Frank: The Voice (37 page)

Dolly had doubtless put on some extra padding since the days when she weighed ninety-odd pounds, but she still stood an inch under five feet zero. Her size was all in the eye of the beholder. Which didn’t make her one bit less intimidating.

The Paramount engagement was both a first and a last. Mass hysteria like this had never existed—not since the Children’s Crusade, the newspapers noted. The events of October 11, 1944, came to be known, collectively, as the Paramount Riot, or the Columbus Day Riot. Little did anyone know at the time that in fact a template was being set: the scene would virtually repeat itself five years later when Dean Martin
and Jerry Lewis played the Paramount, then would recur at successive intervals of seven years (for Elvis) and eight years (for the Beatles). Mass culture was inventing itself as youth came into power; only the avatars would change—until the explosions of the late 1960s burst the culture into a million glittering fragments.

For Sinatra, that stand at the Paramount was a kind of culmination, the final explosive orgy of his cult of youth. His fame would continue to grow until the inevitable backlash set in, but its character would change: several factors, including the war, the movies, even the musicians’ strike, combined to broaden his appeal to a more adult audience. Whatever his official bio said, the singer himself was rapidly approaching thirty.

When Columbia Records finally struck a deal with the American Federation of Musicians in November, Sinatra and Stordahl rushed to Liederkranz Hall, orchestra in tow, as eager as honeymooners. Over the next month, they literally made beautiful music together, recording no fewer than seventeen new sides (with the 78-rpm phonograph record still the state of the art, a song was literally one side of the disc). Thanks to two years of prep work on the radio and on V-Discs, the Sinatra-Stordahl records were of an unprecedented splendor, the team’s great ballad style fully formed. Compared with Frank’s last orchestral record, Manie Sacks’s rerelease of the Harry James “All or Nothing At All,” the Sinatra of the fall of 1944 was not a boy any longer but a man. The Voice had changed.

To listen to his first recording from those sessions, “If You Are But a Dream,” is to hear a Sinatra who, even amid the swelling strings and lush horns and soupy lyrics, is no longer yearning but relating the sad knowledge of maturity. That patented catch in his voice, the one that drove the little girls wild, now has a world-weary edge to it. And the vocal instrument itself is deeper, with a slight rasp to its low notes.

It was Frank’s great artistic achievement, always, to give the world his best self in his music. Yet sounding more mature was by no means a guarantee of mature behavior. On election night, a week before he
began laying down the fresh masterpieces with Stordahl, Sinatra went out on the town with a group of pals, including Orson Welles, and, at Toots Shor’s, got loaded in celebration of FDR’s landslide victory over Thomas Dewey. On their return to the Waldorf, Frank and the boys decided to give it to Westbrook Pegler, who was also staying at the hotel. “
Let’s go down and see if he’s as tough as he writes,” Frank is said to have said. The crew trooped to the conservative columnist’s room, and Frank banged on the door.

At this point accounts diverge.

Sinatra later claimed that Pegler wasn’t there, and that he and his pals left quietly. But in a 1957
Look
magazine profile of Sinatra by Bill Davidson, a man claiming to have been an aide to Pegler recalled, “
Peg was inside, and he kept needling Sinatra through the door with things like, ‘Are you that little Italian boy from Hoboken who sings on the radio?’ Sinatra became so frustrated that he went back to his suite and busted up his own furniture, throwing a chair out of the window.”

Pegler reacted with outrage to the article, writing the editors of
Look:
“
I was in my room at the Waldorf-Astoria continuously from about 11 p.m. until rising time the next morning. No person knocked on my door during that time, and your statement that I was inside and the implication that I was afraid to open the door and confront a drunkard who had come to see how ‘tough’ I might be is false, and no ‘aide’ of mine ever made that statement to your reporter.”

Look
stood by its story.

Frank never went mano a mano with Westbrook Pegler, but if he’d wanted a fight with the columnist, he got one. In the aftermath of the non-incident at the Waldorf, Pegler ramped up his anti-Sinatra campaign, making it political as well as personal. Frank’s friendship with the arch-liberal and Hearst-kingdom Antichrist (see
Citizen Kane
) Welles was sheer serendipity. “
In the company of Orson Welles and others,” Pegler wrote, “Sinatra toured the circuit of expensive New York saloons known as the milk route and spent some time at the political headquarters of Sidney Hillman, which were the Communist
headquarters too. He got shrieking drunk and kicked up such a row in the Waldorf that a house policeman was sent up to subdue him, and did.”

The mention of the radical, Lithuanian-born Hillman, chair of the CIO’s political action committee, was a red flag for the Hearst papers’ Republican readers: Sinatra was not only a Commie but a Jew-lover to boot. The singer retaliated by having Pegler turned away at one of his performances at the Wedgwood Room, and the columnist fired back by writing about Sinatra’s 1938 Bergen County morals arrest.

Alarmed at the escalation of hostilities, George Evans immediately picked up the phone and tried to make nice with Pegler. The publicist reminded the columnist that Frank had been young and foolish back in 1938, and that the charges had been dropped in any case. Evans asked Pegler, as nicely as he possibly could, to print a retraction. What he got instead (Evans, Pegler was sure, was a Jew who had changed his name; he was having it looked into) was this: “
No indictment was found, and Sinatra was discharged. The incident would indicate a certain precocity, however, for it will be observed that the facts of the case never were tried and that this experience of the youth so soon to become the idol of American girlhood was by no means common to decent young American males, however poor.”

Frank Sinatra had put a stick into a bee’s nest and given it a good hard stir. Further results were to follow.

In December, Frank flew back to the Coast, reading all the way. He smiled when he stepped out of the shiny-skinned DC-3 into the bright kerosene-tinged air. The East had been fun and involving and politically passionate, but the East was
serious
. It was playtime again.

Back to the beautiful house by the lake, with its merrily splashing fountain on the terra-cotta-tiled front terrace and its big pots of blazing flowers and its sweet California smells. His well-spoken black butler, John, greeted him at the door, then came both Nancys, the little girl
skipping with glee and leaping into his arms, his wife trailing behind and giving him that look.

He freed an arm and embraced both at the same time, but even after he had kissed Big Nancy’s soft and not entirely yielding lips, she was still training the lie detector on him.

He gave her a look back. It was wonderful to see her too.

She smiled and shook her head at him. She always was a sucker for his nonsense.

A few days later, at the CBS recording studio in Hollywood, he sang the slightly weary-sounding “(I Got a Woman Crazy for Me) She’s Funny That Way,” which contained the line:

He thought of her as he sang that—thought of Nancy even as he smiled at the gorgeous Marilyn Maxwell in her gorgeous sweater, staring steadily at him through the soundproof glass.

There was another song he’d recently sung in
Anchors Aweigh
, its emotionally didactic but all too telling lyric custom-written for him by his attentive hanger-on Sammy Cahn:

They had moved all their furniture from the East and they had bought more, but still the new house felt empty. The big rooms echoed. Nancy was doing her very best to make it nice with chintz curtains and pillows and flowers, but still the rooms echoed. The living room was enormous, with long white wooden beams across the ceiling, like a rec hall at a Catskills resort. It gave Frank an idea. They would give the
new place a proper housewarming, with a New Year’s Eve party. And not just any party—a show! He called his studio musicians; he called Sammy Cahn and told him to start writing special lyrics. He phoned the MGM properties department and ordered them to bring over some bolts of cloth that could be hung at the front of the room as stage curtains. (Bemused at Sinatra’s curt directive, the head of the properties department kicked the request straight up the line to Mayer—who, fortuitously, had just received his invitation.
Of course! Nothing’s too good for our boy!
) Dozens of folding chairs were rented; flowers were bought, and (of course) cases and cases of champagne. As always, no expense was spared. (Dizzying sums of money were coming in every week, and, as Nancy knew all too well, equally dizzying sums were going out. They had almost nothing in the bank.)

The big night was a Sunday, December 31, 1944. The war was winding down, but not easily. In the Pacific, Leyte had been secured, and the terrible fight for the islands was on. In France and Belgium, during the coldest winter in decades, the Battle of the Bulge raged; thousands of untested infantrymen, pressed into service to replace the dead and the wounded, died in the snow under withering German artillery fire. In Frank Sinatra’s Toluca Lake living room, as Gene Kelly and Judy Garland and Phil Silvers and Sammy Cahn stood by, holding sheet music and grinning expectantly (Sammy a bit more expectantly than anyone else), Sinatra—wearing a tuxedo like the rest of the men—stepped to the microphone. He shielded his eyes from the light and peered out at the partygoers; he glanced a little nervously at his own sheet music and then at Cahn. Frank shook his head. Sam had outdone himself this time.

Oh boy, had he outdone himself.

A snickering from the crowded room.

Then Sammy cued the piano player, and Sinatra sang the special lyrics to the very familiar tune, a love song now transformed (as the stellar background singers harmonized behind him) into a satirical romp about the star who left the little studio and went to the big one,
and the nice studio boss who had been smart enough—or was that gullible enough?—to sign him.

The lyrics were funny, biting, double-edged. The room was roaring with laughter. And as Mayer’s long-suffering (but soon to be replaced) wife, Margaret, leaned over and whispered in her husband’s ear that it was a joke, a funny song, the mogul gave a faint, thin-lipped smile.