Frank: The Voice (15 page)

And that was what Tommy Dorsey heard that afternoon in the Palmer House ballroom, as Sinatra stood by the piano, not nervous at all now, but as excited to be following Dorsey’s dazzling trombone lead-in as he had ever been excited by a widespread pair of silky thighs … And you can hear it too, if you listen, back-to-back, to Jack Leonard performing “Marie” on disc 2 of the Tommy Dorsey
Centennial Collection
and Frank Sinatra singing the number with the Dorsey band on disc 5 of
The Song Is You
. First comes Leonard’s strictly serviceable, utterly forgettable vocal, a pallid instrument among more interesting instruments, a lead-in, really, to the main event, Bunny Berigan’s astonishing trumpet solo.

Then comes Sinatra. Or rather, first comes Dorsey’s trombone chorus, and then the rather startling sound of the bandleader’s waspish voice speaking a corny intro: “
Fame and fortune. [
Fame and Fortune
was the name of the NBC radio show on which the song was being broadcast.] One simple little melody may turn the trick. I know—for you’re listening to the tune that had a great deal to do with sending us on our way to fame. And here to bring you a listening thrill is Frank Sinatra, to sing the ever-popular ‘Marie.’ All right, Frank, take it.”

Frank takes it. Crooning the melody against the rollicking background of the band’s chanted antiphony (“
On a night like this/We go pettin’ in the park … Livin’ in a great big way/Oh, mama!”), a background that would have overwhelmed a lesser artist, Sinatra sings with superb authority and subtle swing, having his sweet way with the rhythm and generally making you feel as if he were letting you in on a story he might have just made up then and there.

Dorsey nodded, almost smiling, as Sinatra sang his audition; seeing his reaction, Sinatra smiled and sang even better.

When Frank was done, Tommy told him he wanted him to come sing with the band. If Harry would let him go. Dorsey couldn’t pay him a lot to begin with—just seventy-five a week—but they could talk later.

Sinatra didn’t even hear the figure. He only registered the first sentence:
I’d like you to come sing with the band
. The Dorsey band. He called Nancy from a phone booth in the Palmer House lobby. The distant phone rang, then Nancy answered, far away. She sounded alarmed to hear his voice—but it was good news, he told her. The best.

What about Harry? she asked.

And of course she was right. Nancy, ever practical and straightforward, was always right. And he was wrong so much of the time … except about what he knew he needed.

Harry was in his hotel room with the door open, sitting back in an easy chair reading
Metronome
, his long legs resting on the bed. His socks had pictures of clocks on them. Sinatra walked right in. A room-service tray full of dirty dishes sat on the table. Through the bathroom door, Frank noticed—though Louise was still on the road—a pair of nylons hanging on the shower-curtain rod. The bandleader turned the pages of the magazine and chewed his Black Jack gum, not looking up. Frank stood for a moment, then walked out in the hall and came back in. No response. He left, counted to twenty, and entered again.

Finally, James put down the magazine and asked his singer what was eating him.

Sinatra told Harry that he’d rather open a vein than say what he was about to say. Then he said it.

James whistled, soft and low. He reached out a bony hand. Sinatra took it. James smiled and told Frank he was free. “
Hell, if we don’t do any better in the next few months, see if you can get me on, too.”

It was a bittersweet moment. At not quite twenty-four, Harry James was nothing like the father figure Dorsey was to Dorsey’s band—to Sinatra, he was more like a brother. Still, the singer, who always had vast respect for musical talent, and was voraciously open to musical influences of all kinds, “
learned a lot from Harry,” Louise Tobin said
many years later. “He learned a lot about conducting and a lot about phrasing.”

He’d also learned a lot about jazz, and how to sing up-tempo numbers. But Sinatra also knew—as he would his whole life—precisely when to move on.

There was one final gig with the Music Makers, two weeks in late December and early January at Shea’s Theatre in Buffalo (also on the bill were Red Skelton and Sinatra’s co-star-to-be in
From Here to Eternity
, Burt Lancaster, a grinning young acrobat at the time, half of a trampoline act, dreaming of being in the movies someday). And even though Frank Sinatra had learned what he could from Harry James, and even though by some accounts Frank had been a loner on the Music Makers bus (“
he dozed, read magazines, and seldom said anything,” one bandmate recalled)—despite all this, in later years Sinatra would recall his parting from the band with nostalgia and regret. “
The bus pulled out with the rest of the boys at about half-past midnight,” he said. “I’d said goodbye to them all and it was snowing. There was nobody around, and I stood alone in the snow with just my suitcase and watched the taillights disappear. Then the tears started, and I tried to run after the bus. There was such spirit and enthusiasm in that band, I hated leaving it.”

It’s a beautiful description, snow and taillights and tears. For whom, and about what, precisely, was he crying?

Dry-eyed and with an entourage yet, Sinatra joined the Dorsey band on the road just a few days later. Accompanying him were his old pal Hank Sanicola, to play rehearsal piano and swat off pests, and his Hoboken friend named Nick Sevano, to lay out Frank’s clothes and run for coffee. How the singer could afford not one but two hangers-on at $75 a week is an almost theological question, answered nowhere in the vast body of Sinatriana—did Christ pay the disciples? And as to whether Sinatra met up with his new boss in (as has variously been reported)
Minneapolis or Sheboygan or Milwaukee or Rockford, Illinois, there is no consensus. This much is universally agreed, however: he knocked the socks off of all who were fortunate enough to be present.

“
The first time I heard him, we were on stage in Milwaukee, and I had not even met him,” Jo Stafford recalled. “Tommy introduced him and he came out and sang ‘South of the Border.’ ”

Her visitor was perplexed. Many accounts said the number was “Star Dust.”

Stafford, though a very old lady now, shook her head vigorously. “ ‘South of the Border,’ ” she insisted.

Almost seventy years earlier, at twenty-two, she had helped form Tommy Dorsey’s perfect storm. It began for Stafford during the summer of 1938, when Dorsey tried out a young singing octet called the Pied Pipers on his radio show in New York. The lead singer and the group’s only girl, Stafford had the purest soprano Tommy had ever heard. But the show’s sponsor, an Englishman, threw a hissy fit when the kids sang a slightly risqué Fats Waller number called “Hold Tight (Want Some Sea Food, Mama!),” and fired them on the spot. Still, that girl’s amazing voice stayed with Tommy. And so in December 1939, in Chicago, having hired Sy Oliver and Zeke Zarchy and Buddy Rich, and now Sinatra, Dorsey phoned Jo Stafford at home in California and told her he wanted the Pipers back.

“
The only problem, Jo, is, I can’t afford eight singers,” he said.

Stafford laughed. “That’s OK, Tommy. Four quit to try and earn an honest living. There are only four of us now.”

The Pipers joined the band in December 1939, while Sinatra fulfilled his obligation to Harry James. And they were sitting on the stage in Milwaukee or Sheboygan or Minneapolis or Rockford when he appeared, straight out of the blue.

Had Stafford even heard him on the radio at that point?

“
Never even heard
of
him,” she said. “But I sure knew this was something. Everybody up until then was sounding like Crosby, but this was a whole new sound.”

Was it ever. To get a sense of what Stafford heard that night, skip forward a few months and listen, side by side, to Bing’s version of a corny yet completely seductive number called “Trade Winds” and then Frank’s. The two recordings were made just four days apart—and Sinatra’s was first, on June 27, 1940, in New York City, with Dorsey and orchestra, including the still-unfired Bunny Berigan (like Beiderbecke, a fatally self-destructive lush) on trumpet, Joe Bushkin on piano, and Buddy Rich on drums. Crosby laid down his track the following Monday, July 1, in Los Angeles, with Dick McIntire and His Harmony Hawaiians.

Amazingly, both versions are equally strong. The thirty-seven-year-old Bing had been at the very top of his game for the better part of a decade, the biggest star in America and a vocal force of nature. On this number, as always, his matchlessly rich baritone was simultaneously romantic and (ever so slightly) ironic. Other men could try to sing like him—and many did try—but that voice, utterly of a piece with his elusive personality, was simply inimitable.

As was Sinatra’s.

As young as he was—not yet twenty-five—he carried the flyweight tropical number off with complete aplomb. Unlike Crosby’s version, which, as a superstar deserved, was an out-and-out vocal from beginning to end, Sinatra’s was a band singer’s dutiful turn, coming on the heels of Dorsey’s supersmooth trombone intro. His voice was nowhere near as deep and rich an instrument as it would become in the 1950s, and the Hoboken accent was still defiantly unreconstructed, the
r
’s dicey and the
t
’s a little adventure in themselves (“trade” became “chrade”).

Yet Frank was lilting, persuasive, and assured. He didn’t sound remotely like anyone else—and he knew it. Even that Hoboken accent was part of his arsenal. While Bing’s power was his cool warmth, Frank’s was his unabashed heat.

In fact, Bing’s days were numbered.

Not commercially. Buoyed by his movie career, his matchless radio
presence, and his ever-rising record sales, Crosby’s stock was headed nowhere but up, and would continue to flourish for more than twenty years. But a new ballad singer had taken the field, and though America didn’t know it yet, its heart hung in the balance. Bing had specifically instructed his lyricist, the great Johnny Burke, never to put the words “I love you” into any of his numbers: It simply wasn’t a sentiment the star could carry off head-on. His humor—America loved him for his dry humor—would have been undercut by it. His wooing was more oblique. There was nothing oblique about Frank Sinatra.

“Frank really loved music, and I think he loved singing,” Jo Stafford said. “But Crosby, it was more like he did it for a living. He liked music well enough. But he was a much colder person than Frank. Frank was a warm Italian boy. Crosby was not a warm Irishman.”

So, suddenly, in the land of Crosby sound-alikes, in the year of Our Lord 1940, when Americans heard their president speak on the radio in godlike aristocratic tones, when they heard American movie actors declaiming in indeterminate English-y accents—here was something utterly new: a warm Italian boy. A boy with a superb voice that was also a potent means of communicating all kinds of things that white popular singers had never come close to: call it romantic yearning with hints of lust behind it, or call it arrogance with a quaver of vulnerability. In any case, it was a formula absolutely irresistible to blindsided females—not to mention to impressed males, who very quickly began using Sinatra as background to their wooing. As Daniel Okrent wrote in a 1987
Esquire
article, “
Sinatra knew this: the male of the species has never developed a more effective seduction line than the display of frailty.”

And Jo Stafford, as levelheaded as they come, was seduced. Not sexually (though, as a woman, she had to have felt
that thrum
), but musically. She was operatically trained, a coloratura soprano, a great ear as well as a great voice, and very far from an easy sell. But she knew within a couple of bars of “South of the Border,” there in Minneapolis or Milwaukee or Rockford or wherever the hell it was, when Sinatra
was so new on the band that no charts had been written for him yet, that the entire game had changed, then and there.

“
Well, see,” she said, “he was doing what we call hitters. I mean, there was no arrangement for him. He just sang it, and the band picked up. So it was very impromptu. But of course, you heard the sound of the voice.”

Leaving Crosby aside, her visitor asked, could she say how Jack Leonard or Bob Eberly, for example, were different from Sinatra?

Stafford shook her head. “I don’t know. I think they made their own sounds, and they were good. They just weren’t as good as Frank.”

Why?

“There’s a whole round sound of a beautiful voice with a great tone, singing straight down the middle of that note,” Stafford said. She frowned. “I don’t think I’m very good at describing it.”

Was she aware of his expressiveness right away, the feeling that he brought to the song?

She shook her head again. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I just knew it was a wonderful, great sound, and it was not Crosby. It was a new sound and a good one, a very musical sound.”

What did Sinatra look like then? her visitor asked.

“
Young.” She laughed, a surprisingly strong laugh. Even at close to ninety, she still had a beautiful voice. “Young with lots of hair, and very thin.”