Frank: The Voice (7 page)

And maybe if the right someone heard him on the air, big things would happen.

Dolly, touched by his initiative, leaned hard on Joseph Samperi, the owner of the Union Club, a big, classy nightspot on Hudson Street, to give her son a regular singing job. Samperi, owing her a favor or two, relented. For a while, Frankie crooned there five nights a week, but he was more impatient than grateful: The place lacked what the top clubs had then, a telephone-wire hookup to a New York radio station. None of the Jersey couples out on that dance floor was in a position to advance his career.

Three of the musicians Frankie pestered that spring had a much better gig. They were a singing trio, Italian boys known all too presciently as the Three Flashes: Fred Tamburro, James “Skelly”
Petrozelli, and Pat Principe were their names. Lost to history except as Sinatra witnesses. For a minute and a half in the mid-1930s they were hot stuff. Warm, anyway. Every weekend the Flashes traveled up the road to Englewood Cliffs, just north of the spanking-new George Washington Bridge, to perform with Harold Arden and His Orchestra at a western-style nightclub on the Palisades called the Rustic Cabin. The Cabin didn’t pay much, but what it did have was a wire hookup to WNEW, which—with its live remote broadcasts from New York–area nightclubs, as well as Martin Block’s
Make-Believe Ballroom—
was, by its own admission, “
The NEWest Thing in Radio!”
⁶
For their gigs, the Flashes borrowed a car or, more frequently, hitched a ride with an indulgent musician. Still, indulgence had a way of wearing thin. Once or twice they’d had to take a cab all the way from Hoboken, eating up the evening’s profits. With what they were making, it would be a long time before any of them could afford wheels of his own.

Then came salvation, in the form of this pesky runt.

Little Frankie wanted in the worst way to become the fourth Flash. Sure—like that was about to happen. But when it turned out that Frankie Boy had a green Chrysler convertible, the Flashes got a lot more encouraging.

Watch and learn. Soak it all in for a little while.

He saw it and he wanted it: saw himself, so clearly, standing center stage in the Cabin, the mike beaming his voice to millions of people out in the night, including, of course, People Who Mattered.

Then a remarkable thing happened.

One Friday night while the Flashes were taking five, a sharply dressed fellow came up and handed them a business card. The card belonged to Major Bowes, who, with his
Original Amateur Hour—
the
American Idol
of the day—was the hottest thing on radio, all over the country, not just in New York. The Major was going to shoot some movie shorts, at the Biograph Studios in the Bronx, and he wanted the Flashes, who had cute, guinea-boy face appeal (not that he would have put it in precisely those terms to their faces
⁷
), to appear in one or two.

They slapped each other on the back in the parking lot. Frankie watched enviously, his pulse racing. This was It.

He piped up and asked them to give him a shot.

They looked at each other. Well, they needed a ride home, anyway. They’d think about it.

He knew how long they’d think about it.

He told Dolly the next morning that he wanted this more than anything he’d ever wanted before. Anything.

And what did the fucking no-good bastards tell him?

They told him they’d think about it.

Dolly marched. The Tamburros—eight kids and two exhausted, non-English-speaking parents—lived in a railroad flat on Adams Street in Little Italy. Freddie, with his crazy singing, was kicking a little money into the family till. Dolly paid Mr. and Mrs. T. a visit, to make sure they fully understood the value of her good works—translation, authoritative intercession with landlords, school officials, cops, and so on. Except that this time it wasn’t a Democratic vote she was seeking.

Frankie was in.

Every day for a week, grinning at the wheel of the Chrysler, he drove his fellow Flashes over the great shining bridge (just four years old; an architectural marvel) to Tremont Avenue in the Bronx, home of Biograph. The movie shorts in question—it was an unapologetic era—were a filmed minstrel show. Every day Frankie painted on blackface and big white lips and donned a top hat. He didn’t sing, but he acted (playing a waiter), and
he was in the movies!

But that was only the beginning. After seeing the footage, the Major himself sent word up to the Bronx: he wanted to audition the Flashes for his nationally broadcast radio show.

Tamby, Skelly, and Pat talked among themselves, grumbled. They wanted in the worst way to shake this superfluous banana off the tree. Across the studio floor, Frankie got a gander at the confab, knew at once what was going on.

This time Dolly didn’t have to march. She sent word via drugstore
telephone to a friend on Adams Street, who passed the word to the phone-less Tamburros, in Mezzogiorno dialect:
Dolly Sinatra would be very disappointed if her son were not included in the audition for the great Major Bowes
. No visit necessary this time; her absence as effective as her presence.

And so the four of them gathered, wearing budget-busting white suits with black silk pocket squares, in Major Bowes’s midtown office, in—of course—the Chrysler Building. As they cooled their heels nervously in the waiting room, the door popped open, startling them all. It was the Major himself, gray haired and dyspeptic, with a big red nose and a square jaw and a dark three-piece suit like a senator in the movies. Like W. C. Fields without a sense of humor. His eyes were old and watery; a faint distillery smell hung about him.

They jumped to their feet, shook his hand.

And what did the boys call themselves again?

The Thr——uh, Four Flashes.

Hmm.

They looked at each other while he stroked his chin. And shook his head. His personality, all business, was not what you’d call electric. But he was
Major Bowes
.

The Four Flashes sounded like the Hot Flashes. Or the Four-Flushers. Where were they from?

Thus the freshly christened Hoboken Four (though tiny Patty Principe was technically from West New York) filed into Bowes’s office and cleared their throats to sing. Their audition piece was “The Curse of an Aching Heart,” a syrupy, barbershop relic from 1913.
⁸
The Major liked them but hated the song.

He’d put them on. But they’d need something more up-to-date. Something to lift the hearts of Mr. and Mrs. America.

When they reconvened, Frankie pulled out his ace in the hole, sheet music for “Shine,” a big hit for Bing Crosby and the Mills Brothers a couple of years earlier. It was a minstrel song, all about curly hair and pearly teeth and shiny shoes and not much else, an ideal vehicle
for the wildly talented, instrument-imitating (and African-American) Millses, who pumped along in close-harmony background while Bing led, then scatted his fool head off. A white man scatting!

Frankie told his fellow Flashes that he could do Bing’s part.

The other three looked at each other. He had them over a barrel and they knew it. He had the sheet music and the car and he could sing. The worm had officially turned.

On September 8, 1935, a Sunday evening, Frankie stood in the wings of the Capitol Theater at Fifty-first and Broadway with the other former Flashes, literally unable to stop his knees from shaking. It was the second-largest theater in the entire world, at fifty-three hundred seats—five aisles in the orchestra, an ocean of faces out there. The fact that the Roxy, a block south, was a few hundred seats bigger was no consolation. Frankie’s nerves were like nothing he had ever felt before. Even the stolid Major, he’d noticed before the show, was giving off an extra-strong whiskey odor.

But once the show began, Major Edward Bowes strode out to the center of the stage as if he owned the place (which, in point of fact, he did), took his position beside the big gong,
⁹
and—as the buzzing crowd obediently went dead silent—spoke firmly into the microphone. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the
Original Amateur Hour
.” He sounded like a tired old insurance salesman, but—Frankie peeped out through a crack in the curtain—the audience gazed up at him as if he were Jesus Christ himself. It hit him: Every goddamn sound that went into that big square mike was emanating out to the whole goddamn country. And half the people in the goddamn country wanted to be where he was right now. When their turn came, Frankie’s stomach rose up and fluttered away like a little bird. He wanted to flee, but didn’t think his legs would carry him.

“…  Hoboken Four, singing and dancing fools,” the Major announced.

A little wise guy they’d met before the show, his name lost to history, piped up from the wings: Why did the Major call them fools?

The sour-faced Bowes actually gave a half smile. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess ’cause they’re so happy.”

And with that as their cue, Fred, Skelly, and Pat skipped out onto the giant stage like schoolboys on holiday, Frankie trying his best to walk along behind them.

The Major greeted them. Why not introduce themselves and tell the folks where they worked? This last, of course, was key to establishing their amateur status. Frankie saw Tamby taking charge, doing all the talking, but didn’t hear the words that were coming out. All he was aware of was the roar of blood in his ears and the voice in his head:
What, in Christ’s name, could Tamby say about
him?

Nothing, as it turned out. After a deadly second of dead air, suddenly ten thousand eyes were staring at little Frank Sinatra.

“What about him?” the Major said.

“
Oh, he never worked a day in his life,” Tamby said.

The Hoboken Four on Major Bowes’s
Original Amateur Hour
, circa 1935. Left to right: Fred Tamburro, Pat Principe, Bowes, “Skelly” Petrozelli, Frank.
(photo credit 4.1)

A
nd then they sang, thank God, for that was one thing Frank knew how to do. Or thought he did: while the other three tootled along, doing their best Mills Brothers imitation, Frankie, trying to keep the smile fixed on his lips, jumped in with the nearest thing to Bing’s improvising he could muster:

And yet, more clearly than ever, he realized that what Crosby made sound like falling off a log was in fact nigh unto unattainable: the absolute ease and richness of the voice, the effortless skipping around the beat, never ever putting a foot wrong.

It simply wasn’t Frank. Ease wasn’t his to feel or feign; singing was an urgent matter. A personal matter. Vocalizing in chorus was possible, though not desirable. Skipping around the beat was somebody else’s idea of fun.

He did his best.

Which, miraculously, was all right. The gong never sounded! And when the four of them finally finished, the gigantic beast out in the dark—ten thousand eyes, ears, hands—exploded with delight, sending the needle on the big onstage applause meter far over to the right and keeping it there. The Major looked pleased. He kept nodding, like the old snake-oil salesman he was. These fellows had “
walked right into the hearts of their audience.”