Frank: The Voice (22 page)

Lion and cub. Bing and Frank, around 1940.
(photo credit 9.2)

Newly married, and still in love. Frank and Nancy, circa 1940.
(photo credit 10.1)

D
ecember 6 was a Saturday, the biggest night of the week at the Palladium. At about 2:00 a.m., after the band had left the stand and the musicians packed up their instruments and sheet music, a select crew, Tommy and Buddy and Frank among them, got into their big black cars and drove down Sunset to a large Tudor house on a quiet side street in Brentwood. No civilian could ever understand what it was like to finish a gig, your head still buzzing, your blood pumping. You could never just go to bed. You had to keep
going—
drink, smoke, drug, talk, get laid. Maybe all at once.

The Tudor house’s owner, just twenty years old, had been in the star-studded crowd at the Palladium that night, hovered over by this
square-jawed, tan-skinned actor and that, but she’d only had eyes for the bandstand. She was petite, bottle blond, and deliciously curvy, with a haughty, sultry, heart-shaped face that made her look older than her age. Lana Turner had been around enough—she was a veteran of four hard years in Hollywood—to know that actors were nice to look at, but she really loved musicians. Most actors were a hell of a lot more fascinating on-screen than in real life, and a lot of the handsomer ones were interested in other men. Musicians
did
something, besides speak someone else’s lines. They were funny and profane, and the ones she’d met all seemed to like women a lot.

And they were young (many of them not that much older than Lana Turner) and wild and dangerous and brilliant—the rock stars of their day. Except that they could read music. (Well, except for Buddy and Frank.)

Buddy felt Lana was smiling at him and only him that night. A couple of the others felt the same way.

There was alcohol by the gallons at her house, and the sweet reek of reefer—especially around Joey Bushkin, giggling as he sat at her white grand piano, playing dirty songs and funny songs and beautiful songs. There were a few other girls, there were games and filthy jokes and hilarity, there was quite a bit of misbehavior, and then there was unconsciousness. Buddy ended up in Lana’s bed (the sheets were still warm), but he had drunk too much to get it up, and you could have lit her breath with a match by that point anyway: he’d never found that very sexy.

The sun rose over Brentwood to the sound of snoring in the big Tudor. A few hours later, a black Plymouth coupe pulled up in front of the house, and Lana Turner’s mother, Mildred, a rawboned Arkansas lady with a history of tragedy and pain, got out, a worried look on her long, plain features. She had been calling and calling, but nobody would pick up the phone. Now she opened the house’s heavy front door with her own key, sniffed the pungent air, and frowned at the sight of snoring musicians draped every which way—over the couches
and easy chairs and carpet. Her daughter was going to hell in a hand-basket, and so, apparently, was the world: she had come to bring the news that the country was at war.

Who the hell knew what was going to happen? The world was turning upside down, and Frank had to grab whatever he could. The word was buzzing along the musicians’ grapevine: Bob Eberly, with Jimmy Dorsey’s band, was thinking about going out on his own. Eberly was kind of a handsome lug, and he could really sing. He had a rich, supple baritone, and he and Helen O’Connell had just done a version of “Green Eyes” that sounded as if they were going to hop right into the sack the second they were through.

But if you listened closely, it was a trick. Eberly was just a voice—a terrific voice, it’s true; a ballsy voice. He sounded like a man. But there was no ardor there, no yearning. There wasn’t anybody around, with the exception of Crosby, who could put across a song, could make you feel it, the way Sinatra could. Bob Eberly wasn’t half the singer Frank Sinatra was, and Sinatra knew it. But did the public? He didn’t want to wait around to find out.

And so he began to pester Tommy relentlessly, always mentioning the
Down Beat
poll (and never Manie Sacks): Dorsey
had
to let him record a few on his own. Why not? They’d sell some records!

Dorsey finally said yes just to shut him up.

Frank rehearsed constantly for the next three weeks, afternoons at the Palladium before Tommy showed up, just he and Lyle Henderson or Joey Bushkin on the piano behind him, in the huge quiet stillness of the empty dance hall. He knew exactly which songs he wanted to cut. They were all ballads, of course, all dripping with romance: There was
“The Night We Called It a Day,” by these new kids Matt Dennis and Tom Adair, who’d written “Let’s Get Away from It All” and “Violets for Your Furs.” There was a sweet Hoagy Carmichael number that hadn’t been recorded much, “The Lamplighter’s Serenade.” And then two classics: Kern and Hammerstein’s “The Song Is You” and Cole Porter’s equally immortal “Night and Day,” whose lyrics he’d blown in front of the great man himself.

He had told Dorsey that he wanted strings. Oh, how he wanted them. The last time he’d had the chance to sing with a string section had been at the end of 1938, right around the time of his arrest, when he’d jumped at the chance to do a once-a-week radio show at the WOR Bamberger station in Newark just because their orchestra had a few fiddles. The job paid all of thirty cents a week—the round-trip train fare between Hoboken and Newark. But they had strings. And he got to sing three songs with those strings behind him on every show. He loved the way they carried his voice, like a vase holding a bouquet of flowers. And now he would have strings again, and he knew just the man to make them sing.

Axel Stordahl was a first-generation Norwegian-American from Staten Island who had joined the Dorsey band as fourth trumpeter in the mid-1930s. He was a less than stellar horn player,
¹
but it quickly became clear that he had a gift for arranging ballads. When Sinatra joined the band, it was as if he and Axel had each found his missing piece. Physically and temperamentally, the two couldn’t have been more different: Stordahl, who was tall, bald, and pale lashed, looked like nothing so much as a Norwegian fisherman. He even wore a fisherman’s cap and smoked a pipe. He was intensely calm, quietly humorous. Sinatra, who liked to nickname people he was fond of, called him Sibelius.

Frank Sinatra, of course, was the opposite of calm. Yet when he sang slow numbers, some sort of ethereal best self took over, and Stordahl’s writing helped him attain it. The pattern had been set on the singer’s first two recordings with Dorsey, “The Sky Fell Down” and “Too
Romantic,” and it had continued on every ballad he’d done (and Buddy Rich had grimaced through) with the band.

The recording session, which took place at RCA’s Los Angeles studios on Monday afternoon, January 19, 1942, went off perfectly. Stordahl conducted. There were fourteen players on the date: four saxes and a guitarist who were part of the Dorsey band, and an oboist, four violinists, a violist, a bass fiddler, a harpist, and a pianist—Skitch Henderson—who were not. Pointedly, there was no drummer. Nor did Dorsey attend the session—even though both of the two singles that resulted (released on RCA’s discount Bluebird label) were labeled “Frank Sinatra with Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra.”

Sinatra had been a wreck in the weeks leading up to the session. Whenever he wasn’t rehearsing, he was fretting about the huge implications of leaving Dorsey. No band singer had ever gone out on his own before (though Dick Haymes, who’d replaced Sinatra with Harry James, was trying some solo club dates in between his gigs as Benny Goodman’s boy singer). Frank was “
almost tubercular,” Nick Sevano said. “He was seeing all kinds of doctors, but he was so nervous that he couldn’t eat. He never finished a meal … He started talking a lot about death and dying … ‘I get the feeling that I’m going to die soon,’ he’d say.”

Yet when he walked into the studio that Monday afternoon, it was with a swagger. Harry Meyerson, the Victor A&R man who ran the session, remembered: “
Frank was not like a band vocalist at all. He came in self-assured, slugging. He knew exactly what he wanted. He knew he was good.”

In fact, it was the bravado that was phony—half-phony, anyway. The fact of the matter was that Frank Sinatra was scared shitless. But (true to a pattern he would maintain for the rest of his life) when he was afraid, he liked to make others jump.

A few days later, when the first pressings of the recordings came in, his fear diminished considerably: they were terrific. Axel Stordahl later
recalled sitting for an entire sunny afternoon in Sinatra’s room at the Hollywood Plaza, listening to the four songs over and over on the singer’s portable record player. “
He was so excited you almost believed he had never recorded before,” Stordahl said. “I think this was a turning point in his career.”

Between the lines, Sibelius sounded a little distanced from the exultation, perhaps a bit regretful at not being able to get out and enjoy that glorious Los Angeles afternoon. That was the way it was, though, when you were close to the drama that was Sinatra: you stayed put in your orchestra seat until the performance was through.

Connie Haines remembered listening to Sinatra’s “Night and Day” with some of the rest of the band, not long afterward: “
Frank sat on a stool. He had on one of those hats Bing Crosby had made popular. It was slouched down over his head at just the right angle, and he had a pipe in his mouth … As the last note ended, we all knew it was a hit. The musicians rose to their feet as if one. They cheered. Then I heard him say, ‘Hey, Bing, old man. Move over. Here I come.’ ”

Bing wasn’t the only one who had to move over. Lana Turner, who Buddy Rich sweetly believed only had eyes for him (“
Lana was the love of Buddy’s life,” said Rich’s sister. “And he was the only one that didn’t know about her”), was methodically sleeping her way up the band’s hierarchy. First came a musician or two, then Dorsey himself, and then the man Turner was canny enough to realize now stood at the pinnacle. Tommy, the anti-sentimentalist, knew all about it: one night he bribed a waiter at the Hollywood Plaza to put his dirty dinner dishes, instead of the romantic supper Sinatra had ordered up for Lana and himself, under the food covers on the room-service cart.