by James Kaplan
Bullets Durgom was finding out how far. Durgom, Dorsey’s short, roly-poly record promotion man (his real first name was George; he had acquired the Runyonesque handle by moving fast), had the job of visiting radio stations, in those palmy days before payola got a bad name, and doing whatever it took to drum up interest in the band’s new sides. Drumming up interest might mean bestowing fancy meals, white-wall tires, expensive Scotch, even ladies. The marching orders, and the money, came straight from Tommy, the cagiest careerist around. But you couldn’t flog a dead horse; what wouldn’t sell, wouldn’t sell. And what absolutely wouldn’t sell to radio stations in 1941 were Tommy Dorsey instrumentals. Dead in the water. “All they wanted to hear about,” Durgom told E. J. Kahn Jr. of the New Yorker, for a profile Kahn wrote around that time, “was Frank.”
“Oh! Look at Me Now,” Sinatra doing the vocal, a big hit. “Without a Song,” with Sinatra, a big hit. “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” and “Little Brown Jug,” sans vocals: nowheresville.
“This boy’s going to be big,” Durgom told Kahn, “if Tommy doesn’t kill him first. Tommy doesn’t like people stealing the show—and he doesn’t like people who are temperamental like himself.”
In May, Billboard named Sinatra Male Vocalist of the Year. Over Crosby.
George T. Simon of Metronome, who less than two years earlier had thought the singer sounded like “a shy boy out on his first date,” now found him “insufferably cocky.”
He was insufferably cocky. (And insufferably charming.) He walked fast, talked fast, chewed gum fast, signed autographs fast … the only thing he did slowly (very slowly) was sing. He grinned, then stormed. He hurled out orders to his homeboys Sevano and Sanicola. “Match me,” he’d command, and his cigarette would be lit, just like that. He wasn’t a boy singer anymore. It was all coming true. The pipe, the yachting cap, the blazer and ascot … the costumes he’d tried on fit him perfectly. Bing himself had touched his shoulder. It was almost as if he had everything.
But he would never stop yearning, because he could never get what he truly wanted.
And he could never—ever—get it fast enough.
He was the one they came to see. Gradually at first, and then suddenly, a great national tide of girls surged up, their freshly sprouted breasts swelling with passion for him. Only a minute earlier, they’d been flat-chested kids, playing with their dollies in the dry dust of the Depression. Now they wore calf-length skirts and ankle-length white socks—bobby socks—with saddle shoes or Mary Janes, and they had a little bit of money in their purses: the Depression was over. Some newspaperman called them bobby-soxers, and it stuck.
And soon enough, the war would start, and the sad ballads he sang would hit them all the harder.
But he was the one they wanted. Kids still danced to Glenn Miller and Kay Kyser and Bob Crosby; they bounced to Benny Goodman’s jazz. Artie Shaw could stir up the girls with his handsome face and clarinet wizardry, but then, he was never much for sentiment. And he had a strange relationship with his audiences: there had been the time, not so long before, when right in the middle of a concert, he’d decided the jitterbugs out on the floor were idiots, and said so, walking right off the bandstand and out of the business for a few months.
Yet right now the white-hot center of the business was the unlikely-looking Sinatra, his big Adam’s apple bobbing over those floppy bow ties that Nancy, the good wife, made right at home.3 When he sang the long, long lines of those slow ballads, sounding as though his heart might burst any second, why, those girls felt as though their hearts might burst, and they just had to cry out—
Frankiee!
Dorsey stood, ramrod straight and incredulous, the first time it happened. They were screaming, pretending to faint, really fainting, for Christ’s sake, like Holy Rollers at a revival meeting. Tommy smiled indulgently (they were ticket buyers, after all), but actually felt a kind of genteel horror: What in the goddamn hell was the world coming to?
“I used to stand there on the bandstand so amazed I’d almost forget to take my solos,” the bandleader remembered years later. “You could almost feel the excitement coming up out of the crowds when that kid stood up to sing. Remember, he was no matinee idol. He was a skinny kid with big ears. And yet what he did to women was something awful.” (This last was a slip of the tongue, perhaps. In the spring of 1941, Dorsey’s wife, Toots, walked out on him after she walked in on him doing something awful to sexy, redheaded Edythe Wright, right in their Bernardsville house. The bandleader’s reputation as a prodigious cocksman was just another of the sources of Sinatra’s admiration.)
Tommy smiled about it all—at first. At first, he even made fun of Sinatra. When the girls would start swooning, he would stop the band and have the musicians swoon right back at them. “This inspired the girls to go one better,” Dorsey recalled, “and the madness kept growing until pretty soon it reached fantastic proportions.”
In late August 1941, the band started its second run at the Paramount in New York, a three-week engagement that had sold out—unlike the previous year’s stand—strictly on the basis of Sinatra. The theater’s most spectacular feature was a gigantic moving stage that rose right up out of the orchestra pit when the show began and sank back down when it was over. One night, after the band closed with “I’ll Never Smile Again,” and the stage began to descend, a couple of bobby-soxers leaned over and grabbed the singer’s bow tie, one on each end, and wouldn’t let go. “He was hanging there,” Connie Haines remembered. “I ran over and screamed and hit out at their hands. Tommy ran over too and joined in too, and we got him away!”
It was nice of Tommy. After all, he must have had conflicting impulses: the great trombonist was now officially second fiddle. Dorsey took it philosophically, furiously, humorously, incredulously—he took it all kinds of ways. He was a mercurial fellow, and in the summer and fall of 1941 his world was wobbling a little bit. His wife had left him. The IRS was after him for eighty grand in back taxes—big money anytime, but especially then. The combination would have undone almost any man, but Dorsey was made of iron. Still, he drank a lot. (He had stayed on the wagon for much of the 1930s, but fell off at the turn of the decade, as he climbed toward his greatest success.) And while he was in his cups, he couldn’t help contemplating the perfidy of this kid who was like a son to him (Tommy loved Frank every bit as much as Frank loved Tommy, maybe even more), the treachery of this kid turning into a scornful adolescent and not just pulling away—that would have been bad enough—but actually overshadowing the Old Man.
And yet another father figure lurked in the wings.
In November, the band headed back to Los Angeles, to play a return engagement at the Palladium and shoot another movie. This time the picture was the real deal: an MGM musical. It was called Ship Ahoy (the original title, I’ll Take Manila, was quickly changed soon after Manila fell to the Japanese two months later). It was a piece of froth, yet it starred the incomparable Eleanor Powell, a tap-dancing powerhouse and a class act. And Sinatra got to sing three numbers in close-up, not background, this time, two with the Pipers and one, “Poor You,” more or less alone, though he had to alternate choruses with his silly old pal from Shea’s Theatre in Buffalo, Red Skelton.
It wasn’t quite a star turn, but that scarcely mattered: Sinatra was returning to Hollywood more and more frequently. One of these times he’d break through, he was absolutely certain of it. He was feeling his oats in a very big way. The big crowds at the Palladium had got the message: he was the show. He was also moving in sweller company in Los Angeles than the year before. This time he kept Alora at bay. He was back at the Hollywood Plaza, but told her Dorsey was making him double up with Joey Bushkin. It was a lie, of course. He had his eye peeled for bigger game. He had heard that none other than Lana Turner, who’d been married to Artie Shaw for ten minutes, was screwing Buddy Rich, and if Lana Turner was screwing Buddy Rich, anything was possible.
One cool morning—a rainstorm had swept through the night before;
now the City of Angels sparkled like Eden itself—he was walking between soundstages in Culver City, carrying a cardboard cup of coffee, nodding to this glorious creature (dressed as a harem girl), then that glorious creature (a cowgirl), then that glorious creature (a secretary?)—they all smiled at him—when he ran into, of all people, an old pal of his from the Major Bowes days, a red-haired pianist who’d bounced around the Midwest in the 1930s, Lyle Henderson (Crosby would soon nickname him Skitch). Henderson was strolling with a creature much more glorious, if possible, than the three Sinatra had just encountered. She was tall, dark haired, with sleepy green eyes, killer cheekbones, and absurdly lush lips, lips he couldn’t stop staring at.
Frankie! Henderson said, as they shook hands. His old chum was doing all right these days.
Sinatra smiled, not at Henderson. The glorious creature smiled back bashfully, but with a teasing hint of directness in her dark eyes. The pianist—he was doing rehearsal duty at the studio—then got to say the six words that someone had to say, sometime, but that he and he alone got to say for the first time in history on this sparkling morning: Frank Sinatra, this is Ava Gardner.
Ava Lavinia Gardner, to be exact. She was not quite nineteen, and she was from the picturesquely named hamlet of Grabtown, North Carolina, deep in tobacco-farming country. Her presence in Hollywood was a sheer fluke, the result of a mildly absurd chain of events set in motion by her traffic-stopping face. Visiting her older sister Bappie several months earlier in the big city, New York, Ava had been photographed by Bappie’s boyfriend, who ran a photo portrait studio on Fifth Avenue. The boyfriend put one of the pictures of Ava in his store window as a sample of his work. Passing the window one day, a messenger from the New York legal department of Loew’s, the parent company of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, was stopped in his tracks by the photograph. He decided he would like to go out with that beautiful girl. And so the messenger called the store and inquired about the girl, saying he worked for MGM and hinting he could get her into the movies, even though he could do nothing of the sort. Bappie’s boyfriend told the messenger that the girl had gone back home to North Carolina; the messenger sighed and gave up his quest. But Bappie and her boyfriend, excited by MGM’s “interest,” and not wanting to let the matter drop, packed up the boyfriend’s best shots of Ava and hand-delivered them to Metro’s New York office. Things moved very swiftly from there.
Ava had just arrived in town that August with Bappie; the two were living together in a tiny efficiency apartment in a seamy hotel on Selma Avenue. Every morning Ava took three buses to Culver City, then disembarked to spend her day taking lessons: in walking and talking and acting. The great studio machine was nudging and prodding and poking her, trying to mold her into someone as different as possible from the barefoot, sharp-tongued country girl she really was. Both she and the studio were having a rough time of it.
In the meantime, one of Metro’s biggest stars was putting the full-court press on her. Mickey Rooney, only twenty-one but quite the rake, was crazy for Ava. In fact, Mickey Rooney wanted to marry her. Marry her. Why? Because Ava wouldn’t sleep with him. That was the ridiculous 1941 long and short of it. And truthfully, Ava Gardner wasn’t that interested in sleeping with or marrying Mickey Rooney—which made him even crazier with desire—but she had been watching him on the screen for years, and here he was, in person, right in front of her! And cute as a button, and so persistent.
Frank Sinatra knew none of this. All he knew as he shook her hand that morning—for just a second too long—was that he wanted to possess her. It was a familiar-enough feeling, and he was as confident as ever that he would. But as she released his hand, she gave him another look, slightly inquisitive this time, and something in his gut revolved a little bit. It was just the flicker of a sensation, and it confused him momentarily. He took a sip from his cardboard cup and smiled at her over the rim.
And then she turned and walked down the studio street and around a corner, and was gone.
Meanwhile, the big crowds kept coming to the Palladium, the movie stars in the VIP section watching with amusement as the teenage girls—the message had somehow traveled across the country, an unseen impulse of the kind that moves herds of reindeer or schools of fish—as the girls screamed Frankie’s name and swooned. Out of the crowd one night, between sets, came a familiar face: a carved-out, acne-scarred countenance, on the young side of middle age, similar in some ways to his own, only Jewish where his was Italian, hesitant and thoughtful where his was mercurial and expressive.
His name was Emanuel Sacks—Manie (pronounced “Manny”), for short. He had been a talent agent with MCA, and he had come to the Rustic Cabin around the same time Harry had, and told Frank just what Buddy Rich had told Frank: I like the way you sing. Sinatra had instantly liked this serious, shyly smiling fellow—he ran across so many creeps and phonies, drunks and blowhards in nightclubs, and this guy was clearly none of that, he was clearly a smart Jew, a serious businessman, classy, and he’d given Sinatra his business card. Which Frank had put someplace and forgotten about.
Until tonight. He instantly remembered the guy, whose homely, sensitive features were totally out of place amid the beautiful, hysterical faces at the Hollywood Palladium. They shook hands, and after a moment of small talk Frank asked him what he was up to. Still with that agency?
Not anymore. He was manager of popular repertoire at Columbia Records.
Frank stared. At Columbia?
Sacks smiled, shy but proud.
Not shy, Sinatra looked Manie right in the eye and asked how he’d like to record him as a soloist.
Coming from almost anyone else short of Crosby, it would have been, in late 1941, an absurdly presumptuous suggestion. Singers sang with bands. Bands made singers. Where was the singer who could make it on his own?
Yet Sacks looked back at him with complete seriousness. And more—Sinatra felt it: respect. Sacks said he’d like nothing better in the world than to record Sinatra as a soloist. But wasn’t he still with RCA, with Tommy?
Frank smiled. Things change.
Sacks smiled back. His teeth were crooked and stained. He was ready anytime Frank was. He took a small leather case out of his breast pocket, handed Sinatra a business card.
Sinatra took it and grinned: he would keep this card in a very safe place.
Two days later, Down Beat, in its annual poll, named Frank Sinatra Male Vocalist of the Year. The winner of the poll for the previous six years straight had been Bing Crosby.
Lion and cub. Bing and Frank, around 1940. (photo credit 9.2)
10
Newly married, and still in love. Frank and Nancy, circa 1940. (photo credit 10.1)
December 6 was a Saturday, the biggest night of the week at the Palladium. At about 2:00 a.m., after the band had left the stand and the musicians packed up their instruments and sheet music, a select crew, Tommy and Buddy and Frank among them, got into their big black cars and drove down Sunset to a large Tudor house on a quiet side street in Brentwood. No civilian could ever understand what it was like to finish a gig, your head still buzzing, your blood pumping. You could never just go to bed. You had to keep going—drink, smoke, drug, talk, get laid. Maybe all at once.
The Tudor house’s owner, just twenty years old, had been in the star-studded crowd at the Palladium that night, hovered over by this square-jawed, tan-skinned actor and that, but she’d only had eyes for the bandstand. She was petite, bottle blond, and deliciously curvy, with a haughty, sultry, heart-shaped face that made her look older than her age. Lana Turner had been around enough—she was a veteran of four hard years in Hollywood—to know that actors were nice to look at, but she really loved musicians. Most actors were a hell of a lot more fascinating on-screen than in real life, and a lot of the handsomer ones were interested in other men. Musicians did something, besides speak someone else’s lines. They were funny and profane, and the ones she’d met all seemed to like women a lot.
And they were young (many of them not that much o
lder than Lana Turner) and wild and dangerous and brilliant—the rock stars of their day. Except that they could read music. (Well, except for Buddy and Frank.)
Buddy felt Lana was smiling at him and only him that night. A couple of the others felt the same way.
There was alcohol by the gallons at her house, and the sweet reek of reefer—especially around Joey Bushkin, giggling as he sat at her white grand piano, playing dirty songs and funny songs and beautiful songs. There were a few other girls, there were games and filthy jokes and hilarity, there was quite a bit of misbehavior, and then there was unconsciousness. Buddy ended up in Lana’s bed (the sheets were still warm), but he had drunk too much to get it up, and you could have lit her breath with a match by that point anyway: he’d never found that very sexy.
The sun rose over Brentwood to the sound of snoring in the big Tudor. A few hours later, a black Plymouth coupe pulled up in front of the house, and Lana Turner’s mother, Mildred, a rawboned Arkansas lady with a history of tragedy and pain, got out, a worried look on her long, plain features. She had been calling and calling, but nobody would pick up the phone. Now she opened the house’s heavy front door with her own key, sniffed the pungent air, and frowned at the sight of snoring musicians draped every which way—over the couches and easy chairs and carpet. Her daughter was going to hell in a hand-basket, and so, apparently, was the world: she had come to bring the news that the country was at war.
Lucky Strike green has gone to war. Yes, Lucky Strike green has gone to war … Don’t look for your Luckies in their familiar green package on the tobacco counters. No, your Luckies are wearing a different color now.
Who the hell knew what was going to happen? The world was turning upside down, and Frank had to grab whatever he could. The word was buzzing along the musicians’ grapevine: Bob Eberly, with Jimmy Dorsey’s band, was thinking about going out on his own. Eberly was kind of a handsome lug, and he could really sing. He had a rich, supple baritone, and he and Helen O’Connell had just done a version of “Green Eyes” that sounded as if they were going to hop right into the sack the second they were through.