Frank: The Voice (26 page)

In the first two weeks of 1943, the hysteria at the Paramount built. At one show, thirty girls keeled over; only some of them had been prepped to do so. The crowds outside the theater were equally worked up. Times Square had become a twenty-four-hour Sinatra-thon. Wartime
swing shifts abetted the overnight, around-the-block ticket lines for the 8:45 a.m. shows. The girls pushed and shoved, endangering each other and everything in sight. “
I saw fans run under the horses of mounted policemen,” recalled Sinatra’s assistant road manager Richie Lisella. “I saw them turn over a car.” Cordons of cops did their best to contain the hysteria. And George Evans did his best to fan it.

The publicist coined a whole new lingo, 1940s glib and gumsnappingly brash, to describe the phenomenon he was guiding. Winchell, Earl Wilson, and the other columnists could now refer to the singer as “Swoonatra,” and to his bobby-soxed idolaters as “Sinatratics.” (Which was easier to read than to say.) The anguished pleasure they suffered in his presence was “Sinatrauma”; the specific physical reaction Dr. Evans had noted in one moaning female fan was, unsubtly enough, a “Sinatraism.” (“Sinatrasm” might have been a little too on the money.)

George Evans was brilliant at leveraging publicity. No outlet was too insignificant—although it helped, in the case of high-school newspaper editors, if you could get a couple dozen of them in a room together to interview the star. Evans worked overtime planting Sinatra items—some of them lightly factual, most heavily laced with fancy—in the gossip columns and the news. Evans told reporters: Over a thousand Sinatra fan clubs have sprung up in the U.S.A.! (Who was counting? A thousand was a nice round number.) You had, among many, many others, your Sighing Society of Sinatra Swooners, your Slaves of Sinatra, your Flatbush Girls Who Would Lay Down Their Lives for Frank Sinatra Fan Club. And let us not forget that glorious (and likely fictitious) gaggle of middle-aged aficionadas, the Frank Sinatra Fan and Mahjong Club.

Publicists have sown such corn since the Theodore Roosevelt administration, but this was a bolder variety, and the soil in which it took root was particularly fertile. The war was raging on two fronts, and America was hungry for upbeat stories. And it’s always easier to make up good news than find it, and George Evans was delighted to oblige.

His greatest work of fiction was Sinatra’s first publicity bio, a text that would have done Parson Weems (George Washington’s early biographer and the inventor of the cherry-tree myth) proud. To establish greater solidarity with teenage fans, Evans first chopped a couple of years off the singer’s age: Frank Sinatra had been born, it was now asserted, in 1917.
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He had been raised poor but proud in the slums of Hoboken, narrowly avoiding mayhem at the hands of vicious street gangs. He had triumphantly graduated, rather than dropped out, from A. J. Demarest High, where he had not only lettered in football, basketball, and track but also sung in the glee club. The sports reporter’s chair he had so hungered for at the
Jersey Observer
was now his. And in a truly inspired invention, Evans transformed Dolly from a cussing midwife-abortionist-political fixer into a former Red Cross nurse in World War I—from Mammy Yokum to Catherine Barkley in a single swoop.

And that was only the beginning. In Evans-world, the present-day Frank was a model suburban husband and dad, mowing the lawn, washing the car, patiently teaching Little Nancy chords on the family’s upright piano. To document all this Potemkin domesticity, the publicist dispatched photographers to the Sinatras’ new house, the cute Cape Cod at 220 Lawrence Avenue, Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey. It was an upward-aspiring middle-class quarter of similarly cute houses, all set rather closely together. The Sinatra family doctor lived right next door. And down the block and around the corner—just a hop, skip, and jump away—lived the North Jersey crime boss Willie Moretti. Naturally, the publicity material did not mention this last fact, which may or may not have been sheerest coincidence.

It was also a crowded street, now that Swoonatra had moved in. There were all those publicity photographers, for one thing; for another, there was now a more or less nonstop procession of teenage girls tiptoeing up the driveway, hiding behind the bushes, swiping Frank’s under-shorts from the clothesline, writing love notes in lipstick on the garage door, or casting discretion to the winds and simply pressing their noses
against the glass. “
I’d look out my bedroom window and there would be somebody’s face,” Big Nancy recalled. “They’d sit out there on the lawn for hours. We tried asking them to go home, but they wouldn’t leave. It scared me, but finally I’d feel so sorry for them I’d send out doughnuts and something for them to drink.” As magnanimous as she was, it’s hard to imagine Mrs. S. sending out those doughnuts and drinks more than once or twice before putting her foot down. Publicity, she was quickly learning, cut two ways.

So did fame, though if Sinatra had any regrets, he hid them well. The threadbare private life glimpsed by the twelve-year-old babysitter Ed Kessler in the Audubon Avenue apartment (a life in which, even then, Sinatra participated only sporadically) was now quite thoroughly a thing of the past. Private life for Frank Sinatra had simply winked out like a light, ceased to exist—or rather, he found what little privacy he could in his trysts, and in the wee hours with his pals. It was as though he had stepped out of his front door and into the basket of a hot-air balloon. As he ascended over the landscape of everyday reality, Mr. and Mrs. America got up early, went to work, punched a time clock, listened to the radio, worried about the bills. Far above, Frank Sinatra smiled amid the unimaginably sweet breezes of his new life.

It was a life that seemed somehow inevitable. He had done his share of hard scrabbling, and then some. “
People call me an overnight success,” he said. “Don’t make me laugh.” But when real success did come, it came fast. In early January, when RCA Victor released “There Are Such Things,” one of the Dorsey-Sinatra recordings the bandleader had stockpiled in anticipation of the American Federation of Musicians strike (which had been in full swing since August), the record instantly went to number 2 on the
Billboard
chart. By the middle of the month, it had risen to number 1, knocking off Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.” As a result, the Paramount held Sinatra over for another four-week run, a nearly unprecedented honor (only Rudy Vallée had accomplished it before). And on the strength of the Paramount run and the record sales, CBS, whose recording arm, Columbia, was about
to sign the singer, named Sinatra the star of its flagship radio show, Lucky Strike’s
Your Hit Parade
.

Your Hit Parade
was based on a simple formula: bean counters somewhere would supposedly tabulate the week’s top-selling songs,
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and the studio orchestra and singers (Sinatra’s female counterpart was the now-forgotten Joan Edwards) would perform the top dozen or so of them in reverse order, saving the biggest hit for last. Sandwiched in between were plenty of commercials for Lucky Strikes, with the brand’s mystical, mellifluous slogan (L.S.M.F.T.—“Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco”) and its catchphrase (“so round, so firm, so fully packed”): magic words that made you feel, if you happened to smoke the brand, part of an elect.

The show was hokey, and over Sinatra’s two tenures there (1943–44 and 1947–49) many of the songs were dogs (not even Sinatra could do much with “Red Roses for a Blue Lady”). But radio was everything then, and Sinatra’s selection as the star of
Your Hit Parade
was a direct weekly injection of his name into the American consciousness. Not everyone bought records. Certainly not everyone went to the Paramount Theater (although the cops in Times Square would have disagreed). But
everyone
listened to the radio.

And George Evans was succeeding beyond even his expectations—so much so that in early 1944
Billboard
gave him an award for “Most Effective Promotion of a Single Personality,” an occasion that inspired him to pronounce (a little indiscreetly) to the Chicago Tribune News Service, “
Frankie is a product of crowd psychology … Understand, it was the Sinatra influence that provided the initial impetus. But it was I, Evans, who saw the possibilities in organized and regimented moaning … It’s a big snowball now, and Frankie’s riding to glory on it.”

I, Evans
. The publicist may have been a popinjay, yet he was a very successful one, and there is no evidence that Sinatra resented his ego—as long as that ego was doing good things for him. And Evans was more than just a publicist: he was a father figure, the third in a series of such figures in Frank Sinatra’s life, after Tommy Dorsey and Manie
Sacks. While Sinatra invariably found a way to pry away the intimacies that complicated his life, with the father surrogates things were even more complex, and ultimately explosive. It was as if he had to kill the old man again and again. And each of the father substitutes was—as Sinatra’s actual father of course was not—a considerable figure. Then again, to loom large in Sinatra’s life at this point, a man had to be.

George Evans’s genius went beyond mere publicity. He took a strong hand with his new client, the main issue being Sinatra’s marriage, which was increasingly troubled. There was no deep psychological underpinning to this: it was simply that the more famous Frank Sinatra got, the more women there were who wanted to go to bed with him, and he saw no reason not to oblige as many of them as possible. Covering up the evidence was rarely his first priority. In the quaint era when there was still such a thing as bad publicity, this was one of the worst kinds: in 1940s America, a man—and especially a public exemplar—was nothing if he was not a family man. And if George Evans had anything to do with it, Frank Sinatra would, by God, be a family man—whatever the reality was.

Evans undertook a three-pronged offensive. The first was positioning, or what might today be called spin: the pictures of Frank mowing the lawn and dandling Baby Nancy.

The second was active interdiction. With Sinatra, the women gathered like flies, came in over the transom and through the emergency exit doors. Whenever possible, Evans headed them off, but he couldn’t always be present to look out for his client’s best interests. So whenever news of the singer’s latest indiscretions reached him, the publicist started working the phones—to Sinatra, to the girl, to her folks in Oshkosh, if need be: anything to stamp out the brush fire. And there were a lot of brush fires.

Evans was earning his fat salary, and it was fine with Sinatra. He liked George, liked the fact that the older man was unafraid of him. He smiled when the publicist grabbed him by the elbow to steer him from trouble, smiled even when he stamped out another brush fire. There were always more fires to be lit.

The third prong of the offensive turned out, surprisingly, to be Nancy Sinatra herself. From the moment he met her, George Evans saw that she was a remarkable woman, direct and intelligent, with a quiet dignity and a real beauty behind a physically unconfident exterior. Her liquid brown eyes searched and questioned. And suffered. Evans immediately saw that Nancy was well on her way to becoming one of those Italian peasant ladies you saw sitting on apartment stoops—heavy, fiercely plain, all browns and blacks, coarse fabrics and unplucked hairs. As a married man himself, he understood how women battled with weight, and as Frank Sinatra’s publicist he understood that Nancy was on the verge of giving in: there was simply too much competition.

For the longest time she had been grappling on her own with her position, and it was starting to wear on her. She made bargains with herself: She would lose the weight. (It wasn’t easy.) She would look the other way as long as he came home to her. (He didn’t come home very often.) What made it all so terribly difficult was that she still loved Frank, she was closer to him than to anyone else on earth: they were soul mates—except that the part of his soul that that bitch Dolly owned would never be satisfied. And not only did Nancy love him, but (and this made her furious sometimes) she had stuck by him since the beginning, since the days when they’d lived on spaghetti and meatless tomato sauce because meat simply cost too much. Now that he was really beginning to make some money, why should she share any part of his success with another woman?

But in George Evans, Nancy Sinatra found an ally. He looked at her appreciatively, he saw her as a woman, not just the suffering wifey. In truth, a great part of Evans’s appreciation was professional: the woman had possibilities. Frank Sinatra had to be made to see those possibilities. Evans squinted at Nancy through his horn-rims, seeing the changes in his mind’s eye. And then he went to work.

He took her to Bonwit Teller to shop for dresses—an unimaginable expense for a woman who had made her own clothes forever. He took her to Helena Rubinstein to have her hair done, and for a makeup
consultation. He took her to a Park Avenue dentist to have her teeth capped. And then there was the matter of her generous Barbato nose: just a little thinning of the tip and she would be perfection itself. Louis Mayer would be testing her for the screen.

She gave him a level look. She had lived with this nose for twenty-five years, and it had worked just fine for her so far.

But she was a beautiful woman. Why not make the most of what she already had?

Was there a moment between them? He came to appreciate, more and more, the beauty that flowered under his ministrations. (Meanwhile, his own wife was sullen and resentful these days about the long hours he spent away from home.) And Nancy Barbato Sinatra longed—ached, really—to be looked at again
that way
. It had been such a long time. She melted a little when George called her beautiful, but at heart she was practical and decisive. As was he.

Then there came a day, in early April, when Frank looked at her with her new dress and her hair and her makeup and her teeth (and the five pounds she’d tortured herself to lose), and it was
that look
again. He took her into the city, to go dancing at El Morocco (Hank Sanicola, at a nearby table, shooed away the girls), and for a late supper at Le Pavillon, and they laughed together and looked in each other’s eyes just the way they used to down the shore, down at Long Branch. Later they drove back to Hasbrouck Heights and paid the babysitter, and a month later she was pregnant again.