Frank: The Voice (20 page)

What’s more, he was in the movies. Sort of. During the Palladium stand, the Dorsey band got hired to perform four numbers in the new Paramount B musical
Las Vegas Nights
.
²
It was the kind of picture they called a “programmer”—the sort of lesser fare studios cranked out by the dozen in those pretelevision days, to fill out double and triple features. Hollywood was a funny place: Tommy Dorsey may have been a national figure, but in the magically self-enclosed kingdom of the movies, he was an outsider, a mere beginner. This would be his first film, and he was starting small—the bandleader was barely written into the action (such as it was). For the rest of the band—even for the nation’s hottest young vocalist—it was strictly extra work, at $15 a day.

It didn’t matter to Frank. Even if the band had to play the Palladium until two in the morning and be on the set at Paramount, in makeup, four hours later; even if moviemaking turned out to be a monumentally tedious affair, with long, long waits in between anything happening at all (the musicians mostly lay around the set sleeping)—even with all the exhausting boredom, appearing in his first real motion picture fit right into Frank Sinatra’s master plan. And besides the obvious goal of getting his face on-screen, the enterprise contained a major side benefit.

He had seen, on his first trip to the Coast with the Major Bowes Number Five tour unit, that just about every spectacular girl in the country gravitated to Hollywood, hoping to get into pictures. Since only a small percentage succeeded, the town was ridiculously overstocked with ridiculously available young women, all of them working the angles, doing absolutely anything they could to get their moment in the klieg lights.

Alora Gooding’s moment came when the director Ralph Murphy—who would go on to make such classics as
Sunbonnet Sue
and
Red Stallion in the Rockies—
needed a pretty girl to stare adoringly at Frank Sinatra as he stood by a piano and sang the nation’s number-one hit, “I’ll Never Smile Again,” along with the Pied Pipers. Murphy only had to glance around the set for a moment, tapping his megaphone against his hip, before he spotted the honey blonde with the long stems and big bright smile. He nodded at her. Okay, sweetheart. She beamed. The sequence required staging and setting up and lighting, all the painstaking and time-consuming effort stimulating the illusion, in the minds of Alora Gooding and Frank Sinatra, that the moment would be their Moment. In reality, the short segment of the number that made it to film happened in the background behind a close-up of the film’s two stars, Constance Moore and Bert Wheeler. A moment in a sidelight in a B picture.

But there
she
was, staring adoringly, and, Christ, she was luscious, thought Frank—lissome, long legged, pert nosed, and smiling. So unlike Nancy, that vague, judgmental, faraway presence in Jersey City, all neighborhood-serious and heavy with the baby weight and fretting at him, clinging to him, even when, now and then, they indulged in the expensive, non-pleasurable luxury of a staticky long-distance call.

Looking at the honey blonde’s big eyes and big bright mouth and perfect breasts and legs, he toppled. He had been with—where did the count now stand? a lot—a lot of women and girls, but something about this one, standing in glittering sunlight in front of the bougainvilleas and blue-blossomed jacarandas, something turned his brain to jelly, and he was gone.

Overseas, the Brits were fighting the Nazis in the skies over England. At home, Roosevelt had just announced a national draft. Hollywood on the cusp of the war was like a picnic on a cloudless day with thunder booming far in the distance.

The girl had a day job as a parking attendant at the Garden of Allah, a fancy, boisterous apartment complex on Sunset (Scott Fitzgerald had lived there in the late 1930s, and would die just around the corner, in Sheilah Graham’s apartment on North Hayworth, that December).
Frank went to visit her. She wore a butt-twitching uniform and velvet gloves so she wouldn’t get fingerprints on the chrome door handles of the nice cars that pulled up in front. Frank smiled that smile of his and took her picture with his new camera. He put the picture in his wallet, and forgot about it. (He should have remembered.)

It was the way she had of looking thrilled—thrilled just to be in his presence—that caught him. Innocent, but knowing just what to do. He couldn’t get enough of her. The first time they woke up in his room at the Hollywood Plaza (on Vine, right across from the Brown Derby and just around the corner from the Palladium), he knew he wanted her there again that night. She moved in. Giggling when he carried her across the threshold. Nylons on the shower rod—it didn’t matter. He loved her laugh.

Her real name was Dorothy, she told him. Like the girl with the ruby slippers. He nuzzled her neck, imagining she came from a farm someplace. Dorothy Gooding. It sounded like a girl who had milked cows.

In fact her name was Dorothy Bonucelli, and she was from a broken home on the wrong side of the tracks in Rockford, Illinois.

After her stepfather started paying her visits in the middle of the night, she’d fled west, winding up in Reno, a windblown high-desert town then, full of drunken cowboys reeling down the dusty streets looking for fun. She’d done what she had to. Working as a cocktail waitress, she met a man with a hard face and tight curly hair who became obsessed with her. She strung him along as long as was necessary, then fled again, this time to L.A. It was easier to disappear in those days. She was twenty-five, a few months older than Sinatra. She told him she was twenty-two.

They lived as husband and wife the whole time he was in Los Angeles. The whole band knew; it didn’t matter. Tommy knew; it didn’t matter.

When the band prepared to return east for another big stand at the Paramount, he kissed her tears away and gave her a ring with her birthstone,
an amethyst. He whispered promises, promises to return, in her beautiful ear. He would be as good as his word, more or less.

One day, amid the interminable tedium that was a movie set, there was a stirring—like a rainstorm moving across an open lake. Hardened gaffers and propmen suddenly turned and smiled real smiles; sleeping musicians stirred awake. Ralph Murphy dropped his megaphone to his side and stared at an amazing sight: Bing Crosby, in a gorgeous tweed jacket, blooming pleated trousers, and no yachting cap (no toupee, either). Crosby himself, preparing to shoot
Road to Zanzibar
across the Paramount lot, was stopping by to pay a call on Dorsey. As it happened, Murphy was just about to start a take of the Constance Moore–Bert Wheeler scene with “I’ll Never Smile Again” playing in the background. Crosby gave the director a nod and a wink and told him to go right ahead with what he was doing.

Murphy put the megaphone to his lips and called, “Action”: the lovers spoke their witty lines, Tommy struck up the song in the background. Bing, putting his pipe to his lips and narrowing his eyes, watched Frank carefully. After it was over, he strolled over to Dorsey. The two cool Irishmen shook hands. Just to the side, Sinatra was saying something—he hardly knew what—to Jo Stafford as, his heart racing, he watched Crosby.
Crosby
. Who now was nodding in his direction.

“Very good, Tommy,” Bing was saying. And, indicating Sinatra: “I think you’ve got something there.”

Then Crosby came over to Sinatra and—as Jo Stafford stood back, her eyes lighting up—shook his hand. “Real nice, Frank,” the older singer said. “You’re going to go far.” He said it with complete conviction. He didn’t bullshit you, Bing. He didn’t have to.

Going through his wallet after he returned, while he lay in bed snoring, Nancy found a snapshot of a beautiful blond girl. This girl, whoever
she was, photographed well, and was smiling suggestively at whoever had taken her picture.

Nancy confronted Frank with the snapshot. He pretended to be seeing it for the first time. Her? She’s nobody. A fan, that’s all. Some kid who gave me her picture.

She stared straight into him with a look of terrible fury.

He repeated: She was nobody. Some girl who was hanging around the band.

Christmas came, and to make up for having to work over much of the holiday week—the Dorsey band was in the midst of its second big stand at the Paramount—he found ways to be extra-attentive. She wept again (she wept easily in the months after having the baby) and embraced him.

“
Nothing meant anything to him except his career,” Nick Sevano recalled long afterward. “He had a drive like I’ve never seen in anybody.”

“
I kept thinking to myself, ‘I’ve got to climb a little higher in this next year,’ ” Sinatra told Sidney Zion, at Yale, forty-five years later. “I gave myself calendar times. What could I do in six months? How far could I go?”

Bullets Durgom was finding out how far. Durgom, Dorsey’s short, roly-poly record promotion man (his real first name was George; he had acquired the Runyonesque handle by moving fast), had the job of visiting radio stations, in those palmy days before payola got a bad name, and doing whatever it took to drum up interest in the band’s new sides. Drumming up interest might mean bestowing fancy meals, white-wall tires, expensive Scotch, even ladies. The marching orders, and the money, came straight from Tommy, the cagiest careerist around. But you couldn’t flog a dead horse; what wouldn’t sell, wouldn’t sell. And what absolutely wouldn’t sell to radio stations in 1941 were Tommy Dorsey instrumentals. Dead in the water. “
All they wanted to hear
about,” Durgom told E. J. Kahn Jr. of the
New Yorker
, for a profile Kahn wrote around that time, “was Frank.”

“Oh! Look at Me Now,” Sinatra doing the vocal, a big hit. “Without a Song,” with Sinatra, a big hit. “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” and “Little Brown Jug,” sans vocals: nowheresville.

“
This boy’s going to be big,” Durgom told Kahn, “if Tommy doesn’t kill him first. Tommy doesn’t like people stealing the show—and he doesn’t like people who are temperamental like himself.”

In May,
Billboard
named Sinatra Male Vocalist of the Year. Over Crosby.

George T. Simon of
Metronome
, who less than two years earlier had thought the singer sounded like “
a shy boy out on his first date,” now found him “insufferably cocky.”

He
was
insufferably cocky. (And insufferably charming.) He walked fast, talked fast, chewed gum fast, signed autographs fast … the only thing he did slowly (very slowly) was sing. He grinned, then stormed. He hurled out orders to his homeboys Sevano and Sanicola. “
Match me,” he’d command, and his cigarette would be lit, just like that. He wasn’t a boy singer anymore. It was all coming true. The pipe, the yachting cap, the blazer and ascot … the costumes he’d tried on fit him perfectly. Bing himself had touched his shoulder. It was almost as if he had everything.

But he would never stop yearning, because he could never get what he truly wanted.

And he could never—ever—get it fast enough.