Frank: The Voice (23 page)

So much for Alora Gooding.
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The story of Frank Sinatra’s life is one of continual shedding, both of artistic identities and of associates and intimates who had outlived
their usefulness. The saga of his disentanglement from one of his most powerful relationships, his deep emotional and artistic bond with Tommy Dorsey, is complex and bewildering. Out of forgetfulness, self-protection, and self-mythification, Sinatra sowed no small amount of the confusion himself. When a man he admired, Sidney Zion, was bold enough to ask him, in front of an audience at Yale Law School, about the fabled role of organized crime in the tale, Sinatra parried with a genteel vagueness that befitted the surroundings—and that let himself more or less completely off the hook.

“
Now, in the story that is told in
The Godfather …
about how you happened to get let out of the contract of Mr. Dorsey …, somebody came there and put a gun at his head or whatever,” Mr. Zion said. “There’s been a million stories. I heard one the other day from a guy who said …, ‘It wasn’t the Italians, the Jews did it, and they put a trombone down Harry James’s throat.’ I said, ‘Are you sure it was a trombone or a trumpet down Harry James’s throat?’ So he had that a little wrong. But there’s been a lot of stories about this, made famous through the years, and I think it would be interesting to set it straight.”

Sinatra, seventy and dignified now, smiled in a distinguished way and proceeded to set the record anything but straight. “Well, it’s quite simple, really,” he said. (It was anything but.) “It got so blown out of proportion that it took a long time to clarify it … I’ll tell you here now, for your edification, as to what happened with it—if it’s important at all. Really, it’s passé, it’s so old now.”

Shut up, he explained
.

“The reason I wanted to leave the orchestra,” he continued, “was because Crosby was number one, way up on top of the pile, and in the field … were some awfully good singers with the orchestras. Bob Eberly with Jimmy Dorsey’s Orchestra was a fabulous vocalist. Mr. Como was with Ted Weems, and he still is such a wonderful singer. I thought if I don’t make a move out of this band and try to do it on my own soon, one of those guys will do it, and I’ll have to fight all three of them, from Crosby all the way down to the other two, to get a position. So I took a shot and I gave Mr. Dorsey one year’s notice. It was in
September whatever year. I said, ‘I’m going to leave the band one year from that day.’ Beyond that year, I had another six months to do in the contract. He said, ‘Sure.’ That’s all he said, was ‘Sure.’ ”

Sure.

In fact, Mr. Sinatra gave Mr. Dorsey his notice in February 1942, with ten months left to run on the three-year contract he’d signed in January 1940, and he would continue to sing with the Dorsey band for just seven of those months, and it is quite unlikely that Tommy Dorsey responded to this highly unwelcome news with a simple “Sure.”

We have this last from no less an authority than Art Linkletter—yes, the Art Linkletter of 1950s afternoon-television fame, who as a young reporter in February 1942 went backstage at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Theatre to interview Tommy Dorsey, and found that Sinatra had just given notice, and that Dorsey was not happy. “
He’s such a damn fool,” the bandleader vented to the kid journalist. “He’s a great singer, but you know, you can’t make it without a band … Does he think he can go out on his own, as good as he is? It upsets me because he’s an important part of our band.”

What Dorsey wouldn’t say—or couldn’t bring himself to say—was how betrayed he felt by Sinatra. This was a boy he had taught his deepest art, a boy he had elevated to national fame! A boy who had sat up till all hours playing cards with him … one who, despite the mere ten years’ difference between their ages, had been like a son to him—and who had treated him, in many ways, like a father. And now, inevitably, the youth was leaving the nest. The bandleader was a tightly wound, thickly self-protected man, one who nursed his hurts deep in the sub-basement of his soul, and this was a wound that would stay with him till the end of his days.

Sinatra himself hadn’t come to his decision lightly. Where his career was concerned, he never did anything lightly. He tormented Sevano and Sanicola—when he wasn’t complaining of hypochondriacal symptoms, he was telling his minions, “
I gotta do it, I gotta do it.” Sevano recalled: “He kept telling me, ‘I gotta do it before Bob Eberly does it.’

“He was like a Mack truck going one hundred miles an hour without brakes,” Sevano said. “He had me working around the clock. ‘Call Frank Cooper [an agent at the management company General Amusement Corporation, recommended by Manie Sacks]. Do it now. Don’t wait until tomorrow … Send my publicity photos to Walter Winchell. Get my records to the Lucky Strike
Hit Parade
.’ ”

Those he couldn’t order around, he seduced. “
I was sitting with Sinatra, and we were talking,” Sammy Cahn remembered. “And he says, ‘I’m going to be the world’s greatest singer.’ And I looked at him, and I’ll never forget it, I said, ‘There’s no doubt in my mind. You are the world’s greatest singer.’ He said, ‘Do you mean it?’ I said, ‘What do you mean, do I mean it? You’re the best. You’re the best. There’s nobody better than you. You’re the best.’ ”

This was a complicated moment, an intricate dance between two talented men. In part Cahn was being obsequious: as a lyricist, he had a career to further, and he correctly sensed that Sinatra could be an important part of it. But as a friend, he was also being utterly honest: Sinatra was the best.

Was Sinatra
—Do you mean it?—
being coy? Of course he was. He knew exactly how good he was.

But as always, the one who understood Frank Sinatra most deeply was his chief victim and champion, the girl who had known him when. “
Tommy was a good teacher because he had a great band, and he had wonderful vocalists with him, and they were great together,” Nancy Barbato Sinatra said. “But without Tommy I know it still would have happened … Frank had a master plan for himself, and he worked at getting there. I think he always had it in the back of his mind that this was a stepping stone.”

As was she. As was almost everyone with whom Sinatra ever had a significant relationship. He would step on or over everyone in his path until he grasped the brass ring. The master plan for himself was exactly that: for himself. Alone.

His master plan now included Manie Sacks of Columbia, who had
formally agreed to sign Sinatra the moment he was legally divorced from Dorsey and RCA.

In the months after Sinatra gave notice, Tommy Dorsey went through the classic five stages of grief. There was denial, anger, bargaining, depression—and eventually acceptance, but only after ferocious resistance (on Dorsey’s part), legal maneuvering (on both sides), and the possible introduction (by parties unknown) of a firearm.

In the meantime, Sinatra worked at a frenetic pace for Dorsey in the spring and summer of 1942. From California, the band one-nighted its way back east and opened a monthlong stand at the New York Paramount on April Fools’ Day. Dorsey was at the peak of his powers and popularity: he wanted to milk it for all it was worth. (And with the IRS and his soon-to-be ex on his case, he badly needed the money.) If Sinatra stole the show, that was all right—it just meant more dough in Tommy’s pocket. Moreover, if Sinatra really was going to leave, Dorsey wanted to squeeze as much work out of him as possible.

In advance of a rumored American Federation of Musicians strike over the summer, Dorsey also wanted to record as much as possible, to stockpile sides that could be released if there was a strike. Sinatra was happy to comply: he knew his freedom was imminent.

With the war raging in Europe and the Pacific (and not going well at first), millions of young men, including dozens of musicians, were joining up.
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One of them was Artie Shaw, who’d enlisted with the Coast Guard in early 1942, and had promptly bequeathed his entire string section, eight players in all, to Dorsey. Buddy Rich was disgusted; Sinatra, delighted. The poignancy of string-backed ballads like “Just as Though You Were Here,” “There Are Such Things,” and “In the Blue of Evening” fit the country’s anxious mood—and the singer’s career plans—perfectly. It was as if Dorsey were rehearsing Frank for the next stage in his professional life.

Just as though you were here
. (“
I’ll wake each morning, and I’ll
promise to laugh/I’ll say good morning to your old photograph.”) Now and then that spring, Frank popped up at home—new, nicer digs in a two-family house on Bergen Avenue in Jersey City—to pay a visit to two-year-old Nancy and Big Nancy, who was taking off the weight and looking at him hopefully. He tried to summon up some of the ardor he’d once felt, then gave her a good-bye peck on the cheek: he had places to go.

Many years later, Nancy junior would remember the civil-defense blackouts of 1942: “
The curtains drawn. The lights turned off. And Mom and I sitting on the floor, holding each other in the darkness. Daddy was busy, I guess. He was, it seemed, a voice on the radio most of the time, or a picture in the newspaper … a figure composed of a bow tie and two black patent leather shoes, who was always going away.”

After another eight-week run at the Astor roof in May and June (the prom girls wailing around the bandstand, a few getting lucky afterward), the band went back on the road. In Chicago, in July, Sinatra, feeling expansive, asked Dorsey if he wanted help finding a new singer. Frank mentioned as a possibility—poetic justice—his replacement with Harry James’s Music Makers, Dick Haymes. Haymes was a good-looking blond guy who’d gone to Hollywood to try to break into pictures, and wound up singing instead. He had a romantic light baritone, and the girls loved him—but not the way they loved Sinatra. Haymes made them sigh; Sinatra made them nuts.

Despite the fact that he’d already given his notice, the suggestion did not go down well. “[Tommy] said, ‘No no no, you’re not going to leave this band,’ ” Sinatra recalled. “ ‘Not as easy as you think you are.’ Well, words began to be back-and-forth, and finally he made it very difficult—and I left the band anyway.”

Thus began the anger phase. Dorsey, who was drinking heavily that summer (he’d inaugurated the Astor roof engagement by getting into a boozy backstage fistfight with his brother Jimmy), promptly stopped speaking to Sinatra, and didn’t start again until the end of August,
when it became clear that the singer was going to leave no matter what. Acceptance had finally set in. “
Let him go,” Dorsey said with a shrug. “Might be the best thing for me.”

What definitely wasn’t the best thing for the bandleader was that Sinatra had yanked Axel Stordahl right out from under him, making the arranger an offer he couldn’t possibly refuse: $650 a month, five times what Tommy was paying him. It was money Sinatra didn’t have—yet—but it was a brilliant move: he knew old Sibelius could make him sound even better than he already did. Dorsey was furious, but there was nothing he could do: he had been thoroughly out-flanked.

The bargaining then—if you could call it that. What happened next was a Mephistophelian sit-down between the singer and Dorsey and Dorsey’s agent Leonard Vannerson, a meeting at which each side felt, not quite accurately, that it was holding a hand full of aces. In exchange for Sinatra’s release, plus an advance of $17,000 (at least $225,000 today) to start his solo career, Dorsey and Vannerson had Frank sign a piece of paper—one can almost smell the sulfurous fumes rising from it—that made Dorsey his manager, and guaranteed not just a 10 percent agent’s fee to Vannerson but also 33.3 percent of Sinatra’s gross earnings to Tommy, either (by some accounts) in perpetuity or for the next ten years. The truth of the matter is that in those days, ten years might as well have been perpetuity. A singer going out on his own in 1942 might as well have been sailing over the edge of the earth in 1492. And there was a war on! God knew where anyone would be after all that time—ten years meant Frank Sinatra would still be performing in
 … 1952
. Who could imagine such a thing?