths, in black or gray. Sinatra had a two-toned blue-and-cream Buick convertible.”
And then there was another impressive fact. “He didn’t keep regular hours,” Kessler said. “Most people in the apartment had jobs that were eight-to-five.”
At first, Kessler’s observations were simply those of a curious twelve-year-old. “But then,” he said, “I got asked to baby-sit.”
Suddenly he was in. What did he see? “I saw Nancy Sinatra naked!” Kessler laughed. (He was speaking, of course, of the baby.) Other than that, though, the household was depressingly ordinary: “reasonably neat, not very fancy,” he recalled. “I can’t remember any distinctive artwork or books—it was very working-class. They paid scale—twenty-five or fifty cents an hour.”
And the young marrieds?
“Nancy was pleasant,” Kessler said. “Very short, heavyset—what you might call a typical Italian-looking woman.”
In all fairness, the heaviness was probably post-baby weight. What’s most striking in Kessler’s account, however, is the contrast in the nesting pair, between the brown-toned female and the gaudily feathered male. “I remember him sometimes in a yachting cap,” Kessler said. “He also wore a blazer with an ascot. He looked very confident—he walked erect. He looked like he was ahead of the game all the time. He gave me an autographed picture of himself.”
So now Frank had added a blazer and ascot to the yachting cap. Yet while his teenage dreams of stardom, as symbolized by the Crosby pipe and headgear, had come closer to reality, Sinatra wasn’t quite there yet. He was suddenly well-known, but still not nearly on the level of Dorsey or Crosby. He was anything but rich. (He received a flat bonus of $25 for each recording session with the band, and—of course—no royalty for discs sold.) He was hovering on the doorstep of true fame, but still living in the third-floor walk-up, making payments on the Buick convertible. Yet he was watching Dorsey. He was learning from Tommy’s example how to be a real star. Practicing.
And no matter his financial reality in the summer of 1940, Frank felt a yawning gulf between himself and the everyday, eight-to-five world of black or gray Chevys and Plymouths. Regular hours were for squares. He was the man that got away.
Dorsey loved Dolly, and Dolly loved Dorsey. They had more than one thing in common. Tommy used to take the band over to the Garden Street house for big Sunday-night dinners, linguine and marinara sauce.
More often than not, Nancy was absent.
The two strutting cocks of the Dorsey band couldn’t get off each other’s case. One muggy August night, backstage at the Astor, Buddy Rich decided he had finally had his fill of wielding the brushes, practically nodding off as he kept ultraslow time behind Sinatra’s ballads. He called Sinatra a son-of-a-bitch wop bastard. And the next thing Jo Stafford knew (she was sitting at a table nearby, writing a letter to her mother), “they got at it.”
Sinatra was standing near a waiter’s table laden with pitchers of ice water. Furious, he picked up one of the pitchers and shied it at Rich’s head. Rich ducked just in time. “If he hadn’t,” Stafford said, “he probably would have been killed or seriously hurt. The pitcher hit the wall so hard that pieces of glass were embedded in the plaster.”
She laughed. “It splashed on my letter, which irked me pretty good. I left a few drops to show Mama what it was.”
Stafford shook her head. “I don’t even know what they were fighting about. I wasn’t paying any attention to them.”
They were fighting about the same thing they always fought about. This time, though, it was physical. Sinatra had never been much of a one for actual, as opposed to talked-about, fisticuffs, but these days, with his testosterone levels soaring, he was becoming fearless. The second after Rich ducked the flying pitcher, he flew at Sinatra, and the two bantamweights, Rich’s biographer Mel Tormé writes, “went at each other … all the pent-up bad feelings exploding into curses and swinging fists. Luckily they were separated by members of the band before any real damage could be done. But it wasn’t over.”
After the dustup, Dorsey sent Sinatra home. “I can live without a singer tonight, but I need a drummer,” he said. The bandleader had exacted a worse punishment than he could have imagined. It was humiliation, it was exile—it was home. Sinatra stewed, but not for long.
A few nights later [Tormé continues], Buddy [went] over to Child’s restaurant, just south of the Astor, for a bite between sets. As he was returning to the Astor, he felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned, and the night exploded.
The front page of Down Beat, September 1, 1940, trumpeted:
BUDDY RICH GETS FACE BASHED IN
New York—Buddy Rich’s face looked as if it had been smashed in with a shovel last week as Buddy sat behind the drums in the Tom Dorsey band at the Astor Hotel.
No one was real sure what had happened except that Buddy had met up with someone who could use his dukes better than Rich. Members of the band—several of them “tickled” about the whole thing—said that Buddy “went out and asked for it.”
Rich told Tormé he had been attacked by two men who took nothing from him, but rather administered a “coldly efficient and professional” beating. “He told me,” Tormé writes, “that one night just before Sinatra left Dorsey (September 3, 1942) he quietly approached Frank and asked him point blank if the mugs who had flattened him two years before had done so at Frank’s request. ‘Hey, it’s water under the bridge,’ Buddy assured Frank. ‘No hard feelings. I just want to know.’ Sinatra hesitated and then admitted that he had asked a favor of a couple of Hoboken pals. Rich laughed, shook hands with Frank, and wished him good luck on his solo vocal career.”
A singular relationship. But then, they were both singular men. When the band went west in October to open the new Palladium Ballroom in Hollywood, Jo Stafford and John Huddleston rode across the country with Rich and his father in Rich’s new Lincoln Continental convertible. In these intimate circumstances, Stafford remembers, there was a good deal of talking, but she learned next to nothing about who Buddy actually was. “He was remote,” she told Tormé.
As was Sinatra. The hottest, most accessible part of each man was his bottomless need, his seething ambition. The more people around, the better. As long as they didn’t try to get too close.
I can live without a singer tonight, but I need a drummer. Ultimately, no matter how popular Sinatra got, he was dispensable. But then, that could work the other way, too.
For Dorsey, Frank was getting harder to take all the time. Sometimes he thought, My God, I’ve created a monster. Then he realized the monster was creating himself. As Sinatra’s star rose, his ego, once mostly held in check, became rampant. The band (except for Rich), and even the bandleader, began to defer to him. “If Tommy Dorsey was late to a rehearsal,” Sammy Cahn recalled, “Frank Sinatra acted as substitute orchestra leader. When Dorsey arrived, Sinatra would fix him with a glare of ‘Where the fuck you been?’ Dorsey would apologize that he’d been tied up in this and that and Sinatra’d say something quaint like ‘bullshit.’ ”
No father, good or bad, goes unpunished.
Sinatra’s third trip to the Coast was very different from his second. Just a year earlier, he had been traveling with Nancy and the destitute Music Makers, making the best of a bad situation after the Palomar burned down, then getting the hook while the caged canaries at Victor Hugo’s looked on. Now he was free as a bird, a hot young up-and-comer with a number-one record, singing to all the stars of Hollywood, Bob Hope and Tyrone Power and Lana Turner and Errol Flynn and Mickey Rooney, at the Palladium, the million-dollar pink and chrome 1940s-Moderne palace (its twelve-thousand-square-foot oval dance floor could accommodate six thousand dancers) that had risen from the ashes of the Palomar, next door to Columbia Pictures on Sunset Boulevard.
What’s more, he was in the movies. Sort of. During the Palladium stand, the Dorsey band got hired to perform four numbers in the new Paramount B musical Las Vegas Nights.2 It was the kind of picture they called a “programmer”—the sort of lesser fare studios cranked out by the dozen in those pretelevision days, to fill out double and triple features. Hollywood was a funny place: Tommy Dorsey may have been a national figure, but in the magically self-enclosed kingdom of the movies, he was an outsider, a mere beginner. This would be his first film, and he was starting small—the bandleader was barely written into the action (such as it was). For the rest of the band—even for the nation’s hottest young vocalist—it was strictly extra work, at $15 a day.
It didn’t matter to Frank. Even if the band had to play the Palladium until two in the morning and be on the set at Paramount, in makeup, four hours later; even if moviemaking turned out to be a monumentally tedious affair, with long, long waits in between anything happening at all (the musicians mostly lay around the set sleeping)—even with all the exhausting boredom, appearing in his first real motion picture fit right into Frank Sinatra’s master plan. And besides the obvious goal of getting his face on-screen, the enterprise contained a major side benefit.
He had seen, on his first trip to the Coast with the Major Bowes Number Five tour unit, that just about every spectacular girl in the country gravitated to Hollywood, hoping to get into pictures. Since only a small percentage succeeded, the town was ridiculously overstocked with ridiculously available young women, all of them working the angles, doing absolutely anything they could to get their moment in the klieg lights.
Alora Gooding’s moment came when the director Ralph Murphy—who would go on to make such classics as Sunbonnet Sue and Red Stallion in the Rockies—needed a pretty girl to stare adoringly at Frank Sinatra as he stood by a piano and sang the nation’s number-one hit, “I’ll Never Smile Again,” along with the Pied Pipers. Murphy only had to glance around the set for a moment, tapping his megaphone against his hip, before he spotted the honey blonde with the long stems and big bright smile. He nodded at her. Okay, sweetheart. She beamed. The sequence required staging and setting up and lighting, all the painstaking and time-consuming effort stimulating the illusion, in the minds of Alora Gooding and Frank Sinatra, that the moment would be their Moment. In reality, the short segment of the number that made it to film happened in the background behind a close-up of the film’s two stars, Constance Moore and Bert Wheeler. A moment in a sidelight in a B picture.
But there she was, staring adoringly, and, Christ, she was luscious, thought Frank—lissome, long legged, pert nosed, and smiling. So unlike Nancy, that vague, judgmental, faraway presence in Jersey City, all neighborhood-serious and heavy with the baby weight and fretting at him, clinging to him, even when, now and then, they indulged in the expensive, non-pleasurable luxury of a staticky long-distance call.
Looking at the honey blonde’s big eyes and big bright mouth and perfect breasts and legs, he toppled. He had been with—where did the count now stand? a lot—a lot of women and girls, but something about this one, standing in glittering sunlight in front of the bougainvilleas and blue-blossomed jacarandas, something turned his brain to jelly, and he was gone.
Overseas, the Brits were fighting the Nazis in the skies over England. At home, Roosevelt had just announced a national draft. Hollywood on the cusp of the war was like a picnic on a cloudless day with thunder booming far in the distance.
The girl had a day job as a parking attendant at the Garden of Allah, a fancy, boisterous apartment complex on Sunset (Scott Fitzgerald had lived there in the late 1930s, and would die just around the corner, in Sheilah Graham’s apartment on North Hayworth, that December). Frank went to visit her. She wore a butt-twitching uniform and velvet gloves so she wouldn’t get fingerprints on the chrome door handles of the nice cars that pulled up in front. Frank smiled that smile of his and took her picture with his new camera. He put the picture in his wallet, and forgot about it. (He should have remembered.)
It was the way she had of looking thrilled—thrilled just to be in his presence—that caught him. Innocent, but knowing just what to do. He couldn’t get enough of her. The first time they woke up in his room at the Hollywood Plaza (on Vine, right across from the Brown Derby and just around the corner from the Palladium), he knew he wanted her there again that night. She moved in. Giggling when he carried her across the threshold. Nylons on the shower rod—it didn’t matter. He loved her laugh.
Her real name was Dorothy, she told him. Like the girl with the ruby slippers. He nuzzled her neck, imagining she came from a farm someplace. Dorothy Gooding. It sounded like a girl who had milked cows.
In fact her name was Dorothy Bonucelli, and she was from a broken home on the wrong side of the tracks in Rockford, Illinois.
After her stepfather started paying her visits in the middle of the night, she’d fled west, winding up in Reno, a windblown high-desert town then, full of drunken cowboys reeling down the dusty streets looking for fun. She’d done what she had to. Working as a cocktail waitress, she met a man with a hard face and tight curly hair who became obsessed with her. She strung him along as long as was necessary, then fled again, this time to L.A. It was easier to disappear in those days. She was twenty-five, a few months older than Sinatra. She told him she was twenty-two.
They lived as husband and wife the whole time he was in Los Angeles. The whole band knew; it didn’t matter. Tommy knew; it didn’t matter.
When the band prepared to return east for another big stand at the Paramount, he kissed her tears away and gave her a ring with her birthstone, an amethyst. He whispered promises, promises to return, in her beautiful ear. He would be as good as his word, more or less.
One day, amid the interminable tedium that was a movie set, there was a stirring—like a rainstorm moving across an open lake. Hardened gaffers and propmen suddenly turned and smiled real smiles; sleeping musicians stirred awake. Ralph Murphy dropped his megaphone to his side and stared at an amazing sight: Bing Crosby, in a gorgeous tweed jacket, blooming pleated trousers, and no yachting cap (no toupee, either). Crosby himself, preparing to shoot Road to Zanzibar across the Paramount lot, was stopping by to pay a call on Dorsey. As it happened, Murphy was just about to start a take of the Constance Moore–Bert Wheeler scene with “I’ll Never Smile Again” playing in the background. Crosby gave the director a nod and a wink and told him to go right ahead with what he was doing.
Murphy put the megaphone to his lips and called, “Action”: the lovers spoke their witty lines, Tommy struck up the song in the background. Bing, putting his pipe to his lips and narrowing his e
yes, watched Frank carefully. After it was over, he strolled over to Dorsey. The two cool Irishmen shook hands. Just to the side, Sinatra was saying something—he hardly knew what—to Jo Stafford as, his heart racing, he watched Crosby. Crosby. Who now was nodding in his direction.
“Very good, Tommy,” Bing was saying. And, indicating Sinatra: “I think you’ve got something there.”
Then Crosby came over to Sinatra and—as Jo Stafford stood back, her eyes lighting up—shook his hand. “Real nice, Frank,” the older singer said. “You’re going to go far.” He said it with complete conviction. He didn’t bullshit you, Bing. He didn’t have to.
Going through his wallet after he returned, while he lay in bed snoring, Nancy found a snapshot of a beautiful blond girl. This girl, whoever she was, photographed well, and was smiling suggestively at whoever had taken her picture.
Nancy confronted Frank with the snapshot. He pretended to be seeing it for the first time. Her? She’s nobody. A fan, that’s all. Some kid who gave me her picture.
She stared straight into him with a look of terrible fury.
He repeated: She was nobody. Some girl who was hanging around the band.
Christmas came, and to make up for having to work over much of the holiday week—the Dorsey band was in the midst of its second big stand at the Paramount—he found ways to be extra-attentive. She wept again (she wept easily in the months after having the baby) and embraced him.
“Nothing meant anything to him except his career,” Nick Sevano recalled long afterward. “He had a drive like I’ve never seen in anybody.”
“I kept thinking to myself, ‘I’ve got to climb a little higher in this next year,’ ” Sinatra told Sidney Zion, at Yale, forty-five years later. “I gave myself calendar times. What could I do in six months? How far could I go?”