Frank: The Voice (17 page)

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 shield 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 showmanship: 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
. Both things were crucial on the radio, which, as the main medium for mass 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 God, 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
. 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 God, would swim laps underwater at the Stevens Institute’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
on Sinatra’s sweatshirt 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 classical 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 classical 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 Fauré. 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 shifted into a new gear, swimming and running and listening to classical 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 sexual 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-ass 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 Luscombe-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 Burke–Van 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
for the week of April 28, 1940.

For the whole month of March he headlined at the Paramount, the crème de la crème 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
was the show. “
Go ahead, do your thing, cornball,” he would snarl at her as she jitterbugged, grinning, around the big stage.