Frank: The Voice (13 page)

And Frank Sinatra—well, Sinatra, for his part, was an acquired taste at first. Especially for the critics. When the band played the Roseland Ballroom on West Fifty-second Street in the summer of 1939, Sinatra begged the Music Makers’ road manager, Gerry Barrett, to beg George T. Simon,
Metronome
’s influential critic, for a decent review. The dutiful Barrett all but tackled Simon as he was leaving the building. “
Please give the new boy singer a good write-up because he wants it more than anybody I’ve ever seen and we want to keep him happy,” he said.

Simon (whose brother Richard would found Simon & Schuster, and in a few years father a daughter named Carly, who would herself grow up to do some singing) more or less complied. In his review he effused over James’s “
sensational, intense style,” and went on to praise the saxophonist Dave Matthews, the drummer Ralph Hawkins, and
the arranger Andy Gibson. Then and only then did Simon give a nod to “the pleasing vocals of Frank Sinatra, whose easy phrasing is especially commendable.”

But even if the mention was obligatory (and lukewarm), it contained an important kernel of truth. When it came to that mysterious quantity known as phrasing—the emotional essence of all speech, sung or spoken—Frank Sinatra had a unique ability, composed of innate talent, very hard work, and the irrepressible obtrusion of his unruly soul. Easy? There was nothing remotely easy about any molecule of his being, especially his phrasing. Maybe what George T. Simon should have said was that, like Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio swinging a bat, Sinatra made it
look
easy.

A quarter century later, Simon wrote in
Billboard
what he really thought of Sinatra that night: “
He sounded somewhat like a shy boy out on his first date—gentle, tender but frightfully unsure of himself.” Be that as it may, when the Music Makers hit the Panther Room of the Hotel Sherman in Chicago a couple of weeks after the Roseland gig, Betty Grable, whose star was rising in Hollywood (and who would in a few years replace Louise Tobin as Mrs. Harry James), dragooned a young reporter named James Bacon into going to hear Sinatra. Bacon had never heard of the guy. “
I’ll never forget,” he recalled years later. “The minute Sinatra started singing, every girl left her partner on the dance floor and crowded around the microphone on the bandstand. He was so skinny, the microphone almost obscured him.”

Afterward, Bacon congratulated Harry James on his new boy singer. “Not so loud,” James replied. “The kid’s name is Sinatra. He considers himself the greatest vocalist in the business. Get that! No one ever heard of him. He’s never had a hit record. He looks like a wet rag. But he says he is the greatest. If he hears you compliment him, he’ll demand a raise tonight.”

Frank Sinatra was anything but unsure of himself. Along with his abilities, the other thing he was certain of was precisely how the girls liked him to sound. The boys didn’t always agree. During the Chicago
stand, a
Billboard
reviewer wrote that Sinatra sang “
the torchy ballads in a pleasing way in good voice,” but then went on: “He touches the songs with a little too much pash, which is not all convincing.”

Or maybe all that pash was simply unsettling because it was so new. Among the smooth-as-silk baritones of the day, led by Crosby, Sinatra was an anomaly, a hot artist rather than a cool one, a harbinger of his own singular future.

Harry James, too, was a hot artist: a hepcat, a weed-puffing wild man. He was also a strangely self-defeating character—alcoholic, remote, and persistently broke. That summer, he lost everything he had in a settlement over an auto accident. (Connie Haines, whose salary he could no longer afford, had to leave.) And in a country crowded with big-band talent—Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Charlie Barnet, Count Basie, Jimmy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Bob Crosby, Jimmie Lunceford, Glenn Miller, and Artie Shaw were all crisscrossing the land with their outfits in the swinging late 1930s—James was having a hard time making a go of it. Some nights, as the Music Makers worked their way westward, the band only pulled down $350—and that had to pay seventeen band members and a bus driver, not to mention defray food, gas, and accommodations. There were times the outfit seemed snakebit. Other bands had hit records; Harry James couldn’t catch a break. Meanwhile, a music-business brouhaha—the three-way royalty beef between ASCAP, the American Federation of Musicians, and the radio stations, a dispute that led ASCAP to ban radio performances of all the songs it licensed—didn’t help.

Frank Sinatra, who would record over thirteen hundred songs in his career, cut just ten sides in his six months with the Harry James band. The first time he went into the Brunswick studios at 550 Fifth Avenue—the date was July 13, 1939—was only the second time he had ever set foot in a recording studio. In all, Sinatra and James recorded three times in New York that summer (subsequent sessions would take
place in Chicago in October and Los Angeles in November), on each occasion laying down two sides of a 78-rpm platter. The third session took place on Thursday, August 31, the day before the Nazis stormed through Poland—cool and cloudy in Manhattan; double-decker buses cruising up Fifth Avenue; big fans whirring in the studio. That day the Music Makers recorded one take of a soupy, utterly forgettable Frank Loesser ballad called “
Here Comes the Night” (“Here comes the night, my cloak of blue/Here comes the night, with dreams of you”) and two takes of a new song by Arthur Altman and Jack Lawrence. The number was called “All or Nothing At All.”

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 cliché 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 passionate effect. He was in great voice, his breath control was superb, and the twenty-three-year-old’s assurance, 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
in “to” is so extreme as to be laughable—that
t
could have walked straight off the graveyard shift at the Tietjen and Lang shipyards. And for a heart-stopping half second on the final, operatic high F (“all—or nothing at
alllllll
!”), Sinatra’s voice, at the height of passion, 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 cocksman, with an already shaky commitment to the institution of marriage (“
an institute 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-assured Nancy Sinatra simply demanded it. She had seen the girls clustering 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
. At first the management tried erecting a canopy over the bandstand to muffle 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, shining.

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 fashion.

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 Cokes 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.