Frank: The Voice (4 page)

He may have been timid and babyish and spoiled; he may even, as some accounts suggest, have played with dolls as late as age twelve. But he seems from early years to have had the strong sense that he was Someone—a sense that would have been encouraged by the material things lavished on him, and undercut by the attention that was denied. Not to mention the billy club.

Still, if there’s any truth to the idea of victims’ identifying with the oppressor, it can be found in young Frank Sinatra’s face. Dolly wanted and expected things: things material and immaterial, possessions and power. She wanted the world. Her son may have been uncertain of the ground he walked on where she was concerned, but if there was one thing he was absolutely sure of, it was that he had big things coming to him.

And in early adolescence (just as his family was beginning to bootstrap itself out of the ghetto) he began to dress the part. Frankie had a charge account at the local department store, Geismar’s, and a wardrobe so fabulous that he acquired a new nickname: “Slacksey O’Brien.” A lesser boy might have become just a well-tailored layabout, a Hoboken
vitellone
, but young Frank’s splendor was much more than
skin-deep. And his large sense of himself derived not only from his identification with Dolly’s voracious sense of entitlement but also from the Secret he entertained, the sounds he heard in his head.

In September 1927 the Sinatras made their big move east, from Monroe Street across the super-significant border of Willow Avenue and into a three-bedroom apartment, at $65 a month, in a German-Irish neighborhood on the tony-sounding Park Avenue.
²
Later in life, Frank Sinatra liked to foster the impression that he’d led a pretty rough-and-tumble boyhood among the street gangs of Hoboken. More likely, he spent his early years dodging the gibes and brickbats of the tougher boys of Guinea Town. Now, however, he and his family had crossed a crucial line, into their new life in the high-rent district: every morning, Marty went off to the firehouse to roll up his sleeves (revealing those impressively tattooed arms) and play pinochle; Dolly roamed Hoboken with her black bag; Chit-U limped off to the docks (in his spare time, he limped around the new apartment, mopping and dusting); and Frankie, once school was done for the day (thank God—he hated every minute of it), dreamed by the radio.

It was the centerpiece of any bourgeois or aspiring-bourgeois household in the mid-1920s: the more elaborate and fine-furniture-like, the better. And the Sinatras owned not just one radio but two. For eleven-year-old Frankie had his own bedroom (at a time when entire families in Hoboken slept in a single room) and his very own Atwater Kent, an instrument he would later recall resembling “
a small grand piano.”

Radio was just coming into its own as a medium. The linkage of local transmitters by telephone lines had led, in 1926 and 1927, to the formation of the first two networks, NBC and CBS. Suddenly a wondrous world of faraway news, drama, and sports opened up, emanating from the magical cabinet. Alone in his bedroom, young Frankie would have listened hungrily, passionately. But to his ears, the most miraculous
sounds of all were musical: the operatic voices of Lauritz Melchior and Lily Pons and Amelita Galli-Curci; the jazz rhythms of the Roger Wolfe Kahn and Ted Fio Rito and Paul Whiteman orchestras.

And then there were the crooners.

The recent perfection of the electronic microphone had led to a sea change in the art of popular singing. Music had been recorded since the 1870s and broadcast since 1920, but prior to 1924 singers had to project through megaphones or into acoustical microphones that provided scarcely greater amplification than cardboard cones. The art of popular singing had therefore been an art of projection, and higher voices—female or tenor—simply carried better.

Now with the modern microphones came a new generation of baritones, men who leaned in and sang softly, intimately, to millions of listeners. There was Gene Austin and Art Gillham and Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards (later the voice of Jiminy Cricket) and Rudy Vallée and Russ Columbo. But most startlingly, there was Bing Crosby.

Crosby, out of Spokane, Washington, had come up through vaudeville, singing as part of a trio called the Rhythm Boys, first with Paul Whiteman, then with the Gus Arnheim Orchestra. But Crosby quickly overshadowed his singing partners—and then even the orchestras that accompanied him—by bringing something entirely new to the art of the popular song: himself.

Prior to the age of the new microphone, popular singing had been, of necessity, a declamatory art: singers literally had to reach the back rows. Crosby’s idol, Al Jolson, electrified the Jazz Age with his overpowering pipes and incandescent theatricality. Artifice was an essential part of show business.

The new crooners were more laid-back, but equally artificial. Under the old show-business conventions, a certain remove from the audience, in the form of “classiness,” as exemplified by heightened diction, was a quality to be cultivated. Bing Crosby captured America’s heart as no entertainer had ever done before by removing the remove, by seeming the most common of men.

Of course he wasn’t that by a long shot. He was a one-of-a-kind phenomenon, a single figure as transforming of the American cultural landscape as Jolson had been, and as Frank Sinatra himself—or Elvis Presley, or Bob Dylan—would be in decades to come. Crosby was, first and foremost, a musical genius, a quality that underlay all his other contradictions, which were plentiful. He was a Jesuit-educated intellectual and a ne’er-do-well; he was at once lovably warm and unreachably cool. He was, with his English-Irish background and ice blue eyes, the whitest of white men and, with his fondness for hard liquor (and, now and then, marijuana) and his incomparable talents for melodic and rhythmic improvisation, a great jazz musician to the core of his being. As Artie Shaw memorably put it: “
The thing you have to understand about Bing Crosby is that he was the first hip white person born in the United States.”

In other words, Crosby came along (as Elvis would a quarter century later) at precisely the tick of time when the vast white music-listening audience of the United States was primed for hipness—as long as it came in white form. As Gary Giddins reminds us in his superb biography of Bing,
A Pocketful of Dreams
, the definition of jazz in the Jazz Age was far looser than it would come to be later: witness the above-mentioned Kahn, Fio Rito, and Whiteman orchestras, which were stately and lily-white but agreeably peppy.

Meanwhile, truly transformational musicians, both black and white—the likes of Fletcher Henderson, Bix Beiderbecke, Duke Ellington, Bubber Miley, Chick Webb, and Benny Goodman—were creating genuine jazz. It was an age of intense cross-fertilization in popular music, and an age of great excitement, when anyone who was paying attention could hear new and wonderful things.

And Bing Crosby had big ears, literally and figuratively. He heard jazz, and for a few years at the beginning of his career he projected something earthshakingly new through the speakers of those Zeniths and Crosleys and Philcos, something that set him quite apart from all the other crooners.

First came the voice itself, deep and rich and masculine, though not ostentatiously so. Crosby was also pitch-perfect and wonderfully adventurous rhythmically—but again, these are the last things most listeners would have noticed. What was most thrilling about Bing Crosby’s voice to radio listeners of the 1920s and 1930s was its warmth and directness: unlike other singers, who seemed to be contriving a character as they vocalized, Crosby appeared to be
himself
, speaking straight to the listener in the most casual possible way. It sounded almost as if he were making up the song on the spot.

How did he accomplish this? Remarkably, his Jesuit education had much to do with it. Crosby had been born with a gift for language and a love for words, qualities that were especially encouraged at Spokane’s Gonzaga High and Gonzaga University. Giddins writes: “
Bing Crosby is the only major singer in American popular music to enjoy the virtues of a classical education … Classes in elocution, in which he excelled, taught him not only to enunciate a lyric but to analyze its meaning. At Gonzaga High, education was idealized in the phrase
eloquentia perfecta
(perfect eloquence). Students coached in literature were expected to attain rhetorical mastery as well.”

Crosby did well in his studies; at the same time, he was a deeply ambivalent student who, lured by popular music’s siren call, dropped out of his pre-law course at Gonzaga in his senior year to go on the road—for the rest of his life, as it turned out. His intellectual half-heartedness forever saved him from pedantry and lent a sense of playfulness to his verbal theatrics.

That he was smart and funny on his own terms raised him above the pack. The popular music of Crosby’s early career was a very mixed bag, containing both great standards that would endure the test of time and some of the schmaltziest tunes ever written. As Bing approached the peak of his movie success in the 1930s, he would have the power and the good sense to simply command his songwriters to leave out the schmaltz. Early on, though, he had to sing plenty of it. This is where his fabled coolness stood him in good stead: Crosby possessed the unique
ability to make a number like “Just One More Chance” (“
I’ve learned the meaning of repentance/Now you’re the jury at my trial”) work by sounding wholehearted and ever so slightly skeptical at the same time.

The effect was electric. To women, he sounded romantic, vulnerable, and faintly mysterious; to men, he conveyed emotions without going overboard. He was one of them: a
man
, not some brilliantined eunuch. And the seeming casualness of his vocal style made every man feel he could sing like Bing.

Little Frankie was no exception. But he came by the idea honestly: as it happened, both his parents could also sing. Marty had wooed Dolly by serenading her with an old-fashioned number called “You Remind Me of the Girl Who Used to Go to School with Me.” For her part, Dolly used to love to gussy herself up on Saturday nights, bounce around to Hoboken’s many political meetings, get loaded on beer, and warble “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” over and over and over again. No wonder Frankie got up on the piano at the bar.

Still, Crosby’s influence on him cannot be underestimated. The period of Bing’s explosion into the American consciousness, propelled by radio’s beginnings as a truly mass phenomenon, precisely coincided with Frank Sinatra’s emergence as a sexual being. There he was alone in his room, just him and his radio—with
that voice
coming out of it. (Talk about masculine role models: poor grunting Marty couldn’t have compared well.) Anyone who came of age in the early 1960s, hearing Dylan and the Beatles for the first time, can remember the feeling: There you are with your hormones aboil, and someone is speaking, really speaking, to you … And if that someone who’s speaking happens to possess genius, interesting things percolate in your mind.

Even in early adolescence, Frank Sinatra’s mind was an exceedingly interesting one. He was already aware of something that set him apart from others his age: an inner riot of constantly flowing emotions, happy to sad to miserable to ecstatic to bored, sometimes all within the space of a minute, each shift hanging on the precise character of the daylight, the look of the clouds, a sharp sound in the street, the smell
of the page of a comic book … He might have been ashamed of his inner chaos at times—weren’t these kinds of feelings for girls?—or he might’ve been proud. In any case, he kept this part of himself to himself.
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As—for now—he kept secret the thrill he felt at the sound of Crosby’s voice, couched in the certainty that Bing was
speaking to him
. In fact, in the case of Crosby and Sinatra, genius was speaking to genius—though in Sinatra’s case, the genius was very much nascent. Frank Sinatra was a slow bloomer. With his feet rooted firmly in the soil of New Jersey. When a
Life
magazine writer asked him, in the early 1970s, if he could recall the first time he ever sang in public, Sinatra said, “
I think it was at some hotel in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Late 20s … I probably sang ‘Am I Blue?’ and I probably got paid a couple of packs of cigarettes and maybe a sandwich.”

Which begs the question of those piano-top performances at Marty O’Brien’s, but still—he was singing. Unlike school, this was something he could do.