Frank tried out with the Dorsey band about this time at Charlie’s Grill, a New Jersey roadhouse operated by Willie Moretti, but still Dorsey did not hire him. Meanwhile, he suffered another setback. One night at the Rustic Cabin, the trumpet player leaned over and told Frank that Cole Porter was in the audience. “I dedicated the next song, ‘Night and Day,’ to Mr. Porter,” Sinatra recalled, “and proceeded to forget all the words.”
In the end it was the Cabin’s radio link that brought a breakthrough. Late one night in June 1939, the young singer Louise Tobin was getting ready to leave on a trip. Tobin’s husband was the brilliant trumpeter Harry James, who had just left the Benny Goodman Orchestra to form his own band. He was being helped to do so by the mafioso Gyp De Carlo. “I was packing and listening to the radio,” Tobin remembered. “In those days they had those little speakers up in the corners of hotel rooms. Harry was trying to book his band, and that particular day he was looking for a boy singer. I heard this kid singing, and he sounded good to me. Harry was lying across the bed, and I woke him up and said: ‘Honey, there’s a kid singing here you might want to listen to.’ ”
James drove out to the Rustic Cabin the following night. “I asked the manager,” he recalled, “where I could find the singer. ‘We don’t have a singer,’ he told me. ‘We do have an emcee, though, and he sings a little bit.’ ”
Sinatra claimed it was mere chance that he was working the night James came in—Lucille Kirk had asked him to swap nights off with her. “Oh, yeah?” Kirk said when told this recently. “It was he who asked me if I’d take off. I’m sure he knew James would be there.” Frank had been trying to get James’s attention since hearing he was forming a band. According to one former colleague, he had even persuaded someone to leave his photograph on James’s desk.
Frank was waiting tables when he got word that James was in the audience. “Suddenly,” James remembered, “he took off his apron and climbed onto the stage. He’d sung only eight bars of ‘Night and Day’ when I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rising.” At James’s request, Frank followed up with “Begin the Beguine.” James knew right then, he said years later, that Frank “was destined to be a great vocalist.” The bandleader offered him a job on the spot, at $75 a week for a year. It was none too soon, for the Rustic Cabin management had just told Frank he was to be let go. “I nearly broke his arm so he wouldn’t get away,” he said of that first talk with James. “I called Nancy and told her to quit her job. She was going to travel on the road with me and Harry James. . . . The world looked good, golden, glorious.”
JAMES WAS A SKINNY SIX-FOOTER with dark wavy hair and blue eyes to rival Frank’s. He was the son of circus performers, a bandmaster father and a trapeze artist mother, and at the age of five had been billed as “The Human Eel.” At eight, he had started playing the trumpet with the circus band. Though only twenty-three when he hired Frank, he was way ahead of him in experience.
James drank heavily, smoked marijuana—as did many musicians then—and was a chronic gambler. His sexual promiscuity was legendary; one lover called him the “most faithless son of a gun who ever lived.” He was a lonely man who went out of his way not to be alone. “I loved Harry James,” Sinatra said years later, “loved him for a long time.”
Joining James was a leap forward, but not to the big time. Harry James and the Music Makers were suffering from poor bookings and sparse audiences. “We were struggling for money,” Louise Tobin said, “and Harry wasn’t the best businessman.” He was a virtuoso musician, though, and for Frank he opened up a world of new possibilities.
The day after their meeting at the Rustic Cabin, Frank met with James at the Paramount Theater in New York. Inspired by the texture of Sinatra’s voice, James wanted him to use the stage name Frankie Satin. Frank said no. “Can you imagine?” he once said. “ ‘Now playing in the lounge, ladies and gentlemen, the one and only Frankie Satin.’ . . . If I’d’ve done that, I’d be working cruise ships today.”
The girl singer on the first James tour, Yvonne Marie Jamais, had wisely agreed to take a new name, Connie Haines. Frank, Haines recalled of their appearance at the Baltimore Hippodrome, “was so new that he wasn’t even billed. The fans didn’t even know his name. And after the first show the screaming started in the theater, and those girls came backstage. . . . There were about twenty of them. We didn’t have that many in the audience. But it happened, it was real.”
Frank worked for James throughout the summer and fall of 1939. In Atlantic City, at the Steel Pier, he sang to a huge dance floor thronged with young couples. In New York, which was hosting the World’s Fair, he sang at the Roseland Ballroom on Broadway. George Simon, who had played drums for Glenn Miller and was beginning a career as a music critic, heard him there. “He sounded somewhat like a shy boy out on his first date,” Simon thought, “gentle, tender, but frightfully unsure of himself. His need of approbation was also reflected in a somewhat unusual routine by James’s manager, Gerry Barrett, who—after I’d reviewed the band that night—jockeyed not for a good review of the band but for good notices for ‘the boy.’ ”
Barrett told Simon that Frank wanted a good write-up “more than anybody I’ve ever seen. So give him a good write-up, will you, because we want to keep him happy and with the band and that’s the only thing that will keep him happy.” In the first known published review of the new singer’s work, Simon noted “the very pleasing vocals of Frank Sinatra, whose easy phrasing is especially commendable.”
James had spotted Frank’s great strength. “He was always thinking of the lyrics,” he remembered. “The melody was secondary. The feeling he has for the words is just beautiful. He could sing the wrong melody and it would still be pretty.” Frank’s breath control, however, needed work. James suggested he exercise more, learn to jump rope.
Several times that year, James took his band into recording studios. Five records came out of the sessions, each earning Frank a $50 fee over and above his weekly pay. These were his first commercial records.
“It was new to him,” recalled James’s drummer, Mickey Scrima. “He was anxious, like everybody else is when we’re recording, because if you’re not anxious you don’t give a shit. . . . I remember that on the playbacks Frank would sit there and be very critical, saying, ‘Oh, I missed that . . .’ or ‘I should have done this or that.’ We would do three or four takes on a tune, and he would ask if he could take one of the ones that wasn’t used. Later, he would play them over and over.”
None of the records became immediate hits, in part because a union dispute with broadcasters prevented their being played on the radio. Reissued four years later, though, one of them, “All or Nothing at All,” would go to number two in the charts:
All or nothing at all,
Half a love never appealed to me.
If your heart never could yield to me,
Then I’d rather have nothing at all . . .
Glenn Miller, who a year or so earlier had abruptly rejected Frank, heard “All” and admitted he had missed out. Of the four times Sinatra was to record the song, which became a huge hit, its writer, Jack Lawrence, preferred that first youthful version.
James’s future wife, Betty Grable, heard Frank sing at the Panther Room in Chicago and was captivated. “That guy,” she said, “sings like Clark Gable makes love.” Billie Holiday, who was also in Chicago, was gently critical of his singing style. “I went over to where he was,” she recalled, “and they wouldn’t let me in. But Frank and the others saw me, so four of us, we just went out and had a ball. I told him he didn’t phrase right. . . . He says, ‘Lady, you’re not commercial.’ ”
A Panther Room customer recalled a touching encounter. “The male singer left the stage,” Julie Paresich recalled, “and I proceeded to request his autograph. He was taken by surprise and seemed quite shy. He inquired why I would want it. I said, ‘Because I enjoyed your singing.’ He replied, ‘Nobody has ever asked me for my autograph.’ ”
Perhaps not,
but Frank was hardly modest. When a journalist asked about the “skinny little singer” who sang so well, James replied: “Not so loud. The kid’s name is Sinatra. He considers himself the greatest vocalist in the business. Get that! No one ever heard of him. He’s never had a hit record. He looks like a wet rag. But he says he is the greatest. If he hears you compliment him, he’ll ask for a raise tonight.”
On the West Coast, nothing went right for James and the band. The ballroom they were booked to play in burned to the ground, and the substitute venue, a Beverly Hills supper club called the Victor Hugo, proved totally unsuitable. “The place was so small,” Sinatra remembered, “that the brasses in our band blew the dancers off the floor. There were canaries in cages around, in nooks. . . . After Harry’s first blast they never chirped again.”
The Victor Hugo management canceled the engagement, and the musicians found themselves stranded and broke. Frank and Nancy, who had joined her husband on the tour as planned, found themselves sharing an apartment with two band members and going hungry. “A number of times,” a fellow musician recalled, “Frank was so depressed that the band wasn’t shooting into the sky, that he wasn’t becoming a big star, he actually talked about quitting.” If he considered quitting James’s band, he had no thought of abandoning his ambition. Mickey Scrima, one of the couple’s Los Angeles roommates, said Frank talked constantly about what could be.
He aspired to singing with Count Basie, with whom Billie Holiday had worked. Most of all, he clung to the hope of singing with Tommy Dorsey because, he thought, singing with him would be “a better showcase.” Dorsey had by now heard Frank’s rendering of “All or Nothing at All,” and the bandleader was at odds with his own lead singer.
In November 1939, when his band and James’s were in Chicago at the same time, Dorsey acted. Frank found a scrawled note, on a torn piece of paper, on his dressing room door: “Mr. Dorsey would like to see you.” At Dorsey’s hotel an aide asked Sinatra to sing “Marie,” one of the band’s trademark songs. Frank listened to the Dorsey version on a record player, then sang a cappella. His performance, which ended with an impressive glissando, won him an audience with the bandleader himself.
“The moment I saw him I remembered him,” Dorsey recalled. “I said, ‘You’re the kid who blew the lyrics.’ He laughed and so did I. He told me he had always wanted to be in my band.” Shrewdly, Dorsey gave Frank the impression the job might go to another singer—then offered him a long-term contract at $100 a week. Frank took the bait.
James reacted philosophically to the news. “Well,” he said, “if we don’t do any better in the next few months or so, try to get me on too.” Sinatra never forgot James’s generosity in letting him out of his obligations. He spoke of James as a friend and mentor, the man who “made it all possible.”
Frank spent a miserable Christmas alone as he worked his last few weeks with James, then retreated to bed in Cleveland with pneumonia. Nancy, who was pregnant, was at home with her parents in Jersey City. She sent her husband a gift to cheer him up over the holidays, a pair of gloves—each finger symbolically stuffed with a dollar bill.
Frank sang with James for the last time in January 1940, in Buffalo, New York. The band played at the Shea Theater on a bill with Red Skelton and an acrobat named Burt Lancaster. After the show, around midnight, James and the other musicians left town. “The bus pulled out with the rest of the guys,” Frank remembered. “I’d said goodbye to them all, and it was snowing. There was nobody around, and I stood alone with my suitcase in the snow and watched the tail-lights disappear. Then the tears started. . . . There was such spirit and enthusiasm in that band.”
At home in New Jersey for a week or so, Frank let people know he was leaving town for good. Before he did, though, he and three friends got together at his parents’ home in Hoboken. Using a home recording kit, they made a record featuring only Frank and Walter Costello, an accordionist he knew. Perhaps because war was raging in Europe, they chose to sing “Roses of Picardy,” a haunting ballad of World War I:
She is watching and longing and waiting, Where the long white roadway lies. . . .
Costello told his sister that Frank made the record as “a remembrance.” “I think it was his way of saying goodbye to Hoboken,” said Ed Shirak, a Sinatra enthusiast who stumbled on the record in the late 1990s. “He always had a way of knowing his destiny before he lived it.”
One day, leaning out the window of the Waldorf Towers in Manhattan, Sinatra would look west toward his birthplace. “It’s a lot farther than you think,” he said to a colleague, “from Hoboken to the Waldorf.”
7
“Let Him Go”
AT TWENTY-FOUR, seven years after vowing he would one day be as successful as Bing Crosby, Frank was on America’s musical radar. In January 1940, the month he signed with Dorsey, the trade magazine Metronome published the results of a new poll: Bing Crosby was best “boy singer,” with 637 votes; eleventh on the list was Frank Sinatra, with 21 votes.
Working with Tommy Dorsey would change those numbers. Frank had joined the band he considered “No. 1 in the United States, in fact in the world . . . the General Motors of the band business.” His drummer, Buddy Rich, thought Dorsey “the most beautiful and melodic trombone player who ever lived.” He was known in the business as “the Starmaker,” for with the talent came a flair for business.
Ten years older than Frank, Dorsey had grown up in a home filled with the bright, bold sound of brass instruments. His father, a coal miner turned music teacher in a depressed region of eastern Pennsylvania, handed him his first instrument at the age of six. Tommy and his equally talented brother, Jimmy, formed their first musical group—a little jazz band—as teenagers, when Jimmy was an underage mineworker and Tommy a delivery boy.
After a long, hard apprenticeship, they triumphed briefly as the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra. When they had quarreled and split up, Tommy went on to find national fame as “The Sentimental Gentleman of Swing.” “Sentimental” aptly described Dorsey’s mastery of musical mood, of a sound both warm and easy to dance to. His personality was something else again.
“If you could put up with him, and he could put up with you,” clarinetist Buddy DeFranco said, “you could learn a lot from him.” He demanded total dedication, was intolerant of failure, and enforced strict discipline. He fined musicians who arrived late—one singer was fired for missing the start of rehearsal. He screamed at arrangers. He once chased his finest drummer, Buddy Rich, off the stage and into the street, and another time was said to have hit him over the head with his trombone.
Dorsey drove like a maniac and swore a blue streak. He was a womanizer. He drank too much, but was more irritable when not drinking. “I do what I fucking want,” Dorsey said. “Nobody tells me how to live my life.”
Sometimes he would show his sensitivity, as when he stopped the band’s bus to ask plaintively: “Why don’t you guys like me?” Yet a newcomer to the band would be met with a disconcerting baptism of abuse. “Well, shit heel,” Dorsey might ask, “are you going to give me trouble or are we going to be okay?”
Sinatra joined Dorsey in January 1940, and probably first sang with the band at the Lyric Theater in Indianapolis. Though there had again been talk of altering his name—“Frank Sinatra will never mean much,” one band member had said—there was no change. Frank’s billing, in small print beneath Dorsey’s in large capital letters, was “Frank Sinatra, Romantic Virtuoso.”
“We knew we were going to have a new boy singer,” the female vocalist Jo Stafford recalled, “but we didn’t know anything about him . . . we didn’t even meet him before the first show.” There is some question as to what Frank sang that night, but none as to the reception he got. “Out came this rather frail looking young man with a whole bunch of hair,” Stafford said. “I just thought, Hmm—kinda thin. . . . But he sang no more than a few bars of ‘Stardust’ and a great hush fell over the theatre. . . . Nobody had ever sounded like that before.”
D
orsey’s radio producer, Herb Sanford, heard the same song and thought: “Boy, this is something else.” The press agent Jack Egan recalled how the newcomer “broke it up completely. . . . They kept yelling for more, but Frank had no encore prepared. . . . He and Tommy went into a huddle and Frank suggested they fake ‘South of the Border.’ . . . That broke it up even more.
“The kids started screaming,” Egan said. “There was nothing rigged about it . . . those screams were real.” After the show that night, according to a band member, Frank “actually looked into a mirror and pinched himself.” Trumpeter Zeke Zarchy thought Sinatra seemed “in awe of being where he was.” Frank himself recalled having been somewhat restrained for fear band members would think him an intruder. Others recalled no such reserve. “He just moved right in and took charge,” said arranger Sy Oliver. “He had an awful lot of assurance for a youngster.”
The band routine was grueling, as many as nine shows a day and bus rides as long as four hundred miles through the night to the next gig. Frank took it in his stride. To the amazement of colleagues who struggled to keep themselves presentable, he remained conspicuously well groomed. This was in part thanks to Nick Sevano, who months earlier, at eighteen, had joined him as valet and general gofer. Frank was extravagant, checking into fancy hotels while colleagues put up with humbler quarters. He picked up the tab in restaurants, threw money around. “Frank was always broke,” said band manager Bobby Burns, “because he lent so much to the other guys.”
Early on, noticing that Dorsey usually ate alone after the show, Frank and a friend asked him to dinner. Dorsey reciprocated by taking Frank to Patsy’s, an Italian restaurant on 56th Street in New York, exhorting the owner to “fatten him up.”
Frank became the liaison between the band members and their boss. “One time,” he recalled, “there was a lot of unrest in the band because of traveling all night in Greyhound buses. I went to Tommy and said, ‘Look, the boys are unhappy—hard seats, no air, no refreshments. When they come on the stand they’re out. You won’t get the best out of them.’ After that there were always twelve cases of Coke on every bus— till [pianist] Joey Bushkin introduced the band to Pernod and all the Coke suddenly went green.”