Frank_ The Voice Part 4

It is impossible to listen to the song today and not think of all it would become: a huge hit, a trademark tune for Sinatra, a cliche so delicious that the animator Tex Avery would put singer and song in an MGM cartoon (in which a skunk dressed as Frankie croons it to a bunch of swooning bunnies).

It was not a great song. But it was a powerful song of the period, and an exceptional one: rather than just taking a chorus in the middle, as was customary with band vocalists of the era, Sinatra vocalized all the way through, to powerful and pa.s.sionate effect. He was in great voice, his breath control was superb, and the twenty-three-year-old's a.s.surance, against the rock-solid background of James's band, was extraordinary. There were minor gaffes: On both "half a love never appealed to me" and "if your heart never could yield to me," his dentalization of the t t in "to" is so extreme as to be laughable-that in "to" is so extreme as to be laughable-that t t could have walked straight off the graveyard s.h.i.+ft at the Tietjen and Lang s.h.i.+pyards. And for a heart-stopping half second on the final, operatic high F ("all-or nothing at could have walked straight off the graveyard s.h.i.+ft at the Tietjen and Lang s.h.i.+pyards. And for a heart-stopping half second on the final, operatic high F ("all-or nothing at alllllll alllllll!"), Sinatra's voice, at the height of pa.s.sion, slips upward, a half note sharp.

And yet he had laid down a track for the ages, and on his seventh time out.1 Meanwhile, his boss simply couldn't catch a break. Harry James's management, the Music Corporation of America, didn't know what to do with him. Bookings were scattershot. The band's morale was sinking fast. Then, while the Music Makers played the Hotel Sherman, James finally got some good news: MCA had landed them a big gig at a big venue, the famed Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles, where Benny Goodman and his band had started the Swing Era overnight with a fabled performance in August 1935. There were smiles on the bandstand at last.

On October 4, 1939, the Palomar burned to the ground. (Charlie Barnet lost all his orchestrations, barely escaped with his life.) When Harry James's band bus pulled out of Chicago ten days later, it must have felt a little like the Flying Dutchman.

Frank Sinatra wasn't on the bus. Rather, he and his young wife had traveled west in his green Chrysler convertible. As the self-professed greatest vocalist in the business, Sinatra would have appreciated the symbolic value of separateness, not to mention the convenience of having his own wheels. Yet as an already established c.o.c.ksman, with an already shaky commitment to the inst.i.tution of marriage ("an inst.i.tute you can't disparage," he would sing, jauntily, in 1955-at a moment when his second marriage had collapsed irreparably and he was entering his longest period of bachelorhood), he had to have felt ambivalent, at the very least, about taking the little woman along on the road.

But there is every likelihood that the dignified and self-a.s.sured Nancy Sinatra simply demanded it. She had seen the girls cl.u.s.tering around the microphone. And there was something else: in October 1939, she was just a little bit pregnant.

The band's spirits had nowhere to go but up. And morale soared when, after the Palomar fire, MCA snagged the Music Makers an alternate engagement, at a Beverly Hills dining and dancing establishment called Victor Hugo's, run by a character named Hugo Aleidas. Unfortunately, the restaurant turned out to be a small stuffy joint, with canaries in gilt cages decorating the room: the kind of place where dulcet society bands like Guy Lombardo's fit in just fine. Harry's band didn't just play hot and sweet, they played loud loud. At first the management tried erecting a canopy over the bandstand to m.u.f.fle the sound. When that proved insufficient, the horn players were asked to stuff cloth napkins into the bells of their instruments. By the end of the week, customers were voting with their feet-James, Sinatra, and company were playing to half-full houses. Finally, even Sinatra's ballads were to no avail: one night, while he was in the middle of "All or Nothing At All," no less, Aleidas ran out onto the dance floor, waving his arms and shouting, "Stop! No more! Enough!" To add insult to injury, and to underline Harry James's perfectly bad business luck, the owner refused to pay the band.

Things were so bad that the Music Makers had to bunk together, wherever they could hang their hats. Frank and Nancy shared a two-bedroom apartment in Hollywood with the diminutive drummer Mickey Scrima. The whole band came over for meals. Nancy cooked spaghetti and franks and beans for the musicians, including Harry. It was a desperate period; strikingly, though, both Nancy and Frank would also later remember it as one of the happiest times of their life together.

And, seen through the lens of nostalgia, it was. Everything was simple, because they had nothing. The road lay ahead of them-beckoning, s.h.i.+ning.

But in that moment of loving his wife and the baby inside her, Sinatra felt a growing desperation. He had the goods and he knew it, and here he was eating franks and beans with Harry James, who weighed what he did but was six inches taller. He had learned a lot from Harry James-he loved Harry James. But he knew he needed to get out.

He dreamed of singing with Benny Goodman or Count Basie, the way Billie had, or even Tommy Dorsey, who ran the Rolls-Royce of bands and really knew how to feature singers.

In the meantime, the road was no place for a young wife-especially if the wife was pregnant and the band was broke. Frankie sold the Chrysler and, amid many tears, put Nancy on a train back east. Every penny they had after buying her ticket was in her purse. As the Super Chief pulled out of Union Station, she pointed at him, crying: he'd better be good.

He nodded, crying too. He would try, for her and the baby. In his fas.h.i.+on.

The Music Makers were limping home. MCA managed to get them a week at a Los Angeles movie house and another week at the Golden Gate Theatre in San Francisco, but then came the interminable drive over the Rockies and the Great Plains, the one-nighters in Denver and Des Moines and Dubuque. They lived on hot dogs and c.o.kes and candy bars, flirted halfheartedly with the local girls as they headed toward their next stand: a week at the Chicago Theatre, and a Christmas benefit thrown by the mayor of the Windy City, Boss Edward J. Kelly. Riding, riding through the night. As the rest of the band played cards and laughed or told dirty jokes or slept and snored, Sinatra sat by himself in the back of the bus, his jacket folded over his eyes, with one thought in mind, over the Rockies, across the Great Plains, across the unendingly huge country that did not yet lie at his feet but would: on the bill at the Chicago Theatre would be Tommy Dorsey.

7.

Summit. Frank, Buddy Rich, Tommy Dorsey, circa 1941. (photo credit 7.1) (photo credit 7.1) He was one tough son of a b.i.t.c.h, 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 b.i.t.c.h 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 d.a.m.ned 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 gla.s.ses. He looked just like a high-school music teacher-he knew it, others knew it, and he tried to s.h.i.+ft 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 t.i.tanic, 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 s.h.i.+t from n.o.body, 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 ma.s.sive 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. 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 ma.s.ses 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 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 eclat (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-las.h.i.+ngs, 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 Flus.h.i.+ng. "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 h.e.l.l 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 sc.r.a.p 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, s.h.i.+rt, 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 d.a.m.ned 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.

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 Centennial Collection and Frank Sinatra singing the number with the Dorsey band on disc 5 of and Frank Sinatra singing the number with the Dorsey band on disc 5 of The Song Is You 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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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." 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 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 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. "h.e.l.l, 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 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 n.o.body 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 risque 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 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." 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 d.i.c.k 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 r's dicey and the t t's a little adventure in themselves ("trade" became "chrade").

Yet Frank was lilting, persuasive, and a.s.sured. He didn't sound remotely like anyone else-and he knew it. Even that Hoboken accent was part of his a.r.s.enal. 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 G.o.dlike 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 l.u.s.t 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 Esquire article, "Sinatra knew this: the male of the species has never developed a more effective seduction line than the display of frailty." 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 s.e.xually (though, as a woman, she had to have felt that thrum 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 h.e.l.l 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."

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 a.s.s.") 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 Torme 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.