Frank
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12 “He sounded somewhat”: George T. Simon, “The Sinatra Report,” Billboard, Nov. 20, 1965.
13 “I’ll never forget”: Levinson, Trumpet Blues, p. 76.
14 “the torchy ballads”: Kelley, His Way, p. 49.
15 “Here comes the night”: Lyrics from “Here Comes the Night,” words by Frank Loesser, music by Hilly Edelstein and Carl Hohengarten (New York: Paramount Music, 1939).
16 “half a love”: Lyrics from “All or Nothing At All,” words and music by Jack Lawrence and Arthur Altman (New York, Leeds Music, 1940).
17 “an institute you can’t”: Lyrics from “Love and Marriage,” words by Sammy Cahn, music by James Van Heusen (New York: Barton Music, 1955).
CHAPTER 7
1. At virtually the same moment, Jack Kapp, the brilliant but tunnel-visioned producer who single-handedly created Bing Crosby’s recording career, was pushing Crosby, hard, to abandon his scat-singing ways for a more commercially palatable vocal style. Kapp won, Bing became an enormously wealthy musical demigod, and we lost a great jazz artist. Tommy Dorsey, it might be argued, possessed his own inner Jack Kapp.
SOURCE NOTES
2 “He could do something”: Levinson, Tommy Dorsey, p. 42.
3 “the Dorsey band”: Ibid., p. 108.
4 “the greatest melodic”: Friedwald, Sinatra! p. 80.
5 “Have you heard”: Levinson, Tommy Dorsey, p. 110.
6 “Yes, I remember”: Douglas-Home, Sinatra, p. 23.
7 “Fame and fortune”: Tommy Dorsey–Frank Sinatra: The Song Is You (RCA, 1994). Set of five compact discs.
8 “On a night like this”: Lyrics from “Marie,” words and music by Irving Berlin (New York: Irving Berlin, 1928).
9 “Hell, if we don’t”: Levinson, Tommy Dorsey, p. 111.
10 “learned a lot from Harry”: Friedwald, Sinatra! p. 75.
11 “he dozed”: Ibid., p. 74.
12 “The bus pulled”: Levinson, Trumpet Blues, p. 79.
13 “The first time”: Jo Stafford, in discussion with the author, Feb. 2006.
14 “The only problem”: Jo Stafford, interview with Michael Feinstein, Ballad of the Blues (Feinery, 2003). Compact disc.
15 “Never even heard”: Ibid.
16 “Frank really loved”: Ibid.
17 “Sinatra knew this”: Daniel Okrent, “A Season of Song: Saint Francis of Hoboken,” Esquire, Dec. 1987.
18 “Well, see”: Stafford, discussion.
19 “Young”: Ibid.
20 “I want you”: Tormé, Traps, the Drum Wonder, p. 53.
CHAPTER 8
1. He was in a Chicago studio with the band just days after he joined Dorsey, recording “The Sky Fell Down” and “Too Romantic.”
SOURCE NOTES
2 “I can still”: Jo Stafford, in discussion with the author, Feb. 2006.
3 “For maybe”: Frank Sinatra, interview with Sidney Zion, Yale University, April 15, 1986.
4 “Once, Sinatra”: Friedwald, Sinatra! p. 88.
5 “Tommy was a very”: Douglas-Home, Sinatra, p. 24.
6 The producer George: George Avakian, in discussion with the author, Oct. 2006.
7 “I used to watch”: Summers and Swan, Sinatra, p. 65.
8 “Tommy sometimes”: Friedwald, Sinatra! p. 86.
9 “You can have”: Stafford, discussion.
10 “I was never”: Sinatra, interview.
11 “calisthenics for the throat”: Summers and Swan, Sinatra, p. 66.
12 “Frank can hold”: Ibid.
13 “The audience wouldn’t”: Levinson, Tommy Dorsey, p. 114.
14 “He had something”: Ibid.
15 “When I say”: Ibid., p. 115.
16 “It was at the Meadowbrook”: Ibid., p. 119.
17 “I take a sheet”: Steve Wynn, from “Remembering Frank Sinatra,” USA Weekend, May 4, 2008.
18 “Go ahead, do your thing”: Kelley, His Way, p. 53.
19 “When you sing”: Stafford, interview.
20 “He wound it up”: Friedwald, Sinatra! p. 90.
21 “Just call out”: Levinson, Tommy Dorsey, p. 125.
22 “Next thing I know”: Friedwald, Sinatra! p. 91.
23 “I’ll never smile again”: Lyrics from “I’ll Never Smile Again,” words and music by Ruth Lowe (New York: Sun Music, 1939).
CHAPTER 9
1. He would finish it, in a way, forty years later, when, his voice crackling with age and emotion, he recorded a monumentally powerful version of “Soliloquy,” on Sinatra 80th: Live in Concert.
2. The name of the city had very different connotations in the early 1940s, when Las Vegas was still a sleepy desert burg with sand on the streets and hitching posts for horses, from what it would have fifteen or twenty years later, when Sinatra, with the help of organized crime, had turned the town into, well … Vegas.
3. Jean Bach knew Sinatra before he wore those floppy bow ties, and believes she knows where he got the idea: her. She used to sew ties like that for her husband, Shorty Sherock, she said. “I remember this particular print, I thought Shorty was brave to wear it—and he came home one day, and he’d been in the elevator at the Brill Building, and Frank got on and looked at Shorty and menacingly said, ‘Who wrote the lyrics to that tie?’ And the next thing we know, we saw photographs of him with a kind of artist-looking bow tie” (Bach, in discussion with the author, March 30, 2006).
SOURCE NOTES
4 “Dad was in”: Nancy Sinatra, American Legend, p. 43.
5 “I hated missing”: Frank Sinatra, interview with Sidney Zion, Yale University, April 15, 1986.
6 “Frank would tap”: Summers and Swan, Sinatra, p. 69.
7 “It must have been”: Kelley, His Way, p. 56.
8 “Tommy Dorsey came”: Ed Kessler, in discussion with the author, May 2006.
9 “They were in”: Ibid.
10 “I remember him”: Ibid.
11 “they got at it”: Jo Stafford, in discussion with the author, Feb. 2006.
12 “went at each other”: Tormé, Traps, the Drum Wonder, p. 62.
13 “I can live”: Ibid., p. 63.
14 “coldly efficient”: Ibid.
15 “If Tommy Dorsey”: Cahn, I Should Care, p. 131.
16 “Nothing meant anything”: Levinson, September in the Rain, p. 114.
17 “I kept thinking”: Sinatra, interview.
18 “All they wanted”: E. J. Kahn, “The Voice,” New Yorker, Nov. 9, 1946.
19 “This boy’s going”: Wilson, Sinatra, p. 31.
20 “a shy boy”: Summers and Swan, Sinatra, p. 58.
21 “Match me”: Kelley, His Way, p. 111.
22 “I used to stand”: Hanna, Sinatra, p. 16.
23 “He was hanging”: Connie Haines, in discussion with the author, Jan. 2006.
CHAPTER 10
1. As would be another important Sinatra arranger, Quincy Jones.
2. And, a couple of years later, it would be hasta la vista to Lana. The way was paved one night during that same fateful January 1942, when Sinatra stopped in at the brand-new, star-studded L.A. nightclub Mocambo (palm fronds, cockatoos in cages), where he once again encountered the gorgeous Ava Gardner, nineteen and newly married to Mickey Rooney. When Rooney “introduced” her to the singer—both she and Sinatra remembered, but failed to mention, the earlier meeting at MGM—Sinatra said, flirtatiously, “Why didn’t I meet you first?” She blushed at the inside joke, and both filed away the compliment (Server, Ava Gardner, p. 174).
3. Sinatra had registered for the draft in December 1940 but, as a married father, was granted a deferment. The loophole protected him from the draft—but not the contempt of much of the public and many men in uniform—until the fall of 1943, when the deferments were ended and he was reclassified 1-A. Shortly afterward, to nationwide hoots, he was reclassified yet again, to 4-F, for a punctured eardrum.
In August 1942, after Lana Turner impulsively married a Hollywood wannabe named Steve Crane (who, it would inconveniently tu
rn out, was already married at the time), a heartbroken Buddy Rich enlisted in the Marines and left Dorsey.
4. Although Hoboken lives on robustly in his dentalization of the t’s in the lyric: “I hear music when I look at you/A beautiful theme of ev’ry dream I ever knew.” His pronunciation of “beautiful” sounds like something that might come out of the mouth of a sensitive gunsel in an old Warner Brothers gangster picture.
5. In appearance and bearing, Goodman was almost Dorsey’s Jewish counterpart: bespectacled, tough, egomaniacal. Musically, though, he was deeper and more virtuosic: Goodman was esteemed as both a classical and a jazz musician. In the late 1940s, as Dorsey continued to wax sentimental, Goodman even developed an interest in bebop.
SOURCE NOTES
6 “Lucky Strike green”: Jones, From Here to Eternity, pp. 754–55.
7 “almost tubercular”: Kelley, His Way, p. 60.
8 “Frank was not like”: Shaw, Twentieth-Century Romantic, p. 30.
9 “He was so excited”: Levinson, Tommy Dorsey, p. 151.
10 “Frank sat on a stool”: Summers and Swan, Sinatra, p. 73.
11 “Lana was the love”: Tormé, Traps, the Drum Wonder, p. 74.
12 “Now, in the story”: Frank Sinatra, interview with Sidney Zion, Yale University, April 15, 1986.
13 “He’s such a damn”: Levinson, Tommy Dorsey, p. 152.
14 “I gotta do it”: Ibid., p. 155.
15 “I was sitting with Sinatra”: Friedwald, Sinatra! p. 110.
16 “Tommy was a good”: Levinson, Tommy Dorsey, p. 155.
17 “I’ll wake each”: Lyrics from “Just as Though You Were Here,” words by Edgar De Lange, music by John B. Brooks (New York: Yankee Music, 1942).
18 “The curtains drawn”: Nancy Sinatra, My Father, p. 35.
19 “[Tommy] said, ‘No’ ”: Sinatra, interview.
20 “Let him go”: Wilson, Sinatra, p. 35.
21 “Don’t worry”: Levinson, Tommy Dorsey, p. 156.
22 “After tonight”: Tommy Dorsey, The Sentimental Gentleman of Swing: Centennial Collection (RCA, 2005). Set of three compact discs.
23 “Well, Frank”: Ibid.
24 “was literally crying”: Summers and Swan, Sinatra, p. 74.
25 “I hope you fall”: Nancy Sinatra, American Legend, p. 51.
26 “I was now free”: Sinatra, interview.
27 “this skinny kid”: Shaw, Twentieth-Century Romantic, p. 40.
28 “He said, ‘What are you’ ”: Sinatra, interview.
29 “I was in New York”: Nancy Sinatra, My Father, p. 44.
30 “There were about five”: Ibid., p. 45.
31 “What the fuck”: Kelley, His Way, p. 40.
CHAPTER 11
1. Including the band’s girl singer, a blond, pug-nosed twenty-two-year-old from North Dakota named Norma Deloris Egstrom, a.k.a. Peggy Lee.
2. Interestingly, one of the first buyers of the new and improved Sinatra age was none other than E. J. Kahn Jr. in “Phenomenon,” the three-part 1946 New Yorker profile—prepared with the aid of that magazine’s legendary fact-checking department—that was the basis for his 1947 book, The Voice.
3. Or, as the announcer would intone: “Your Hit Parade survey checks the best sellers on sheet music and phonograph records, the songs most heard on the air and most played on the automatic coin machines, an accurate, authentic tabulation of America’s taste in popular music” (Brooks and Marsh, TV’s Greatest Hits, p. 280).
SOURCE NOTES
4 “EXTRA ADDED ATTRACTION”: Friedwald, Sinatra! p. 123.
5 “Be careful, it’s my heart”: Lyrics from “Be Careful, It’s My Heart,” words and music by Irving Berlin (New York: Irving Berlin, 1942).
6 “a kid was given a ticket”: Kahn, Voice, p. 67.
7 “certain things were”: Ibid.
8 “George was a genius”: Jerry Lewis, in discussion with the author, March 2008.
9 “in case a patron”: Kelley, His Way, p. 67.
10 “I saw fans run”: Nancy Sinatra, My Father, p. 47.
11 “I’d look out my bedroom”: Nancy Sinatra, American Legend, p. 54.
12 “People call me an overnight”: Frank Sinatra, interview with Sidney Zion, Yale University, April 15, 1986.
13 “Frankie is a product”: Kelley, His Way, p. 75.
CHAPTER 12
1. Another hypothesis, lip-wise: starting in the early 1940s and until the end of his career, Sinatra had a habit, during vocalization, of periodically pulling his mouth to the right and lowering his eyelids—an expression that signaled emotional transport, but that also might have been his version of the corner-of-the-lips pinhole that Tommy Dorsey used to sneak a breath.
2. In fact he was the president of his congregation, Temple Beth Israel in Philadelphia.
3. Ben Barton, as a young supplicant, had brought the song to Frank backstage at the Paramount, initiating a thirty-year business and personal relationship.
4. The figure isn’t universally accepted: some have pointed out that “All” never won a gold record, as, for example, Glenn Miller’s “Chattanooga Choo Choo” had the year before. Still, sales were brisk. And, it should be noted, the fact that Harry James himself had broken through in a big way didn’t hurt a bit. Not long after Sinatra made his big splash at the Riobamba, James—now divorced from Louise Tobin and dating Betty Grable—and the Music Makers, now twenty-seven strong (including an eight-piece string section and two French horns), opened at the Paramount, causing almost the same kind of hysteria that Frankie had.
5. The studio’s pointed new slogan: “Entertainment, not genius.”
6. Very chivalrous of Frank, as long as he was fudging his age by two years, to make Nancy two years younger, too!
7. One of which, Harold Adamson and Jimmy McHugh’s “I Couldn’t Sleep a Wink Last Night,” was nominated for an Oscar.
8. Though the general hoity-toitiness was somewhat ruffled by the highly conspicuous ringside presence of Dolly (attending not with Marty but with a gaggle of Hoboken girlfriends). Mama Sinatra cheered lustily throughout Frankie’s performance, then came backstage afterward to pose for pictures and brief reporters: “You know, my son has broken just about every record that bastard Bing Crosby ever set. Write that down in your goddamn notepad” (Taraborrelli, Sinatra, p. 67).
9. Some men reluctant to go into military service during World War II are known to have had an eardrum punctured. However, the FBI file on Sinatra notes that “the perforation of the drum (tympanum) was a disease perforation so far as Captain WEINTROB could tell and not the result of an incision by human hands” (Kuntz and Kuntz, Sinatra Files, p. 19).
10 The following year he would acknowledge his fears, with only partial irony, by recording a novelty number called “Dick Haymes, Dick Todd, and Como.” The V-Disc, a unique collaboration among Sammy Cahn, Johnny Burke, and Jimmy Van Heusen, contained lines such as “I’ll soon become a wreck/they’re breathin’ on my neck” and “They’re really comin’ fast/Who knows, I may be past.” Where Haymes and Como were concerned, Sinatra’s fears were not misplaced. One suspects Todd, the so-called Canadian Crosby (he sounded exactly like Bing played at a slightly slower speed), was thrown in for joke value. And as always with Frank, his best jokes were written by others.
SOURCE NOTES
11 “You better push”: Kelley, His Way, p. 72.
12 “SPECIALLY ADDED”: Shaw, Twentieth-Century Romantic, p. 43.
13 “Frank was in”: Wilson, Sinatra, p. 44.
14 Many years later: Frank Sinatra, interview with Sidney Zion, Yale University, April 15, 1986.
15 “If you’re not scared”: Jerry Lewis, in discussion with the author, March 2008.
16 “Three times an evening”: George Frazier, “Frank Sinatra,” Life, May 3, 1943.
17 “When I came”: Summers and Swan, Sinatra, p. 81.
18 “I’m flying high”: Kelley, His Way, p. 79.
19 “was a sensation”: Cahn, I Should Care, p. 132.
>
20 “He had them”: Friedwald, Sinatra! p. 130.
21 “Jimmy Van Heusen once canceled”: Kelley, His Way, p. 574.
22 “He was a very unusual-looking”: George Avakian, in discussion with the author, Oct. 2006.
23 “He is acutely aware”: Goddard Lieberson, liner notes for Frank Sinatra Conducts the Music of Alec Wilder (Columbia Records, 1946).
24 “Traveling by train”: Nancy Sinatra, American Legend, p. 57.
25 “SECRET OF LURE”: Isabel Morse Jones, “Secret of Lure Told by Crooner—It’s Love,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 12, 1943.
26 “Noah Webster forgive”: Parsons, Tell It to Louella, p. 147.
27 “Dear Sir”: Kuntz and Kuntz, Sinatra Files, p. 4.
28 “It’s Dorsey”: Friedwald, Sinatra! p. 112.
29 “The next day”: Puzo, Godfather, p. 43.
30 “The man who straightened”: Sinatra, interview.
31 “Frank told me years”: Lewis, discussion.
32 “Bergen Record entertainment”: Levinson, Tommy Dorsey, p. 161.
33 “vividly remembers her”: Ibid.
34 “not real underworld”: Taraborrelli, Sinatra, p. 65.
35 “It wasn’t much”: Ibid.
36 “Hey, Wop”: Wilson, Sinatra, p. 79.
37 “Frank Albert Sinatra is physically”: Kuntz and Kuntz, Sinatra Files, p. 11.
38 “Dear Mr. Winchell”: Ibid., p. 5.
39 “The diagnosis”: Weintrob to Commanding General, Dec. 28, 1943, FBI, 25-244122-7.
40 “stated that no one”: Kuntz and Kuntz, Sinatra Files, p. 20.
41 “What physical or mental”: Ibid., p. 11.
CHAPTER 13
1. It must have been a different group of soldiers and sailors who attended a show at the Hollywood Canteen in January 1944. Not just Sinatra, but Hope, Crosby, Ginger Rogers, and Fibber McGee and Molly were present. “When it was [Sinatra’s] turn to sing,” Nancy Sinatra writes, “the ovations kept him on stage for over an hour. At the end of his performance, it was reported that servicemen swarmed onto the stage, lifted him to their shoulders and paraded him throughout the Canteen, cheering so loudly that it could be heard blocks away” (Nancy Sinatra, American Legend, p. 59).