Frank: The Voice (9 page)

Both, like Sinatra, were in their early twenties; each would become central in the singer’s life. Sanicola was a salt-of-the-earth character, a workmanlike aspiring songwriter who knew enough about music to understand his limitations, and to recognize real talent when he heard it. Van Heusen had real talent.

Edward Chester Babcock, of Syracuse, was a paradox: foul-mouthed, obsessed with sex and alcohol, but a songwriter of deep and delicate gifts, verging on genius. Some of the melodies that would one day make his reputation had been in his head since puberty. Meanwhile, he bided his time trying to sell other men’s tunes at Remick and Company, the music publisher.

While Van Heusen watched for his shot as an in-house songwriter, he sat at his piano facing a daily tide of would-be bandleaders and vocalists. One of the latter was this starved-looking kid from Hoboken, so cocky he walked around in a yachting cap in imitation of his
idol Bing Crosby. Van Heusen listened to the kid, and liked what he heard. He liked Frank Sinatra, period. The two young men (Jimmy was about three years older) had much in common: an eye for the ladies, a night-owl disposition, a sardonic sense of humor. Soon Chester (as Jimmy’s close friends called him) was running with Sinatra and Sanicola.

Physically speaking, either Hank or Chester could have snapped Frank in two, could have wiped the floor with him the way Tamby and Skelly had, if they felt like it. But they didn’t feel like it.

Instead, they listened to him, smiled when he barked. The guy was a pussy magnet, it was as simple as that.

Manhattan in those days was a hotbed of great jazz: Jimmy Dorsey at the New Yorker Hotel, Tommy Dorsey and Artie Shaw at the Manhattan Room of the Hotel Pennsylvania. You could stroll down Fifty-second Street at 2:00 a.m. and pop into Leon and Eddie’s or the Famous Door or the Onyx Club, and see, and hear, Fats Waller, Art Tatum, Count Basie, Louis Prima. This was Sinatra’s Moveable Feast, a time and place he would remember forever.

The jazz was thrilling, but what he loved most were the singers. The clubs on Fifty-second Street, most of them small and intimate, featured them heavily. He heard the great Ethel Waters, who could break your heart with a ballad or scat like Louis Armstrong; there was a young black Englishwoman named Mabel Mercer who spoke the lyrics more than sang them, and with such beautiful diction. And then there was Billie Holiday. Just twenty, only eight months older than Sinatra, she was—quite unlike him—an astonishingly mature artist, with a fully formed style. Barely out of her teens, she sang like a woman who had been around awhile, and in fact she had: her history made Sinatra look like the spoiled rich boy he almost was. She had been born out of wedlock to a thirteen-year-old mother impregnated by a sixteen-year-old banjo player, had been brought up in a Baltimore slum, been raped
twice before the age of fifteen, had worked as a prostitute and done jail time. She began singing for tips in Harlem clubs; in 1933, the Columbia Records artists and repertoire man John Hammond discovered her at one of them, and immediately started her recording with Benny Goodman. She was eighteen. Two years later, when Sinatra first saw her, probably at the Famous Door, she was singing with Jimmy Van Heusen’s idol the great pianist Teddy Wilson. Chester boasted he could play almost as well as Teddy.

Frankie wished he could sing like Billie. He gazed at her. She was extraordinary-looking: slim and straight, with honey-colored skin, high cheekbones, something Indian around the flashing eyes. Dark lipstick and white white teeth. Perhaps by merging with her, he could somehow take in her sorcery. Even more than Waters or Mercer, she lived in the lyric, made you ache its ache, while skipping around the music’s beat like some kind of goddess of the air, landing just where she pleased. And as was not the case with Ethel Waters or Mabel Mercer, Billie Holiday brought sex—painful, longing sex—into every syllable of her songs.

He wanted her even though (maybe a little because) she was what Marty would call a
mulignane
. A
moolie
, an eggplant. His eyes stung at the sheer stupidity of it, boiling someone down to the color of her skin—and eggplant was all wrong anyway. He’d been called wop and dago enough times to know all the names were bullshit. He knew dumb wops and micks and kikes and niggers, and he knew plenty of smart ones too—and there was brown-skinned Teddy Wilson, with his mustache and cigarette and haughty squint, sitting like a king at his keyboard. And Billie, making everyone in the joint fall in love with her.

Someday, someday, maybe he could sing like that.

Not yet, though. His voice was still thin and high, stuck in his throat. Sanicola, who had a little money in his pocket (and slipped Frankie a buck or two here and there), told him he knew a singing teacher, said
he would stake him to a lesson or two. He had to get that voice down into his chest somehow.

The teacher had him sing scales while he, the teacher, played the piano—boring but necessary—and taught him where his diaphragm was. But it turned out the lessons were $2 for forty-five minutes: a fucking fortune, the price of a good meal at Horn & Hardart’s Automat, and Frank didn’t want to have to choose between eating and singing.

The teacher passed him along to another coach desperate enough to charge half the price.

John Quinlan had sung tenor for the Metropolitan Opera before getting bounced for drinking. Even now, at 10:00 a.m., he had that Major Bowes barroom bouquet about him. He was a big, solid fellow, his thin sandy hair slicked straight back from a high forehead, his collar slightly askew around a meager tie knot, plenty of dandruff on his shoulders. He spoke with an English accent that wasn’t quite English—there was something tough about it. Irish? Turned out he was Australian, far from home. Quinlan listened to Frank sing, and nodded.

There was something to work with; that was a relief. But the first thing they
had
to do was get him to stop sounding like a stevedore from—where the Christ did he say he was from?

Week in and week out, Frankie did the vocal exercise: “Let us wander by the bay,” running up the scale and back down, in all twelve keys. Quinlan could do accents, could mimic Caruso in perfect Italian, sing
Carmen
in French, speak the King’s English. He taught Sinatra that “brother” had an
r
at the end, a
th
in the middle. “While” began with an exhalation, as if the
h
came first.

Puff the air out, Frank
.

Frank needed to work on his
t
’s—the tip of his tongue was touching the back of his teeth instead of the roof of his mouth. Crisp
t
’s, Frank. Tut tut tut.

Dut dut dut.

And so—even though his
t
’s, over the next sixty years, would never become entirely crisp—the Hoboken began to drain from his voice.
Not in day-to-day speech; rather, it was a trick, something he could, increasingly, do at will. At first, though, it drew the discomfiture of old friends and acquaintances. But even as they mocked him, they envied him. Suddenly he could sound almost like the people in the movies and on the radio: people who were never without a trenchant observation or a witty rejoinder, people who were never sad or hard up or horny or just sitting around picking their noses, bored. Most especially, people in the movies and on the radio were never, ever bored.

Frank was singing with more confidence. He’d begun to find regions of his chest he never knew existed; his increasing poise with diction was bringing the words alive a little bit.

He learned to look at the lyric on paper and think about it. Somebody had written those words for a reason—he tried to imagine what that reason might have been. He began to see: you can’t sing it if you don’t understand it.

The songs were almost all about love, but the implicit and compelling argument—in that era—was that love was the ultimate human subject, and could therefore encompass absolutely any idea or shade of emotion: euphoria, sorrow, lust, hate, ambivalence, cynicism, naughty fun, surprise, surrender. The best lyricists were akin to poets. A singer who could comprehend their work would understand their brilliance and polish it, even add to it. Would, in optimal circumstances, take temporary possession of the song, making it seem like something that had just been thought up and uttered, most compellingly.

For the time being, the best Frank could hope for was to begin to understand. He saw now how hollow his earlier efforts had been—trying to ape Bing and Rudy and Russ Columbo, wanting the rewards of acclaim without truly comprehending what he was doing. He began to see the differences between poor and fair and good and great songs.

But it seemed the more he learned and the harder he tried, the
less work he could find. Sometimes it felt as if he had had his shot, his moment in the national sun with the Major, and maybe it would all be downhill from there. He spent his nights at the Onyx Club and the Three Deuces on Fifty-second Street strictly as a spectator, a nobody from nowhere, his nose pressed against the glass. He was stuck in Hoboken like a fly on flypaper, still singing for chump change at bars and social clubs and weddings, and even in blackface—again—at a minstrel show sponsored by Marty’s fire company. (Marty looked all too entertained.) He kept dogging the radio stations, WAAT and WOR and WNEW, offering to work for free, or for carfare, and being taken up on the offer—and then having to put his hand out to Sanicola or Dolly for walking-around money. Two breaks raised his hopes: First, his cousin Ray Sinatra, an arranger for the NBC radio house band, wangled him an audition, and he got a job on a daily fifteen-minute spot on the network—for seventy cents a week. Then he sang “Exactly Like You” (accompanying himself on the ukulele) on another amateur hour,
Town Hall Tonight
, hosted by the vinegar-pussed Fred Allen. Nothing came of it.

Then he heard about something he really wanted.

The Rustic Cabin, whose parking lot he knew all too well from his days chauffeuring the Flashes, had an opening for a singing waiter and emcee. Fifteen dollars a week—not so great, even at the bottom of the Depression. But the wire to the radio station was still there, and now the station had a new broadcast, WNEW
Dance Parade
, featuring the Cabin’s band and singer. A golden opportunity. Frankie drove the familiar route up to Englewood Cliffs, strolled into the club—the dark interior had log-cabin walls, booths with high split-log partitions (ideal for tête-à-têtes and trysts), a dance floor, and a bandstand—and found himself face-to-face with Harold Arden. Not Harold Arlen the immortal songwriter, but Harold Arden the bush-league bandleader, who wore a mustache with long waxed tips and bore a passing resemblance to the supercilious actor Franklin Pangborn. Arden, for some reason, had taken an instant dislike to Sinatra: maybe it was the yachting
cap; maybe it was the way he carried himself. In any case, as soon as Frankie, standing by the bored piano player, had finished singing his latest hit, “Exactly Like You,” Arden gave the owner, Harry Nichols, a lemon-sucking look. Nichols took out his cigar.

They’d keep him on file.

Dolly, of course, was standing by the door when he got home, waiting to ask if he’d gotten the job. Girlie, his miniature collie, came up to greet him, and before Dolly could get the question out, Frank swooped the dog into his arms, pounded up the stairs to his room, and slammed the door.

Dolly stood in the front hall, stymied. Twenty-two years old, living at home, no trade, no money in his fucking pocket except what she put there—useless for everything, in short, except warbling tunes for spare change.

And bawling like a little girl.

Yet she knew not what he could be—she hadn’t the ear for that—but that there was nothing else he could be. So he was high-strung. So what?

This time she picked up her white telephone and rang a Democratic Party pal named Harry Steeper, who was the mayor of North Bergen, between West New York and Cliffside Park. He was also head of the New Jersey musicians’ union—and, as such, a good pal to James Caesar Petrillo, the man who was swiftly rising toward absolute power in the American Federation of Musicians. Petrillo was a mediocre trumpet player but, as his middle name foreordained, a vastly ambitious man whose chief abhorrence in life was the phonograph record. As James Caesar Petrillo saw it, the phonograph was an invention whose sole purpose was to put honest musicians out of work. And Petrillo (whose path would cross with Frank Sinatra’s in an important way in just a few years) was a Friend of the Musician, and Harry Steeper was a friend of James C. Petrillo’s.
²