by James Kaplan
Frank Cooper, the agent to whom Manie Sacks had sent Sinatra, took one look at that Faustian contract and blanched. Not only would the singer be forking over 43.3 percent to Dorsey and Vannerson, but he’d also have to pay Cooper’s 10 percent. Plus income tax.
Sinatra smiled at the poor, sputtering mortal. “Don’t worry,” he told Cooper. “I’m not paying him a quarter.” Meaning Dorsey.
Dolly’s son had learned his lessons well.
Sinatra made his last radio broadcast with the Dorsey band on September 3, at the Circle Theater in Indianapolis. On the intro to “The Song Is You,” you can sense the chaos under Tommy’s steely-smooth, slickly cadenced patter. “After tonight,” the bandleader told the Hoosier audience, “he’s going to be strictly on his own. And Frank, I want to tell you that everyone in the band wishes you the best of luck.”
“Thanks, Mac,” Sinatra says, using the nickname Jimmy Dorsey had given his brother when the two were boys. The singer’s voice sounds very young, very Hoboken, and—surprisingly—soft with emotion. “I’d like to say that I’m gonna miss all you guys after kickin’ around for three years. And ladies and gentlemen, I’d like you to meet the boy who’s gonna take my place as the vocalist with Tommy and the band—he’s a fine guy, a wunnerful singer, and he was good enough for Harry James and Benny Goodman, and—that’s really sayin’ plenty. Folks, I’d like you to meet Dick Haymes.”
After a nice round of applause, Haymes pipes up: “Well, Frank, I don’t know if anyone can really take your place with this band. But I’m gonna be in there tryin’. You can bet on that. As for you, well, I know that you’ll be knockin’ ’em dead on your own hook.”
Then it’s almost as if Dick Haymes actually gets the hook—Dorsey jumps right back in, just about cutting him off: “I agree with you there, Dick, and thanks a lot, Dick Haymes—Frank, before you hit the road, how ’bout one more song just for—auld lang syne.”
“That’s all right with me, Tom,” Sinatra says. “Gimme the beat on our arrangement of ‘The Song Is You,’ and I’ll see what I can do with it.”
It’s all old-style showbiz corn, phony modesty an inch thick, but when Sinatra shifts from those Hoboken street tones to the first few bars of the Kern and Hammerstein masterpiece, you do a double take: the Voice is that rich, gorgeous, and expressive.4 Look out world, here I come, is the clear message—along with a quick Good luck, kiddo to Dick Haymes. And a quick thumb of the nose to Tommy Dorsey.
The way he ends the song—an ethereal falsetto high F—has an infinitely vulnerable sound: as always, his emotions were powerful and complicated. Dorsey told a magazine writer years later that at a party backstage after the show, Sinatra “was literally crying on my shoulder … depressed about what would happen to his career.” Depressed? Good and scared was more like it. He had Tommy’s seventeen grand in his pocket, but that would burn fast, especially with the way he spent. (He had just put down a payment on his first house, a wood-frame Cape with a front porch, in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey.) What he didn’t have were bookings. Cooper had managed to land him a bit part singing one number, “Night and Day,” in a Columbia B picture, Reveille with Beverly, and Sacks had wangled him a spot on a CBS radio show in New York. Period. Besides that, it was going to be strictly Sit and Wait.
He was terribly frightened. Excited, too—he believed in his luck. But some part of him always felt like that kid in bed in the dark on Garden Street, listening through the wall as his mother rattled on and on and his old man just lay there, grunting.
As for the Sentimental Gentleman of Swing, Tommy Dorsey drank a good bit backstage at the Circle Theater the night of that final broadcast, and liquor always put a fine edge on his cold Irish anger. When Sinatra cried on his shoulder, Dorsey had seven words for him.
“I hope you fall on your ass,” the bandleader said.
At first it seemed that was exactly what was going to happen. After returning from Los Angeles (where Frank had stopped by the NBC radio studios, hat in hand, to ask for a job as staff singer that the network did not vouchsafe to give him), Frank got to spend a lot of time around the new house, helping Nancy paint and paper and fuss over their little girl, and she got to see what kind of good mood that put him in. Meanwhile, Frank Cooper was working hard to get his client a job, any job—against the opposition of many who felt that a solo singer, even Sinatra, couldn’t draw an audience without a big band behind him.
It’s hard to imagine in this age of instant information, but fame in those days was a far more parochial phenomenon than it is now. Frank Sinatra was a name to conjure with among the kids, the jitterbugs, the record-buying big-band fans; but to much of America, where singers were concerned, it was Crosby, period. Sinatra was really just catching on.
His own retrospective assessment of his situation in the fall of 1942 may have been a little bleaker than was actually the case—he always did like to buff his story a bit. “I was now free,” he told Sidney Zion at the Yale Law School talk. “I had no ties with anybody. I didn’t even have an agent to represent me. [Frank Cooper was very much alive when Sinatra—who in his later years would also sometimes claim never to have had a voice lesson—made this astounding statement.] I was living in Hasbrouck Heights at the time, and I found out that there was a theater [nearby] where they had vaudeville, and I went around, spoke to the manager, and I said, ‘I’d like to play here for a couple of nights, maybe a weekend.’ He said okay. So I played there for a week, Tuesday through Sunday. I found out later that each manager or booker from the theaters in New York—the Roxy, the Strand, the Loew’s State, the Paramount, the Capitol Theater—sent their scouts over to see what all the noise was about.”
In fact, Sinatra had not one but two agents working for him. Frank Cooper now joined forces with a man named Harry Romm—whose not inconsiderable claim to fame was having put together the Three Stooges—to try to browbeat Bob Weitman, the manager of the Paramount, into booking Sinatra. In a classic case of How Quickly They Forget, Weitman—who had seen the girls go ape for Frankie in his theater, had seen them camp out for five or six shows, refusing to go home—was skeptically disposed. It was one thing, he thought, when you had the matchless presence of Dorsey, the blazing drums of Buddy Rich, and the heavenly harmonies of the Pied Pipers all together on that gigantic elevator stage. But could bony little Sinatra, all by his lonesome, put four thousand asses in the seats?
Cooper and Romm finally hit on a clever ploy: they prevailed upon Weitman to attend an early-December Sinatra performance at the Mosque Theatre in Newark. What Weitman didn’t realize was that Newark was Sinatra’s backyard. If ever Frank owned an audience, this was it. The whole thing was strictly a setup. Years afterward, Weitman recalled sitting and watching in awe as “this skinny kid walks out on the stage. He was not much older than the kids in the seats. He looked like he still had milk on his chin. As soon as they saw him, the kids went crazy. And when he started to sing they stood up and yelled and moaned and carried on until I thought—excuse the expression—his pants had fallen down.”
It was December 12, 1942: Sinatra’s twenty-seventh birthday. An auspicious omen. Weitman phoned him at home that night. “He said, ‘What are you doing New Year’s Eve?’ ” Sinatra recalled. “I said, ‘Not a thing. I can’t even get booked anywhere.’ Weitman said, ‘I’d like you to open at the joint,’ as he used to call it. He said, ‘You’ve got Benny Goodman’s Orchestra and a Crosby picture.’ I fell right on my butt.”
The Crosby picture was Star Spangled Rhythm, a patriotic musical starring not only Bing but also Bob Hope, Dorothy Lamour, Ray Milland, Paulette Goddard, and a few dozen other of the studio’s stars, all playing themselves. And Benny Goodman was, of course, Benny Goodman: a godlike bandleader and instrumentalist at least on a par with Dorsey.5
“In those days,” Sinatra said, “they called you an ‘extra added attraction.’ I went to rehearsal at seven-thirty in the morning, and I looked at the marquee, and it said, ‘Extra added attraction, Fran
k Sinatra,’ and I said, ‘Wow! Wow!’ ”
Wow was not what Jack Benny (who was emceeing the show) said. Such was the narrowness of Sinatra’s renown at that point that the comedian had never heard of him. Benny recalled:
I was in New York City doing a radio show, and Bob Weitman … came to me and asked if just before I do my radio show, I could come over to the Paramount for the debut of Frank Sinatra. I said who? He said, “Frank Sinatra, and Benny Goodman’s Orchestra is also playing and Benny Goodman will introduce you, and you will introduce Frank Sinatra …” I said, “Well, I’m sorry, but I never heard of him. But, Bob, I’ll do this for you and Benny Goodman and Sinatra too if it is any help …”
Benny Goodman went on and did his act, and then he says, “Now, ladies and gentlemen, to introduce our honored guest, we have Jack Benny.” So I walked out on a little ramp and got a very fine receptio,n you know, I thought it was nice. I certainly didn’t think Sinatra would get much of anything ’cause I never heard of him. So, they introduce me and I did two or three jokes and they laughed and then I realized there were a lot of young people out there, probably waiting for Sinatra, so I introduced Frank Sinatra as if he were one of my closest friends—you know, I made a big thing of it and I had to make all of this up, ’cause I didn’t know who he was—and then I said, “Well, anyway, ladies and gentlemen, here he is, Frank Sinatra”—and I thought the goddamned building was going to cave in. I never heard such a commotion with people running down to the stage, screaming and nearly knocking me off the ramp. All this for a fellow I never heard of.
Bob Weitman said, “There were about five thousand people in the theater at the time, and all five thousand were of one voice, ‘F-R-A-N-K-I-E-E-E-E-E!’ The young, the old—as one person—got up and danced in the aisles and jumped on the stage. The loge and the balcony swayed. One of the managers came over to me and said, ‘The balcony is rocking—what do we do?’ ”
Standing on the stage, his back to the audience as he prepared to conduct his band, Benny Goodman had a different reaction as the huge sound burst forth.
“What the fuck was that?” he said.
Benny Goodman and Frank, Los Angeles, early forties. (photo credit 10.2)
Act Three
HIGHER
AND
HIGHER
11
“Good morning. My name is Frank Sinatra.” His first line in the movies, in the 1943 RKO Radio Pictures feature Higher and Higher. (photo credit 11.1)
EXTRA ADDED ATTRACTION” was indeed how the Paramount first billed him: fourth on the program, beneath Benny Goodman and His Famous Orchestra,1 under a comedy trio called the Radio Rogues and a comedy duo called Moke and Poke, and just above “DON BAKER at the PARAMOUNT ORGAN.” Frank Sinatra’s name was, however, the only one besides Goodman’s in boldface, and in type only slightly smaller. And beneath the name, the slogan: “The Voice That Has Thrilled Millions.”
It was true enough. But the phrase itself sounded like something that would have rolled off the stentorian tongue of some radio announcer of the 1920s or 1930s. And here in January 1943—one of those hinges in time that come along periodically, a moment when everything simply vaults forward—Frank Sinatra, a radically new American product, needed drastic repackaging, and somebody new to do it.
The coiner of the slogan was another of Sinatra’s agents at the time, a soon-to-be-forgotten figure named Harry Kilby. The publicist who convinced the powers that be at the Paramount to affix the tired-sounding strapline to the bottom of the marquee was one Milt Rubin, a Times Square hack and the willing slave of the Emperor Winchell—Walter, of course. Sinatra had hired Rubin in the fall of 1942, soon after leaving Dorsey, on a tip from the all-powerful columnist, and had quickly come to regret it. The PR man treated Frank like just another act, no more important than anyone else on his C-list roster of ventriloquists, acrobats, and female impersonators. Meanwhile, Rubin hovered around Winchell’s table at Lindy’s, laughing at the great man’s jokes and begging for scraps. There were times Sinatra—admittedly a high-maintenance client—couldn’t reach his $50-a-week publicist on the telephone. Nancy, who wrote the checks, began ignoring Rubin’s bills. This got his attention, though not in a good way: the publicist initiated legal proceedings against his client.
Manie Sacks of Columbia, Sinatra’s new rabbi, had the solution: George Evans was Frank’s man. The best in the business—the best there ever was.
This was manifestly true. Between Rubin and Evans, there was simply no comparison. A glance into the former’s fusty Times Square office would have made it clear: a cluttered couple of rooms behind a frosted-glass transom door, an old broad in a snood doing her nails at the reception desk while some sweaty guy with a Chihuahua cooled his heels. In George B. Evans’s clean and modern Columbus Circle suite, on the other hand, there were three assistants fielding calls from clients like Mr. Glenn Miller, Mr. Duke Ellington, and Miss Lena Horne.
Evans was forty, in the prime of his life, and he was a dynamo, with a thrusting determined jaw and a ravening look in his piercing dark eyes. Lightly balding, bespectacled (tortoise-shell frames were his trademark), handsome in his way, he dressed well, spoke fast and crisply, came straight to the point. And he had a good opinion of himself, with reason: he lived for his clients, and his clients did well by him. Their joys were his joys; their sorrows were his, too. If they needed solace at 4:00 a.m., he picked up the phone, no questions asked. He was as expert at making trouble go away as he was at whipping up excitement.
In return he was choosy about whom he wanted to represent. Where this Sinatra boy was concerned, Evans was skeptical at first, Manie Sacks’s laudatory call notwithstanding. Singers were a dime a dozen, and what was a singer, anyway, without a band? The bands made news; the bands brought the crowds. And the bandleaders were gods. Glenn, Duke: God, just the thought of these brilliant, elegant, authoritative men gave Evans chills. In some sense, representing them made him feel he was taking on their qualities.
But a boy singer! This one might even be different from the rest—from what he had heard on records and the radio, Evans was willing to grant that. It was a pleasant voice, nicely expressive. Still, George Evans didn’t quite see what all the fuss was about.
Then he went, and he saw. Nick Sevano, Sinatra’s Hoboken homeboy and soon-to-be ex-gofer (one too many tantrums about starch in the shirts; life was too short—except that Sevano would spend the rest of his very long life trading, like so many others, on his acquaintance with the singer), met the publicist in the Paramount lobby and whisked him down the aisle in the middle of the 2:30 show. Evans, not easily impressed, gaped at what he saw.
Actually, the sound and smell were what hit him at first. The place was absolutely packed with hysterical teenage girls, almost five thousand of them, fire laws be damned (a few hundred slipped into the right hands earned Bob Weitman a lot of extra money). They were jamming the seats, the aisles, the balcony—all but hanging from the rafters. And hanging raptly on the words to the song the starved-looking kid in the spotlight at center stage was singing—
Be careful, it’s my heart …
and going nuts when he hit that last word:
It’s not my watch you’re holding, it’s my he-art.
The (by now very practiced) catch in his voice, the tousled spit curl on his forehead (no Dorsey anymore to order him to comb it), the help-me look in his bright blue eyes (always, pointedly, laser focused on one girl or another in the audience)—it all set them off like dynamite. The air in the great auditorium was vibrating, both with earsplitting screams (FRANKIEEE!!! FRANKIEEE!!!) and with the heat and musk of female lust. Evans could smell perfumes, BO, the faint acrid tang of urine (the girls would come for the first show at 9:15 a.m. and stay for show after show, determined never to relinquish a precious seat even if it meant soaking it), and something else. They were like a great herd of female beasts, he thought with wonderment, all in heat at once …
As Evans hovered close to the stage, open
mouthed (Sevano just behind him, grinning knowingly), a girl in an aisle seat stood and tossed a single rose, its long stem wrapped in protective paper, up to the singer. The flower hung for a second in the whirling beam of the spotlight—and then, with a graceful movement, Sinatra caught it, smiled at her, and closed his eyes as he sniffed the blossom, sending the whole theater into yet another paroxysm. The publicist’s ears picked out one sound above the din: a low moan, emanating from a lanky black-haired girl standing next to the rose thrower. It was a sound he had heard before—only in very different, much more private, circumstances.
Then and there George Evans decided he would represent Frank Sinatra.
He had been in the business for ten years; he had represented Russ Columbo and Rudy Vallée at a time when such sappy crooners could capture the hearts of America’s females—and when hearts were the only part of the female anatomy in play. Now the game had clearly advanced, and Sinatra was clearly the man responsible.