by Kitty Kelley
“I used to sit up there on the bandstand with the other singers,” he said. “They’d be looking all around the dance hall or whatever it was we were playing in, and I’d be looking at Tommy Dorsey’s back. I never took my eyes off his back. He’d stand there playing his trombone, and I’d swear the son of a bitch was not breathing. I couldn’t even see his jacket move—nothing. Finally, he gets finished playing ‘Sleepy Lagoon’ one night and he turns to me and says, ‘Jesus Christ, you mean you still haven’t figured it out yet?’ ”
“He knew I’d been watching him all the time, but he would never let me know. Then that night he explained to me how he would sneak short breaths out of the corners of his mouth at certain points in the arrangement. I do the same thing in a song.”
Having taught Frank his technique for seamless phrasing, Dorsey advised him to listen to Bing Crosby’s singing. “I used to tell him over and over, there is only one singer you ought to listen to, and his name is Crosby. All that matters to him is the words, and that is the only thing that ought to matter to you too.”
Frank listened to Tommy Dorsey, who had become his mentor, his guide, his hero. “He became almost a father to me,” he said. On the road, he sat up with him playing cards until five in the morning because Dorsey could not sleep. “He had less sleep than any man I’ve ever known,” said Frank many years later. “I’d fall off to bed around then, but around nine-thirty A.M. a hand would shake me and it’d be Tommy saying, ‘Hey pally—how about some golf?’ So I’d totter out onto the golf course.”
Nevertheless, Frank was no longer star-struck. If Dorsey was late to a rehearsal, Frank acted as substitute orchestra leader. “When Dorsey arrived, Sinatra would fix him with a glare of ‘Where the fuck you been?’ ” said lyricist Sammy Cahn. “Dorsey would apologize that he’d been tied up in this and that, and Sinatra’d say something quaint like ‘Bullshit.’ ”
Tommy was a fan of Dolly Sinatra. Nick Sevano said, “Tommy adored Frank’s mom and her cooking, so we were always dragging the band to Hoboken for one of Dolly’s Italian dinners.” Sevano had been one of the many babies delivered by Mrs. Sinatra. Now in his work with Frank, he soon became the conduit between the overbearing mother and her elusive son.
“Dolly would get mad at me if I didn’t call her every day to keep her informed of what was going on,” said Nick. “I even had to call her when we were on the road because Frank didn’t have the time. Boy, if I didn’t call, she’d chew me out the next time I talked to her. ‘You bastard, where have you and that son of a bitch son of mine been? Why didn’t you call me, ya fucking bum?’ she’d say. I still remember sitting in her living room on Garden Street just after we had come home from California with Dorsey’s band and Frank had not been in touch with her for over a week. God, did she give him hell. ‘You bastard, you too good to call your own mother?’ she shouted. I always took her side, of course. ‘Jesus, Frank,’ I’d say. ‘Why didn’t you call her?’ Frank would lower his head and say, ‘I couldn’t. I was on the road.’ Then she’d really light into him. Frank would sit there and take it because he respected her. After she got the last word and blasted us both by yelling and screaming, cursing and swearing, she’d say, ‘Okay, you bastards. Into the kitchen. I’ve made some linguine.’ ”
Besides pacifying Mama Sinatra, Nick Sevano frequently had to run interference between Frank and his wife. Once little Nancy was born—mother and daughter would be forever defined by size—big Nancy developed an uneasy alliance with Dolly out of sheer necessity. Frequently, she had to turn to her two-fisted mother-in-law to bring her husband home at night. Now that the baby was born, Nancy was no longer traveling with Frank.
“Nancy was always interrogating me,” said Nick Sevano. “She’d corner me and say, ‘Where were you last night? Who were you with? Why were you out so late? I called the hotel all night and there was no answer in your room. Why not? Was Frank with another woman?’ God, I’d have to think fast at times. I’d always lie and cover for Frank, saying that we were with another band member in his room rehearsing or something. Then Frank would take me aside and ask me what Nancy had said. ‘Does she know? What did you tell her?’
“Sometimes Nancy would come right out and confront him about other women, crying and carrying on, but Frank would just ignore her. When she really started sobbing, he’d walk out of the room. ‘Let’s go, Nick,’ he’d say, and we’d leave Nancy in tears and head for New York. I’d feel awful about it, but there was nothing I could do. That’s the way Frank is.
“Then Nancy would call Dolly and bring the old lady into the act. Dolly didn’t mess around, let me tell you. She had the guts of a bandit. She’d collar Frank and say, ‘What are you doing with those broads? You know you’re a married man. You have a family now. You can’t be acting like a bum.’ Frank would deny everything, of course, and say the girls were just friends. ‘They hang around the band,’ he’d say. He always had that excuse, but he dreaded those confrontations with his mother. She could be real tough on him. She had that Italian way of keeping her family together, no matter what. She was the one who pushed for that marriage with Nancy. She brought it together, and now she was going to keep it from coming apart. You don’t have to like your daughter-in-law as long as you do what’s right by the family and make your son do what’s right. That’s the way Dolly felt about things in those days.”
Most of Frank’s friends knew that the marriage was over for him within the first year. He made no pretense about his interest in other women and even talked openly about his marital problems.
“It must have been sometime in 1940 … he was a restless soul even then,” said Sammy Gahn. “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.”
The first major rupture in the marriage occurred in October 1940, when Frank went to Hollywood with the Dorsey band to open the Palladium, a lavish new dance palace. With the Dorsey band as the star attraction, prices were raised from the usual one dollar to five dollars a person, which included “a deluxe dinner.” After playing nights at the Palladium, Tommy and the band worked all day at Paramount studios making Las Vegas Nights, their first feature film. Frank appeared on screen as the anonymous band vocalist singing “I’ll Never Smile Again.”
“We got paid as extras,” said the clarinetist, Johnny Mince. “Frank, The Pied Pipers, Buddy Rich … I think it was about fifteen dollars a day. Shortly after we got to the studio the band would be asleep all around the set. There just wasn’t that much to do.”
By the second or third day, Frank had met Alora Gooding, a beautiful blond starlet. Within a week, they were staying together.
“This was Frank’s first big love away from home,” said Nick Sevano. “In fact, she was the first big love of his life after he married Nancy. He was crazy about her, really in love with her. She was his first brush with glamour, and he was mad for her. The affair lasted a few years, and Frank even tried to leave Nancy because of it, but Dolly put the pressure on and wouldn’t let him get a divorce.
“Although it was an unheard-of thing to do in 1940, Frank and Alora lived together when he was in California. She stayed with him at the Hollywood Plaza, which is where the band was staying.”
Back in Jersey City taking care of their new baby, Nancy Sinatra had no idea of what was going on. She called Frank frequently, but usually ended up talking to Nick Sevano or Hank Sanicola, who tried to allay her fears with all sorts of creative stories about how tired and bored everyone was working at night and filming all day. By the time Frank returned home, he was besotted with Alora Gooding and carried her picture in his wallet. His wife soon found it.
“Sometimes I wondered if Frank did that kind of thing on purpose just to get caught,” Nick Sevano said. “When Nancy confronted him with the photograph and demanded to know who the beautiful blonde was, h
e said, ‘Oh, that. She’s just a fan, a kid who was hanging around the band and wanted me to have her picture.’ I couldn’t believe it when he said that. Nancy wasn’t stupid, but what could she do?”
A procession of women followed Alora Gooding, including a sixteen-year-old named Rita Maritt, who said she was fresh from a convent school when the twenty-five-year-old singer first seduced her.
“I remember when he took me to bed and told me stories about his childhood—how he would have to steal milk bottles to get the money to feed his family,” she recalled. “He said that when he was a little boy, he would stand on the street corners in Hoboken singing songs to people, who threw coins at him.”
Between the touch of Hollywood glamour and the teenager was a Long Island debutante who looked like Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story. She lived on an estate in Great Neck with nine acres fronting on Manhasset Bay and separate quarters for the maids and butlers. Her father was an oil baron, and she and her prep school friends loved the big bands. Every week they climbed into their shiny new cars to seek out the swinging sounds of Glenn Miller at the Glen Island Casino or Benny Goodman in the Manhattan Room.
“That’s how I first met Frank,” said Mary Lou Watts. “I’d gone with a date to hear Tommy Dorsey at the Astor Roof, and I went up to say hello to the trumpeter, Bunny Berrigan. He introduced me to Frank, and we became very good friends.”
Frank was immediately beguiled by this Episcopalian princess from America’s upper class. “She was some kind of untouchable thing to him,” said Nick Sevano. “He couldn’t reach that high, not where he came from. With a highfalutin family like hers, he was definitely from the wrong side of the tracks. They did not acknowledge him, of course, but that didn’t make any difference to Frank. He called Mary Lou constantly and saw her all the time. He cared a great deal for her.”
Mary Lou attended the Mount Vernon School for Girls in Washington, D.G., which she described as a private finishing school of sorts that taught one hundred and fifty young women how to be ladies.
“It was comparable to the first year of junior college, and a very strict establishment,” she said. “We had to write down who we were going out with, and when we had dates, who came to see us. We had to introduce them to everybody, and bring them into one of the small living rooms to sit down. The doors to these rooms had to be open at all times. When Frank visited me, I always signed him in as Frank Steel because I didn’t want the other girls mooning around. I knew they’d go in and look in the book and come out screaming and shrieking and all that kind of stuff if they saw his name.
“One weekend he came on a Sunday night and he was going to go to chapel with me. Afterwards, we were sitting in one of the little rooms, and some girls walked by who had just come from a prom in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where the Dorsey band had played. I could see them looking in and going ‘Oh’ and ‘Ah’; then they ran up the stairs, and fifteen minutes later, three quarters of the school was standing on this great winding staircase staring down at us. One of the girls was so excited that she told the teacher on duty that Frank Sinatra was sitting in the room. The teacher ran to the book and saw that I had signed in a man named Frank Steel, so she told the girls that they were wrong, ‘That’s Frank Steel,’ she said. But the girls started squealing and told her it was Frank Sinatra and they had just come from hearing him sing at a prom.
“She said, ‘Miss Watts, come in here this minute. The girls tell me that they have just come from Chapel Hill, where they saw the gentleman that you are entertaining. They say that his name is not Frank Steel but Frank Sinatra.’
“You have no idea of the trouble I got into as a result of that! I was campused for weeks, and the school wrote a letter to my mother asking if she realized that I was going out with Frank Sinatra. The school was shocked and incensed. Not because Frank was a married man, which I didn’t know at first, or because he was eight years older than me, but because he was a singer! Well-bred young women simply didn’t go out with show-business people. They were declassé and beneath the consideration of ladies. My mother was wonderful about it. She wrote me back and said that she trusted me completely, and, by the way, who is Frank Sinatra? She’d never heard of him.”
After Mary Lou was graduated from Mount Vernon and living at home again, Mrs. Watts soon became acquainted with Frank, for he started calling her daughter at three o’clock in the morning. Those early morning phone calls rang on the phone in her bedroom, and Mrs. Watts had to get up and walk down the hall to her daughter’s room to tell her she was wanted on the telephone.
“At that hour of the morning, I’d know that it was Frank and that he’d just gotten off the bandstand and finished work for the evening,” said Mary Lou. “My mother would shake her head. ‘I simply don’t understand anybody who works at this hour of the night,’ she’d say.”
Entranced by the big bands, Mary Lou Watts enjoyed socializing with Frank. “We’d sit around and talk about the band,” she said. “Frank hated Buddy Rich, who was uncouth and common, and he couldn’t stand Connie Haines either. I don’t know why. You didn’t ask. If he didn’t like them, you didn’t like them either, and that was it. If he didn’t talk to them, you didn’t talk to them.
“After he got off work, we’d go out to fun places like Jack White’s Club 18 and to Harlem to hear Billie Holiday sing. He took me to publicity benefits and to a lot of recording sessions. I remember, they’d rehearse in the worst places, and they’d practice a long time before they ever recorded one song.”
By now, Mary Lou was engaged to the man who became her husband. Nick Sevano said he spent many hours consoling her fiancé when he’d cry to Nick about Mary Lou’s being out with Frank.
But she had her fiancé with her when she decided to help the unschooled singer from Hoboken by introducing him to café society. They took him to the Stork Club, where he met their friends. “Maybe we taught him how to eat,” she said. “He learned, and he was always nice to everyone.” She felt rewarded for her efforts.
“Frank sang beautifully, but he spoke with ‘deze, dem, and doze’ diction,” she said. “He had a terrible New Jersey accent, but it didn’t show in his singing. It’s like the Japanese who sing English and sound just like us. If you can string it out into syllables, it will sound right, and that’s what Frank did, I guess. I always knew that he was going to be a great success someday because he was absolutely determined to become a star. He had amazing confidence in himself. He was torn about leaving Tommy Dorsey, though, and kept asking me if he should do it. It was a terrible decision for him.”
In May 1941, Frank, age twenty-five, was named the top band vocalist by Billboard, and girls started swooning. Every time they did, Dorsey had his musicians stop the music and swoon right back at them. “This inspired the girls to go one better,” said the bandleader, “and the madness kept growing until pretty soon it reached fantastic proportions.”
Tommy couldn’t believe how moved women were by the frail singer with the face of a debauched faun. “I used to stand there on the bandstand so amazed I’d almost forget to take my solos,” he said. “You could almost feel the excitement comin’ 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.”
By the end of the year, Frank had displaced Bing Crosby at the top of the Downbeat poll, a position that Crosby had held for six years.
“That’s when he really started pushing Tommy,” said Nick Sevano, remembering how Frank clamored to record some solo songs. Dorsey finally agreed, and on January 19, 1942, with Axel Stordahl as arranger and conductor, Frank held his first recording session, singing “Night and Day,” “The Night We Called It a Day,” “The Song Is You,” and “Lamplighter’s Serenade.”
“Frank rehearsed day and night for that project,” said Connie Haines. “We were playing the Hollywood Palladium at the time and rehearsing there. They put the record on the loudspeaker, and Fr
ank’s voice began to fill the Palladium. We all knew it was a hit. Frank knew it, too, because he said, ‘Hey, Bing, old man. Move over. Here I come.’ ”
The next afternoon, Frank sat in his room at the Hollywood Plaza with Stordahl, playing the two sides of the record over and over on his portable machine. “He just couldn’t believe his ears,” said the conductor. “He was so excited, you almost believed he had never recorded before. I think this was a turning point in his career. I think he began to see what he might do on his own.”
That evening, Frank told Sammy Cahn that he had to leave Dorsey and go on his own because he was going to be the best singer in the world. He had worried so much in the last few months about making the move that he’d lost his appetite and barely weighed a hundred pounds.
“He was almost tubercular,” Nick Sevano recalled. “He was seeing all kinds of doctors, but he was so nervous that he couldn’t eat. He never finished a meal. He’d order fifteen different things but then he’d just pick, eat two bites of a steak, a forkful of pasta, and that would be it. He’d always get in deep depressive moods, but now he started talking a lot about death and dying. He’d tell me that he didn’t think he would live very long. ‘I get the feeling that I’m going to die soon,’ he’d say. That’s why he filled his days with so much activity. He always had to be moving and constantly doing something.
“He knew the time had come to move on and was just trying to ‘guts’ up to it. I thought he was crazy myself. So did Hank. Tommy had given him such prominence with the band that Frank had become a star with Dorsey. He was making about thirteen thousand a year. He’d already been in two movies, Las Vegas Nights and Ship Ahoy, and made over eighty recordings. I thought he was nuts to throw all that away, but Frank was determined to go on his own. ‘I gotta do it, I gotta do it,’ he kept telling me. ‘And I gotta do it before Bob Eberly does it.’ He drove Tommy up the wall telling him he didn’t want to be known as ‘Dorsey’s boy’ all his life. Hank and I were worried at first, but Frank would scream at us and say, ‘I’m going to be big, real big, bigger than Bing Crosby, bigger than anybody. I’ll leave the rest of those singers in the dust.’ So we fell in line. We started by staying up all night calling Frank Cooper, an agent at GAC [General Amusement Corporation], to represent him. Manie Sacks, head of Columbia Records, had taken a liking to Frank, and he was kind of guiding us. He’d already promised Frank a recording contract and then recommended Cooper at GAC to represent him. Later, he got Frank a spot on CBS and helped us find a press agent.”