Frank: The Voice (31 page)

Frank signs his induction papers at local draft board No. 19–160 in Jersey City, October 1943. He was classified 1-A. Two months later he was reexamined and exempted from military service due to a perforated eardrum and emotional instability.
(photo credit 13.1)

F
rank Sinatra had a knack for stirring people up. His draft reclassification did not go down well with the newspaper columnists, nor with the hundreds of thousands of men who were fighting overseas, or even just pulling mind-numbing Stateside duty, marching in the hot sun and eating creamed chipped beef on toast at Fort Ord or Fort Monmouth or Fort Benning. “Draft dodger” was an ugly epithet that people—mostly men—were starting to hang on Sinatra, for all his protestations
to the press and even to friends that he was dying to serve, that the 4-F had been a crushing disappointment.

Part of him really did feel that way. And then there was the part that remembered what had happened to Jack Leonard: he had vanished, become just another serial number among the millions of Sad Sacks … Frank knew this was not his fate. His destiny was here, being Frank Sinatra.

His female fans were thrilled that their Frankie would be staying close to them. As for the servicemen, one old acquaintance gave it to Sinatra straight from the shoulder: Tommy Dorsey’s former band manager Bobby Burns, the man who’d once slipped Sinatra a note telling him the Great Man himself would grant him an audience, was now a buck private at Camp Haan, in California. After Sinatra entertained at the base, Burns went up to him to say hi. “
There’s a lot of griping over your 4-F status,” Burns told him. “The troops figure you’re home living it up with the babes while they’re away.”

Frank grinned.

What other conclusion were the troops to draw? He
was
living it up, with every available babe, and he was sufficiently indiscreet that the whole world knew: not only his wife, but also millions of homesick, love-starved, generally disgruntled servicemen.
¹
William Manchester wrote in
The Glory and the Dream
, his history of mid-twentieth-century America, “
It is not too much to say that by the end of the war Sinatra had become the most hated man in the armed services.”

George Evans was fighting a heroic public-relations battle, but he was bucking overwhelming odds. And his client wasn’t helping matters. In the year since Sinatra had left Tommy Dorsey, he had become a spectacularly unrepentant hedonist, on the loose in a time of public piety and sacrifice. And as of January 1944, he was now on the loose in Hollywood, a continent away from Evans and Big Nancy.

On January 1, Sinatra legally became a California resident, a status he would maintain until the end of his life. On January 5, he began
a new radio show on CBS,
The Frank Sinatra Program
. Unlike
Your Hit Parade—
on which the singer continued, but only as a glorified co-host—and the now defunct
Songs by Sinatra
, which had aired, unsponsored, for just fifteen minutes weekly, the new broadcast was a star vehicle, thirty minutes every Wednesday night, with a big-time backer, Vimms Vitamins. (“
Take a minute! See what’s in it! When you’re buying a vitamin product, read the label! Make sure you get all the vitamins recommended by government experts! You do in Vimms! And three essential minerals also!”)

In compliance with Sinatra’s demands, the new show (with Stordahl conducting the orchestra, and the Bobby Tucker Singers back in service as the Vimms Vocalists) was broadcast from Hollywood.

He had come west to start shooting his second RKO feature,
Step Lively
, a musical version of the hit Broadway comedy
Room Service
, with songs written by his old pal Sammy Cahn and Cahn’s partner Jule Styne. Radio could make a crooner an imaginary friend to the great American audience, but movies could make him larger than life: look at Bing.

First, though, came a minor distraction.

At 5:50 p.m. on Monday, January 10, Nancy Sinatra once again gave birth at the Margaret Hague Maternity Hospital in Jersey City, again unattended by her husband. During Little Nancy’s delivery three and a half years earlier, Frank had been just across the Hudson River, singing with Dorsey at the Astor roof. For the birth of his only son, he managed to be all the way across the country. “
Dad was on the air in the middle of a radio show broadcast live from Hollywood when Franklin Wayne Emmanuel [
sic
] Sinatra was born,” writes Nancy junior, in
Frank Sinatra: An American Legend
. At 2:50 p.m. Pacific standard time on January 10, Frank Sinatra was certainly in the middle of something, but not a radio broadcast, since
Your Hit Parade
aired, live, on Saturday nights; the Vimms show, Wednesdays. And so Franklin Wayne Emanuel Sinatra came squalling into the world as he would remain in the world: fatherless, more or less.
²

Evans immediately kicked into overdrive, slapping together a major
photo op for the next day at Margaret Hague Maternity, arriving first thing in the morning to marshal the event. He first had Nancy don a pale blue quilted Best & Co. bed jacket, then brought in a cosmetologist and a beautician who made up, coiffed, and manicured her to the nines. Evans then handed Mom a framed photo of Dad and told her exactly what to do when the reporters trooped in: Smile. Hold up the baby. Hold up the photo.

Family was always an ambivalent matter with Sinatra. But the beautification of Nancy Sinatra was real. Once the nice ladies were done with her, she
was
beautiful—more so than any new mother had a right to be. When the reporters finally clumped in, clad in white coats for the occasion as if they were about to discover penicillin, brandishing their notebooks and giant flash cameras, Nancy was ready to answer their questions. Who was he named for? Which side of the family did he favor? Could he sing like his old man?

George stood behind them as they flashed away. He smiled at her, and she at him. And her smile was really beautiful.

Of course she wasn’t just smiling at Evans. She was thrilled about this baby, and even loved the attention. She was, after all,
Mrs. Frank Sinatra—
a very important position in America, not so very different from being the First Lady. She was aware of the privileges and responsibilities.

To a great degree it was like a political marriage: the public had begun to overwhelm the private. The time they actually spent together, just the two of them, was almost nonexistent—especially with Frank so busy on the Coast. The phone calls were misery: with the three-hour difference, they always came at the wrong time, and since he hated being alone, there were usually other voices, even festive sounds, in the background, forcing her to imagine whom he was spending his evenings, not to mention his nights, with. Sometimes, when she was expecting his call, it wouldn’t even be him, but that goddamn Hank Sanicola instead, going through his usual rigmarole about how long and hard Frank’s days were, what with shooting the picture and broadcasting
the radio shows and all. Frankie was dead tired, Hank would say; he never slept enough, couldn’t keep any weight on—he made her husband sound like a candidate for Vimms himself …

It had been Frank who’d phoned the night of the birth—or rather, very early in the morning of the next day, most likely with the sounds of dishes and glasses and feminine laughter in the background.

How was she doing? How was their boy? Was he handsome? He missed her … He’d better go now—she needed her sleep … He missed her …

The hell of it was that she knew it was true—that he did miss her. In his fashion. And she missed him. With all her heart.

For the second Vimms show, on January 12, the fans began lining up at 6:45 a.m. outside the CBS Radio Playhouse at 1615 North Vine. By 5:00 p.m., an hour before broadcast time, more than a thousand of them—the vast majority girls, of course—queued around the block. The CBS studio seated 350. When Sanicola came in and told him most of the girls were about to be turned away, Sinatra saw red. How would 350 girls, as opposed to 1,500, sound to the American radio audience? Like a goddamn classical string recital, that was how.

He let the nervous-looking CBS executive hovering nearby have it. Then he turned to Hank. Was there a bigger studio?

Vine Street Playhouse seated fourteen hundred.

Sinatra pointed to the executive. Vine Street.

The man began to splutter. It would take hours to set up in another studio; they were scheduled to go on live in
one
hour. The sound levels were completely different in the other theater. The engineers …

The singer cocked his head and narrowed his lips.

Vine
Street.

Dolly could have done no better.

The executive went to an office and stood by a telephone for a panicky moment before realizing he didn’t have to put the impossible matter before his boss at all. A minute later, he leaned out the door, summoned Sanicola, and handed him the phone. It was not CBS but
the chief of the local chapter of AFRA, the American Federation of Radio Artists, on the other end.

“Tell your boy either he goes on from the CBS studio or he’s through as far as AFRA’s jurisdiction is concerned,” the stern voice said.

Sanicola went back to Sinatra, whispered to him behind his hand. Frank raised his eyebrows. Should he call Saul Jaffe? In a rare moment of forbearance—the exception proving the rule—Sinatra decided to pick his battles. He squared his shoulders and turned to Stordahl. Time to rehearse.

Back at Margaret Hague Maternity, the nurse turned on the radio just before nine. Now, as Nancy held the milky-warm little bundle close, Frank was talking to her: “I’d like to sing one of my favorite songs to my little son in New Jersey. So pull up a chair, Nancy, and bring the baby with you. I want him really to hear this.”

It was hard having his tender voice so near and yet so very far away. That voice! Goddamn it, she knew it worked on a million other women, and it worked on her, too …

He sang his theme song, the schmaltzy number he’d written with Sanicola:

Goddamn
him—
he could sound closer when he was far away than when he was standing right next to her. Sometimes, when George called to see how she was doing—he was far more attentive than Frank—she would start to cry.

Lately, Evans had begun to tell her, in his calm, decisive way, that she must move out there.

She thought about it. It was the only thing that made sense—except that her whole family was here, in Jersey. Her sisters. Her parents. She didn’t know a soul in Hollywood. She wouldn’t fit in. She would die of homesickness.

She couldn’t. Not yet.

But she knew it was the only way. She ached with loneliness. This wasn’t a way for a married woman to live.

And Frank, of course, was almost never alone. Everyone wanted to be near him, to touch him; and it was so strange, he couldn’t bear to be touched (especially by strangers) except on his own terms, but he needed someone near him, always, like a drug. Chance encounters arose at delightfully odd moments: in a janitor’s closet off a soundstage, for example. But the constant was his entourage—the Western Varsity. Hank was here, naturally, and Sammy Cahn and now Jule Styne, and a couple of other funny Jews Frank kept running into at poker games and prizefights, Phil Silvers and a comedy writer named Harry Crane, né Kravitsky. Stordahl was rooming in a luxury suite in the Wilshire Tower with Jimmy Van Heusen, who was frequently absent for some shadowy reason …

In fact, three days a week, Jimmy was working as a test pilot at Lockheed’s Burbank plant, flying P-38s and C-60s, under the name Edward Chester Babcock. The other four days, he was writing movie tunes at Paramount with Johnny Burke, under his professional name. No one at Lockheed knew about his other career, and nobody at the studios was wise, either. As Burke said, “
Who wants to hire a guy to write a picture knowing he might get killed in a crash before he’s finished it?”