Frank: The Voice (27 page)

Warm Valley. Frank posts the sign he made himself on the front lawn of the Hasbrouck Heights house, April 1943. Big and Little Nancy look on adoringly.
(photo credit 11.2)

Frank at the Riobamba, February 1943. “You better push the walls of this joint out. I’m gonna pack ’em in.”
(photo credit 12.1)

E
ven as Sinatra soared, he encountered occasional turbulence, not to mention other highfliers. Handsome Dick Haymes (who was dogging Sinatra’s trail, having followed him with both Harry James and Tommy Dorsey) had now also gone out on his own, and was selling an awful lot of records on Decca. A new kid named Perry Como was on the rise. Nor was it clear, yet, that Frank Sinatra was anything more
than a national fad. He had the hysteria market locked up; the girls would buy his records. But would the grown-ups listen?

On this count, he failed at first. In February 1943, Sinatra’s management moved heaven and earth to book him into the Copacabana, a big new club on East Sixtieth Street. These were the days when Manhattan was the center of the popular-culture universe, and nightclubs were the white-hot core of Manhattan sophistication. And the Copa was the hottest of the hot. The club was secretly owned by the top mobster (and Walter Winchell buddy) Frank Costello, but its major-domo was a pinkie-ring-wearing, frog-voiced thug named Jules Podell, who, where this kid Sinatra was concerned, was not buying.

Podell croaked his indignation. So the kid had had Times Square tied in knots for two months; so what. Fuck Times Square. Fuck all those little girls, and fuck Frankie Sinatra. Frankie Sinatra would not play the Copacabana. Sophie Tucker played the Copacabana. Jimmy Durante played the Copacabana. Fuck Frankie Sinatra!

A year later, Podell would be kissing Sinatra’s pinkie ring. But for now, the singer’s people, in a bind, had to do the best they could—which in this case was a Copa knockoff (right down to the Mob ownership), only smaller: a glitzy jewel box of a joint on East Fifty-seventh called the Riobamba. Unlike the Copacabana, however, the Riobamba was on its uppers, largely due to depressed wartime business. (There was also the minor detail that its proprietor, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter of Murder Inc., was in Leavenworth awaiting execution.) The club was delighted to book Sinatra—it needed a quick injection of whatever it could get—but the most it could pay was a cut-rate $750 a week, half of what he was earning at the Paramount.

Sinatra was angry, and scared. (The two usually went hand in hand with him.) He could make the bobby-soxers scream by raising an eyebrow; the Upper East Side snobs who frequented the Riobamba might not react so favorably, and he hadn’t played a nightclub since his days with Dorsey. Moreover, the Riobamba was an intimate place—no stage, just a piano on a little dance floor. Sinatra would be out
there on his own, the patrons at their tables close enough to see him sweat.

Typically, he turned fear into bluster. When the club’s manager showed Sinatra the tiny setup, he said, “
You better push the walls of this joint out. I’m gonna pack ’em in.”

But then he got scared all over again. He really was going to have to prove himself. The club’s ads for his appearance didn’t even bill him first: he was listed as “
SPECIALLY ADDED,” under Walter O’Keefe (a monologist and comedian) and Sheila Barrett (a singer and comedian). On opening night, in honor of the sophisticated surroundings, Sinatra came out in a tuxedo instead of his Paramount uniform of suit and floppy bow tie. He had to make his entrance right across the nightclub floor, sidling among the tables, trying his best not to bump into anyone. Literally shaking with stage fright, he backed into the protective curve of Nat Brandwynne’s baby grand and began to sing. That was when things started going his way.

“
Frank was in a dinner jacket,” Earl Wilson wrote, “and he was wearing a wedding band. He had a small curl that fell almost over his right eye. With trembling lips—I don’t know how he made them tremble, but I saw it—he sang ‘She’s Funny That Way’ and ‘Night and Day’ and succeeded in bringing down the house … It was a wondrous night for all of us who felt we had a share in Frankie … The
New York Post
’s pop-music critic, Danny Richman, leaned over to me and said, ‘He sends me.’ ”

That night Frank didn’t have to make his lips tremble: he was that terrified.
¹
Many years later he would confess that he felt sick with fear every time he walked out onto a stage. The same is true of many other performers (“
If you’re not scared, it means you don’t care,” Jerry Lewis has said), but unlike most Sinatra never bothered to try to hide his vulnerability. Wide-eyed with trepidation and excitement, he gave an audience naked emotion. Dick Haymes or Perry Como or Bob Eberly would have made a very different presentation: a nightclub audience would have admired the handsome face and voice, the musical grace,
the thoroughgoing professionalism. But what the swell crowd at the Riobamba got was a jolt of sheer electricity.

Life
magazine wrote: “
Three times an evening, Sinatra steps into the baby spotlight that splashes on to the dance floor. In a come-hither, breathless voice, he then sings such songs as ‘You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,’ ‘That Old Black Magic,’ ‘She’s Funny That Way,’ and ‘Embraceable You.’ As he whispers the lyrics, he fondles his wedding ring and his eyes grow misty. A hush hangs over the tables, and in the eyes of the women present there is soft contentment. The lights go up and Sinatra bows, slouches across the floor and is swallowed up by the shadows.”

Suddenly, rather than having to try to hear him over screams, audiences—grown-up audiences—were hanging on the caress of his voice. He had made them come to him. Overnight, Frank Sinatra had become an adult phenomenon.

The word traveled like lightning around Manhattan, and within a week it was standing room only at the Riobamba, even for the 2:30 a.m. show. Just as Frank had predicted. Within a week, Sheila Barrett was history—the club had put her under Sinatra on the bill; she walked—and Walter O’Keefe followed quickly. “
When I came to this place,” O’Keefe told the audience on his final night, “I was the star and a kid named Sinatra, one of the acts. Then suddenly a steamroller came along and knocked me flat. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the rightful star—Frank Sinatra!” Just like that, the joint was all Frank’s. His pay was doubled, and his gig extended.

And no one was less surprised than Sinatra. To a young reporter, he said, “
I’m flying high, kid. I’ve planned my career. From the first minute I walked on a stage I determined to get exactly where I am; like a guy who starts out being an office boy but has a vision of occupying the president’s office.”

Frank “
was a sensation, doing extra shows,” Sammy Cahn remembered, “and I went to the two-thirty a.m. show with a stop first in his dressing room. The moment he saw me he put his arms around me and said, ‘Did I tell ya? Did I
tell
ya?’

“
He had them in the grip of his hand,” Cahn said. “One of my vivid memories is, while he was singing, some gorilla coughed. A giant guy, like two hundred fifty pounds. He turned and looked at this guy, and the guy didn’t know what to do with himself. Do you understand what I’m trying to say? Frank had power, menace … It was an incredible experience.”

Only a week or two earlier, he had been backed up trembling against the club’s piano; now he was staring down tough guys. His bravado was a self-fulfilling prophecy: bluster away the terror; then, when victorious, strut and gloat and bully. It was unattractive, but Dolly’s teaching had left him little middle ground. The triumphant present was maximum revenge on the past, on the days when the Flashes had used him as a punching bag. Suddenly he was the alpha-dog leader of a pack of hangers-on self-dubbed the Varsity.

The group was the first of its kind, the 1943 forerunner of a hip-hopper’s posse, complete with camel-hair overcoats, golden bling, and nights at the fights. Among them were Sanicola and (for the time being) Sevano; Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen when they were in from the Coast; Manie Sacks; the singer’s music-publishing partner, Ben Barton; two pugilists (and crowd-control specialists) named Al Silvani and Tami Mauriello; and another Jimmy, Tarantino, a shady character who wrote for a boxing magazine picturesquely called
Knockout
. They would swagger around Manhattan, from watering hole to watering hole, the little man at the center of the group, protectively cordoned, the functionaries at the periphery greasing the way with crisp new bills. It was the beginning of a pattern that would continue for the next thirty-three years of Sinatra’s life, until he slipped the wedding ring onto the finger of his fourth and final wife—who, in a self-preserving power play, proceeded, with ruthless efficiency, to force out the sycophants, cronies, and enablers, one by one.

In the meantime, for a long time to come, he was King, with all that that entailed. The oboist and conductor Mitch Miller, who would one day produce Sinatra’s records at Columbia, recalled: “Jimmy Van
Heusen once canceled dinner with me by saying, ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve got to eat with the Monster.’ Everyone called Sinatra the Monster.”

They called him that because he acted like that—not always, but too often for comfort. He gave free rein to the terrible impatience that had always plagued him; his temper too was sanctioned by his success. Anything could set him off: a bad review, a package of shirts mistakenly starched by the laundry. He felt too much: it was his burden, his gift.

And what did Manie Sacks think of all these macho goings-on? How did the quiet and Talmudic record executive blend in with the hearty extroverts of the Varsity? No doubt, like many reflective men, he took vicarious pleasure in the company of doers. We do know that by a complicated formula, Sinatra, who detested solitude and surrounded himself with loud talkers and backslappers, took great pleasure in Manie Sacks’s company. And he trusted him. Sacks brought out (as no man ever had before) a better self in Sinatra, a contemplative side at his center that few, with the exception of Nancy, had ever seen. Manie calmed Frank down. It was a valuable skill, and a unique one. The arranger Stordahl was a serene character, yet when things went south during a recording session, he would quietly smoke his pipe (upside down, like the Norwegian sailor he actually was) as Hurricane Sinatra raged and threatened and finally blew itself out.