Frank: The Voice (12 page)

Frank broadcasting with the Harry James Orchestra, August 1940, at the Roseland Ballroom, New York City. Left to right: Frank, unidentified, band manager Pee Wee Monte, Harry James, vocalist Bernice Byers.
(photo credit 6.1)

I
t was a typical day in the life of a touring swing band:
long
. Motor down the pike from New York to Philadelphia, play a tea dance at the Benjamin Franklin Hotel, turn around, and head home. On the way out of Manhattan that morning, riding ahead of the band bus in his big Chrysler, Harry James had stopped on Riverside Drive to pick up his new girl singer, a petite seventeen-year-old dynamo from Florida with a big voice, a sparkly personality, and a laughably impossible
name: Yvonne Marie Antoinette JaMais. As they rolled south through the Jersey farmlands with the band manager, Pee Wee Monte, at the wheel, James clacked a stick of Black Jack gum and squinted in deep thought at the problem of rechristening her for the stage.
Rhymes with Yvonne …
In a moment, he had it: Connie!

Connie what?

“Connie Haines!” he suddenly crowed. He had a high, squeaky voice and a Texas accent. The bandleader smiled in triumph: it went perfectly with Harry James.

So Connie Haines it was, and as the Chrysler sped north through the New Jersey night, the newly named singer, exhausted and elated after a successful first engagement with the band, was amazed to see that Harry was still full of beans, bouncing around in the front passenger’s seat, clacking his gum, tapping in time on the dashboard to the staticky song on the radio. Suddenly he turned around, resting his long chin on his long fingers on the back of the seat.

“
Hey, Connie Haines,” he said with a wink. “How you doin’ back there?”

Fine, she told him. Maybe a little tired.

That was just what he wanted to talk to her about, he said. He wanted to make one little stop before they crossed the bridge. There was this boy singer he wanted to hear.

Harry James was the same age as Frank Sinatra—in fact he was three months younger. But even given Sinatra’s tour with Major Bowes, all the gigs in dumps and dives, the radio shows, the women, the arrests—James had done a lot more living in his twenty-three years than Sinatra had in his. To begin with, Harry Haag James was a son of the circus. His mother was a trapeze artist whose specialty (“The Iron Jaw”) was dangling from a wire far above the sawdust by her teeth; his father was a cornetist and bandmaster. Harry himself had started performing as a drummer for the Christy Brothers Circus at age three; at the tender
age of five, he became a contortionist known as the Human Eel. At eight he began playing the trumpet, and by the time he was twelve, he was leading the circus’s number-two band. At fourteen, young Harry was drinking hard and taking his pick of the innocent girls who came to gawk at the big top’s spectacles.

James was a superbly gifted natural musician whom the circus had schooled to play loud, hard blues. It was a style equally apt for the midway and the dawning of the Swing Era in the mid-1930s. By 1935, the nineteen-year-old James was married to the seventeen-year-old Louise Tobin (and cheating on her every chance he could get) and playing with a band led by the Chicago drummer Ben Pollack; by the end of 1936, he had signed with Benny Goodman, the
capo di tutti capi
of American bandleaders. They made a formidable combination. On the occasion of the great clarinetist’s death in 1986, the
San Francisco Chronicle
columnist Herb Caen vividly recalled a Goodman concert of fifty years earlier as “
bedlam. Gene Krupa riding his high hat like a dervish. Harry James puffing out his cheeks till surely they must burst, the rhythm always burning and churning and driving you out of your mind, and then, just when you thought nothing could get hotter, Benny’s clarinet rising like a burnished bird out of the tightly controlled maelstrom and soaring to the heavens, outscreaming even the crowd.”

It was rock ’n’ roll with big-band arrangements. And two years of maximum national prominence with Goodman had turned Harry James into the 1930s equivalent of a rock star. He was itching to fly on his own. At the end of 1938, bankrolled by Goodman, the trumpeter started his own outfit, Harry James and His Music Makers.

Musical gods were different then. For one thing, teenagers of that era didn’t demand that their musical idols be, or look like, teenagers. By the spring of 1939, Harry James was a very famous, accomplished, and self-assured twenty-three-year-old—and with his hawk nose, piercing blue eyes, pencil mustache, and big-shoulder suits, he didn’t remotely resemble any twenty-three-year-old we would recognize today. At twenty-three he looked as if he were well into his thirties. He
had star quality to burn, and when he strode into the Rustic Cabin that blossom-heavy night in early June 1939, the crowd parted before him like the Red Sea before Moses.

The Cabin’s owner, Harry Nichols, came up, grinning, his cigar hanging from his lower lip, and told James to take any table he’d like. Drinks on the house, of course.

James winked at him. How about that boy singer his wife had heard on the radio the other night? Was he here?

Nichols frowned. “
We don’t have a singer,” he said.

James frowned back. “That’s not what I heard.”

“Well, we do have an emcee who sings a little bit …”

“This very thin guy with swept-back greasy hair had been waiting tables,” James recalled many years later. “Suddenly he took off his apron and climbed onto the stage. He’d sung only eight bars when I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rising. I knew he was destined to be a great vocalist.”

This has all the verisimilitude of an MGM musical, and the tin-can ring of hindsight, but Harry James surely heard something that night, especially if, as he later reported, Sinatra really performed Cole Porter’s notoriously difficult, 108-bar epic “Begin the Beguine.” Any twenty-three-year-old who could bring
that
off would indeed be something special. But in a way it doesn’t matter what Sinatra sang that night—it was the way he sang it, the voice itself, that got Harry James where he lived.

“
It’s an interesting thing,” the singer and musicologist Michael Feinstein says. “You can look at the vibration of somebody’s voice on a machine—whatever the machines are called—and it looks like this; someone else’s voice will look the same. You can match up graphs that look the same, but they don’t sound the same. The point is that there is something that cannot be defined in any way scientifically.

“You can’t explain what it is about the sound of Sinatra’s voice,” Feinstein says. “I mean, you can try, and you can get very poetic in describing it. But there is something there that is transcendent, that
simply exists in his instrument. He developed it, he honed it, he understood it himself, he knew what he could do, and he used it to his best advantage. That was something that people responded to.”

The voice was still developing in the spring of 1939—it would continue to develop for the next fifty years. It wasn’t as rich as it would be even five years later. But its DNA was there, the indefinable something composed of loneliness and need and infinite ambition and storytelling intelligence and intense musicality and Hoboken and Dolly herself, the thing that made him entirely different from every other singer who had ever opened his mouth.

And Frank Sinatra had one more astounding thing at twenty-three: a plan. He was going to knock over Crosby. He knew it in the pit of his gut. Not even Nancy knew the true height of his hubris.

Harry James, believing that whatever Sinatra had was worth signing him up for, offered him a contract on the spot: $75 a week. It was quite an offer: three times what Sinatra was currently making, more than he and Nancy were earning together. What James neglected to mention was that there were some weeks (he wasn’t especially good with money) when he didn’t have $75 to his name.

Since Harry had created Connie Haines that morning, he was feeling lucky. Sinatra was too Eye-talian, he said. How about Frankie Satin? It went nice with that nice smooth voice of his.

Just a moment before, Sinatra recalled in later years, he had been grasping James by the arm, incredulous at the offer, making sure his main chance didn’t get away. Now, as Connie Haines remembered sharply sixty-seven years after that night, the singer’s eyes went cold. “
Frank told Harry, ‘You want the singer, take the name,’ ” Haines said. “And walked away.”

Sinatra had good reason to be insulted. His father’s boxing alias, Marty O’Brien, had been not a whim but a forced decision: an Italian surname would have gotten him barred from training gyms. In perception and reality, the Irish stood above the Italians on the American social ladder, a heavy foot firmly planted on all upturned faces. Even as
late as the 1940s, the Italian-American author Gay Talese recalled, “
The Irish kids were the ones who called me ‘wop.’ ” And as Pete Hamill, a Sinatra friend who has analyzed the underheated melting pot from the Irish-American point of view, wrote: “In those days it would not have been strange for a boy to believe that the man was ashamed of being Italian. His father’s split identity surely explains, at least in part, Sinatra’s … vehemence about keeping his own name when Harry James wanted to change it.”

Sinatra had already tried an anglicized stage name—Frankie Trent—very briefly, a couple of years before. Very briefly because once Dolly got wind of it, she gave him both barrels—maybe she hit him with the bat. In any case, while “Frankie Trent” was bad enough, “Frankie Satin” was much, much worse—it made “Connie Haines” look like sheer genius. It wasn’t even anglicized; it was 100 percent corn oil. As Sinatra told Hamill, “
Can you imagine? Is that a name or is that a name? ‘Now playing in the lounge, ladies and gennulmen, the one an’ only Frankie Satin’ … If I’d’ve done that, I’d be working cruise ships today.”

But when Frank walked away, James came right after him. The defiantly unrenamed Frank Sinatra joined the Music Makers on June 30, as they opened a weeklong engagement at the Hippodrome in Baltimore. He was so new that he wasn’t even listed on the bill. Still, some girls in the audience quickly got the idea. “
After the first show, the screaming started in the theater, and those girls came backstage,” Connie Haines told Peter J. Levinson for his Harry James biography,
Trumpet Blues
. “There were about twenty of them … it happened, it was real, it was not a gimmick.”

Not a gimmick at all. The Voice—might as well start capitalizing it here—was simply working its spooky subliminal magic. Did it help that the singer was clearly in need of a good meal, that his mouth was voluptuously beautiful, that his eyes were attractively wide with fear and excitement, that he knowingly threw a little catch, a vulnerable vocal stutter, into his voice on the slow ballads? It helped. It whipped
into a frenzy the visceral excitement that his sound had started. But the sound came first. There was simply nothing like it.

The singer was a genius, the trumpeter-leader a kind of genius. The band was terrific (and light-years from the rinky-dink six-piece outfit at the Rustic Cabin). The world would fall at both men’s feet in a few years. But not everyone was thrilled at first: both Sinatra and Harry James seemed to be simply ahead of their time. James blew hot and hard, a style that delighted critics
—Down Beat
had voted him America’s number-one trumpeter in 1937, over the headiest of competition: Louis Armstrong, Bunny Berigan, and Roy Eldridge—but didn’t always sit well with country-club and society-ballroom and nightclub audiences. They didn’t want to
listen;
they wanted to dance close and slow, and go home and make babies who would grow up and go to country clubs and society ballrooms and dance close and slow … A nice society band, a Lawrence Welk or an Eddy Duchin outfit, was simply more adequate to the purpose than a group that made you sit up and take notice.