Finally, after giving a year’s notice, he broke free from Tommy Dorsey in the fall of 1942. He further infuriated Dorsey by persuading arranger Axel Stordahl to go with him, at a salary of $650 a week, four times what Dorsey was paying him. The departure was bitter. Dorsey was quick to fire people; he could never forgive people who, in effect, fired him. Before granting him a release, Dorsey coldly insisted that Sinatra sign a document awarding Dorsey a third of Sinatra’s earnings for the next ten years, plus an additional 10 percent to Dorsey’s manager. For doing nothing, except letting him go. So much for father figures. By this point, Sinatra was desperate. He signed. He was on his own at last. At first, it wasn’t all that easy. Bookers still were more interested in the big swing bands than in solo singers. They didn’t fully realize that Sinatra’s recordings, played at home, on the radio, or on jukeboxes, were building him a very special audience.
After an impressive engagement at the Mosque Theater in Newark, he was booked into the Paramount as a special added attraction with the Benny Goodman band. This wasn’t Goodman’s idea; he already featured Peggy Lee as vocalist and Jess Stacy on piano. He and his band were the stars, and Sinatra was only a kind of dessert when Goodman’s show was over. But Sinatra wanted desperately to play the Paramount as a solo act, and his instincts were correct. The date was December 30, 1942. He walked out, his suit baggy on his bony frame, more than a little scared, wearing a bow tie that Nancy had made a size larger to hide his Adam’s apple. He started singing, “The bells are ringing, for me and my gal. …” The rest of the words were lost in the screaming.
OH, GOD, FRANK SINATRA COULD BE THE SWEETEST, MOST CHARMING MAN IN THE WORLD WHEN HE WAS IN THE MOOD.
– AVA GARDNER
I AM VERY MUCH SURPRISED WHAT I HAVE BEEN READING IN THE NEWSPAPERS BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR DARLING WIFE. REMEMBER YOU HAVE A DECENT WIFE AND CHILDREN. YOU SHOULD BE VERY HAPPY. REGARDS TO ALL.
–TELEGRAM TO FRANK SINATRA FROM WILLIE (WILLIE MOORE) MORETTI, 1949
5
I’M A FOOL TO WANT YOU
ONE OF SINATRA’S most mysterious achievements was also the one that allowed him to endure for more than half a century after Harry James heard him in the Rustic Cabin. It was the nature of his audience. Sinatra started out with far more female than male fans. He ended up with more male fans. This happens to very few pop singers.
On the simplest level it was connected to the times themselves. For millions of women during the war, Sinatra was the romantic voice of the American homefront. He was singing to Rosie the Riveter, the symbolic woman who had walked into a war plant and found employment that was ordinarily reserved for men. She was more than a self-reliant patriot or an earner of a day’s pay for a day’s work. She was something new, and her newness began to transcend the work itself; Rosie the Riveter was soon asserting some of the prerogatives of men – smoking cigarettes, drinking when she wanted to drink, right up against the bar, sleeping around if she wanted to sleep around, or choosing her own erotic fantasies. The music of Frank Sinatra wasn’t used only by men to seduce women; during the conflict that Studs Terkel called “the good war,” some women used that music, with its expression of sheer need, to seduce the available men. Yes, Sinatra was singing to all those girls whose boyfriends were fighting in Anzio or Guadalcanal; some maintained a patriotic virginity; others went their own ways. At the same time, he was singing to those women, of whatever age, who had never managed to find a boyfriend at all and for whom Saturday night truly was the loneliest night of the week.
In his life Sinatra’s sudden, immense fame worked as a kind of aphrodisiac. There were then, as there would be during the long reign of rock and roll, groupies who would sleep with famous men to add them to scoreboards; the names were like the downed Messerschmitts or Zeroes painted by pilots on the sides of P-51s during the war. But there were also many less calculating females suddenly knocking on Frank Sinatra’s door. He certainly wasn’t so perfectly handsome that he seemed unattainable; he looked to some young women that he’d be as happy to meet them as they would be to meet him.
But the Sinatra fantasy was also safe because its consummation seemed so unlikely. The big reason was that he was also married, was living after June 1944 in Toluca Lake, California, with his wife, Nancy, his daughter, Nancy, and after September 28, 1944, his son. The boy was named Franklin (for President Roosevelt) Emanuel (for his agent, Manie Sachs) Sinatra. He wasn’t really a “junior” but would be cursed with the label of Frank Jr. for his entire life. In the wartime years Sinatra played by the rules of the publicity game; if that was what was required to become a gigantic star, then that was what he would do. And so he allowed fan magazines to photograph him with his family, first in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey (wearing a Crosby-style yacht cap, smoking a pipe, posing in the bar of his finished basement), and then in the grander circumstances of Los Angeles. His wife, Nancy, was always there, smiling in an amused way; in public she played the part of the older, wiser woman who was the guarantor of the innocence of the girls who wanted her husband.
This bow to the conventional pieties became part of the double image that Sinatra was conjuring: the traditionalist, with house and family, and the potential lover, consumed by loneliness and unrequited love. As a singer, he was almost always the lover. In American music of the time, Bing Crosby was the reigning husband.
He and Crosby met in 1943, liked each other, worked together on radio shows and patriotic rallies. But Crosby successfully presented a reassuring, almost paternal image to the audience, one whose wild oats had long ago been sown, and kept his personal life – and whatever private demons he might have had – safely behind his own walls. With Sinatra, public and private seemed to merge, and the result was a disturbing ambiguity. Yes, he had a wife and children and a house; but in the music he professed a corrosive emptiness, an almost grieving personal unhappiness. The risk attached to his kind of singing was that it promised authenticity of emotion instead of its blithe dismissal or the empty technique of the virtuoso. His singing demanded to be felt, not admired. It always revealed more than it concealed. Unlike the Crosby persona, Sinatra could not laugh off his losses. That transparency was essential to his music. But it didn’t make real life easier for him.
While Sinatra’s career was taking off after 1943, with hit records, radio shows, and movie contracts, rumors about his private life started finding their way into gossip columns. He was spotted with this starlet or that woman; on the road he seldom slept alone. Or so the rumors said. Some were certainly true. “You’re a young guy,” he said once, in another context. “You don’t say three Hail Marys and pray for sleep.” Sex, of course, was also about power. Young women could use sex to impose fleeting power over the famous young man; Sinatra, the new kid in town, could sleep with Hollywood movie stars to prove to himself that he had true power and would never end up back in Hoboken. But he also was learning that even after the most casual feasts, someone presents you with the bill.
Very early he came up against the terrible scrutiny that comes with fame – and he didn’t like it at all. It was one thing for an unknown Sinatra to live in Hoboken and have a fling in Englewood; nobody would ever know, except the principals. It was different for a star. Someone was always watching. Years later Sinatra was still struggling with the velvet prison of fame.
“It just changes everything,” he said. “You can’t go to a beach. You can’t walk into a movie. You can’t stand on a corner and eat a hot dog. You want the fame but, baby, you pay a price.”
During the war, rumors of Sinatra’s carousing didn’t matter to the young women in the audience. If Sinatra was indeed doing what he was accused of, the female audience wasn’t surprised. The subtext of his music suggested that he didn’t feel complete in his personal life; in a complicated way, these young fans also wanted the same chance that the other women seemed to be having. Most didn’t identify with Nancy; they envied her, even honored her, but they were more like the other women, desiring a night with
Frank Sinatra with no illusions about living happily ever after. Everywhere on earth, wartime is a bad time for traditional values. When Sinatra did go home to Nancy, there were often angry confrontations, abrupt denials or dismissals, slammed doors. Sinatra didn’t handle any of this well. It was one thing to create romantic fantasies for strangers; it was quite another to deal directly with a humiliated wife. The emerging truth was quite unremarkable: like many other young men, Frank Sinatra was a good father and a poor husband.
In many ways he was a very lucky American. Timing is everything, in music and life. His career timing had been perfect. He was also lucky to have been declared 4-F. But his good fortune during the war hurt him when it was over. Absorbed with his expanding career, and perhaps fearful of his reception among the GIs, Sinatra didn’t make a USO tour until after the war in Europe ended on May 8, 1945. He was accompanied on the six-week tour by comedian Phil Silvers (with whom he had written “Nancy (with the Laughing Face)” as a birthday present for his daughter on her fourth birthday). On the long transatlantic journey to Europe, Sinatra was anxious. There had been predictions that the soldiers might be hostile, might throw eggs or tomatoes at the man who was making their girlfriends and sisters swoon while GIs were fighting the war. That didn’t happen. With shrewd advice from Silvers, Sinatra cast himself as a skinny underdog, an ordinary guy much like GI Joe. He made fun of himself and his image. He charmed the grizzled young veterans, expressed his gratitude to them, identified with them, and soon had them identifying with him. The press agents sighed in relief; so did Sinatra. Everything had gone smoothly. He’d even visited Italy and had met the Pope.
But when the veterans started coming home that fall, after the atom bombs ended the war with Japan, the smooth ride of Frank Sinatra started getting bumpier. The return of actors like Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart reminded Americans that many show business figures had gone off to war. The ballplayers came home too, including Pee Wee Reese and Pete Reiser from the Brooklyn Dodgers, Hank Greenberg from the Detroit Tigers, Ted Williams from the Boston Red Sox, and, of course, the great DiMaggio. All were among the 9 million Americans who had served their country. More than half a million had been Italian Americans, thirteen of whom received the Congressional Medal of Honor while ten were awarded the Navy Cross. More than 300,000 Americans didn’t come home at all, including 13,712 from the state of New Jersey. And in every state in the Union, those who had been wounded and maimed tried to adjust to the changed country. Some have speculated about the effect military service might have had on Sinatra’s personality and career; that leads nowhere. For reasons that were honorable, he didn’t go to his generation’s war and had to settle for playing servicemen in eleven of his sixty movies. One thing is certain: for many of those who came back from World War II, the music of Frank Sinatra was no consolation for their losses. Some had lost friends. Some had lost wives and lovers. All had lost portions of their youth.
More important to the Sinatra career, the girls from the Paramount, and all their sisters around the country, started marrying the men who came home. Bobby socks vanished from many closets. The girls who once wore them had no need anymore for imaginary lovers; they had husbands. Nothing is more embarrassing to grownups than the passions of adolescence, and for many, Frank Sinatra was the teenage passion. Children were soon being born in unprecedented numbers, all those kids who a generation later would be known as the baby boomers. At the same time, the children of all those turn-of-the-century immigrants, now toughened by war, equipped with the benefits of the GI Bill, began leaving city ghettos for the expanding new suburbs; some became the first people in the histories of their families to go to universities.
Swing music was rapidly dying, for complicated reasons. Most important was a two-year strike by the American Federation of Musicians, which, among other things, forced Sinatra to make his first sides for Columbia Records singing a cappella with a choral group. The strike kept the big bands out of the studios, unable to reach the mass audience with new material. Goodman, Dorsey, and others sounded stale; Glenn Miller was dead, having disappeared over the English Channel. The economics of the bands also changed. Postwar inflation drove up the cost of transportation. Sidemen who gladly worked for $40 a week during the Depression were now asking for $200, with soloists demanding more. Musically, the big band sound was exhausted. From Fifty-second Street to Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem, the hippest fans were now listening to bebop, to Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro, Max Roach, and others — all of them playing in small groups that were formed during the musicians’ strike. Jazz had become a freer, more democratic form of chamber music, an ongoing jam session liberated from the dictates of rigid big band arrangements. Younger fans, with only vague memories of the Depression, were listening to mush or to novelty tunes. For many other people, the music of the swing bands reminded them of the war, a time they wanted to forget. It would be a long time before nostalgia would work its magic, transforming that music into a symbol of a more innocent America.
Musically, Sinatra reacted to the postwar climate in several ways. Even before leaving for his USO tour, he had experimented with other sounds, recording four sides with a black gospel-style group called the Charioteers and two others in a rumba rhythm with the orchestra of Xavier Cugat. He conducted an instrumental album of Alec Wilder songs. He wrote the lyrics to an aching ballad called “This Love of Mine.” But basically, he stayed with variations on his own traditional taste in ballads and jump tunes, most of them arranged by Stordahl. Many were very well done, enriched by strings and woodwinds, but the mysterious currents of public taste were shifting. The fans were groping for something new, sounds that would express the exuberance, optimism, and, in certain ways, mindlessness of the years after the war. Some would find it in singers as varied as Billy Eckstine, Frankie Laine, and Guy Mitchell. Perry Como had a string of hits. Doris Day became a star, along with Peggy Lee, Vaughn Monroe, Vic Damone, and the Four Aces. Even Gene Autry had a hit in 1949 with “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.” There were no signs of panic in Frank Sinatra, but he must have been uneasy.
He put much of his energy into the movies. In 1945 he won a special Academy Award for a ten-minute short called The House I Live In. He played himself, leaving a radio studio and running into some kids who are beating up another “because we don’t like his religion.” Sinatra tries to straighten them out and sings the title song. At the time, Sinatra’s liberal politics were widely known. Most performers of that era kept their politics to themselves; let Democrats in the audience believe they were Democrats, Republicans think they were Republicans. But Sinatra was a new breed in Hollywood. He publicly supported Franklin D. Roosevelt and visited him in the White House. This was more than familial loyalty to his mother, Dolly; Sinatra was one of the first big stars to use his fame to promote his politics, and those politics were, by all accounts, deeply felt. He made an effort to visit schools and talk to teenagers about bigotry, always citing the hurtful words that had been hurled at him as a boy in Hoboken. He signed petitions. He sent money to candidates. The short, directed by Mervyn LeRoy from a script by Albert Maltz (later to become one of the Hollywood Ten during the anticommunist crusade), impressed the critics.
“Mr. Sinatra takes his popularity seriously,” said the reviewer for Cue. “More, he attempts to do something constructive with it. Millions, young and old, who will not or cannot read between the lines of their daily newspapers and are blind to the weed-like growth of bigotry and intolerance planted by hate-ridden fanatics, will listen carefully to what Mr. Sinatra has to say in this short film.”
He followed the short with Anchors Aweigh (1945), a bright, good-natured musical about sailors on shore leave. Sinatra was superb. He worked with Gene Kelly — worked very hard indeed, and his dance number with Kelly shows it; the routine is full of high spirits, self-kidding, and good dancing. “I never worked so goddamned hard in my life,” he said later, laughing in a fond way. “Kelly was a brute.” But those were th
e days of the major studios; at MGM, where Sinatra had a five-year contract, he often couldn’t choose his vehicles. The films that followed were mediocre (It Happened in Brooklyn, RKO’s The Miracle of the Bells), and one, The Kissing Bandit (1948), was dreadful. Set in the nineteenth century, this semimusical stars Sinatra as a young Mexican fresh out of an Eastern college who goes back to Old California to run the family rancho. He even sings one song while riding a white horse. Sinatra’s love interest is Kathryn Grayson, and the movie also features J. Carrol Naish, the Irish actor from Life with Luigi, who plays Sinatra’s Mexican foreman, Chico. “I hated reading the script,” Sinatra later said, “hated doing it, and, most of all, hated seeing it. So did everyone else.”
He wasn’t truly good again as a movie actor until 1949, when he teamed up once more with Kelly in an MGM musical called Take Me Out to the Ball Game, and quickly followed it with a movie masterpiece, On the Town. Another story of sailors on shore leave, this time in New York, the film was codirected by Kelly (who also stars) and Stanley Donen. It was written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. Music for a ballet was composed by Leonard Bernstein. The reviews were raves. Sinatra’s star should have been ascending.