Frank: The Voice (14 page)

Summit. Frank, Buddy Rich, Tommy Dorsey, circa 1941.
(photo credit 7.1)

H
e was one tough son of a bitch, the second son of a horn-playing family from the coal-mining hills of eastern Pennsylvania, one of the starkest places on earth. His father, Tom Dorsey Sr., was self-taught on cornet and four other instruments, and an even tougher son of a bitch than his sons. Pop Dorsey had used his musical skills to escape the mines, had dragged himself up by his bootstraps from the worst job in the world, and was damned if his sons would have to go
down in those black pits. So he pushed them, bullied them really, to learn their instruments: Jimmy, the saxophone, and Tom junior, the trombone. And they learned well, both boys, they were brilliant musicians like their dad, but like their dad they also had the devil in them, a taste for alcohol and a deep black anger, as black as the coal in the mines, as old as Ireland, as explosive as TNT. They got into fistfights with anyone they had to, and many they didn’t have to, and they fought each other, too. They vied for supremacy, Tommy refusing to accept the role of the second son, giving his older brother no deference. They loved each other, but perhaps hated each other a little more.

The brothers played together (and fought together) in dozens of bands as they came up during the 1920s and 1930s: the Scranton Sirens and Jean Goldkette’s band (with an insanely talented, desperately alcoholic cornetist named Bix Beiderbecke) and Paul Whiteman’s; then, against all emotional logic, they formed their own outfit, the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra, and fought some more, and then, as the Swing Era was getting started in 1935, Tommy couldn’t take the fighting anymore, and walked out to start on his own.

He was just thirty, but thirty was more like forty in those days, and coming from where he’d come from, and having done what he’d done, Tommy Dorsey had a hundred thousand miles on him. He was five ten and ramrod straight, with a square, pitiless face, a hawk nose, cold blue eyes behind little round glasses. He looked just like a high-school music teacher—he knew it, others knew it, and he tried to shift the impression by dressing more elegantly than other bandleaders (he had an immense wardrobe, over sixty suits) and standing taller (he wore lifts in his shoes, and tended to pose for the camera with his trombone slide extended alongside himself, to emphasize the vertical line). His ambition was titanic, his discipline incomparable. He could (and often did) drink himself into a stupor after a gig, sleep three hours, then get up at 6:00 a.m., play golf, and be fresh as a daisy for the day’s work. No matter how long the road trip or how taxing the engagement, he was never seen in rumpled clothes. He did precisely what he wanted, when
he wanted, took shit from nobody, and played an absolutely gorgeous trombone. “
He could do something with a trombone that no one had ever done before,” said Artie Shaw, who was stingy with compliments. “He made it into a singing instrument … Before that it was a blatting instrument.”

Dorsey had a massive rib cage and extraordinary lung power. He could play an unbelievable thirty-two-bar legato. And yet he hopelessly idolized the legendary Texas trombonist and vocalist Jack Teagarden, a great jazz artist, a man who could transform a song into something new and sublime and dangerous. Dorsey didn’t transform: he ornamented; he amplified. It was a quibble, really, but not in Dorsey’s mind. There was something about himself—there were a few things—that he didn’t like. When he thought about Teagarden, the pure artist, he would pour himself another drink, turn mean as a snake, go looking for somebody to punch out.
¹
But when he blew those glorious solos, measure after silken measure seemingly without a pause for breath, you forgot about jazz: Tommy Dorsey made his own rules.

Still, jazz dominated the mid-1930s. The bad, scared days of the Depression were starting to give way to the optimism of the New Deal; people wanted to dance. The black bands of Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Jimmie Lunceford were wildly swinging and innovative, and Benny Goodman—who was soon to break the color barrier by hiring Teddy Wilson, Lionel Hampton, and Charlie Christian—wasn’t far behind.

Then there was Tommy Dorsey, whose theme song, “I’m Getting Sentimental over You,” spoke for itself; he also had a deliciously corny nickname, the Sentimental Gentleman of Swing. For three years he entranced the fox-trotting masses with his long sweet solos. But swing grew hotter as the 1940s approached—even Glenn Miller’s band was starting to sound punchier—and the critics began to carp about Dorsey’s monotonous mellowness. The truth is, Tommy Dorsey was starting to get bored with himself. Any sentimentality that he possessed was buried under layers of toughness and anger. Nor was he—except when
the microphone was on—particularly gentlemanly. Before his public grew bored too, the ever restless, insatiably ambitious bandleader decided to make some changes.

And 1939 was a year for change. Dorsey’s first move was his most radical: that summer, he hired away Jimmie Lunceford’s genius arranger, Melvin James “Sy” Oliver. Other white bands had used black arrangers before: Fletcher Henderson was the secret of Benny Goodman’s success. Tommy Dorsey needed some similar magic, and with Sy Oliver he got it. The immediate and dramatic result of the new acquisition, as Peter J. Levinson noted in
Tommy Dorsey: Livin’ in a Great Big Way
, was that “
the Dorsey band … became a magnet for jazz musicians who noticed the difference Oliver’s presence made.”

One of those musicians was the ace trumpeter Zeke Zarchy. Another was the percussively and temperamentally explosive twenty-two-year-old drummer Buddy Rich, who had become a national phenomenon that year while playing for Artie Shaw’s band. Rich had first performed onstage at the age of eighteen months, a percussion prodigy of Mozartean éclat (complete with a pushy, less-talented stage father) known as Traps, the Drum Wonder. The famously temperamental Shaw and the volatile, egomaniacal Rich were bound to clash, and clash they did, when Shaw accused Rich—of all things—of not being a team player. Of course Buddy Rich wasn’t a team player: he was a force of nature, a law unto himself, a hard-drumming whirlwind who could give Gene Krupa a run for his money anytime. In November, Rich magnanimously accepted Dorsey’s offer of $750 a week—a fortune then—and joined the band at its engagement at the Palmer House in Chicago.

Buddy Rich loved Tommy Dorsey’s playing (“
the greatest melodic trombone player that ever lived. Absolutely”) and detested him personally. Many others felt the same way. Dorsey was really more a dictator than a leader, a martinet who ran an almost militarily rigid organization, enforcing proper dress and decorum, fining or firing violators for drinking or smoking marijuana. (Dorsey’s own heavy drinking and womanizing—he
had a wife at home in New Jersey, but was carrying on an affair with his girl singer, Edythe Wright—were theoretically beside the point.) Physically powerful and fearless, he had literally thrown offenders off the band bus. The object wasn’t petty discipline but tight playing and—always—commercial success. He was renowned for firing his entire trumpet section (somehow it was always the trumpet section) if their playing didn’t come up to snuff. His musicians, most of them in their twenties, called him the Old Man. In November 1939, Tommy Dorsey had just turned thirty-four.

In his own way, Jack Leonard was another part of the musical storm forming around the Dorsey band in the late fall of 1939. Over the years, it has become accepted wisdom that Dorsey’s silky-voiced young baritone had grown restless and wanted to go out on his own. In fact Leonard was restless with his domineering boss. Dorsey had learned a cold and cutting wit from his tough family, and was free with it on and off the bandstand. His musicians learned to take it when he dished it out. But one night at the Palmer House, Jack Leonard, who had been with the band since he was nineteen, who had crisscrossed the country many times, his bladder ready to burst (it was rumored Dorsey didn’t have one) in the ice-cold or baking-hot band bus, who had dutifully laid down the workmanlike vocals on forty-two Dorsey recordings, who had felt the Old Man’s occasional warmth, but—more often—suffered his tongue-lashings, had simply had it. He walked off the bandstand, took a deep breath—free!—and left for good.

It wasn’t easy: at times, Dorsey had been like a father to him. They’d had one of their warm moments a couple of months before, as leader and singer drove out to Dorsey’s country house in New Jersey after a gig at the Hotel Pennsylvania roof in Manhattan. Basking in the Old Man’s presence, late at night in the car, Leonard felt expansive. He asked Dorsey if he’d happened to catch Harry James’s new boy singer on the radio—each afternoon, before the evening gig at the Roseland, the Music Makers were broadcasting from the World’s Fair, out in Flushing. “They’ve got this new kid, Tommy, singing ‘All or Nothing At All.’ Have you heard him?”

At the wheel, Dorsey shook his head. “Uh-uh.”

“Well,” Leonard said, “this kid really knocks it out of the park. In fact, if you want to know the truth, he scares the hell out of me. He’s that good.”

Dorsey had cause to remember the conversation soon after Leonard walked out. One night in Chicago, the bandleader was having dinner with a pal named Jimmy Hilliard, the music supervisor for CBS, and bemoaning his boy-singer problem. “
Have you heard the skinny kid who’s singing with Harry James?” Hilliard asked. “He’s nothing to look at, but he’s got a sound! Harry can’t be paying him much—maybe you can take him away.”

Dorsey had quickly filled the breach caused by Leonard’s departure with a baritone named Alan DeWitt. But DeWitt was merely adequate, and Tommy Dorsey wasn’t interested in adequacy.

Then he heard Sinatra for himself.

The band was filing through the lobby of the Palmer House when a radio playing stopped Dorsey in his tracks. The song was “All or Nothing At All.” He beckoned to his clarinetist, Johnny Mince. “Come here, Johnny, I want you to hear something,” Dorsey said. “What do you think?”

The next night he sent his manager, Bobby Burns, to Mayor Kelly’s Christmas party to hear the Music Makers. After the performance, Burns slipped Harry James’s boy singer a note scribbled on a strip torn from a sandwich bag. Frank Sinatra’s heart thumped hard when he saw the pencil scrawl on the grease-spotted brown paper: the note indicated Dorsey’s suite number at the Palmer House and the time Frank should show up. Sinatra saved that scrap of paper for a long time.

It was a careful dance, the kind of unspoken minuet men do when approaching each other on a matter of importance. Sinatra had been aware, with each mile Harry James’s rickety band bus traveled eastward, of Dorsey’s looming presence in Chicago: it was like entering the gravitational field of an enormous dark star. And Dorsey, always calculating, had registered something when Jack Leonard made his offhand comment that night in the car on the way to Bernardsville.
The something moved a click when Jimmy Hilliard mentioned Sinatra, then clicked into place when Dorsey heard that song on the radio: he had already met this kid once.

Sinatra, of course, remembered the occasion intimately, as one of his great gaffes, like spilling a drink on a pretty girl’s dress or calling someone important by the wrong name: he had frozen up in the great man’s presence. It was one thing to be trying out for a new band—Bob Chester was a nice kid—it was quite another to have Himself walk in. He could freeze you with a stare, that cold puss of his. Sinatra still blushed just thinking about it.

This would be Frank’s one and only chance to set things right, his one and only second chance with the great man, and it must, it must go right. There would be no third chance. He slept barely at all that night, for thinking of Tommy Dorsey’s tough face and his perfect suits and, most of all, his gorgeous sound, those long, beautiful melody lines that backed a singer the way the purple velvet in a jewel box backed a diamond bracelet …

At 2:00 p.m. on the dot, Dorsey greeted Frank at the door of his suite, wearing a silk dressing gown over suit pants, shirt, and a tie. He exuded a manly whiff of Courtley cologne. His square gold cuff links were engraved TD.

Sinatra felt weak in the knees.

A strong handshake and that icy stare, from slightly above, with the very faintest of smiles. “
Yes, I remember that day when you couldn’t get out the words.”

And damned if it didn’t almost happen again: Frank’s mouth fell open, and for a second nothing came out. He had to clear his throat to get his heart started again, and with that sound, miraculously, a sentence emerged.

Well, he’d been pretty nervous that day. He was pretty nervous today, too.

The smile warmed just a degree or two.

Dorsey told Frank to call him Tommy. He told him he’d like to hear him sing. Did Frank think he could manage that?

He had a few of the boys waiting up in the ballroom, Dorsey said. Did Frank know “Marie”?

Frank had only heard Jack Leonard sing it about a million times with that band behind him, had only imagined himself in Leonard’s place about a million times. And Sinatra knew he could leave Jack Leonard in the dust. If he could get the words out.