Frank

by James Kaplan

  She gave him a level look. She had lived with this nose for twenty-five years, and it had worked just fine for her so far.

  But she was a beautiful woman. Why not make the most of what she already had?

  Was there a moment between them? He came to appreciate, more and more, the beauty that flowered under his ministrations. (Meanwhile, his own wife was sullen and resentful these days about the long hours he spent away from home.) And Nancy Barbato Sinatra longed—ached, really—to be looked at again that way. It had been such a long time. She melted a little when George called her beautiful, but at heart she was practical and decisive. As was he.

  Then there came a day, in early April, when Frank looked at her with her new dress and her hair and her makeup and her teeth (and the five pounds she’d tortured herself to lose), and it was that look again. He took her into the city, to go dancing at El Morocco (Hank Sanicola, at a nearby table, shooed away the girls), and for a late supper at Le Pavillon, and they laughed together and looked in each other’s eyes just the way they used to down the shore, down at Long Branch. Later they drove back to Hasbrouck Heights and paid the babysitter, and a month later she was pregnant again.

  Warm Valley. Frank posts the sign he made himself on the front lawn of the Hasbrouck Heights house, April 1943. Big and Little Nancy look on adoringly. (photo credit 11.2)

  12

  Frank at the Riobamba, February 1943. “You better push the walls of this joint out. I’m gonna pack ’em in.” (photo credit 12.1)

  Even as Sinatra soared, he encountered occasional turbulence, not to mention other highfliers. Handsome Dick Haymes (who was dogging Sinatra’s trail, having followed him with both Harry James and Tommy Dorsey) had now also gone out on his own, and was selling an awful lot of records on Decca. A new kid named Perry Como was on the rise. Nor was it clear, yet, that Frank Sinatra was anything more than a national fad. He had the hysteria market locked up; the girls would buy his records. But would the grown-ups listen?

  On this count, he failed at first. In February 1943, Sinatra’s management moved heaven and earth to book him into the Copacabana, a big new club on East Sixtieth Street. These were the days when Manhattan was the center of the popular-culture universe, and nightclubs were the white-hot core of Manhattan sophistication. And the Copa was the hottest of the hot. The club was secretly owned by the top mobster (and Walter Winchell buddy) Frank Costello, but its major-domo was a pinkie-ring-wearing, frog-voiced thug named Jules Podell, who, where this kid Sinatra was concerned, was not buying.

  Podell croaked his indignation. So the kid had had Times Square tied in knots for two months; so what. Fuck Times Square. Fuck all those little girls, and fuck Frankie Sinatra. Frankie Sinatra would not play the Copacabana. Sophie Tucker played the Copacabana. Jimmy Durante played the Copacabana. Fuck Frankie Sinatra!

  A year later, Podell would be kissing Sinatra’s pinkie ring. But for now, the singer’s people, in a bind, had to do the best they could—which in this case was a Copa knockoff (right down to the Mob ownership), only smaller: a glitzy jewel box of a joint on East Fifty-seventh called the Riobamba. Unlike the Copacabana, however, the Riobamba was on its uppers, largely due to depressed wartime business. (There was also the minor detail that its proprietor, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter of Murder Inc., was in Leavenworth awaiting execution.) The club was delighted to book Sinatra—it needed a quick injection of whatever it could get—but the most it could pay was a cut-rate $750 a week, half of what he was earning at the Paramount.

  Sinatra was angry, and scared. (The two usually went hand in hand with him.) He could make the bobby-soxers scream by raising an eyebrow; the Upper East Side snobs who frequented the Riobamba might not react so favorably, and he hadn’t played a nightclub since his days with Dorsey. Moreover, the Riobamba was an intimate place—no stage, just a piano on a little dance floor. Sinatra would be out there on his own, the patrons at their tables close enough to see him sweat.

  Typically, he turned fear into bluster. When the club’s manager showed Sinatra the tiny setup, he said, “You better push the walls of this joint out. I’m gonna pack ’em in.”

  But then he got scared all over again. He really was going to have to prove himself. The club’s ads for his appearance didn’t even bill him first: he was listed as “SPECIALLY ADDED,” under Walter O’Keefe (a monologist and comedian) and Sheila Barrett (a singer and comedian). On opening night, in honor of the sophisticated surroundings, Sinatra came out in a tuxedo instead of his Paramount uniform of suit and floppy bow tie. He had to make his entrance right across the nightclub floor, sidling among the tables, trying his best not to bump into anyone. Literally shaking with stage fright, he backed into the protective curve of Nat Brandwynne’s baby grand and began to sing. That was when things started going his way.

  “Frank was in a dinner jacket,” Earl Wilson wrote, “and he was wearing a wedding band. He had a small curl that fell almost over his right eye. With trembling lips—I don’t know how he made them tremble, but I saw it—he sang ‘She’s Funny That Way’ and ‘Night and Day’ and succeeded in bringing down the house … It was a wondrous night for all of us who felt we had a share in Frankie … The New York Post’s pop-music critic, Danny Richman, leaned over to me and said, ‘He sends me.’ ”

  That night Frank didn’t have to make his lips tremble: he was that terrified.1 Many years later he would confess that he felt sick with fear every time he walked out onto a stage. The same is true of many other performers (“If you’re not scared, it means you don’t care,” Jerry Lewis has said), but unlike most Sinatra never bothered to try to hide his vulnerability. Wide-eyed with trepidation and excitement, he gave an audience naked emotion. Dick Haymes or Perry Como or Bob Eberly would have made a very different presentation: a nightclub audience would have admired the handsome face and voice, the musical grace, the thoroughgoing professionalism. But what the swell crowd at the Riobamba got was a jolt of sheer electricity.

  Life magazine wrote: “Three times an evening, Sinatra steps into the baby spotlight that splashes on to the dance floor. In a come-hither, breathless voice, he then sings such songs as ‘You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,’ ‘That Old Black Magic,’ ‘She’s Funny That Way,’ and ‘Embraceable You.’ As he whispers the lyrics, he fondles his wedding ring and his eyes grow misty. A hush hangs over the tables, and in the eyes of the women present there is soft contentment. The lights go up and Sinatra bows, slouches across the floor and is swallowed up by the shadows.”

  Suddenly, rather than having to try to hear him over screams, audiences—grown-up audiences—were hanging on the caress of his voice. He had made them come to him. Overnight, Frank Sinatra had become an adult phenomenon.

  The word traveled like lightning around Manhattan, and within a week it was standing room only at the Riobamba, even for the 2:30 a.m. show. Just as Frank had predicted. Within a week, Sheila Barrett was history—the club had put her under Sinatra on the bill; she walked—and Walter O’Keefe followed quickly. “When I came to this place,” O’Keefe told the audience on his final night, “I was the star and a kid named Sinatra, one of the acts. Then suddenly a steamroller came along and knocked me flat. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the rightful star—Frank Sinatra!” Just like that, the joint was all Frank’s. His pay was doubled, and his gig extended.

  And no one was less surprised than Sinatra. To a young reporter, he said, “I’m flying high, kid. I’ve planned my career. From the first minute I walked on a stage I determined to get exactly where I am; like a guy who starts out being an office boy but has a vision of occupying the president’s office.”

  Frank “was a sensation, doing extra shows,” Sammy Cahn remembered, “and I went to the two-thirty a.m. show with a stop first in his dressing room. The moment he saw me he put his arms around me and said, ‘Did I tell ya? Did I tell ya?’

  “He had them in the grip of his hand,” Cahn said. “One of my vivid memories is, while he was singing, some gorilla coughed. A gi
ant guy, like two hundred fifty pounds. He turned and looked at this guy, and the guy didn’t know what to do with himself. Do you understand what I’m trying to say? Frank had power, menace … It was an incredible experience.”

  Only a week or two earlier, he had been backed up trembling against the club’s piano; now he was staring down tough guys. His bravado was a self-fulfilling prophecy: bluster away the terror; then, when victorious, strut and gloat and bully. It was unattractive, but Dolly’s teaching had left him little middle ground. The triumphant present was maximum revenge on the past, on the days when the Flashes had used him as a punching bag. Suddenly he was the alpha-dog leader of a pack of hangers-on self-dubbed the Varsity.

  The group was the first of its kind, the 1943 forerunner of a hip-hopper’s posse, complete with camel-hair overcoats, golden bling, and nights at the fights. Among them were Sanicola and (for the time being) Sevano; Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen when they were in from the Coast; Manie Sacks; the singer’s music-publishing partner, Ben Barton; two pugilists (and crowd-control specialists) named Al Silvani and Tami Mauriello; and another Jimmy, Tarantino, a shady character who wrote for a boxing magazine picturesquely called Knockout. They would swagger around Manhattan, from watering hole to watering hole, the little man at the center of the group, protectively cordoned, the functionaries at the periphery greasing the way with crisp new bills. It was the beginning of a pattern that would continue for the next thirty-three years of Sinatra’s life, until he slipped the wedding ring onto the finger of his fourth and final wife—who, in a self-preserving power play, proceeded, with ruthless efficiency, to force out the sycophants, cronies, and enablers, one by one.

  In the meantime, for a long time to come, he was King, with all that that entailed. The oboist and conductor Mitch Miller, who would one day produce Sinatra’s records at Columbia, recalled: “Jimmy Van Heusen once canceled dinner with me by saying, ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve got to eat with the Monster.’ Everyone called Sinatra the Monster.”

  They called him that because he acted like that—not always, but too often for comfort. He gave free rein to the terrible impatience that had always plagued him; his temper too was sanctioned by his success. Anything could set him off: a bad review, a package of shirts mistakenly starched by the laundry. He felt too much: it was his burden, his gift.

  And what did Manie Sacks think of all these macho goings-on? How did the quiet and Talmudic record executive blend in with the hearty extroverts of the Varsity? No doubt, like many reflective men, he took vicarious pleasure in the company of doers. We do know that by a complicated formula, Sinatra, who detested solitude and surrounded himself with loud talkers and backslappers, took great pleasure in Manie Sacks’s company. And he trusted him. Sacks brought out (as no man ever had before) a better self in Sinatra, a contemplative side at his center that few, with the exception of Nancy, had ever seen. Manie calmed Frank down. It was a valuable skill, and a unique one. The arranger Stordahl was a serene character, yet when things went south during a recording session, he would quietly smoke his pipe (upside down, like the Norwegian sailor he actually was) as Hurricane Sinatra raged and threatened and finally blew itself out.

  Manie Sacks was a different ball of wax. From their first meeting, Sinatra seems to have sensed that Manie didn’t just have real business acumen, didn’t just have something Sinatra wanted (a contract with Columbia, the Rolls-Royce of record labels); he also had—for lack of a better word—soul. Manie was honest to the core; he was incapable of disingenuousness. Sinatra, who could wear a half-dozen personalities in the course of a morning, was fascinated by the man’s purity. Like George Evans, Sacks was in his early forties, old enough to feel like a father to Sinatra. But Evans was another extrovert, a man to whom words were verbs. Sacks was deep.

  He was small and dark haired, with a long, thin, acne-scarred face and a sizable nose—not homely-handsome, really, but homely-memorable. When he began to spend time with Sinatra, the crazed fans would sometimes mistake the record executive for the recording artist. For a brief time the press, when it had nothing else to write about, would make much of the supposed resemblance between the two. In fact, though, only in the grossest possible details—stature, hair color, face shape—was there a correspondence. Sinatra, for all his facial imperfections, had a wild, Dionysian beauty. Manie Sacks looked like a rabbi.2

  “He was a very unusual-looking man,” George Avakian recalled. Avakian first met Sacks in the late 1930s, when, while still a student at Yale, he was starting to produce jazz albums for Columbia. “You got the feeling right away that this was a man who knew what he was doing. He could have a piercing gaze. I don’t mean like Benny Goodman’s famous ray. But he looked you in the eye, and he was very direct in his speech. He didn’t waste a lot of time. He always looked as though he was on the point of doing something very intense. He looked very intense. And he was. Manie I think ended up getting ulcers.”

  And Sinatra would have been the one who gave them to him. But at first the relationship was a beautiful thing, even in a difficult time. The American Federation of Musicians strike against the record companies, which had begun in August 1942, was in full swing when Sinatra signed with Columbia Records. Indeed, the first time Frank stepped into a recording studio as a solo artist (Liederkranz Hall on East Fifty-eighth Street; Monday, June 7, 1943), beginning a commercial relationship with Columbia that would last for a tumultuous decade, he saw no musicians, only the eight-person vocal group that had recently accompanied him on the radio, the Bobby Tucker Singers. Sinatra hadn’t made a record in eleven months. Manie Sacks was so desperate to get product out to Frank’s female fan base that he had asked him to sing a cappella.

  He was game at first. Listen to his maiden recording, of Hoffman, Lampl, and Livingston’s “Close to You”: You hear Sinatra in fine vocal form, backed by what sounds at first like a heavenly choir, trilling along in close harmony.3 Unfortunately, the heavenliness quickly turns cloying. The effect is pretty, but … crowded. Too many voices in the room, when there should be only the Voice.

  He would record nine of the instrumentless singles between June and November 1943, and the fans would dutifully buy them (five of the numbers hit the Billboard best-sellers chart), but none of the records had anything like the impact of a disc that Sinatra had cut an eon ago, with Harry James—and that Manie Sacks had the good sense to reissue on June 19. The song was “All or Nothing At All.” Only eight thousand people had bought the record when it was first released in June 1940. This time it sold a million.4

  Since Axel Stordahl was an orchestra arranger, and organizing the voices of a small chorus so they would sound something like a band of actual instruments was a highly specialized problem, Sacks brought in a new man to arrange and conduct Sinatra’s Bobby Tucker sessions. His name was Alexander Lafayette Chew Wilder—Alec for short. He was an upstate New Yorker, thirty-six years old, and a genuine American eccentric: a self-taught composer who wrote both serious music and popular songs, Wilder lived alone in the Algonquin Hotel, passed his days doing crosswords and jigsaw puzzles, and spent his evenings drinking, smoking, drinking some more, and dazzling New York’s best and brightest with his encyclopedic knowledge of more or less everything. “He is acutely aware of what is happening in the world and why it happens,” read the liner notes to an album of Wilder’s orchestral music released several years later—an album that would loom large in Sinatra’s life. “He is passionately fond of living in hotels, riding on trains, and reading detective stories; he is equally enamored of sitting still in a small town, attending to a garden, and talking to children.” Wilder was mustached and handsome in an old-money way, with a beetling brow and a distracted, kind of sideways, manner. The first time Sinatra laid eyes on him, he called him by the only possible nickname: the Professor.

  Working with Sinatra would have been a big deal for Wilder, if Wilder hadn’t been above caring about such matters. But oddly enough, working with Alec did feel like a big deal to Frank. I
n Sacks and Wilder, Frank Sinatra was rubbing elbows with a new caliber of talent. Manie may have hung with the crew, have smiled at the hijinks, but ultimately he kept himself to himself. His integrity was inviolable. And as charmed as Alec Wilder was with Sinatra—and as bowled over by his musical gifts—he had absolutely no interest in joining the Varsity, or any fraternity at all. He might, out of anthropological curiosity, tag along to a Friday-night prizefight; he might, just as likely, spend the next evening drinking with Alexander Woollcott and Dottie Parker.

  Both Sacks and Wilder had that ineffable quality that Frank Sinatra thought of as Class. He wanted the same thing of those who had it that those who lacked it wanted of him. Class didn’t necessarily have anything to do with wealth: the rich stiffs who flocked to see him at the Riobamba mostly lacked the elusive quantity entirely, as far as he could see. (Though in later years, cleverer stiffs, primarily in Hollywood and Palm Springs, would gain access to Sinatra by assuring him that their money was no greener than his.) It was easy to feel superior to some jackass with dough; Sinatra never, for one second, felt superior to Manie or the Professor. If anything, it was quite the opposite. Which made things kind of complicated sometimes, but never stopped him from longing for just a little bit of what they had.

  On August 11, 1943, Frank Sinatra made his grand entrance to Hollywood—except that it wasn’t Hollywood. It was Pasadena. Nancy Sinatra writes, in Frank Sinatra: An American Legend, “Traveling by train to Los Angeles, Dad tried to avoid the waiting crowds by deboarding [sic] in Pasadena, but it was no use: A huge throng of bobby-soxers mobbed the station, and he was rushed by police to the safety of a nearby garage. ‘They converged on our car and practically picked it up,’ Dad recalls. ‘There must have been 5,000 kids mashed against the car. It was exciting, but it scares the wits out of you, too.’ ”