Frank_ The Voice Part 5

8.

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) (photo credit 8.1) The 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 gla.s.s. "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, earm.u.f.fs, 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 s.a.d.i.s.tic 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 a.s.s in line through a combination of kindness and menace-much like a certain pet.i.te redhead from Hoboken. When the boy singer got too c.o.c.ky (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 compa.s.sion. "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 s.h.i.+ning teacher's apple.

"Anyway," Sinatra recalled, "one night two of us decided to h.e.l.l 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 b.l.o.o.d.y-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 s.e.xually exciting. There's a psychological term for the attraction: identification with the aggressor. Rumors of sadom.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic 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 subst.i.tutes 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 leaders.h.i.+p 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 cla.s.sical 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 b.i.t.c.h was not breathing. I couldn't even see his jacket move...I thought, he's gotta be breathing some place-through the ears?"

Dorsey did indeed have spectacular breath control, through a combination of anatomical good fortune-he was extremely broad chested-and artful deception. His trick was to take an extra breath, when he needed one, through a pinhole he would form at the corner of his mouth and which he would s.h.i.+eld from prying eyes with his left hand, which, in standard trombonist's form, was held close to the instrument's mouthpiece. Hence those sixteen-bar (or thirty-two-bar, depending on who's telling the story) legatos.

But his long trombone lines were more than trickery or showmans.h.i.+p: they were the melodic essence of his art. His band's numbers usually began with a solo by the lead trombonist, to (1) instantly announce the presence of TD, and (2) quickly tell the story of the song tell the story of the song. Both things were crucial on the radio, which, as the main medium for ma.s.s communication of the day, had a tremendous imaginative force that all began with sound. Through long years of study, Dorsey had arrived at a method of proclaiming the artist, and his art, that was as aurally unmistakable as the call of some glorious mythological bird.

And his whole band-which, after all, was his true instrument, a sixteen-piece extension of his towering personality-needed to be up to the task. The saxophonist Arthur "Skeets" Herfurt recalled: "Tommy sometimes used to make the whole orchestra (not just the trombones) play from the top of a page clear down to the bottom without taking a breath. It was way too many bars! But I sure developed lung power...Everybody in the band would learn to play like Tommy did."

Clever as he was, Sinatra instantly realized he would have to raise his game vocally. Even if, as his first recordings with the band show, he began rather pallidly, trying to fit in and generally hold his own, he was watching and learning every second.1 Tommy Dorsey was a superstar (even if that vulgar word hadn't yet been coined), and Sinatra was, by G.o.d, going to be one too. Even bigger. But copying Dorsey's breath control was a far more powerful statement than copying the cologne or toothpaste he used. Sinatra had heard other singers, even very good ones, take a breath in the middle of a phrase, and he thought it sounded lousy. It showed artifice, just like the hoked-up accents and stuffy styles of most vocalists in those days. It said, Tommy Dorsey was a superstar (even if that vulgar word hadn't yet been coined), and Sinatra was, by G.o.d, going to be one too. Even bigger. But copying Dorsey's breath control was a far more powerful statement than copying the cologne or toothpaste he used. Sinatra had heard other singers, even very good ones, take a breath in the middle of a phrase, and he thought it sounded lousy. It showed artifice, just like the hoked-up accents and stuffy styles of most vocalists in those days. It said, This is a singer, singing a song This is a singer, singing a song. Most of those guys-even the very good ones-never sounded as if they felt what they were singing, as if they really believed it. Singing the phrase straight through showed he really understood, and meant, the words.

A message that was not lost on his listeners. He saw the way the girls stared at him as he sang. He was telling them something, a story of love, and they were listening. (He could continue the story whenever he wanted, on or off the stage.) They didn't stare at Bing that way.

No one ever told the Sinatra story better than Sinatra himself. And one of the great chapters was the account of how he had developed powers of breath control even more legendary than those of the short-lived Dorsey (who-with horrible irony-died of asphyxiation, choking to death on his own vomit in his sleep after a heavy meal at age fifty-one, in 1956). After Dorsey mentioned offhandedly that he'd built up his lung capacity by swimming underwater, Sinatra decided that he too, by G.o.d, would swim laps underwater at the Stevens Inst.i.tute's indoor pool-and let the world know about it. Not only that: he would also run laps on the Stevens track. It has the feeling of a Hollywood montage (and the Stevens theme must have been meaningful for a boy who had so gravely disappointed his father by failing to become an engineer). You can practically see the big varsity S S on Sinatra's sweats.h.i.+rt as he pounds the cinders of that Stevens quarter mile. on Sinatra's sweats.h.i.+rt as he pounds the cinders of that Stevens quarter mile.

And yet, while Sinatra doubtless did some underwater swimming and ran some laps, it's hard to imagine an inveterate night owl and hedonist, fully engaged in the grueling existence of a touring swing band, taking on any sort of concentrated training regimen.

Jo Stafford insisted that all the mythic accounts of underwater swimming were just that: mythological. The true story, she said, was anatomical. "You can have a big enough rib cage to take a deep breath," she said. "And also, know how to let it out. You can sing a note and use half as much breath as most people do. I think that if you want to learn to do that, you can. Frank certainly could. I could. Tommy also."

Another chapter in the Sinatra-phrasing saga hinges on a Carnegie Hall cla.s.sical concert that he attended, on a whim, in early 1940. The program consisted of Brahms, Debussy, Rachmaninoff, and Ravel; Jascha Heifetz was the soloist. "I was never a great fan of the cla.s.sical music," Sinatra told Sidney Zion. "I enjoyed hearing the pretty parts of it; didn't understand most of it." This time, for some reason, he was ready to hear it. He was especially fascinated by Heifetz's violin technique. He could "get to the end of the bow and continue without a perceptible missing beat in the motion," Sinatra recalled. "I thought, 'Why can't I do that? If he's doing that with the bow, why can't I do it even better than I'm doing it now, as one who uses my breath?' I began to listen to his records. I couldn't afford many at the time, but I got some of them. I sat and listened to them and it worked. It really worked."

Soon he was listening to the above-mentioned composers as well as Ralph Vaughan Williams and Delius and Glazunov and Faure. His ear expanded with his lung capacity.

Maybe Frank did have an extra-large rib cage; maybe, once the band came east from Chicago in February 1940 (to start a New York stand that would continue through the summer), he simply s.h.i.+fted into a new gear, swimming and running and listening to cla.s.sical music. He was twenty-four, after all: starting to leave adolescence behind at last. As soon as he got back to New York, he returned to his old voice teacher Quinlan and practiced "calisthenics for the throat," resuming the "Let us wander by the bay" exercise that he would thenceforth practice for the rest of his career. He was gathering a huge new power, a kind of s.e.xual supercharge. Sammy Cahn recalled watching Sinatra sing with Dorsey: "Frank can hold a tremendous phrase, until it takes him into a sort of paroxysm-he gasps, his whole person seems to explode, to release itself."

Zeke Zarchy could see it from the trumpet section. "The audience wouldn't let him off the stage," he recalled. "This scrawny kid had such appeal. I had never seen a vocalist with a band go over like that. He had a certain quality. Jack Leonard was a good singer, but a band singer...I could sense [Sinatra] knew that also."

Now, with the rocket booster of the Dorsey band behind him, Frank was going farther, faster-in fact, he was approaching escape velocity.

The rest of the band knew something was up, though they hadn't a clue how far it would really go. John Huddleston of the Pied Pipers (then Jo Stafford's husband) said, "He had something. He sure knew it. I could sense that he was going to do whatever he wanted." And Zarchy further observed, "When I say he was standoffish, it's not because he felt that he was better than anybody else. He knew that he was going to be a star because he wanted to be a star...And I didn't blame him one bit and neither did anybody else because we saw what his appeal was."

This last isn't entirely true. The band's first date after it returned from Chicago was at one of the biggest clubs in the East, Frank Dailey's Meadowbrook, on Route 23 in Cedar Grove, New Jersey. "It was at the Meadowbrook," Peter J. Levinson writes, "that Dorsey first gave Sinatra, rather than to Buddy Rich, featured billing. Buddy immediately expressed his anger to Tommy but to no avail. In retaliation, he speeded up the tempo on slow ballads behind Sinatra or played loudly behind him."

Things would escalate from there. But Rich was fighting a losing battle-and he knew it, which riled him up even more. He felt gypped: he had signed on with Dorsey to propel jazz, and now the ballads (totally boring to keep time to), and the ballad singer, were taking over. And no matter how blazing a drummer's solos, he sits at the back of the band; the singer stands in front. Literally and figuratively, Frank Sinatra was beginning to stand in front of everyone else.

Everyone.

Tommy Dorsey would have laughed in the face of anyone who told him that his boy singer, this pain-in-the-a.s.s little guinea, was single-handedly bringing the primacy of the big band to an end and ushering in the age of the solo vocalist. The Dorsey empire was running smoothly, its ruler a superb businessman as well as a great bandleader. His band hit the ground running when it reached the Big Apple. Not only were they booked into the Paramount for four weeks in March and April, but they also began a blazing streak of New York recording sessions that would continue through August and result in almost forty of the eighty-three studio numbers that Sinatra eventually cut with Dorsey.

And Frank's confidence grew with every tune. He began a practice he would continue to the end of his career. "I take a sheet with just the lyrics. No music," he told the casino mogul Steve Wynn many years later. "At that point, I'm looking at a poem. I'm trying to understand the point of view of the person behind the words. I want to understand his emotions. Then I start speaking, not singing, the words so I can experiment and get the right inflections. When I get with the orchestra, I sing the words without a microphone first, so I can adjust the way I've been practicing to the arrangement. I'm looking to fit the emotion behind the song that I've come up with to the music. Then it all comes together. You sing the song. If the take is good, you're done."

The first number he recorded in New York was one that had been written by his old drinking buddy from the hungry years (just three years earlier), the brilliant former Remick and Company song plugger Jimmy Van Heusen. The number, co-written with the lyricist Eddie DeLange, was called "Shake Down the Stars."

Sinatra had a gift for seeing talent and allying himself with it. Both Sammy Cahn and Van Heusen were coming into their own in 1940, Van Heusen in a spectacular way: he would write sixty songs that year. Chester had already been wooed by Bing Crosby's lyricist Johnny Burke, and would move to Hollywood that summer (flying his own plane, a two-seat Lus...o...b..-Silvaire, cross-country) to start collaborating with Burke on movie tunes for Bing.

But it was Sinatra-"Junior," as Crosby would soon refer to him-who would make hits of two BurkeVan Heusen numbers that year. The first was "Polka Dots and Moonbeams," which he recorded on March 4, and which became Frank's very first charting song, reaching number 18 in Billboard Billboard for the week of April 28, 1940. for the week of April 28, 1940.

For the whole month of March he headlined at the Paramount, the creme de la creme of big-band venues. The girls were so gaga for him that they would line up hours ahead of time for the first show at 9:00 a.m. and then, when that show was over, refuse to leave, staying for five more. Sinatra came up with the brilliant publicity stunt of bringing out a big tray of food after the first show, to tide over his increasingly fanatical public. At the end of the day, he had to be escorted by the police to the Hotel Astor, just a block south on Broadway. The last time he had been escorted by police, they had escorted him to jail.

The band was putting up at the Astor; Nancy was staying with her parents in Jersey City. A big wide river lay in between. What with six shows a day followed by 9:00 p.m. rehearsals (crazy Dorsey felt that a band simply couldn't be too tight), plus recording sessions, Frank didn't have much time to get home. Nor was his ever-heavier wife much inclined to schlep over to the Paramount and listen to young girls scream for her husband.

Meanwhile, a little blast from the recent past arrived in the form of Connie Haines, whom Harry James had had to let go for financial reasons the previous August, but whom Tommy Dorsey could very much afford. Unlike the Pied Pipers, who, as splendidly as they sang, were strictly background, Haines was a star, a pint-sized nineteen-year-old with big eyes, a perky figure, a thick Savannah, Georgia, accent, and a big voice. She could really sing, and swing, and audiences ate her up (and Dorsey, a great showman, knew it). And Sinatra hated her thunder-stealing guts. He He was the show. "Go ahead, do your thing, cornball," he would snarl at her as she jitterbugged, grinning, around the big stage. was the show. "Go ahead, do your thing, cornball," he would snarl at her as she jitterbugged, grinning, around the big stage.

But he would soon have the spotlight all to himself. Beginning in May, the band was booked to play the Astor's gloriously posh roof garden-it had a thousand-foot tree-lined promenade, with lights twinkling like stars among the branches. For New York's glitterati, the Dorsey stand was a much-antic.i.p.ated event. Sinatra too was all aflutter. The Astor was Cla.s.s with a capital C C, and the singer, who from an early age craved cla.s.s just about as much as he craved s.e.x (but found it much more unattainable), was more nervous than he had ever been about a gig. It was one thing to play the Paramount, with its great sea of undifferentiated faces; it was quite something else to entertain the rich at close hand. He could depend on a certain number of swooning teenage girls (it was prom season), but the audience at the Astor would mainly consist of grown-ups-wealthy, arrogant, jaded grown-ups. With an exquisitely calibrated social sense born of deeply held feelings of inferiority-Italians had risen in the American public's estimation since Marconi and Toscanini, but not much-Sinatra felt an entirely reasonable fear of what he was up against.

Still, fear got him excited. And on opening night, Tuesday, May 21, 1940, he got the Astor excited. The band's first number featured Sinatra and the Pied Pipers, and-as was distinctly not the case when he shared the stage with Haines-his respect for his co-performers led him to vocalize selflessly and beautifully. It was yet another string to Sinatra's bow. "When you sing with a group, it takes a certain amount of discipline, and Frank was excellent at it," Jo Stafford said. "You can't wander off into your own phrasing. You've all got to do exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. Very few solo singers can do that. He could. When he sang with us, he was a Piper, and he liked it, and did it well. I don't know any other solo singer, solo male singer especially, that can do that."

Of course he wasn't like other singers. And on the next number, the hypnotically beautiful "Begin the Beguine," the stage, and the song, were all his. And, as the twenty-three-year-old pianist Joe Bushkin, who'd just joined the band in April, recalled: "He wound it up with a nice big finish, and the place went bananas!" The formerly jaded crowd, which had stopped dancing to listen, was screaming for an encore-but "Begin the Beguine" was the only solo feature Sinatra did with Dorsey at the time.

Canny showman that he was, Dorsey put his own ego on hold and stopped the band. If they wanted an encore, they'd get one. "Just call out the tunes," he told Sinatra, "and Joey will play 'em for you."

This went fine for three or four numbers, Bushkin said-until Sinatra turned around and said, "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." The lovely Kern-Harbach tune has a notoriously tricky middle section, a chord modulation that looks great on paper but can be h.e.l.l to pull from memory. Under pressure, Bushkin simply blanked. "Next thing I know," he said, "Frank was out there singing it all by himself...a capella. I was so embarra.s.sed. I mean, Jesus, all the guys were looking at me, so I just turned around and walked away from the piano!"

The cream of New York society-gents in dinner jackets; dames in gowns; a few hundred fancy prom kids, all dressed to the nines-stood hushed, craning their necks to see, while the skinny boy with the greasy hair filled the big room with song, all by himself.

"And that is the night," Joe Bushkin said, "that Frank Sinatra happened."

Just two days later, Dorsey, and a stripped-down core unit that he called the Sentimentalists, went into the RCA recording studio in Rockefeller Center and took another stab at a number they had tried, without much success, a month earlier. The song, a mournful ballad written by a pianist named Ruth Lowe in memory of her late husband, was called "I'll Never Smile Again." The May 23 version moves at a dreamy-slow tempo. It begins with a piano intro, followed by the perfect five-part harmony of the four Pied Pipers, plus Sinatra, singing the first stanza and a half-"I'll never smile again, until I smile at you/I'll never laugh again"-and then Sinatra comes in alone: "What good would it do?" he sings, aspirating the initial "wh" of "what" with such plummy, Quinlan-esque precision that it comes out "hwat," a p.r.o.nunciation that would not have sounded amiss to any of Cole Porter's society swells.

It sounded just great to America. When the record came out five weeks later, it quickly shot to number 1 on the Billboard Billboard chart-the first number 1 on the first chart-the first number 1 on the first Billboard Billboard chart-and stayed there for twelve weeks, turning Frank Sinatra into a national star. Meanwhile, on the strength of Frank's eclat, the Dorsey band's initial booking of three weeks at the Astor was extended to fourteen. chart-and stayed there for twelve weeks, turning Frank Sinatra into a national star. Meanwhile, on the strength of Frank's eclat, the Dorsey band's initial booking of three weeks at the Astor was extended to fourteen.

Did Tommy Dorsey come up with more solo ballads for Sinatra to sing? You bet he did. Just like that, the cart was pulling the horse.

Frank with Dorsey and the band in his first MGM musical, s.h.i.+p Ahoy s.h.i.+p Ahoy. Buddy Rich is on the drums, Tommy leads, Jo Stafford and her fellow Pied Pipers are behind the piano. (photo credit 8.2) (photo credit 8.2)

9.

"Hey, Bing, old man. Move over. Here I come." Recording with Dorsey's musicians, but, pointedly, no Dorsey. Frank is the star on this session. Los Angeles, January 19, 1942. (photo credit 9.1) (photo credit 9.1) Meanwhile. On a Sat.u.r.day evening, June 8, Nancy Sandra Sinatra was born at the Margaret Hague Maternity Hospital in Jersey City. "Dad was in Hollywood with the band," Nancy Sinatra writes in Frank Sinatra: An American Legend Frank Sinatra: An American Legend. In fact, Dad was not in Hollywood with the band-he was at the Hotel Astor with the band, Broadway and Forty-fourth Street, six miles as the crow flies from Jersey City, a million miles as the native son flies.

"I hated missing that," Sinatra told an interviewer years later, sounding as strangely cold-blooded-that-as if he were talking about missing a certain c.o.c.ktail party. "It was just a taste of things to come, man. When I think of all the family affairs and events I would miss over the years because I was on the road."

If that last sentence looks incomplete, it's because Sinatra didn't finish the thought.1 Frank and Big Nancy, as she would now forever be known, named Tommy Dorsey as Baby Nancy's G.o.dfather. Of course, it was Frank's idea.

Four nights later, on an NBC radio broadcast from the Astor roof, Sinatra sang "I'll Never Smile Again" to another houseful of upper-crusters. The air check of the number reveals a small but striking difference from the recording: on the radio version's out-chorus (the last words sung in the song), as Sinatra sings "Within my heart, I know I will never start/To smile again, until I smile at you," he uses the vocal trick he'd discovered back at the Rustic Cabin, a breathy little catch in his voice, in this case before the initial h h of "heart." It's a small thing, a showman-like touch that would have made no sense on a recording but all the sense in the world before a live crowd-a naked play for the hearts of the rich girls in the audience. Calculated, and thoroughly effective. of "heart." It's a small thing, a showman-like touch that would have made no sense on a recording but all the sense in the world before a live crowd-a naked play for the hearts of the rich girls in the audience. Calculated, and thoroughly effective.

They watched him, and he watched them. Taking five during the fast numbers, standing by the piano, "Frank would tap me on the shoulder and say, 'Check the action out!'" Joe Bushkin recalled. "Some gal with a lot of booze in her would be shaking it up on the dance floor...Whenever he could take a shot at a woman he would."

In the beginning it had been both pretty ones and not-so-pretty ones. He didn't have to settle so much anymore. They were getting prettier all the time.

"It must have been sometime in 1940," Sammy Cahn wrote in his memoir. "He told me how unhappy he was being a married man. I gave him the George Raft syndrome. 'George Raft has been married all his life. Put it this way-you're on the road all the time, you at least can go home to clean sheets.' He kind of understood that."

"Tommy Dorsey came up to see the baby," Ed Kessler remembered. "I thought my sister was gonna fall out the window."

Kessler was twelve in the summer of 1940. His family lived in a brown-brick apartment building at 12 Audubon Avenue in Jersey City; Frank and Nancy Sinatra, and now Baby Nancy, lived just upstairs. It was a nice, leafy neighborhood, around the corner from the State Teachers College and just across from Bergen Park.

"They were in a three-room apartment on the third floor," Kessler said. "We were upscale from them, five rooms on the second floor. My mother was very cla.s.s-conscious-unless you were Jewish and lived within a certain area of Jersey City, you didn't count. She thought the Sinatras were low-cla.s.s."

The kids disagreed. Kessler's sister, five years older than Ed, was agog when Sinatra moved in. And while young Eddie hadn't been entirely sure at first exactly who this singer was, he quickly took note of him. For one thing, there was his car. "About a quarter to a third of the tenants in our building owned automobiles," Kessler recalled. "Those who owned, owned Chevys, Fords, Plymouths, in black or gray. Sinatra had a two-toned blue-and-cream Buick convertible."

And then there was another impressive fact. "He didn't keep regular hours," Kessler said. "Most people in the apartment had jobs that were eight-to-five."

At first, Kessler's observations were simply those of a curious twelve-year-old. "But then," he said, "I got asked to baby-sit."

Suddenly he was in. What did he see? "I saw Nancy Sinatra naked!" Kessler laughed. (He was speaking, of course, of the baby.) Other than that, though, the household was depressingly ordinary: "reasonably neat, not very fancy," he recalled. "I can't remember any distinctive artwork or books-it was very working-cla.s.s. They paid scale-twenty-five or fifty cents an hour."

And the young marrieds?

"Nancy was pleasant," Kessler said. "Very short, heavyset-what you might call a typical Italian-looking woman."

In all fairness, the heaviness was probably post-baby weight. What's most striking in Kessler's account, however, is the contrast in the nesting pair, between the brown-toned female and the gaudily feathered male. "I remember him sometimes in a yachting cap," Kessler said. "He also wore a blazer with an ascot. He looked very confident-he walked erect. He looked like he was ahead of the game all the time. He gave me an autographed picture of himself."

So now Frank had added a blazer and ascot to the yachting cap. Yet while his teenage dreams of stardom, as symbolized by the Crosby pipe and headgear, had come closer to reality, Sinatra wasn't quite there yet. He was suddenly well-known, but still not nearly on the level of Dorsey or Crosby. He was anything but rich. (He received a flat bonus of $25 for each recording session with the band, and-of course-no royalty for discs sold.) He was hovering on the doorstep of true fame, but still living in the third-floor walk-up, making payments on the Buick convertible. Yet he was watching Dorsey he was watching Dorsey. He was learning from Tommy's example how to be a real star. Practicing.

And no matter his financial reality in the summer of 1940, Frank felt a yawning gulf between himself and the everyday, eight-to-five world of black or gray Chevys and Plymouths. Regular hours were for squares. He was the man that got away.

Dorsey loved Dolly, and Dolly loved Dorsey. They had more than one thing in common. Tommy used to take the band over to the Garden Street house for big Sunday-night dinners, linguine and marinara sauce.

More often than not, Nancy was absent.

The two strutting c.o.c.ks of the Dorsey band couldn't get off each other's case. One muggy August night, backstage at the Astor, Buddy Rich decided he had finally had his fill of wielding the brushes, practically nodding off as he kept ultraslow time behind Sinatra's ballads. He called Sinatra a son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h wop b.a.s.t.a.r.d. And the next thing Jo Stafford knew (she was sitting at a table nearby, writing a letter to her mother), "they got at it."

Sinatra was standing near a waiter's table laden with pitchers of ice water. Furious, he picked up one of the pitchers and s.h.i.+ed it at Rich's head. Rich ducked just in time. "If he hadn't," Stafford said, "he probably would have been killed or seriously hurt. The pitcher hit the wall so hard that pieces of gla.s.s were embedded in the plaster."

She laughed. "It splashed on my letter, which irked me pretty good. I left a few drops to show Mama what it was."

Stafford shook her head. "I don't even know what they were fighting about. I wasn't paying any attention to them."

They were fighting about the same thing they always fought about. This time, though, it was physical. Sinatra had never been much of a one for actual, as opposed to talked-about, fisticuffs, but these days, with his testosterone levels soaring, he was becoming fearless. The second after Rich ducked the flying pitcher, he flew at Sinatra, and the two bantamweights, Rich's biographer Mel Torme writes, "went at each other...all the pent-up bad feelings exploding into curses and swinging fists. Luckily they were separated by members of the band before any real damage could be done. But it wasn't over."

After the dustup, Dorsey sent Sinatra home. "I can live without a singer tonight, but I need a drummer," he said. The bandleader had exacted a worse punishment than he could have imagined. It was humiliation, it was exile-it was home home. Sinatra stewed, but not for long.

A few nights later [Torme continues], Buddy [went] over to Child's restaurant, just south of the Astor, for a bite between sets. As he was returning to the Astor, he felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned, and the night exploded.The front page of Down Beat Down Beat, September 1, 1940, trumpeted:BUDDY RICH GETS FACE BASHED INNew York-Buddy Rich's face looked as if it had been smashed in with a shovel last week as Buddy sat behind the drums in the Tom Dorsey band at the Astor Hotel.No one was real sure what had happened except that Buddy had met up with someone who could use his dukes better than Rich. Members of the band-several of them "tickled" about the whole thing-said that Buddy "went out and asked for it."

Rich told Torme he had been attacked by two men who took nothing from him, but rather administered a "coldly efficient and professional" beating. "He told me," Torme writes, "that one night just before Sinatra left Dorsey (September 3, 1942) he quietly approached Frank and asked him point blank if the mugs who had flattened him two years before had done so at Frank's request. 'Hey, it's water under the bridge,' Buddy a.s.sured Frank. 'No hard feelings. I just want to know.' Sinatra hesitated and then admitted that he had asked a favor of a couple of Hoboken pals. Rich laughed, shook hands with Frank, and wished him good luck on his solo vocal career."

A singular relations.h.i.+p. But then, they were both singular men. When the band went west in October to open the new Palladium Ballroom in Hollywood, Jo Stafford and John Huddleston rode across the country with Rich and his father in Rich's new Lincoln Continental convertible. In these intimate circ.u.mstances, Stafford remembers, there was a good deal of talking, but she learned next to nothing about who Buddy actually was. "He was remote," she told Torme.

As was Sinatra. The hottest, most accessible part of each man was his bottomless need, his seething ambition. The more people around, the better. As long as they didn't try to get too close.

I can live without a singer tonight, but I need a drummer. Ultimately, no matter how popular Sinatra got, he was dispensable. But then, that could work the other way, too.

For Dorsey, Frank was getting harder to take all the time. Sometimes he thought, My G.o.d, I've created a monster My G.o.d, I've created a monster. Then he realized the monster was creating himself. As Sinatra's star rose, his ego, once mostly held in check, became rampant. The band (except for Rich), and even the bandleader, began to defer to him. "If Tommy Dorsey was late to a rehearsal," Sammy Cahn recalled, "Frank Sinatra acted as subst.i.tute orchestra leader. When Dorsey arrived, Sinatra would fix him with a glare of 'Where the f.u.c.k you been?' Dorsey would apologize that he'd been tied up in this and that and Sinatra'd say something quaint like 'bulls.h.i.+t.'"