Frank: The Voice (19 page)

“
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 class-conscious—unless you were Jewish and lived within a certain area of Jersey City, you didn’t count. She thought the Sinatras were low-class.”

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-class. 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 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 cocks 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-bitch wop bastard. 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 shied 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 glass 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 Tormé 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
. Sinatra stewed, but not for long.

Rich told Tormé he had been attacked by two men who took nothing from him, but rather administered a “
coldly efficient and professional” beating. “He told me,” Tormé 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 assured 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 relationship. 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 circumstances, 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 Tormé.

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 God, 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 substitute orchestra leader. When Dorsey arrived, Sinatra would fix him with a glare of ‘Where the fuck you been?’ Dorsey would apologize that he’d been tied up in this and that and Sinatra’d say something quaint like ‘bullshit.’ ”

No father, good or bad, goes unpunished.

Sinatra’s third trip to the Coast was very different from his second. Just a year earlier, he had been traveling with Nancy and the destitute Music Makers, making the best of a bad situation after the Palomar burned down, then getting the hook while the caged canaries at Victor Hugo’s looked on. Now he was free as a bird, a hot young up-and-comer with a number-one record, singing to all the stars of Hollywood, Bob Hope and Tyrone Power and Lana Turner and Errol Flynn and Mickey Rooney, at the Palladium, the million-dollar pink
and chrome 1940s-Moderne palace (its twelve-thousand-square-foot oval dance floor could accommodate six thousand dancers) that had risen from the ashes of the Palomar, next door to Columbia Pictures on Sunset Boulevard.