by Kitty Kelley
When Evans could not “sell” an interview, he invented a news event, like Frank Sinatra Day in Philadelphia, the “Why I Like Frank Sinatra” contest in Detroit, or New York’s “I Swoon for Sinatra” contest. With Evans at the controls, the bobby-soxer brigade quickly grew into thousands of ecstatic, shrieking, rapturous fans.
“We hired girls to scream when he sexily rolled a note,” said Jack Keller, who was George Evans’s partner on the West Coast. “The dozen girls we hired to scream and swoon did exactly as we told them. But hundreds more we didn’t hire screamed even louder. Others squealed, howled, kissed his pictures with their lipsticked lips, and kept him a prisoner in his dressing room between shows at the Paramount. It was wild, crazy, completely out of control.”
So spectacular was the Sinatra publicity campaign that Billboard awarded Evans a scroll in 1943 for the “Most Effective Promotion of a Single Personality,” which Evans proudly displayed on his office wall. “Frankie is a product of crowd psychology,” he told the Chicago Tribune News Service. “And the girls loved it. Understand, it was the Sinatra influence that provided the initial impetus. But it was I, Evans, who saw the possibilities in organized and regimented moaning.… It’s a big snowball now, and Frankie’s riding to glory on it.”
With the zeal of an empire builder, the devoted press agent began composing a biographical sketch of his client, which he distributed to the press. This was one of his most creative endeavors. After shrewdly assessing what the public wanted in its new boy singer, Evans lopped two years off Frank’s age, asserting that the twenty-eight-year-old bobby-sox idol had been born in 1917 rather than 1915. That was intended to make him closer in age to his young fans. Ignoring Frank’s expulsion from school, he elevated the high school dropout who had no interest in sports to a graduate of Demarest High who ran track, played football, leaped for basketballs, and sang in the glee club. Evans then promoted him from a lowly fly boy who bundled newspapers for The Jersey Observer to a full-fledged sports reporter. Both immigrant parents became native-born, and Evans made no mention, of course, of Uncle Babe’s prison record or Uncle Gus’s numbers operation. He raised Dolly from a Hoboken midwife with a thriving abortion business to a Red Cross nurse who had served her country in World War I. Marty was depicted as the head of the house. His place on the Hoboken fire department was left intact, with nothing said about how he got the job. Sensing that the public would not be endeared to a spoiled brat indulged by a mother as tough as a stevedore, Evans transformed Frankie into a poor, struggling little boy who barely survived the vicious gang wars in his slum neighborhood. He conjured up terrifying images of Hoboken brutes smashing one another with chains, knives, and brass knuckles. He depicted Frank as a Depression child who knew only poverty and deprivation. He was the American Dream personified.
But the most inventive part was Evans’s description of his client as a loving family man. He insisted that Frank wear his wedding band, and frequently had him quoted saying such things as: “Nobody comes before my wife, Nancy. That goes for now and for all time.” Giving “Mommy” full credit for his jaunty bow ties, Frank said, “We thought up that type of large bow tie as a trademark. Nancy shops around for bits of silk, keeps making new ones. I’ve got a hundred—I give lots away.” At the end of his radio broadcasts he always said, “Good night, Nancy.” When Nancy became pregnant again in 1943, no one was happier than the avuncular Evans, who hoped that it would solidify Frank in the eyes of the public as a happily married man and keep him out of the gossip columns.
“God, how George tried to keep Frank and Nancy together!” said Ben Barton, who started a music company with Frank and Hank Sanicola in 1944 to publish all of Frank’s songs. “He did everything he could to bust up Frank’s outside romances.”
“George was like a father to Frank, and he rode him hard about playing around with other women,” said Nick Sevano. “He did everything he could to keep him with Nancy. He said his fans wouldn’t tolerate him seeing other women when he was a married man with a three-year-old daughter at home and a baby on the way, and they’d drop him cold if he ever got a divorce.”
Evans did more than lecture Frank on the subject of fidelity; he took it upon himself to befriend Nancy, and he slowly transformed her from a little Italian housewife into an extremely winning woman. Knowing that Frank was fatally attracted to glamour, he wanted Nancy to be able to hold her own. He sent her to a dentist to get her teeth capped and recommended cosmetic surgery for her nose, which seemed to overpower her small face and almost obliterate her deep brown eyes. He also made a series of appointments for her at Helena Rubinstein for makeup lessons and hair styling.
Then he took her shopping, insisting that she stop making her own clothes and spend money on something striking so that she would be beautifully dressed when Frank took her out, thereby making him proud of her. This was the hardest part for Nancy, who had been budgeting all her life. She believed in saving, and Frank in spending, so she handled the family finances. Always cutting corners, she asked her brother-in-law, Anthony Puzo, an accountant, to do their taxes, and took legal matters to Danny Figarelli, the brother-in-law who was a lawyer. She knew that the family wouldn’t charge as much as outsiders. Ironically, the more money Frank made, the tighter Nancy held on to it.
When they bought their house in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, in 1943, Nancy suggested that Frank call Don Milo, the Hoboken musician who had dressed him for the Major Bowes audition. Milo was now the purchasing agent for Republic Pictures and entitled to a forty percent discount on furniture. Nancy wanted a Stork Line bedroom set, plus new living room, dining room, and kitchen furniture, but she didn’t want to pay full price. So Frank phoned Milo and Nancy bought everything wholesale.
She resented reimbursing Nick Sevano and Hank Sanicola for business expenses, especially when she suspected they were spending the money on entertaining other women for Frank, and she was almost niggardly about paying his other associates.
“He hired me to do some work for him at fifty dollars a week, but he got two months behind in paying me,” said Milt Rubin, Frank’s first press agent. “I asked somebody to find out why, and they told me that Nancy was handling the money and she felt that if she didn’t pay people on time, they would work harder for Frank. I had to start suit to collect.”
Money was the only weapon Nancy had to wield control over her husband’s freewheeling style, and though he usually ignored her and continued spending, his associates couldn’t be so cavalier. “Nancy really tried to hold us down,” said Nick Sevano, “but money never ruled Frank. That was probably his best quality. When I was with him, he lived like King Farouk and spent all the time. He was always telling me to pick up six theater tickets for someone, to send flowers to someone else, to buy a gold lighter for this reporter and a gold watch for that one, to tip the maître d’, tip the waiter, tip the hatcheck girl, tip the cabbie, tip, tip, tip. He never wanted anyone to think that he was not successful because he didn’t have money, so he spent like crazy. And he never worried about going broke either. He said that he was the greatest singer in the world and that he’d always be able to make millions because he had such a fantastic talent. Hank and I thought he was nuts at times, but then, when you come from humble beginnings like we did, you tend to hang on to money for fear you’ll never see it again. Nancy was like that, too, but not Frank. He always had money growing up because of his mom, and now he was always going to have it because of his talent.”
Following his astounding success at the Paramount, the money rolled in as Frank signed contracts with Your Hit Parade, Columbia Records, and RKO. He made sure the press knew the astronomical sums he was making—$1,250 a week at the Paramount and $4,500 for a return visit, $2,800 a week on the Hit Parade, $1,000 for personal appearances on radio programs like The Jack Benny Show, Amos ’n Andy, and the George Burns and Gracie Allen show; $1,000 for a three-minute song in Reveille with Beverly, plus $25,000 for his first RKO movie, $50,000 for the second, and $100,000
for the third. “I’m in the $100,000 class now,” he told the New York Daily News.
He had the swooners, but now he needed the sophisticates. So his agents accepted an April 1943 booking at the Riobamba, a sleek New York City nightclub that catered to socialites but was in financial trouble due to some recent cancellations. After much brokering, Frank was hired, but only as the “extra added attraction” for $800 a week. The two stars, monologist Walter O’Keefe and singer-comedienne Sheila Barrett, received $1,500 apiece.
Evans was worried. He knew how important it was for Frank to capture this sophisticated audience if he was to break into nightclubs and soar to the top. Hank Sanicola, also apprehensive, suggested more rehearsals, but Frank laughed. He had already seen the Riobamba. After looking the place over, he had turned to the owner and said, “You better push the walls of this joint out. I’m gonna pack ’em in.”
Five days later, the nightclub was filled. By the end of the week, it was standing room only, and the club started making a profit. After two weeks, the two headliners were dropped, leaving only Frank and a line of chorus girls. His three-week engagement was extended, and his price upped to fifteen hundred a week. He was exultant and preening.
“I’m flying high, kid,” he told a reporter. “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 ‘someday.’ I hitched my wagon to a star and. …”
Composer Jule Styne sat in the opening night audience and parried with Frank until dawn. A few hours later, a messenger delivered to Styne a gold ID bracelet from Cartier inscribed: “To Jule Who Knew Me When. Frankie.”
“Frank was a sensation, doing extra shows, and I went to the two-thirty A.M. show with a stop first in his dressing room,” recalled Sammy Cahn. “The moment he saw me he put his arms around me and said, ‘Did I tell ya? Did I tell ya?’ Of course, after that show, we all hugged and laughed and shouted. For us it was proof that the ‘B’ group now had an ‘A’ singer, which was the wire I promptly sent to the other members of the ‘B’ group back on the coast. The ‘A’ group of that era was Bing Crosby and Company.”
The next month, Frank returned to the Paramount, where he was besieged by thousands of screaming, swooning youngsters. They stormed the theater and broke down the doors to get inside, sweeping aside the police and security men as if they were cardboard cutouts.
“It was absolute pandemonium,” said Nick Sevano. “This time, they threw more than roses. They threw their panties and their brassieres. They went nuts, absolutely nuts.”
The critics were flabbergasted. “The hysteria which accompanies his presence in public is in no way part of an artistic manifestation,” said the Herald-Tribune. “It is a slightly disturbing spectacle to witness the almost synchronized screams that come from the audience as he closes his eyes or moves his body slightly sideways, because the spontaneous reaction corresponds to no common understanding relating to tradition or technique of performance, nor yet to the meaning of the sung text.”
“Hysteria to the point of swooning is definitely harmful,” said a New York psychiatrist. “This is a nervous disease and a harmful thing. Apparently such singing upsets nerves that are already keen.”
“Mass frustrated love without direction,” said a sociologist.
“His voice is an authentic cry of starvation,” said a doctor.
“It’s mammary hyperesthesia,” said another.
“Purely mass psychology built up by his press agent,” said a Brooklyn analyst. “They all work on one another. It’s an emotional situation no different from the Holy Rollers.”
The head of the New York Police Department’s missing persons bureau blamed Frank for the problem of runaway girls and recommended that he be exiled to New Guinea.
The education commissioner of New York City threatened to press charges against him for encouraging truancy, because thousands of girls were skipping school to hear him sing. “We can’t tolerate young people making a public display of losing control of their emotions,” he said.
One member of Congress excoriated him as “the prime instigator of juvenile delinquency in America.”
Frank thrived on the controversy he was creating and laughed when a magazine described his singing as “a kind of musical drug … an opium of emotionalism.” He was not at all amused, though, when his voice was characterized as “worn velveteen,” and he swore at the critic who wrote that “listening to The Voice is like being stroked by a hand covered with cold cream.”
He snapped angrily at reviewers who said that he usually sang a half note or so off-key. “Nuts,” he said. “If they knew music or at least knew enough to realize what I’m doing when I sing, they’d never say it. Those characters just don’t know.”
He scolded the critic who suggested that Tommy Dorsey and his band had made him a star. “Now when I sing, there is nothing to distract from me,” he said. “Thirty-three musicians in the Dorsey band. It was like competing with a three-ring circus. Now I’m up there alone.”
Frank was spending little time at home. Every bit of energy was directed toward his career, and he let nothing get in the way of that ambition.
Still, he also did nothing to protect his voice. On the contrary, he drank and smoked and sometimes did five shows a day. There wasn’t much time for rehearsals, but he squeezed some in. He was constantly working, constantly in motion—whipping himself to glory.
He became so accustomed to the adulation of his young fans that he resented anything less from anyone else. If he read a negative review, he threw it on the floor of his dressing room and started ranting at whoever was standing there. “If it wasn’t a bad review, then it was something else,” said Nick Sevano. “Frank would always find a reason to start hollering about something. It was just frustration, but he scared most people to death because he acted like a madman. He’d just go crazy if things weren’t done the minute he wanted them done.
“At the Paramount, we sent his shirts to the laundry every day because of all the makeup he wore, and we always wrote in indelible ink ‘no starch.’ One day they came back starched, and Frank hit the ceiling. He threw the shirts at me and started kicking them all over the floor, yelling and screaming and cursing. ‘Fuck you,’ he hollered. I threw the shirts right back at him and yelled, ‘Fuck you, too, Frank. What the hell do you think you’re doing? Are you crazy or something? It isn’t my fault. I didn’t starch the damn things.’ He stormed out of the room and didn’t speak for hours.”
Behind Frank’s back, his friends started referring to him as “the monster,” and calling George Evans “Frankenstein.” They knew better than ever to speak to Frank in the morning.
“It would take him two hours to wind up, and nobody talked until he was ready,” said Nick. “Nobody would even go into the room until they knew what kind of mood he was in that day.”
Axel Stordahl and songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen stood the best chance of eliciting good humor, but Frank screamed even at them occasionally. The two men were part of the entourage called The Varsity. It included his gofer/assistant Nick Sevano; his music company partner, Ben Barton; manager Hank Sanicola; bodyguard/boxers Tami Mauriello and Al Silvani; Jimmy Taratino, who wrote for the boxing magazine Knockout; along with lyricist Sammy Cahn and record company chief Manie Sacks.
The Varsity headed for cover the day that Frank read the review saying that he was nothing more than a love object of girls swept away by war hysteria. The reviewer dismissed his success as the result of “wartime degeneracy.” Frank exploded. “The war has nothing to do with it. It just so happens that I am the greatest singing sensation of the last ten years.”
The mere mention of the war galvanized Evans into action. He understood the resentment of those who felt that Frank had no right to be making thousands of dollars at home while so many brave American boys were dying for forty dollars a month, so he sent him to Philadelphia
to sing for the boys in the naval hospital. Then he began volunteering him for as many war bond rallies as he could find. At a war bond auction at Bonwit Teller’s in Manhattan, which Evans arranged and publicized, Frank sang songs for the highest bidders. The top bid of $10,000 was for “The Song Is You”; “Night and Day” brought $4,500. A Frank Sinatra kiss brought one hundred dollars.
Everyone seemed to be getting into uniform except Frank. Buddy Rich, Dorsey’s drummer, joined the Marines. Ziggy Ellman, Dorsey’s trumpeter, and Paul Weston, the arranger, joined the Army. Eddy Duchin was in the Navy and Glenn Miller was leading the Air Force band. Joe DiMaggio and Hank Greenberg, two of the biggest baseball stars of the day, also joined. And so did Frank’s good friend, Tami Mauriello, the heavyweight boxer.
Evans kept telling reporters that Frank was a father before Pearl Harbor and his wife was expecting another baby soon, both legitimate reasons to disqualify him from the draft. In 1943 it seemed almost shameful for an able-bodied man to be seen at home. Already Frank had fought with a couple of soldiers who had seen him in a nightclub and yelled out, “Hey, Wop. Why aren’t you in uniform?” A variation of that same question began popping up in the press. “I’ll go anytime they say,” said Frank publicly. ‘I’d like to join the Marines.’ Privately, he confided to columnist Earl Wilson that he would lose more than $300,000 worth of contracts if his career were interrupted with a stint in the service.
He was classified 1-A after his preliminary medical and said that he was “restless and ready to go.” A month later, he was called back for a second examination and rejected for service as 4-F. “I’ve got a hole in my left eardrum,” he said, referring to the puncture that had resulted from childbirth.