Frank_ The Voice Part 3

this funny thing called love?

Feeling the words, and remembering how Billie could tell you her whole life story in the glide of a note, Frank began to sing the lyrics as if he really meant them, and something happened.

The girls, dancing with their dates, began to stop mid-step and stare at him.

And Dolly knew. Which was why it was so important to push forward the Plan. She'd thought of it more than two years before, when he first brought the little mouse home: Frankie had to marry her.

She was from a good family, a family with money, with a big wooden house and five sisters who had married lawyers or accountants. Even if she wasn't beautiful, she was pretty, with a quiet dignity about her: She would make good babies; she would take care of a household.

And Nancy Barbato would never threaten Dolly's supremacy.

The Plan was accelerated when Frank met the older one. The truth of it was that there were many girls now, coming out of the cursed knotty-pine woodwork of the Rustic Cabin, bewitched by the sound of his voice. They were writing letters to him, mash notes in perfumed envelopes-Dolly stuffed them straight into the garbage, with the coffee grounds and grapefruit rinds. They were storming his front door, just as she had known they would. And the older one was the most dangerous of all: cheap trash from Lodi-her father was a rumrunner or something. She was three years Frankie's senior, Antoinette Della Penta, and pretty, but with a f.u.c.ked-out look about her-she might as well have been a wh.o.r.e as far as Dolly was concerned. Mrs. M. Sinatra of upper Garden Street hadn't pulled her little clan up from Guinea Town to have her only son grabbed by a gold-digging hussy.

There had been a dinner between the two families, Dolly and Marty generously making the trip to Lodi, but it had not gone well. Dolly-no surprise-had spoken her mind.

Still, Toni kept coming on strong even as Frankie continued to woo Nancy. For a while it was fun, Nancy and Toni coming alternate nights to the Cabin, Nancy the good girl sitting uneasily as the other women stared openmouthed at her Frankie. Nancy the good girl, with her sweet face and sweet hair and sweet kisses-and kissing was where it stopped.

Then, on the other nights, Toni the bad girl, or the girl with the promise of badness anyway. He couldn't help himself; he was so desperate to have her that he gave her a ring, not a big stone, a cheap chip of diamond, but it did the trick. She let him take her to a hotel, and they registered as Mr. and Mrs. Sinatra. She teased him mercilessly as he lay there with his eyes rolled back in his head. Had anyone ever done that for him?

Certainly not Nancy. But then came the night after Thanksgiving, when Nancy and Frank were sitting in a booth between sets and Freddy the busboy brought the black telephone to the table. Freddy gave Frankie a funny look: For you, kid For you, kid. Nancy, giving him her own look, a look of power and ownership, pushed Frank's hand away from the phone and picked up the receiver.

He sat there with his hand over his eyes as she went at it pretty good. He was surprised at how tough she was. She'd pull Toni's hair out by the roots if she ever caught her anywhere near her Frank.

His stomach warmed to hear that, but then, after she slammed down the receiver, he knew he was in for it. The bawling out, though, that was the easy part. The hard part was dealing with the other one.

Half an hour later, she stomped into the Cabin as he was about to start singing and walked toward him, but Nancy stopped her. Then they were flailing at each other like two cats. The music stopped and everyone stared. Before Frank and the other waiters and the busboys could get between the women, Toni had ripped Nancy's good white dress.

It was a long night, but he stuck to his story: The woman was nothing to him. It had been a flirtation, and it was over. The woman couldn't face the facts.

The next night, Sat.u.r.day, things got worse. After he'd sung "Night and Day," there was a stirring on the dance floor, and two cops in motorcycle boots stomped in and arrested him right in front of everyone.

Frankie tried to bluff it out. Mistaken ident.i.ty, he announced, as they led him to the door, to scattered applause (which began with the band).

They took him to the county clink, in Hackensack-it was two in the morning-and booked him.

Even in a mug shot it is an astonishing face. The extravagantly sensual lower lip. The intelligence of the pale, wide-set eyes. The greasy hank of hair over the left eyebrow-he could have flicked it out of the way; he chose not to-is a rebellious 1930s touch worthy of a Dillinger or Pretty Boy Floyd. It is a sensitive face, but one of a man with full knowledge of his own importance.

Full-face he looked defiant, but in profile he looked weary. A night in jail had taken the starch out of Frank. Now he was allowed to make his single phone call. Dolly answered, and told him she would have him out in an hour.

It took a bit longer than that. The whole episode was an operetta in three acts, playing out over months, each part taking its own sweet time. The original arrest warrant stated that on November 2 and 9, 1938, Frank Sinatra, "being then and there a single man over the age of eighteen years, under the promise of marriage, did then and there have s.e.xual intercourse with the said complainant who was then and there a single female of good repute for chast.i.ty whereby she became pregnant." Then and there. Good repute for chast.i.ty. Old English language aside, the warrant had a couple of holes in it. The beginning of November sounds like very quick work if indeed she did become pregnant; some have speculated the affair actually began in the spring and was consummated during the summer, which sounds more plausible. And there was this small detail: The female was not single. She was legally separated, but still married.

The case fell apart like the house of cards it was, except that it fell in slow motion. First, Dolly sent Marty to call on Toni's father. Marty had such a hangdog expression-"He looked like a hobo at the door begging for something to eat," Toni recalled many years later-that her father offered the poor old pug a shot of booze. The two men drank together-sacred bond-and finally Toni was persuaded to go spring Frankie herself.

According to Toni, Frankie sobbed when she confronted him in his cell. She withdrew the charges, but only after (she remembered) she made her lover promise that his mother would apologize for the mean things she'd said. Dolly apologize! Three weeks later, no apology having occurred, Toni went to Garden Street to confront Mrs. Sinatra. After a screaming fight that brought the neighbors out of their houses, the forty-two-year-old, four-foot-eleven Dolly somehow managed to throw the young woman into the bas.e.m.e.nt. The police arrived. This being Dolly Sinatra's turf, Toni was arrested and given a suspended sentence for disorderly conduct. She thereupon swore out a second second warrant against Frank Sinatra: not having been able to make seduction stick, this time she owned up to her non-single status and went for adultery. Three days before Christmas, he was arrested once more-again at the Cabin, this time by court officers purporting to be bearing a Christmas gift from admirers. Dolly once more arrived with bail, and Frankie was once again released on his own recognizance. A headline in the next day's warrant against Frank Sinatra: not having been able to make seduction stick, this time she owned up to her non-single status and went for adultery. Three days before Christmas, he was arrested once more-again at the Cabin, this time by court officers purporting to be bearing a Christmas gift from admirers. Dolly once more arrived with bail, and Frankie was once again released on his own recognizance. A headline in the next day's Jersey Observer Jersey Observer read: SONGBIRD HELD IN MORALS CHARGE. read: SONGBIRD HELD IN MORALS CHARGE.

It may have been North Jersey light opera, a tempest in a 1930s teapot, but Mike Barbato can't have failed to notice that his prospective son-in-law was neither a lawyer nor an accountant nor even a plasterer, but, well, a songbird and a perp. (Though Toni eventually dropped these charges as well because, she claimed, she'd found out about Dolly's Dolly's arrest record, for abortion.) Nancy Rose might have looked like a terrific match to Dolly, but things can't have appeared quite so rosy from the Jersey City side. And what did Nancy herself think about all this? Her boyfriend's stonewalling wasn't helped by a second arrest, not to mention newspaper headlines. arrest record, for abortion.) Nancy Rose might have looked like a terrific match to Dolly, but things can't have appeared quite so rosy from the Jersey City side. And what did Nancy herself think about all this? Her boyfriend's stonewalling wasn't helped by a second arrest, not to mention newspaper headlines.

But she loved him. And he loved her. It was the G.o.d's honest truth. She knew him to the bottom of his soul, and loved him for it and in spite of it. What's more, she knew he contained that strangest of all quant.i.ties, there among the frame row houses and brownstone tenements of blue-collar, bill-paying Hudson County: greatness. And he loved that she knew it, and he loved that she loved him, and he loved her goodness, her wisdom, and her sweet kisses.

It was just that he needed so much more...

It was time to put a cap on things. There were more Tonis out there. Dolly came up with a 1930s solution: against the Barbatos' grave misgivings, Frank and Nancy would be married. It happened just a little over a month after his second arrest-Sat.u.r.day, February 4, 1939, at Our Lady of Sorrows Church in Jersey City. A small wedding, in the Barbatos' territory; few Hobokenites in attendance. The bride's white dress was as true as the tears that flowed from her eyes as her father, guardedly happy, walked her down the aisle: she did love Frank Sinatra, but now she was joined to him forever, with all that entailed.

Three weeks later, Dolly was arrested once more, for performing another abortion. This too made the papers. The Sinatras were famous all over Hudson County.

So the boy left his mother (sort of: he was commanded to visit Garden Street at least once a week-alone, if possible) and settled, uneasily, into married life, in a $42-a-month, third-floor walk-up on Garfield Avenue in Jersey City. As cozy as the little apartment was, the newlyweds didn't see much of each other. Weekdays, Nancy worked as a $25-a-week secretary at American Type Founders in Elizabeth, rising early to the sight of her skinny young husband still snoring, exhausted from his labors at the Cabin. The club-on-site arrests notwithstanding-had given him a raise to $25 a week. He often spent more than that on clothes. His practical young wife fretted about his predilection for budget-busting $35 Woodside suits. She skimped on her own clothing, made him silk bow ties so he wouldn't have to spend the money. His wardrobe took up what little closet s.p.a.ce they had, and then some.

She coped. She wanted stability, and a family; she still worried about his mercurial nature. As far as other women were concerned, she knew it was not a question of if, but-Italian men being Italian men-when and how. (Mike Barbato, the tough paterfamilias, the paragon of respectability, was no exception in this regard.) But Nancy loved Frank desperately. He was infinitely sensitive; he could be so sweet and funny. And she knew he loved her. Then the slightest thing-there was no predicting-could set him off. And she had backbone: she would stand up to him. They had some terrible blowouts (the neighbors below banged on their ceiling). Then they made up. That was nice.

She wanted children. What else was marriage for? He was reluctant at first: they couldn't afford them yet. She did everything she could to hold him-cooked him spaghetti just the way he liked it, baked him lemon-meringue pies. He loved her meals, and he loved her, but he was elusive. He had important places to go, people to see. He would rise in the afternoon and gather up his Hoboken pal Nick Sevano before getting on the ferry to Manhattan and making the rounds of radio stations and music publishers. Sanicola and Van Heusen would often join him for the evening, along with a new friend, a fast-talking, wisecracking, breathtakingly talented little lyricist named Sammy Cahn. n.o.body else in the crew was married. Why were the chicks always drawn to the one that was?

He felt stalled that spring, a fly trapped in amber. He had married in haste; he wasn't cut out for it. He loved her so much, but he wasn't cut out for it. Much of the time-he hated himself for thinking it-Nancy was a millstone around his neck. He wasn't getting any younger, and his career wasn't going anywhere. The radio stations still weren't paying, and nerves caused him to blow two important occasions: Once when he was trying out for a band run by a new leader, a rich kid from Detroit named Bob Chester, Tommy Dorsey stopped by. Tommy f.u.c.king Dorsey Dorsey. Sinatra got so fl.u.s.tered at the sight of that cold Irish puss (he looked like a G.o.dd.a.m.n emperor or something) that he forgot the lyrics of the song he was singing and froze-literally opened his mouth and nothing came out.

And the same d.a.m.n thing happened again one night at the Cabin: almost fifty years later, the horror of it would still live with him. "On a Sunday evening during the summer months, people would come back from the countryside, and stop and have a little nip before they went over the bridge to go back into New York," Sinatra recalled, at Yale Law School in 1986.

There were about seven people in the audience, and the trumpet player-we had a six-piece "orchestra"; big sound, beautiful-the trumpet player, named Johnny Buccini, said to me, "Do you know who this is sitting out there?" I said, "No. Where?" He said, "Right out there, you dummy. Look straight ahead." I said, "Yeah, I know that face." He said, "That's Cole Porter."I had been so infatuated with his music that I couldn't believe he was sitting out in the audience with four or five people. I said to the orchestra leader, "I'd like to do one of Cole Porter's songs...Let's do 'Night and Day' for them, and I'll talk about it." So I said, "Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to sing this song and dedicate it to the greatly talented man who composed it and who is maybe one of the best contributors to American music at this particular time in our lives." I said that Mr. Porter was in the room, and the orchestra played the introduction-and I proceeded to forget all the words. I swear to G.o.d. I couldn't think. I kept saying "night and day" for fifteen bars!

But with Sinatra, ambition trumped shame every time. And twenty years later, during the making of High Society High Society, Porter would recall the night, and smile.

One afternoon that winter, Frankie stopped by the Sicilian Club in Bayonne and found Frank Mane, an alto sax player he knew from WAAT, rehearsing some songs with a ten-piece pickup band. When he asked Mane what he was practicing for, the sax player told him he was trying out for a spot with a Los Angeles outfit, Clyde Lucas and His California Dons. He was going over to Manhattan to make an audition record.

"Cheech, could I go to New York with you and sing with the band?" Frankie asked.

Mane shrugged. "Sure, why not?"

And so on March 18, all atingle, Frankie set foot for the first time in a recording studio-Harry Smith's, 2 West Forty-sixth Street, a large office tower today. It was a Sat.u.r.day afternoon: the city was quiet; studio time was cheap. After Mane and his band cut a couple of instrumentals, the musicians took out the sheet music to something called "Our Love"-corny lyrics grafted onto Tchaikovsky's theme for Romeo and Juliet Romeo and Juliet. Then, with a nod from the guy in the gla.s.s booth, the band hit the first notes and Frankie began to sing. He couldn't help grinning at the freedom and ease, the rightness rightness of it: he was making a record! of it: he was making a record!

Our love, I feel it everywhere...

Our love is like an evening prayer.

A little while later, he was able to listen to a 78-rpm demo platter with his very own voice on it. It was a respectable-enough debut: the sound was a little scratchy, the band's tempo plodding, but Frankie had sung on key and hit all the high notes. To him it was a miracle: he would have listened to the disc over and over again if Frank Mane had let him, so entranced was he at the sound of his own voice.

It wasn't just narcissism. His ear, after all, was part of his genius. He was literally amazed at himself-the voice worked worked. Technically speaking, there were much better instruments out there: the Eberle brothers, Bob (who spelled it "Eberly") and Ray; d.i.c.k Haymes-all, at that point, could sing circles around him. They had bigger, richer baritones; they sounded like men. He still sounded like a boy.

But this was what worked for him-he didn't sound like anyone else. He was was a boy, and he was vulnerable (and would remain so, as long as Dolly was alive), and he could carry a tune, in both senses of both words. He made good and G.o.dd.a.m.n sure that he understood the words to every song he sang, made sure (like Mabel, like Billie) that his audiences knew he was telling a story. And his audiences (and especially the women in them) wanted to hear him telling it. a boy, and he was vulnerable (and would remain so, as long as Dolly was alive), and he could carry a tune, in both senses of both words. He made good and G.o.dd.a.m.n sure that he understood the words to every song he sang, made sure (like Mabel, like Billie) that his audiences knew he was telling a story. And his audiences (and especially the women in them) wanted to hear him telling it.

The iconic mug shot. Defiance, style, and the astonishing intelligence of the pale, wide-set eyes. A man with full knowledge of his own importance. (photo credit 5.2) (photo credit 5.2) A woman happened to hear him on the radio one night that spring-the WNEW wire from the Rustic Cabin, the Dance Parade Dance Parade. Her name was Louise Tobin, and she was a band singer herself-young, black haired, gorgeous, and newly married to a freshly minted young bandleader, a tall, rail-thin, hatchet-headed Texas trumpeter named Harry James. Tobin and James were in their room at the Lincoln Hotel, at Eighth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street; Tobin was preparing to catch a late train for a gig in Boston; James was lying on the bed, resting up after his appearance at the Paramount.

Tobin was standing at the mirror, watching herself putting in an earring, wearing that abstracted look women get, holding the earring post in her mouth, when she heard this kid singing "Night and Day" through the Philco's cheesy speaker. (This time he knew the words.) The voice stopped her. The kid had something. It wasn't the most stupendous voice she had ever heard-the earring post didn't fall from her lips-but he sounded awfully self-a.s.sured for however the h.e.l.l old he was.

"So," Tobin recalled many years later, "I woke Harry and said, 'Honey, you might want to hear this kid on the radio.'"

Act Two

HARRY AND TOMMY

6.

Frank broadcasting with the Harry James Orchestra, August 1940, at the Roseland Ballroom, New York City. Left to right: Frank, unidentified, band manager Pee Wee Monte, Harry James, vocalist Bernice Byers. (photo credit 6.1) (photo credit 6.1) It was a typical day in the life of a touring swing band: long long. Motor down the pike from New York to Philadelphia, play a tea dance at the Benjamin Franklin Hotel, turn around, and head home. On the way out of Manhattan that morning, riding ahead of the band bus in his big Chrysler, Harry James had stopped on Riverside Drive to pick up his new girl singer, a pet.i.te seventeen-year-old dynamo from Florida with a big voice, a sparkly personality, and a laughably impossible name: Yvonne Marie Antoinette JaMais. As they rolled south through the Jersey farmlands with the band manager, Pee Wee Monte, at the wheel, James clacked a stick of Black Jack gum and squinted in deep thought at the problem of rechristening her for the stage. Rhymes with Yvonne... Rhymes with Yvonne... In a moment, he had it: Connie! In a moment, he had it: Connie!

Connie what?

"Connie Haines!" he suddenly crowed. He had a high, squeaky voice and a Texas accent. The bandleader smiled in triumph: it went perfectly with Harry James.

So Connie Haines it was, and as the Chrysler sped north through the New Jersey night, the newly named singer, exhausted and elated after a successful first engagement with the band, was amazed to see that Harry was still full of beans, bouncing around in the front pa.s.senger's seat, clacking his gum, tapping in time on the dashboard to the staticky song on the radio. Suddenly he turned around, resting his long chin on his long fingers on the back of the seat.

"Hey, Connie Haines," he said with a wink. "How you doin' back there?"

Fine, she told him. Maybe a little tired.

That was just what he wanted to talk to her about, he said. He wanted to make one little stop before they crossed the bridge. There was this boy singer he wanted to hear.

Harry James was the same age as Frank Sinatra-in fact he was three months younger. But even given Sinatra's tour with Major Bowes, all the gigs in dumps and dives, the radio shows, the women, the arrests-James had done a lot more living in his twenty-three years than Sinatra had in his. To begin with, Harry Haag James was a son of the circus. His mother was a trapeze artist whose specialty ("The Iron Jaw") was dangling from a wire far above the sawdust by her teeth; his father was a cornetist and bandmaster. Harry himself had started performing as a drummer for the Christy Brothers Circus at age three; at the tender age of five, he became a contortionist known as the Human Eel. At eight he began playing the trumpet, and by the time he was twelve, he was leading the circus's number-two band. At fourteen, young Harry was drinking hard and taking his pick of the innocent girls who came to gawk at the big top's spectacles.

James was a superbly gifted natural musician whom the circus had schooled to play loud, hard blues. It was a style equally apt for the midway and the dawning of the Swing Era in the mid-1930s. By 1935, the nineteen-year-old James was married to the seventeen-year-old Louise Tobin (and cheating on her every chance he could get) and playing with a band led by the Chicago drummer Ben Pollack; by the end of 1936, he had signed with Benny Goodman, the capo di tutti capi capo di tutti capi of American bandleaders. They made a formidable combination. On the occasion of the great clarinetist's death in 1986, the of American bandleaders. They made a formidable combination. On the occasion of the great clarinetist's death in 1986, the San Francisco Chronicle San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen vividly recalled a Goodman concert of fifty years earlier as "bedlam. Gene Krupa riding his high hat like a dervish. Harry James puffing out his cheeks till surely they must burst, the rhythm always burning and churning and driving you out of your mind, and then, just when you thought nothing could get hotter, Benny's clarinet rising like a burnished bird out of the tightly controlled maelstrom and soaring to the heavens, outscreaming even the crowd." columnist Herb Caen vividly recalled a Goodman concert of fifty years earlier as "bedlam. Gene Krupa riding his high hat like a dervish. Harry James puffing out his cheeks till surely they must burst, the rhythm always burning and churning and driving you out of your mind, and then, just when you thought nothing could get hotter, Benny's clarinet rising like a burnished bird out of the tightly controlled maelstrom and soaring to the heavens, outscreaming even the crowd."

It was rock 'n' roll with big-band arrangements. And two years of maximum national prominence with Goodman had turned Harry James into the 1930s equivalent of a rock star. He was itching to fly on his own. At the end of 1938, bankrolled by Goodman, the trumpeter started his own outfit, Harry James and His Music Makers.

Musical G.o.ds were different then. For one thing, teenagers of that era didn't demand that their musical idols be, or look like, teenagers. By the spring of 1939, Harry James was a very famous, accomplished, and self-a.s.sured twenty-three-year-old-and with his hawk nose, piercing blue eyes, pencil mustache, and big-shoulder suits, he didn't remotely resemble any twenty-three-year-old we would recognize today. At twenty-three he looked as if he were well into his thirties. He had star quality to burn, and when he strode into the Rustic Cabin that blossom-heavy night in early June 1939, the crowd parted before him like the Red Sea before Moses.

The Cabin's owner, Harry Nichols, came up, grinning, his cigar hanging from his lower lip, and told James to take any table he'd like. Drinks on the house, of course.

James winked at him. How about that boy singer his wife had heard on the radio the other night? Was he here?

Nichols frowned. "We don't have a singer," he said.

James frowned back. "That's not what I heard."

"Well, we do have an emcee who sings a little bit..."

"This very thin guy with swept-back greasy hair had been waiting tables," James recalled many years later. "Suddenly he took off his ap.r.o.n and climbed onto the stage. He'd sung only eight bars when I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rising. I knew he was destined to be a great vocalist."

This has all the verisimilitude of an MGM musical, and the tin-can ring of hindsight, but Harry James surely heard something that night, especially if, as he later reported, Sinatra really performed Cole Porter's notoriously difficult, 108-bar epic "Begin the Beguine." Any twenty-three-year-old who could bring that that off would indeed be something special. But in a way it doesn't matter what Sinatra sang that night-it was the way he sang it, the voice itself, that got Harry James where he lived. off would indeed be something special. But in a way it doesn't matter what Sinatra sang that night-it was the way he sang it, the voice itself, that got Harry James where he lived.

"It's an interesting thing," the singer and musicologist Michael Feinstein says. "You can look at the vibration of somebody's voice on a machine-whatever the machines are called-and it looks like this; someone else's voice will look the same. You can match up graphs that look the same, but they don't sound the same. The point is that there is something that cannot be defined in any way scientifically.

"You can't explain what it is about the sound of Sinatra's voice," Feinstein says. "I mean, you can try, and you can get very poetic in describing it. But there is something there that is transcendent, that simply exists in his instrument. He developed it, he honed it, he understood it himself, he knew what he could do, and he used it to his best advantage. That was something that people responded to."

The voice was still developing in the spring of 1939-it would continue to develop for the next fifty years. It wasn't as rich as it would be even five years later. But its DNA was there, the indefinable something composed of loneliness and need and infinite ambition and storytelling intelligence and intense musicality and Hoboken and Dolly herself, the thing that made him entirely different from every other singer who had ever opened his mouth.

And Frank Sinatra had one more astounding thing at twenty-three: a plan. He was going to knock over Crosby. He knew it in the pit of his gut. Not even Nancy knew the true height of his hubris.

Harry James, believing that whatever Sinatra had was worth signing him up for, offered him a contract on the spot: $75 a week. It was quite an offer: three times what Sinatra was currently making, more than he and Nancy were earning together. What James neglected to mention was that there were some weeks (he wasn't especially good with money) when he didn't have $75 to his name.

Since Harry had created Connie Haines that morning, he was feeling lucky. Sinatra was too Eye-talian, he said. How about Frankie Satin? It went nice with that nice smooth voice of his.

Just a moment before, Sinatra recalled in later years, he had been grasping James by the arm, incredulous at the offer, making sure his main chance didn't get away. Now, as Connie Haines remembered sharply sixty-seven years after that night, the singer's eyes went cold. "Frank told Harry, 'You want the singer, take the name,'" Haines said. "And walked away."

Sinatra had good reason to be insulted. His father's boxing alias, Marty O'Brien, had been not a whim but a forced decision: an Italian surname would have gotten him barred from training gyms. In perception and reality, the Irish stood above the Italians on the American social ladder, a heavy foot firmly planted on all upturned faces. Even as late as the 1940s, the Italian-American author Gay Talese recalled, "The Irish kids were the ones who called me 'wop.'" And as Pete Hamill, a Sinatra friend who has a.n.a.lyzed the underheated melting pot from the Irish-American point of view, wrote: "In those days it would not have been strange for a boy to believe that the man was ashamed of being Italian. His father's split ident.i.ty surely explains, at least in part, Sinatra's...vehemence about keeping his own name when Harry James wanted to change it."

Sinatra had already tried an anglicized stage name-Frankie Trent-very briefly, a couple of years before. Very briefly because once Dolly got wind of it, she gave him both barrels-maybe she hit him with the bat. In any case, while "Frankie Trent" was bad enough, "Frankie Satin" was much, much worse-it made "Connie Haines" look like sheer genius. It wasn't even anglicized; it was 100 percent corn oil. As Sinatra told Hamill, "Can you imagine? Is that a name or is that a name? 'Now playing in the lounge, ladies and gennulmen, the one an' only Frankie Satin'...If I'd've done that, I'd be working cruise ships today."

But when Frank walked away, James came right after him. The defiantly unrenamed Frank Sinatra joined the Music Makers on June 30, as they opened a weeklong engagement at the Hippodrome in Baltimore. He was so new that he wasn't even listed on the bill. Still, some girls in the audience quickly got the idea. "After the first show, the screaming started in the theater, and those girls came backstage," Connie Haines told Peter J. Levinson for his Harry James biography, Trumpet Blues Trumpet Blues. "There were about twenty of them...it happened, it was real, it was not a gimmick."

Not a gimmick at all. The Voice-might as well start capitalizing it here-was simply working its spooky subliminal magic. Did it help that the singer was clearly in need of a good meal, that his mouth was voluptuously beautiful, that his eyes were attractively wide with fear and excitement, that he knowingly threw a little catch, a vulnerable vocal stutter, into his voice on the slow ballads? It helped. It whipped into a frenzy the visceral excitement that his sound had started. But the sound came first. There was simply nothing like it.

The singer was a genius, the trumpeter-leader a kind of genius. The band was terrific (and light-years from the rinky-d.i.n.k six-piece outfit at the Rustic Cabin). The world would fall at both men's feet in a few years. But not everyone was thrilled at first: both Sinatra and Harry James seemed to be simply ahead of their time. James blew hot and hard, a style that delighted critics-Down Beat had voted him America's number-one trumpeter in 1937, over the headiest of compet.i.tion: Louis Armstrong, Bunny Berigan, and Roy Eldridge-but didn't always sit well with country-club and society-ballroom and nightclub audiences. They didn't want to had voted him America's number-one trumpeter in 1937, over the headiest of compet.i.tion: Louis Armstrong, Bunny Berigan, and Roy Eldridge-but didn't always sit well with country-club and society-ballroom and nightclub audiences. They didn't want to listen; listen; they wanted to dance close and slow, and go home and make babies who would grow up and go to country clubs and society ballrooms and dance close and slow...A nice society band, a Lawrence Welk or an Eddy Duchin outfit, was simply more adequate to the purpose than a group that made you sit up and take notice. they wanted to dance close and slow, and go home and make babies who would grow up and go to country clubs and society ballrooms and dance close and slow...A nice society band, a Lawrence Welk or an Eddy Duchin outfit, was simply more adequate to the purpose than a group that made you sit up and take notice.

And Frank Sinatra-well, Sinatra, for his part, was an acquired taste at first. Especially for the critics. When the band played the Roseland Ballroom on West Fifty-second Street in the summer of 1939, Sinatra begged the Music Makers' road manager, Gerry Barrett, to beg George T. Simon, Metronome Metronome's influential critic, for a decent review. The dutiful Barrett all but tackled Simon as he was leaving the building. "Please give the new boy singer a good write-up because he wants it more than anybody I've ever seen and we want to keep him happy," he said.

Simon (whose brother Richard would found Simon & Schuster, and in a few years father a daughter named Carly, who would herself grow up to do some singing) more or less complied. In his review he effused over James's "sensational, intense style," and went on to praise the saxophonist Dave Matthews, the drummer Ralph Hawkins, and the arranger Andy Gibson. Then and only then did Simon give a nod to "the pleasing vocals of Frank Sinatra, whose easy phrasing is especially commendable."

But even if the mention was obligatory (and lukewarm), it contained an important kernel of truth. When it came to that mysterious quant.i.ty known as phrasing-the emotional essence of all speech, sung or spoken-Frank Sinatra had a unique ability, composed of innate talent, very hard work, and the irrepressible obtrusion of his unruly soul. Easy? There was nothing remotely easy about any molecule of his being, especially his phrasing. Maybe what George T. Simon should have said was that, like Joltin' Joe DiMaggio swinging a bat, Sinatra made it look look easy. easy.

A quarter century later, Simon wrote in Billboard Billboard what he really thought of Sinatra that night: "He sounded somewhat like a shy boy out on his first date-gentle, tender but frightfully unsure of himself." Be that as it may, when the Music Makers. .h.i.t the Panther Room of the Hotel Sherman in Chicago a couple of weeks after the Roseland gig, Betty Grable, whose star was rising in Hollywood (and who would in a few years replace Louise Tobin as Mrs. Harry James), dragooned a young reporter named James Bacon into going to hear Sinatra. Bacon had never heard of the guy. "I'll never forget," he recalled years later. "The minute Sinatra started singing, every girl left her partner on the dance floor and crowded around the microphone on the bandstand. He was so skinny, the microphone almost obscured him." what he really thought of Sinatra that night: "He sounded somewhat like a shy boy out on his first date-gentle, tender but frightfully unsure of himself." Be that as it may, when the Music Makers. .h.i.t the Panther Room of the Hotel Sherman in Chicago a couple of weeks after the Roseland gig, Betty Grable, whose star was rising in Hollywood (and who would in a few years replace Louise Tobin as Mrs. Harry James), dragooned a young reporter named James Bacon into going to hear Sinatra. Bacon had never heard of the guy. "I'll never forget," he recalled years later. "The minute Sinatra started singing, every girl left her partner on the dance floor and crowded around the microphone on the bandstand. He was so skinny, the microphone almost obscured him."

Afterward, Bacon congratulated Harry James on his new boy singer. "Not so loud," James replied. "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 demand a raise tonight."

Frank Sinatra was anything but unsure of himself. Along with his abilities, the other thing he was certain of was precisely how the girls liked him to sound. The boys didn't always agree. During the Chicago stand, a Billboard Billboard reviewer wrote that Sinatra sang "the torchy ballads in a pleasing way in good voice," but then went on: "He touches the songs with a little too much pash, which is not all convincing." reviewer wrote that Sinatra sang "the torchy ballads in a pleasing way in good voice," but then went on: "He touches the songs with a little too much pash, which is not all convincing."

Or maybe all that pash was simply unsettling because it was so new. Among the smooth-as-silk baritones of the day, led by Crosby, Sinatra was an anomaly, a hot artist rather than a cool one, a harbinger of his own singular future.

Harry James, too, was a hot artist: a hepcat, a weed-puffing wild man. He was also a strangely self-defeating character-alcoholic, remote, and persistently broke. That summer, he lost everything he had in a settlement over an auto accident. (Connie Haines, whose salary he could no longer afford, had to leave.) And in a country crowded with big-band talent-Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Charlie Barnet, Count Basie, Jimmy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Bob Crosby, Jimmie Lunceford, Glenn Miller, and Artie Shaw were all crisscrossing the land with their outfits in the swinging late 1930s-James was having a hard time making a go of it. Some nights, as the Music Makers worked their way westward, the band only pulled down $350-and that had to pay seventeen band members and a bus driver, not to mention defray food, gas, and accommodations. There were times the outfit seemed snakebit. Other bands had hit records; Harry James couldn't catch a break. Meanwhile, a music-business brouhaha-the three-way royalty beef between ASCAP, the American Federation of Musicians, and the radio stations, a dispute that led ASCAP to ban radio performances of all the songs it licensed-didn't help.

Frank Sinatra, who would record over thirteen hundred songs in his career, cut just ten sides in his six months with the Harry James band. The first time he went into the Brunswick studios at 550 Fifth Avenue-the date was July 13, 1939-was only the second time he had ever set foot in a recording studio. In all, Sinatra and James recorded three times in New York that summer (subsequent sessions would take place in Chicago in October and Los Angeles in November), on each occasion laying down two sides of a 78-rpm platter. The third session took place on Thursday, August 31, the day before the n.a.z.is stormed through Poland-cool and cloudy in Manhattan; double-decker buses cruising up Fifth Avenue; big fans whirring in the studio. That day the Music Makers recorded one take of a soupy, utterly forgettable Frank Loesser ballad called "Here Comes the Night" ("Here comes the night, my cloak of blue/Here comes the night, with dreams of you") and two takes of a new song by Arthur Altman and Jack Lawrence. The number was called "All or Nothing At All."