Why Sinatra Matters (12 page)

Sinatra and the Dorsey band were in Hollywood, making a small film called
Ship Ahoy,
when the airplanes of the Japanese Imperial Navy ended the Depression by bombing Pearl Harbor. Twice Sinatra tried to enlist
in the army, and each time he was turned down because of that punctured eardrum. But he was increasingly anxious to go out
on his own, convinced that there would be a huge audience for a new kind of music that went beyond the big band format. It
would be built around the singer, as vigorous as swing but made lusher, more romantic with the use of strings. Sinatra didn’t
want another singer to get there first. Perry Como from the Ted Weems band. Ray Eberle from Glenn Miller. Or even Jack Leonard.

“I didn’t want to be left behind,” he said later. “I wanted to get there first.”

In January 1942, with Dorsey’s reluctant permission, the impatient Sinatra cut four sides for the cut-rate Bluebird Records,
using Axel Stordahl as the arranger and employing strings and woodwinds for the first time. These were the first records made
on his own, without the dominating accompaniment of a star big band. The tunes were “Night and Day,” “The Night We Called
It a Day,” “The Song Is You,” and “The Lamplighter’s Serenade.” The first three would remain part of his repertoire for the
rest of his life. He was exultant. Stordahl remembered sitting with Sinatra after the session, listening to acetate disks:
“He just couldn’t believe his ears. He was so excited.”

Those records enhanced his reputation and found their way to another huge emerging market: jukeboxes. They also increased
his obsessive desire to escape from Dorsey. His 1940 recording with Dorsey of “I’ll Never Smile Again” had spent twelve weeks
as the number one song on the
Billboard
charts, and the same combination had hits with “Stardust,” “Trade Winds,” “Our Love Affair,” “This Love of Mine,” “Dolores,”
and “Oh, Look at Me Now.” But those were all perceived as
Tommy Dorsey
hits, not Frank Sinatra hits. It was the music he made with Stordahl for Brunswick that came closest to what Sinatra wanted
to do. He also knew that he had a real opportunity now to fulfill the boast he’d made after seeing Bing Crosby perform in
1935. That process had already begun. In May 1941
Billboard
named him the nation’s top male vocalist. The same year’s
Down Beat
poll (released in January 1942) also encouraged Sinatra’s ambition; for the first time since 1937 Bing Crosby had lost the
number one position. The new favorite was Frank Sinatra. The time to leave was now.

Finally, after giving a year’s notice, he broke free from Tommy Dorsey in the fall of 1942. He further infuriated Dorsey by
persuading arranger Axel Stordahl to go with him, at a salary of $650 a week, four times what Dorsey was paying him. The departure
was bitter. Dorsey was quick to fire people; he could never forgive people who, in effect, fired him. Before granting him
a release, Dorsey coldly insisted that Sinatra sign a document awarding Dorsey a third of Sinatra’s earnings for the next
ten years, plus an additional 10 percent to Dorsey’s manager. For doing nothing, except letting him go. So much for father
figures. By this point, Sinatra was desperate. He signed. He was on his own at last. At first, it wasn’t all that easy. Bookers
still were more interested in the big swing bands than in solo singers. They didn’t fully realize that Sinatra’s recordings,
played at home, on the radio, or on jukeboxes, were building him a very special audience.

After an impressive engagement at the Mosque Theater in Newark, he was booked into the Paramount as a special added attraction
with the Benny Goodman band. This wasn’t Goodman’s idea; he already featured Peggy Lee as vocalist and Jess Stacy on piano.
He and his band were the stars, and Sinatra was only a kind of dessert when Goodman’s show was over. But Sinatra wanted desperately
to play the Paramount as a solo act, and his instincts were correct. The date was December 30, 1942. He walked out, his suit
baggy on his bony frame, more than a little scared, wearing a bow tie that Nancy had made a size larger to hide his Adam’s
apple. He started singing,
“The bells are ringing, for me and my gal. …”
The rest of the words were lost in the screaming.

O
H
, G
OD
, F
RANK
S
INATRA COULD BE THE SWEETEST, MOST CHARMING MAN IN THE WORLD WHEN HE WAS IN THE MOOD
.

– A
VA
G
ARDNER

I
AM VERY MUCH SURPRISED WHAT I HAVE BEEN READING IN THE NEWSPAPERS BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR DARLING WIFE. REMEMBER YOU HAVE A DECENT
WIFE AND CHILDREN
. Y
OU SHOULD BE VERY HAPPY
. R
EGARDS TO ALL
.

–T
ELEGRAM TO
F
RANK
S
INATRA FROM
W
ILLIE
(W
ILLIE
M
OORE
) M
ORETTI
, 1949

O
NE OF
S
INATRA’S
most mysterious achievements was also the one that allowed him to endure for more than half a century after Harry James heard
him in the Rustic Cabin. It was the nature of his audience. Sinatra started out with far more female than male fans. He ended
up with more male fans. This happens to very few pop singers.

On the simplest level it was connected to the times themselves. For millions of women during the war, Sinatra was the romantic
voice of the American homefront. He was singing to Rosie the Riveter, the symbolic woman who had walked into a war plant and
found employment that was ordinarily reserved for men. She was more than a self-reliant patriot or an earner of a day’s pay
for a day’s work. She was something new, and her newness began to transcend the work itself; Rosie the Riveter was soon asserting
some of the prerogatives of men – smoking cigarettes, drinking when she wanted to drink, right up against the bar, sleeping
around if she wanted to sleep around, or choosing her own erotic fantasies. The music of Frank Sinatra wasn’t used only by
men to seduce women; during the conflict that Studs Terkel called “the good war,” some women used that music, with its expression
of sheer
need,
to seduce the available men. Yes, Sinatra was singing to all those girls whose boyfriends were fighting in Anzio or Guadalcanal;
some maintained a patriotic virginity; others went their own ways. At the same time, he was singing to those women, of whatever
age, who had never managed to find a boyfriend at all and for whom Saturday night truly was the loneliest night of the week.

In his life Sinatra’s sudden, immense fame worked as a kind of aphrodisiac. There were then, as there would be during the
long reign of rock and roll, groupies who would sleep with famous men to add them to scoreboards; the names were like the
downed Messerschmitts or Zeroes painted by pilots on the sides of P-51s during the war. But there were also many less calculating
females suddenly knocking on Frank Sinatra’s door. He certainly wasn’t so perfectly handsome that he seemed unattainable;
he looked to some young women that he’d be as happy to meet them as they would be to meet him.

But the Sinatra fantasy was also safe because its consummation seemed so unlikely. The big reason was that he was also married,
was living after June 1944 in Toluca Lake, California, with his wife, Nancy, his daughter, Nancy, and after September 28,
1944, his son. The boy was named Franklin (for President Roosevelt) Emanuel (for his agent, Manie Sachs) Sinatra. He wasn’t
really a “junior” but would be cursed with the label of Frank Jr. for his entire life. In the wartime years Sinatra played
by the rules of the publicity game; if that was what was required to become a gigantic star, then that was what he would do.
And so he allowed fan magazines to photograph him with his family, first in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey (wearing a Crosby-style
yacht cap, smoking a
pipe,
posing in the bar of his finished basement), and then in the grander circumstances of Los Angeles. His wife, Nancy, was always
there, smiling in an amused way; in public she played the part of the older, wiser woman who was the guarantor of the innocence
of the girls who wanted her husband.

This bow to the conventional pieties became part of the double image that Sinatra was conjuring: the traditionalist, with
house and family,
and
the potential lover, consumed by loneliness and unrequited love. As a singer, he was almost always the lover. In American
music of the time, Bing Crosby was the reigning husband.

He and Crosby met in 1943, liked each other, worked together on radio shows and patriotic rallies. But Crosby successfully
presented a reassuring, almost paternal image to the audience, one whose wild oats had long ago been sown, and kept his personal
life – and whatever private demons he might have had – safely behind his own walls. With Sinatra, public and private seemed
to merge, and the result was a disturbing ambiguity. Yes, he had a wife and children and a house; but in the music he professed
a corrosive emptiness, an almost grieving personal unhappiness. The risk attached to his kind of singing was that it promised
authenticity of emotion instead of its blithe dismissal or the empty technique of the virtuoso. His singing demanded to be
felt, not admired. It always revealed more than it concealed. Unlike the Crosby persona, Sinatra could not laugh off his losses.
That transparency was essential to his music. But it didn’t make real life easier for him.

While Sinatra’s career was taking off after 1943, with hit records, radio shows, and movie contracts, rumors about his private
life started finding their way into gossip columns. He was spotted with this starlet or that woman; on the road he seldom
slept alone. Or so the rumors said. Some were certainly true. “You’re a young guy,” he said once, in another context. “You
don’t say three Hail Marys and pray for sleep.” Sex, of course, was also about power. Young women could use sex to impose
fleeting power over the famous young man; Sinatra, the new kid in town, could sleep with Hollywood movie stars to prove to
himself that he had true power and would never end up back in Hoboken. But he also was learning that even after the most casual
feasts, someone presents you with the bill.

Very early he came up against the terrible scrutiny that comes with fame – and he didn’t like it at all. It was one thing
for an unknown Sinatra to live in Hoboken and have a fling in Englewood; nobody would ever know, except the principals. It
was different for a star. Someone was always watching. Years later Sinatra was still struggling with the velvet prison of
fame.

“It just changes everything,” he said. “You can’t go to a beach. You can’t walk into a movie. You can’t stand on a corner
and eat a hot dog. You want the fame but, baby, you pay a price.”

During the war, rumors of Sinatra’s carousing didn’t matter to the young women in the audience. If Sinatra was indeed doing
what he was accused of, the female audience wasn’t surprised. The subtext of his music suggested that he didn’t feel complete
in his personal life; in a complicated way, these young fans also wanted the same chance that the other women seemed to be
having. Most didn’t identify with Nancy; they envied her, even honored her, but they were more like the other women, desiring
a night with Frank Sinatra with no illusions about living happily ever after. Everywhere on earth, wartime is a bad time for
traditional values. When Sinatra did go home to Nancy, there were often angry confrontations, abrupt denials or dismissals,
slammed doors. Sinatra didn’t handle any of this well. It was one thing to create romantic fantasies for strangers; it was
quite another to deal directly with a humiliated wife. The emerging truth was quite unremarkable: like many other young men,
Frank Sinatra was a good father and a poor husband.

In many ways he was a very lucky American. Timing is everything, in music and life. His career timing had been perfect. He
was also lucky to have been declared 4-F. But his good fortune during the war hurt him when it was over. Absorbed with his
expanding career, and perhaps fearful of his reception among the GIs, Sinatra didn’t make a USO tour until after the war in
Europe ended on May 8, 1945. He was accompanied on the six-week tour by comedian Phil Silvers (with whom he had written “Nancy
(with the Laughing Face)” as a birthday present for his daughter on her fourth birthday). On the long transatlantic journey
to Europe, Sinatra was anxious. There had been predictions that the soldiers might be hostile, might throw eggs or tomatoes
at the man who was making their girlfriends and sisters swoon while GIs were fighting the war. That didn’t happen. With shrewd
advice from Silvers, Sinatra cast himself as a skinny underdog, an ordinary guy much like GI Joe. He made fun of himself and
his image. He charmed the grizzled young veterans, expressed his gratitude to them, identified with them, and soon had them
identifying with him. The press agents sighed in relief; so did Sinatra. Everything had gone smoothly. He’d even visited Italy
and had met the Pope.