by Kitty Kelley
Dorsey held his band close to him and took it as a personal affront if someone wanted to leave. “When a kid in the band said, ‘I’m giving you two weeks’ notice,’ Tommy wouldn’t look at him for the whole two weeks,” Frank said. “In fact, he would never talk to the guy again. I knew this, so when I started thinking about leaving, I said to him one day, ‘I’m giving you a year’s notice.’ He looked at me and said, ‘What?’ He didn’t believe me. He thought I was kidding. That was in 1942. Six months later I asked him if he wanted me to look for another singer. He got the message then, and for the next six months he never spoke to me.”
“Tommy held on to Frank so fiercely,” said Nick Sevano. “He cherished him like a son. When he realized that Frank was finally serious, he called me, crying, ‘Please, Nick, talk him out of it. Please talk him out of it.’
“But you couldn’t talk Frank out of anything. Ever. He was a driven man in those days. He was relentless, so ambitious. He was like a Mack truck going one hundred miles an hour without brakes. He had me working around the clock. ‘Call Frank Cooper. Do it now. Don’t wait until tomorrow,’ he’d say. ‘Send my publicity photos to Walter Winchell.’ ‘Get my records to the Lucky Strike Hit Parade.’ ‘Call Columbia Records and tell them I’ll be singing such and such.’ Frank knew so much about promotion and how to hype himself. He learned it from Tommy. He was wining and dining disc jockeys when no one else was paying any attention to them. He knew that was the way to get his records played on the radio. He bought drinks for reporters all the time and took columnists out to dinner and was always buying them presents or sending them flowers. He never once let up—not for a minute.
“We’d be walking out of the theater at two in the morning after working all day and he’d say to me, ‘Did you talk to So-and-So? You didn’t call, did you?’ ‘Yeah, yeah,’ I’d say, ‘I’m on it.’ Of course, I’d have forgotten all about it, but Frank didn’t.”
Once he had a recording commitment from Manie Sacks, Frank wanted to make his move. He asked Axel Stordahl to go with him to do his arrangements. After seven years with Dorsey, Stordahl was reluctant to leave, but Frank agreed to pay him $650 a month, five times what Dorsey paid him. As angry as he was about his taking Stordahl, Dorsey still offered to advance Frank $17,000 if he would sign a contract pledging Dorsey 33 1/3 percent of his gross earnings over $100 a week for the next ten years. The contract also called for Frank to pay an additional ten percent to Leonard K. Vannerson, Dorsey’s personal manager, as a commission for bringing Frank to the attention of Columbia Records.
Frank needed the advance because he no longer would have a steady salary. He had to hire men and he wanted to buy a new house for his wife and baby daughter. Besides, he always needed money because he spent so heavily. So, in August 1942, he signed eagerly.
But a year later, he was sorry. He had given Dorsey only one thousand dollars under the contract, and now was refusing to pay anything further. He complained bitterly to the press about the financial hammerlock Tommy had on him, and his fans started boycotting Dorsey’s performances.
“You can quote Sinatra as saying that he believes it is wrong for anybody to own a piece of him and collect on it when that owner is doing nothing for Sinatra,” Frank told the New York Herald-Tribune. “Sinatra will fight this foreclosure or whatever it is to the last ditch.”
“It all sounds like a black-market meat-slicing affair to us,” said an editorial in Metronome.
Piqued at being portrayed as something short of an extortionist, Tommy sued. “I thought the lug would think the price too high,” he said. “I didn’t want him to quit, but he did. I never tried to collect, but when he gave out with interviews about how I had him all cut up, it made me sore.”
In August 1943 Frank’s lawyer, Henry Jaffe, flew to Los Angeles to meet with Dorsey’s lawyer, N. Joseph Ross, to try to settle the matter. In the end, MCA, the agency representing Dorsey and courting Sinatra, made Dorsey a $60,000 offer that he accepted. To obtain Frank as a client, the agency paid Dorsey $35,000 while Sinatra paid $25,000, which he borrowed from Manie Sacks as an advance against his royalties from Columbia Records. MCA agreed that until 1948 it would split its commissions on Sinatra with GAC, the agency that Frank had signed with when he left the Dorsey band.
Afterward, everyone seemed satisfied with the arrangement. MCA had Frank as a new client, and GAC was well compensated for giving him up. Frank told the press that he was delighted to own himself once again, and Tommy told friends that he had made “a hell of a deal.”
“I saw Dorsey that afternoon, and he was in a great mood,” said Arthur Michaud, who had managed Dorsey and would soon manage him again. “ ‘I just turned Frank Sinatra over to MCA for sixty thousand dollars,’ he told me.
“ ‘You got the money?’ I asked him.
“ ‘Yeah.’
“ ‘Dope. You should’ve taken twenty thousand with two and a half percent for seven years or three and a third of his earnings. That’s the deal you should have made.’
“Tommy thought for a minute and said, ‘You’re right. Those bastards at MCA gave me bad advice.’ Dorsey and I were close, close friends and he would’ve told me if the buy-out had been anything else. That’s why I never believed that stupid Mafia story.”
Michaud was referring to the fact that as time passed, the story of MCA’s simple buy-out had changed to a far more ominous one, which held that Willie Moretti, the padrino of New Jersey who was to become Frank’s good friend and neighbor when Frank moved to Hasbrouck Heights, had gone to Dorsey’s dressing room and demanded that he release the singer—using as persuasive argument a revolver he rammed down Dorsey’s throat. Supposedly, Dorsey thereupon sold Sinatra for one dollar.
“That’s crap,” said Nick Sevano. “It was a simple buyout by MCA. Frank was involved with the racket boys later but not on the Dorsey deal.”
Tommy Dorsey’s attorney swore that his client had never been subjected to Mafia intimidation. “Oh, God, no,” N. Joseph Ross said. “Absolutely not. It’s not true. I remember after we got a settlement I called Tommy and woke him up. He was very happy with the outcome. No, there was no gun put down his throat. Ever.”
But Frank was never to forget the terms of the original break with Dorsey. And he was reminded of it all over again in 1951 when he read an article in American Mercury magazine about his associations with gangsters in which Dorsey talked of the contract dispute with Frank. The bandleader said that after a breakdown in negotiations he was visited by three businesslike men who told him out of the sides of their mouths to “sign or else.” Five years passed before Frank spoke to Dorsey again.
In August 1956, fourteen years after that agreement was signed, Frank accepted a week’s engagement with the Dorsey brothers at the Paramount, where his film Johnny Concho was the screen attraction. Three months later, Tommy Dorsey died suddenly after choking in his sleep. His widow never received any kind of condolence from Frank Sinatra. There was no letter, no telephone call, no flowers, no acknowledgment of any kind. Nor would Frank join Dorsey’s friends and former band members in the one-hour television show called A Tribute to Tommy Dorsey. Connie Haines sang “Will You Still Be Mine,” and Jo Stafford, with Paul Weston conducting, sang the first song she had ever recorded with the Dorsey band. Even Jack Leonard returned to sing “Marie,” but there was no song by Sinatra.
He had never forgiven the bandleader, especially after Tommy gave an interview to a newspaper reporter in which he characterized Frank as “brittle.” When asked what he thought of the singer, Dorsey had said, “He’s the most fascinating man in the world, but don’t stick your hand in the cage.”
Rancor continued to fester within Frank. More than three decades after the contract break with Dorsey, Frank’s grudge seemed even stronger than it had been. At a concert at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles on June 15, 1979, Frank introduced Harry James before an audience of sixty-two hundred people and said what a wonderful guy Harry was because when Sinatra
was just starting out as a singer, James had let him out of his contract after only six months.
“And then there was Tommy Dorsey,” said Frank. “And when I wanted to get out of my contract to him years later, it cost me seven million dollars.” He stamped his foot on the stage, and stared down as if the bandleader were smoldering in hell for the wrongs he’d committed against his one-time singer. “You hear me, Tommy?” Frank yelled. “You hear me? I’m talking to you.”
6
In 1942, driven by the tensions and deprivations of a country at war, people on the home front began spending lavishly for entertainment. They were so eager to be distracted that they flocked to theaters at all hours, forcing movie houses in Portland, Oregon, to stay open all night and feature a “swing-shift matinee” for workers from midnight to four o’clock in the morning. Live music was the best entertainment available, and the public handsomely rewarded its musicians, especially those singers whose way with a romantic lyric touched deep longings. Nelson Eddy was the highest paid musician in the country in 1942, commanding more than seven thousand dollars for a concert.
Managers of large theaters in New York City, Boston, and Chicago tried to book one of the big bands when they showed a new feature film. People wanted to hear Helen O’Connell sing “Embraceable You” with Jimmy Dorsey’s orchestra or to listen to Eddy Duchin play “Stormy Weather.” They loved swaying to Les Brown’s orchestra and toe-tapping to Glenn Miller’s “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree.”
Sinatra’s last performance with Tommy Dorsey was in September 1942. From then on he was on his own.
Bob Weitman, manager of New York’s Paramount Theater, booked Benny Goodman, the King of Swing and the country’s number one bandleader, as the star attraction for the New Year’s show that year. Featured with the famous clarinetist were singer Peggy Lee, Jess Stacy on the piano, and the Benny Goodman sextet. At the last minute, Weitman decided to add a scrawny singer who couldn’t read a note of music but who had made the girls swoon when he performed the week before at the Mosque Theater in Newark, New Jersey.
“I still don’t know exactly why I did it,” said Weitman. “I had Star Spangled Rhythm as the picture for those weeks, and that certainly didn’t need extra attractions.… Benny Goodman could pack the house himself. But there was something about this kid.”
Sinatra had been a top band singer, but now he didn’t have the Dorsey band behind him. And he knew that Benny Goodman, a serious musician, was conscious only of his clarinet and his orchestra, nothing else, certainly not of any new up-and-coming singers. The King of Swing had never heard of Sinatra. Billed as an “extra added attraction,” the twenty-seven-year-old singer in the floppy bow tie was almost paralyzed by stage fright as he waited to walk to the microphone for that first show on December 30, 1942. It was a long wait. Benny Goodman dazzled the audience with his music for an hour before making his laconic introduction—“And now, Frank Sinatra.”
Sinatra stuck his head and one foot out through the curtains—and froze. Immediately, the girls let out a scream. Sinatra still couldn’t move a muscle. They sent up such a tremendous roar that the startled bandleader also froze, his arms raised on the upbeat. He looked over one shoulder and said to no one in particular, “What the fuck was that?”
Hearing him, Frank started laughing and ran to the microphone to sing “For Me and My Gal.”
A few days later Nick Sevano brought a new press agent to the show.
“Up to this point,” Sevano said, “the publicity had been handled by a guy named Milt Rubin, who was very close to Walter Winchell. Milt didn’t fawn over Frank the way he was supposed to. In fact, he sometimes acted like Winchell was more important than our boy and that was his undoing. Then Manie Sacks suggested George Evans, who handled Glenn Miller and the Copa. He was the biggest thing to ever happen to Frank.
“I was bringing George Evans down the aisle to get closer to the stage,” recalled Nick Sevano. “A girl stood up and threw a rose at Frank, and the girl next to her moaned a little. That’s all George needed to see. A couple of days later, he created an absolute pandemonium for Frank.”
The forty-year-old press agent engulfed everyone with his energy. Dynamic and hard-charging, he represented the best in the business: Duke Ellington, Lena Home, Kitty Kallen, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, the Copacabana Club. He considered himself personally responsible for his clients’ success and happiness, pushing himself tirelessly on their behalf. After seeing Frank sing at the Paramount, the astute press agent worked with dervishlike energy to turn the sparks of a tossed rose and a moaning teenager into a conflagration of screaming hysterical women. In the process, George Evans made his new client the most sensational singer in the country.
“I thought if I could fill the theater with a bunch of girls moaning, ‘Oh, Frankie,’ I’ve got something there,” Evans said.
He hired twelve long-haired, round-faced little girls in bobby socks and paid them five dollars apiece to jump and scream and yell “Oh, Frankie. Oh, Frankie” when Frank started to sing one of his slow, soft ballads. He drilled them in the basement of the Paramount, directing them to holler when Frank bent and dipped certain notes. “They shouldn’t only yell and squeal, they should fall apart,” Evans said. He showed Frank how to caress the microphone, clutching it as if he were going to fall down. Then he suggested that when he sang “She’s Funny That Way” and purred the words “I’m not much to look at, nothin’ to see,” one of the girls should interrupt and yell “Oh, Frankie, yes, you are!” On “Embraceable You,” he suggested that Frank open his arms wide when he sang the words “Come to Papa, Come to Papa, do.” Then Evans instructed the girls to scream “Oh, Daddy,” telling Frank to murmur softly into the mike “Gee, that’s a lot of kids for one fellow.” Two of the girls were coached to fall in a dead faint in the aisle, while the others were told to moan in unison as loudly as they could.
To pack the theater to capacity, Evans distributed free tickets to hundreds of youngsters on school vacation. He hired an ambulance to sit outside and gave the ushers bottles of ammonia “in case a patron feels like swooning.”
Evans knew it was one thing to be a popular band singer where the band and bandleader always dominate, and quite another for a singer to be a star on his own. Evans was going to give Sinatra everything he thought he needed to become that kind of star. He told a few select columnists that a new young singer was appearing at the Paramount. He said Frank was going to be bigger than Rudy Vallee and Bing Crosby because he made women fall on the floor. Photographers were alerted, and the next day’s newspapers showed pictures of young girls being carried out “in a swoon” after seeing Frank Sinatra: Twelve were hired but thirty fainted.
By the end of the week, the ticket lines stretched around the block, and reporters were writing about the thrilling new crooner who cocked his head, hunched his shoulders, and caressed the microphone, all of which made young girls faint and old women scream.
The Paramount stayed packed for the four weeks of Benny Goodman’s engagement, and Frank was named by Metronome as the top male vocalist in the country. Bob Weitman immediately signed him for another four weeks, saying it was the first time a performer had been held over since Rudy Vallee was the nation’s singing idol in 1929. Then he hired extra guards for crowd control.
By this time, George Evans was in manic overdrive. He christened his client “Swoonatra” or “The Voice.” He called his mooning fans “Sinatratics,” and labeled the swooning phenomenon “Sinatraism,” all of which was immediately adopted by the press. He encouraged bobby-soxers to form their own fan clubs, hold mass meetings, and write letters to the newspapers about their hero. Each fan club received a flossy embossed parchment charter signed by Frank.
Within weeks, Evans was calling reporters to tell them that more than one thousand Sinatra fan clubs had sprung up in the United States, among them the Moonlit Sinatra Club, The Slaves of Sinatra, and The Flatbush Girls Who Would Lay Down Their Lives for Frank Sinatra Fan Clu
b, as well as the Frank Sinatra Fan and Mahjong Club, consisting of forty middle-aged Jewish women who met to play their favorite game while listening to Sinatra songs. Evans said more than two hundred fifty of the clubs published their own newspapers. Most reporters laughed, so Evans sent them copies of Frank Fare, the newspaper of a Newark, New Jersey, fan club called The Sighing Society of Sinatra Swooners, in which the editor wrote, “Cynical singers and orchestra leaders sneered at him at first, but we in the deepness of our hearts knew that our Frankie was straight and true and that someday he would be known and loved all over the world.”
Evans circled this particular passage, and reporters dutifully wrote it up. He courted the press assiduously, knowing that published stories about Frank’s fanatic fans and their bizarre behavior would set a pattern that even more youngsters would want to adopt. Consequently, he worked hard to arrange as many interviews as possible. He even devised a mass radio interview with two hundred high school editors quizzing Frank over WAAT in Jersey City, thereby ensuring stories in two hundred high school papers.
From the start, George Evans played Frank as a family man, the boy-next-door answer to girlish fantasies. Frank cooperated completely. He sat for every interview that George arranged and threw open his home to reporters and photographers. He posed patiently for any pictures they wanted to take of him and Big Nancy and Little Nancy in the kitchen, the bedroom, and the nursery. He put on a sailor cap and posed for pictures leaning on a lawn mower in the backyard. Soon, so much fan mail poured in that he hired two full-time secretaries to handle the letters and requests for photographs. This he did willingly. “I believe in publicity,” he said. “It’s the best thing to spend money on.”