Frank: The Voice (24 page)

Frank Cooper, the agent to whom Manie Sacks had sent Sinatra, took one look at that Faustian contract and blanched. Not only would the singer be forking over 43.3 percent to Dorsey and Vannerson, but he’d also have to pay
Cooper’s
10 percent. Plus income tax.

Sinatra smiled at the poor, sputtering mortal. “
Don’t worry,” he told Cooper. “I’m not paying him a quarter.” Meaning Dorsey.

Dolly’s son had learned his lessons well.

Sinatra made his last radio broadcast with the Dorsey band on September 3, at the Circle Theater in Indianapolis. On the intro to “The Song Is You,” you can sense the chaos under Tommy’s steely-smooth, slickly cadenced patter. “
After tonight,” the bandleader told the Hoosier audience, “he’s going to be strictly on his own. And Frank, I want to tell you that everyone in the band wishes you the best of luck.”

“Thanks, Mac,” Sinatra says, using the nickname Jimmy Dorsey had given his brother when the two were boys. The singer’s voice sounds very young, very Hoboken, and—surprisingly—soft with emotion. “I’d like to say that I’m gonna miss all you guys after kickin’ around for three years. And ladies and gentlemen, I’d like you to meet the boy who’s gonna take my place as the vocalist with Tommy and the band—he’s a fine guy, a wunnerful singer, and he was good enough for Harry James and Benny Goodman, and—that’s really sayin’ plenty. Folks, I’d like you to meet Dick Haymes.”

After a nice round of applause, Haymes pipes up: “
Well, Frank, I don’t know if anyone can really take your place with this band. But I’m gonna be in there tryin’. You can bet on that. As for you, well, I know that you’ll be knockin’ ’em dead on your own hook.”

Then it’s almost as if Dick Haymes actually gets the hook—Dorsey jumps right back in, just about cutting him off: “I agree with you there, Dick, and thanks a lot, Dick Haymes—Frank, before you hit the road, how ’bout one more song just for—auld lang syne.”

“That’s all right with me, Tom,” Sinatra says. “Gimme the beat on our arrangement of ‘The Song Is You,’ and I’ll see what I can do with it.”

It’s all old-style showbiz corn, phony modesty an inch thick, but when Sinatra shifts from those Hoboken street tones to the first few bars of the Kern and Hammerstein masterpiece, you do a double take:
the Voice is that rich, gorgeous, and expressive.
⁴
Look out world, here I come
, is the clear message—along with a quick
Good luck, kiddo
to Dick Haymes. And a quick thumb of the nose to Tommy Dorsey.

The way he ends the song—an ethereal falsetto high F—has an infinitely vulnerable sound: as always, his emotions were powerful and complicated. Dorsey told a magazine writer years later that at a party backstage after the show, Sinatra “
was literally crying on my shoulder … depressed about what would happen to his career.” Depressed? Good and scared was more like it. He had Tommy’s seventeen grand in his pocket, but that would burn fast, especially with the way he spent. (He had just put down a payment on his first house, a wood-frame Cape with a front porch, in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey.) What he didn’t have were bookings. Cooper had managed to land him a bit part singing one number, “Night and Day,” in a Columbia B picture,
Reveille with Beverly
, and Sacks had wangled him a spot on a CBS radio show in New York. Period. Besides that, it was going to be strictly Sit and Wait.

He was terribly frightened. Excited, too—he believed in his luck. But some part of him always felt like that kid in bed in the dark on Garden Street, listening through the wall as his mother rattled on and on and his old man just lay there, grunting.

As for the Sentimental Gentleman of Swing, Tommy Dorsey drank a good bit backstage at the Circle Theater the night of that final broadcast, and liquor always put a fine edge on his cold Irish anger. When Sinatra cried on his shoulder, Dorsey had seven words for him.

“
I hope you fall on your ass,” the bandleader said.

At first it seemed that was exactly what was going to happen. After returning from Los Angeles (where Frank had stopped by the NBC radio studios, hat in hand, to ask for a job as staff singer that the network did not vouchsafe to give him), Frank got to spend a lot of time around the new house, helping Nancy paint and paper and fuss over
their little girl, and she got to see what kind of good mood
that
put him in. Meanwhile, Frank Cooper was working hard to get his client a job, any job—against the opposition of many who felt that a solo singer, even Sinatra, couldn’t draw an audience without a big band behind him.

It’s hard to imagine in this age of instant information, but fame in those days was a far more parochial phenomenon than it is now. Frank Sinatra was a name to conjure with among the kids, the jitterbugs, the record-buying big-band fans; but to much of America, where singers were concerned, it was Crosby, period. Sinatra was really just catching on.

His own retrospective assessment of his situation in the fall of 1942 may have been a little bleaker than was actually the case—he always did like to buff his story a bit. “
I was now free,” he told Sidney Zion at the Yale Law School talk. “I had no ties with anybody. I didn’t even have an agent to represent me. [Frank Cooper was very much alive when Sinatra—who in his later years would also sometimes claim never to have had a voice lesson—made this astounding statement.] I was living in Hasbrouck Heights at the time, and I found out that there was a theater [nearby] where they had vaudeville, and I went around, spoke to the manager, and I said, ‘I’d like to play here for a couple of nights, maybe a weekend.’ He said okay. So I played there for a week, Tuesday through Sunday. I found out later that each manager or booker from the theaters in New York—the Roxy, the Strand, the Loew’s State, the Paramount, the Capitol Theater—sent their scouts over to see what all the noise was about.”

In fact, Sinatra had not one but two agents working for him. Frank Cooper now joined forces with a man named Harry Romm—whose not inconsiderable claim to fame was having put together the Three Stooges—to try to browbeat Bob Weitman, the manager of the Paramount, into booking Sinatra. In a classic case of How Quickly They Forget, Weitman—who had seen the girls go ape for Frankie in his theater, had seen them camp out for five or six shows, refusing to go
home—was skeptically disposed. It was one thing, he thought, when you had the matchless presence of Dorsey, the blazing drums of Buddy Rich, and the heavenly harmonies of the Pied Pipers all together on that gigantic elevator stage. But could bony little Sinatra, all by his lonesome, put four thousand asses in the seats?

Cooper and Romm finally hit on a clever ploy: they prevailed upon Weitman to attend an early-December Sinatra performance at the Mosque Theatre in Newark. What Weitman didn’t realize was that Newark was Sinatra’s backyard. If ever Frank owned an audience, this was it. The whole thing was strictly a setup. Years afterward, Weitman recalled sitting and watching in awe as “
this skinny kid walks out on the stage. He was not much older than the kids in the seats. He looked like he still had milk on his chin. As soon as they saw him, the kids went crazy. And when he started to sing they stood up and yelled and moaned and carried on until I thought—excuse the expression—his pants had fallen down.”

It was December 12, 1942: Sinatra’s twenty-seventh birthday. An auspicious omen. Weitman phoned him at home that night.
“He said, ‘What are you doing New Year’s Eve?’ ” Sinatra recalled. “I said, ‘Not a thing. I can’t even get booked anywhere.’ Weitman said, ‘I’d like you to open at the joint,’ as he used to call it. He said, ‘You’ve got Benny Goodman’s Orchestra and a Crosby picture.’ I fell right on my butt.”

The Crosby picture was
Star Spangled Rhythm
, a patriotic musical starring not only Bing but also Bob Hope, Dorothy Lamour, Ray Milland, Paulette Goddard, and a few dozen other of the studio’s stars, all playing themselves. And Benny Goodman was, of course, Benny Goodman: a godlike bandleader and instrumentalist at least on a par with Dorsey.
⁵

“In those days,” Sinatra said, “they called you an ‘extra added attraction.’ I went to rehearsal at seven-thirty in the morning, and I looked at the marquee, and it said, ‘Extra added attraction, Frank Sinatra,’ and I said, ‘Wow! Wow!’ ”

Wow
was not what Jack Benny (who was emceeing the show) said.
Such was the narrowness of Sinatra’s renown at that point that the comedian had never heard of him. Benny recalled:

Bob Weitman said, “
There were about five thousand people in the theater at the time, and all five thousand were of one voice, ‘F-R-A-N-K-I-E-E-E-E-E!’ The young, the old—as one person—got up and danced in the aisles and jumped on the stage. The loge and the
balcony swayed. One of the managers came over to me and said, ‘The balcony is rocking—what do we do?’ ”

Standing on the stage, his back to the audience as he prepared to conduct his band, Benny Goodman had a different reaction as the huge sound burst forth.

“
What the fuck was that?” he said.

Benny Goodman and Frank, Los Angeles, early forties.
(photo credit 10.2)