Frank: The Voice (16 page)

She was sold; most in the band weren’t. At first the veterans, who had all been fond of the sweet-tempered Jack Leonard, simply froze the newcomer out. And then there was Buddy Rich. On Sinatra’s first one-nighter, he noticed that the bus seat next to the drummer was empty—not much of a surprise, given Rich’s abrasive personality. (When Dorsey first introduced Sinatra to Rich, it was with these words: “
I want you to meet another pain in the ass.”) So Sinatra sat down. The two young men—Frank was twenty-four; Buddy, twenty-two—got to
talking, and, lo and behold, they hit it off. After a few days on the road, Rich told Sinatra, “I like the way you sing.” It was extravagant praise, coming from one of the biggest egomaniacs in the business—little did Sinatra realize how truly heartfelt the comment was. (In later life, Rich admitted he had had to turn his face to hide his tears when Sinatra sang “Star Dust.”) The two became roommates. It sounds like a sweet story. It was doomed from the start.

Sinatra’s days as an only child set the pattern: he had never been much for sharing a room—or much of anything, for that matter. (Traveling with the James band over most of the first year of his marriage, he had barely lived with his young wife.) The end to the Sinatra-Rich honeymoon came when Sinatra insisted on clipping his toenails in their hotel room at 2:00 a.m. Remarkably, Rich told his biographer Mel Tormé that the insomniac singer had also kept him awake by reading till all hours. Among all the big-band personnel crisscrossing the United States in the late 1940s, Sinatra and Artie Shaw may have been the only two men keeping late hours with, now and then anyway, a book.

But the real reason the singer and the drummer split was that each felt he was Dorsey’s true star. (Tommy Dorsey knew he and he alone was the star, another problem altogether.)

Of course, Dorsey’s name was printed in the biggest type on the band’s posters, but the leader decided whose name would be featured under his, an honor with purely commercial underpinnings that depended on—and, in a circular way, determined—which band member was hottest. Often it was Bunny Berigan; lately, in early 1940, it had been the new star, Rich. But soon enough, it would be Sinatra all the way.

The Old Man shows ’em how. Frank with Tommy Dorsey and the orchestra, December 1, 1941. Connie Haines is front row far right, jitterbugging.
(photo credit 8.1)

T
he life of a traveling band, even a highly successful band, wasn’t for sissies. If the Music Makers had been a jaunty but slightly depressed boys’ club, the Dorsey organization was like a well-disciplined Army platoon. They even wore uniforms—different suits depending on the venue. (College shows meant blue blazers, tan trousers, and brown and white saddle shoes.) Dorsey’s musicians would play up to nine shows a day, then ride all night on their dilapidated former Greyhound bus,
sometimes four hundred miles or more at a clip (at forty and fifty miles per hour, on two-lane blacktop), with infrequent rest stops, sleeping in their seats, the Old Man right up front, where he could keep an eye on everybody. “
I can still see Tommy in the second seat on the right aisle with the hat on, riding through the night,” Jo Stafford said.

Stafford recalled “lots and lots of laughs and good times together” on the Dorsey bus, but Sinatra’s memories of those long rides are strikingly unpeopled: especially in later years, he would reminisce again and again about learning how to keep the crease in his suit while sitting in his seat, about falling asleep with his cheek pressed against the cold glass. “
For maybe the first five months,” he said, “I missed the James band. So I kept to myself, but then I’ve always been a loner—all my life.”

He was naturally aloof, but he was also taking his cues from the man in charge. Tommy Dorsey was anything but hail-fellow-well-met: he was the model of a tough commander who kept his distance from his troops—except for occasional, fumbling attempts at intimacy. There was the time, during a long, cold drive across Pennsylvania (“a Greyhound bus is not the greatest place to spend winter in the East,” Stafford noted drily), when Dorsey had the driver stop at a general store and bought the whole band scarves, earmuffs, and mittens. In warmer months, there were frequent band baseball games—though the Old Man seems always to have been mindful of his lofty status: Jean Bach, who was married to Dorsey’s trumpeter Shorty Sherock, recalled one such game, at Dorsey’s house in Bernardsville, in which the band members drank warm beer and sweated on the diamond while the leader relaxed in the shade of his porte cochere and sipped chilled champagne. Dorsey also loved practical jokes—a particularly sadistic form of amiability, usually involving liquid. He would leave wet sponges on his instrumentalists’ seats, spray them with a fire hose from the wings, squirt seltzer down the cleavages of his girl singers. There were ambivalent smiles.

Sinatra watched and learned. And frequently rebelled. Curfews
and deadlines were not for him. He also had a habit of letting a lock of his luxuriant hair droop over his forehead—a look that drove the girls wild, and made Dorsey furious. The bandleader kept his new pain in the ass in line through a combination of kindness and menace—much like a certain petite redhead from Hoboken. When the boy singer got too cocky (and it’s hard to imagine Sinatra tamping down his natural style), Dorsey took to threatening to replace him with a smooth-voiced, and better-behaved, band singer named Bob Allen. “Once,” Will Friedwald writes, “Sinatra walked into the band’s dressing room … and discovered the other singer’s tuxedo draped over his chair. After another session of pleading and shouting with Dorsey, Sinatra went on that night.”

Ultimately, Sinatra took to cultivating Dorsey—though he insisted that it was a matter of compassion. “
Tommy was a very lonely man,” he said. “He was a strict disciplinarian with the band—we’d get fined if we were late—yet he craved company after the shows and never really got it … We all knew he was lonely, but we couldn’t ask him to eat and drink with us because it looked too much like shining teacher’s apple.

“Anyway,” Sinatra recalled, “one night two of us decided to hell with it, we’d ask him out to dinner. He came along and really appreciated it. After that he became almost like a father to me … I’d sit up playing cards with Tommy till maybe five-thirty every morning. He couldn’t sleep ever: he had less sleep than any man I’ve ever known.”

If you detect a sneaking similarity to the ring-a-ding-ding Sinatra of the mid-1950s through the early 1960s, the infinitely lonely kingpin who couldn’t bear to be alone, especially in the deep watches of the night, the man who would forcibly restrain (through force of personality, that is, which in Sinatra’s case was every bit as powerful as physical force) his drinking buddies from going to sleep before he did—usually at or past the hour when Mr. and Mrs. America were waking up to go to work—then you understand. It’s not enough to say that from the moment Sinatra joined the Dorsey organization he deliberately set about remaking himself in the bandleader’s image: the process was
both conscious and unconscious. Tommy Dorsey was the most powerful male figure Sinatra had ever encountered—everything the younger man wanted to be, the strong father he had never had.

But in a certain way, Dorsey was also the mother he did have. To begin with, Dorsey was more feared than loved, and fear was a key part of Sinatra’s makeup. The bandleader had a hot temper, as did Sinatra, but it stemmed from a different source: Dorsey’s anger was black-Irish and bloody-minded; Sinatra’s was the rage of a child who is terrified he will be slapped down—or worse, ignored. Sinatra once said that the only two people he was ever afraid of were his mother and Tommy Dorsey—a flip comment but also a sincere and deeply significant one.

With both the uncertainty was torturous, but in another way it must also have been thrilling, even sexually exciting. There’s a psychological term for the attraction: identification with the aggressor. Rumors of sadomasochistic tendencies have always hovered around Sinatra, and it’s not hard to see why. In many ways, Frank would become both Dolly and Dorsey, and the royal road to his fixation on the bandleader was his addiction to his mother.

Marty too was ingrained in Sinatra’s psyche, but probably in a negative way—by his absence rather than by his presence. In later years Sinatra would sometimes drop a comment about how his father had kept him in line, yet those comments had a way of feeling like a sop to the old man, a tacit admission that the non-reading, non-writing, non-speaking Marty should have been more of a dad than he really was. In post-Dorsey years, Sinatra would pick up several more father figures here and there, but Tommy was the first and the most powerful.

Still, there was one thing all the father substitutes had in common: Sinatra always left them before they had a chance to leave him.

In the beginning, Sinatra set out to learn everything he could from Dorsey, personally and musically. (“There’s only one singer,” the bandleader told Frank early on, “and his name is Crosby. The lyrics mean everything to him, and they should to you too.”) Some of the personal lessons would take years, even decades, to achieve their full effect. The singer first experienced leadership himself amid his gradually
expanding crew of cronies and gofers. His next subjects were musicians—but he only gained power with his players when, after Columbia Records dropped him, he was signed by Capitol and started to record in Los Angeles. (
The producer George Avakian, who worked on both coasts, points out that California studio musicians were far more deferential to Sinatra than their New York counterparts, who were apt to be snooty classical artists.)

And it was only when rock ’n’ roll killed his record sales and he started to tour heavily in the 1970s and 1980s that Sinatra became a true leader, in the more-or-less-benign-despot style of Dorsey. His musicians even gave him the same nickname: the Old Man. (Which, for most of the time he led a touring band, he actually was.) Frank even took up Dorsey’s model-railroading obsession: in late middle age, the unabashedly nostalgic Sinatra devoted an entire building in his Palm Springs compound to an enormous electric-train setup.

What thrilled him at the outset was simply the way Dorsey carried himself, the way he handled his fame and power: his ramrod posture, his smooth patter on the bandstand and at radio microphones, his perfect wardrobe (he was once photographed, during a summertime stand in New York, wearing tailored Bermuda shorts with his jacket and tie). Not to mention his eye for the ladies and his heavy after-hours drinking. Sinatra, always an obsessive, even copied some of the tiniest details—Dorsey’s Courtley cologne, his Dentist Prescribed toothpaste.

But of course the most important lessons the singer learned from the leader were musical. Sinatra was gigantically ambitious, virtually every move he made in his life had to do with the furtherance of his career, and in this respect he saw that Tommy Dorsey had a great deal to teach him. Much has been made of the magical breath control Sinatra supposedly learned at Dorsey’s feet—or rather at his back, while he was playing his magical trombone. “
I used to watch Tommy’s back, his jacket, to see when he would breathe,” he said. “I’d swear the son of a bitch was not breathing. I couldn’t even see his jacket move … I thought, he’s gotta be breathing some place—through the ears?”