Sinatra

by Anthony Summers

  On September 1, 1940, Down Beat reported that Rich had been beaten up in the street by two men, sustaining injuries that left his face “as if it had been smashed in with a shovel.” The assailants had been total strangers to Rich, according to his biographer Mel Tormé, and they had stolen nothing. The beating they administered, Tormé wrote, was “coldly efficient and professional.”

  Rich asked Frank if he was behind the attack. Frank hesitated, then confessed that “he had asked a favor of a couple of Hoboken guys.” Even after that admission, amazingly, the pair later made up. When Rich wanted to form his own band, Frank lent him a large sum of money. They performed together far into the future, and Frank helped when Rich was seriously ill. The relationship encapsulated the extreme manifestations of Sinatra’s character—from violent retaliation to lavish generosity. “He’s the most fascinating man in the world,” Tommy Dorsey famously remarked, “but don’t stick your hand in the cage.”

  By early 1941, the bandleader’s relations with Sinatra were deteriorating. Frank’s tantrums and moodiness had become a nuisance to Dorsey, who himself had a short fuse. He sent Frank home the night he threw the jug at Rich. The band could function without a singer, he grumbled, but not without a drummer. He fired Frank when he made life unpleasant for Connie Haines, only to rehire him soon afterward. A real rift was opening up between the two men, one that deepened in proportion to Frank’s success. Dorsey advance man “Bullets” Durgom, whose job it was to drum up interest at radio stations, found that “all they wanted to hear about was Frank.” “This boy’s going to be big,” he told a reporter, “if Tommy doesn’t kill him first. Tommy doesn’t like Frank stealing the show—and he doesn’t like people who are temperamental like himself.”

  Dorsey liked regimentation in his musicians—he outfitted the band in uniforms—and that did not suit Frank. The bandleader deplored the little curl on the forehead that Frank affected, and once ordered him to leave the stage and “go and comb your goddamn hair.” Each night, like his fellow “vocalists,” Frank had to sit with his arms folded until Dorsey signaled him to center stage. “We were like puppets,” he remembered, “and Tommy was the guy who pulled the strings.” Frank put up with working in Dorsey’s shadow for many months, but he was restless. In the fall of 1941, by his account, he gave Dorsey a year’s notice. “Tommy was very angry,” he said, “refused to speak to me for months.” Dorsey raised Frank’s pay to $250 a month, but word spread in music circles that Frank might go “on strike.”

  In January 1942, Dorsey allowed Frank to record as a soloist. This was a major step forward, and he rehearsed intensively before the session at a Los Angeles studio. “It was a real nervous moment,” recalled Dorsey arranger Axel Stordahl. “Frank didn’t know what would happen—whether he would sell alone on a label. I’ll never forget when we got the dubs [early copies]. We sat there in Frank’s room in the Hollywood Plaza Hotel listening to them over and over. This was a turning point in his career.”

  Connie Haines recalled the scene as the band heard the first cut. “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. I watched. . . . Little involuntary movements of his shoulders, eyes, fingers. . . . 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.’ ”

  The four songs Frank had recorded at the first solo session—“Night and Day,” “The Night We Called It a Day,” “The Song Is You,” and “The Lamplighter’s Serenade”—were well received. He continued to top popularity polls. At concerts crowds insisted on encore after encore. Dorsey reportedly raised his salary to $400 a week ($4,500 today).

  Yet Frank was still miserable, a bundle of nerves. He picked at his food, flitted from doctor to doctor. “He started talking about death and dying,” Nick Sevano recalled. “He’d tell me he didn’t think he’d live long.” Frank was in this state, he told Sevano and Sanicola, because he felt he had to leave Dorsey or be overtaken by other singers.

  When Frank again told Dorsey he planned to quit soon, the bandleader reacted first with disbelief, then with a plea to stay on, then with anger. Frank, he insisted, had to stay on until the end of his contract— two more years. In the hope that Dorsey would give up on him, Frank began showing up late for broadcasts and walking out of recording sessions. It did not work.

  Ever more desperate, Frank worked through the summer of 1942 on a breakneck schedule that took the band to New York, Montreal, Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, and on to the Midwest. In Washington, he told Dorsey once and for all that he was leaving. The bandleader had him sign a severance agreement, then reportedly shrugged, “Let him go. Might be the best thing for me.”

  Frank sang with the band for the last time on September 10, 1942, in Minneapolis. As the drinks flowed after the show, according to Dorsey, Frank “was literally crying on my shoulder . . . depressed about what would happen to his career.” Three months short of his twenty-seventh birthday, after nearly three years with the country’s top band, he was on his own—but with horrendous strings attached.

  “You’re not gonna leave this band as easy as you think you are,” Dorsey had said. Frank had ignored the stern clauses in the document that set him free. Under the terms of the release, Frank agreed to pay a third of all future earnings over $100 a week to Dorsey for the next ten years. Another 10 percent “off the top” was to go to Dorsey’s manager. These deductions were to be made before expenses and taxes. It is possible, moreover, that the severance deal applied not for ten years but for an unlimited period of time. (Frank also had to pay 10 percent of all his earnings to the agent he had taken on to represent him as a solo performer.)

  The following year, when the dollars were rolling in, Frank told the press it was “wrong for anybody to own a piece of him.” He would dismiss the Dorsey severance deal as having been just a “ratty piece of paper.” When he failed to honor the agreement, Dorsey and his manager sued. Then suddenly, two days after the Dorsey suit had been filed in California, it was settled out of court.

  “I hired a couple of lawyers to get me out of it,” Frank said a decade later. “They spoke to Dorsey, but he refused to budge. Finally I was referred to a noted theatrical attorney, Henry Jaffe, and he took me to Jules Stein, head of the biggest theatrical agency, Music Corporation of America. Mr. Stein was anxious to represent me and secured my release for $60,000, he contributing $35,000 and I paying $25,000 [$625,000 today].”

  Sinatra offered more detail years later. Dorsey initially refused to give ground, he said, insisting: “No! No! No! No! I want one third of his salary for the rest of his life—as long as he lives.” Using his clout as counsel for the American Federation of Radio Artists, according to Sinatra, Jaffe responded with a direct threat. The conversation went as follows:

  Jaffe: “You enjoy playing music in hotel rooms and having the nation hear you on the radio? . . . You like broadcasting on NBC?”

  Dorsey: “Sure I do.”

  Jaffe: “Not anymore you won’t. . . . Well, how about we talk about Frank Sinatra and we’ll see what kind of deal we can make—if you want to continue on radio.”

  As Sinatra told it, that was the exchange that broke Dorsey’s resolve and persuaded him to cut a deal.

  Dorsey’s version of the episode began to emerge only a decade later, in a 1951 magazine article. He had surrendered, Dorsey was quoted as saying, only after “he was visited by three businesslike men, who told him out of the sides of their mouths to ‘sign or else.’ ” Former Las Vegas casino entertainment director Ed Becker said Dorsey told him privately about the episode. “Tommy told me it was true,” Becker recalled. “He said, ‘Three guys from New York City by way of Boston and New Jersey approached me and said they would like to buy Frank’s contract. I said “Like hell you will.” . . . And they pulled out a gun and said, “You wanna si
gn the contract?” And I did.’ ”

  Sinatra insisted that nothing remotely like that ever happened. A former attorney of Dorsey’s, as well as a former aide, said they knew of no such intimidation. Frank’s friend Brad Dexter, however, said Frank acknowledged to him that the story was true. Two of Dorsey’s children said the threat was discussed in the family. “I’m sure it’s fact,” said his son, Tommy Dorsey III. Dorsey’s daughter Patricia, who said she heard about the episode from her grandparents, said, “There was a threat that somebody was going to kidnap my brother and me. I assume that those were the kind of threats that made Dad decide to go on and let him out of the contract.”

  Before his death in 1956, Dorsey told Lloyd Shearer, then the West Coast correspondent for Parade magazine, “I was visited by Willie Moretti and a couple of his boys. Willie fingered a gun and told me he was glad to hear that I was letting Frank out of our deal. I took the hint.”

  First corroboration of Moretti’s involvement came in 2005, as the paperback edition of this book was being prepared. Dan Lewis, a former newsman with the Paterson Call in New Jersey, recalled how the gangster cultivated his friendship in the postwar years—in hopes of involving him in a newspaper venture. He got to know Moretti well enough to ask him whether there was truth behind rumors that he had intervened in Frank’s dispute with Dorsey. The mafioso smiled, Lewis remembered, then responded more or less as follows: “Let’s say that we made a good deal, one that made everybody happy. . . . Let’s just say we took very good care of Sinatra.”

  The mobster Joseph “Doc” Stacher, who worked with Luciano’s people, said, “The Italians among us were very proud of Frank. They always told us they had spent a lot of money helping him in his career, ever since he was with Tommy Dorsey’s band.”

  Luciano himself spoke before his death of the time “when some dough was needed to put Frank across with the public. . . . I think it was about fifty or sixty grand. I okayed the money and it come out of the fund, even though some guys put up a little extra on a personal basis. It all helped him become a big star.”

  From the time the mob forced Dorsey to back down, a Federal Bureau of Narcotics document stated in the 1950s, Sinatra became “one of many in the entertainment world who knowingly collaborates with the Big Mob.” According to his friend Sonny King, Luciano and Frank Costello “assigned” two specific mafiosi to handle Sinatra. Joe Fischetti, King said, was to “be around him all the time.” Sam Giancana, the future Chicago Mafia boss, was there to step in “if major things came up.” In the words of Giancana’s mistress Phyllis McGuire, Frank remained “friends with the Boys for years, ever since he needed to get out of his contract with Tommy Dorsey.”

  “You don’t know Italians the way Italians know Italians,” said Gene DiNovi, an Italian-American pianist who worked with Sinatra. “Italians tend to break down into two kinds of people: Lucky Luciano or Michelangelo. Frank’s an exception. He’s both.”

  8

  “F-R-A-N-K-I-E-E-E-E-E!”

  I HOPE YOU FALL ON YOUR ASS!” Tommy Dorsey told Frank as their dispute ended. He did not think Sinatra would last long on his own.

  Frank should have been able to walk away from Dorsey and straight into a lucrative contract with Columbia Records. A top Columbia executive, Emanuel “Manie” Sacks, had long since recognized his talent and promised him recording work as a soloist the moment he was free. By the time he was, however, the recording industry was paralyzed by labor problems that effectively closed down the studios for two years.

  So Frank headed for Hollywood. He made a brief singing appearance in a B movie called Reveille with Beverly, tried and failed to get a job as a staff singer with NBC, and then went back east. The comedian George Burns rejected him and picked instead a singing group the Three Smoothies—a.k.a. Babs and her Brothers—for a weekly spot on his radio show. Sacks found him a fifteen-minute show on CBS Radio, which did provide some important exposure. By late 1942, though, Frank was back in New Jersey playing small-town theaters.

  His luck turned on December 12, his twenty-seventh birthday, thanks to a persistent New York booker named Harry Romm. After weeks of trying, Romm got the attention of Robert Weitman, director of the Paramount Theater, Broadway’s hottest music and movie venue. Weitman already had a surefire New Year’s show, the musical comedy movie Star Spangled Rhythm starring Bing Crosby, coupled with Benny Goodman’s band.

  Nevertheless, Romm went on and on about Sinatra. “Take a chance. Come over and look for yourself,” he recalled telling Weitman. “It’s the damnedest thing you ever saw. A skinny kid who looks strictly from hunger is singing over in Newark and the she-kids are yelling and fainting all over the joint. You’ve got to see it to believe it.” Weitman agreed to go to Newark’s cavernous Mosque Theater to hear Sinatra perform. The place was less than half full. “Then,” he remembered, “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.”

  Weitman swung into action within hours. “He rang me at the house,” Frank remembered, “and said, ‘What are you doing New Year’s Eve?’ I said, ‘Not a thing. I can’t even get booked anywhere. . . .’ He said, ‘I’d like you to open at the joint.’ He used to call the Paramount ‘the joint.’ I said, ‘You mean on New Year’s Eve?’ He said, ‘That’s right.’ . . . And I fell right on my butt!”

  The Paramount was majestic, the tallest structure on Broadway north of the Woolworth Building. The illuminated glass globe at its top could be seen as far away as New Jersey. It was the model for the vast movie palaces of the day, and its plush red and gold auditorium could accommodate almost four thousand people. Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallee, Fred Astaire, Gary Cooper, Mae West, and Claudette Colbert were among the stars who had seen their names on the marquee beneath the Paramount’s vast ornamental arch. At dawn on December 30, when Frank arrived to rehearse, there was his name beneath the title of the movie and “Benny Goodman and His Band” and alongside the billing for the Radio Rogues comedy act: “EXTRA—FRANK SINATRA.”

  That night was pivotal. For all his early success, he was still relatively unknown. When Weitman told Goodman that Frank would be appearing, Goodman asked: “Who’s he?” The comedian Jack Benny introduced Frank onstage as though he was a bosom pal—as a favor to Weitman. He had in fact never heard of him before.

  As Sinatra’s name was spoken, though, there came a reaction from the audience that no one present ever forgot. “I thought the goddamned building was going to cave in,” said Benny. “People running down to the stage, screaming.” As Weitman remembered it, there was a long call from the audience of “F-R-A-N-K-I-E-E-E-E-E!” Sinatra himself recalled a sound that was “absolutely deafening . . . a tremendous roar.” Conducting with his back to the audience, Goodman could not imagine what was going on.

  Frank froze in terror for a moment, then burst out laughing. He could not remember later whether he began by singing “For Me and My Gal” or “That Old Black Magic.” “The devout,” wrote the editor of The New Republic, Bruce Bliven, had recognized “a pleasant-appearing young man” who “with gawky long steps moves awkwardly to the center of the stage while the shrieking continues. . . . He has a head of black curls and holds it to one side as he gestures clumsily and bashfully, trying to keep the crowd quiet enough for him to sing.”

  Something unprecedented had begun. Vast throngs of people, most of them female and very young, began flocking to the theater. Frank was soon singing as many as a hundred songs a day—at least nine shows. “One Saturday I did eleven shows,” he remembered. “We started at 8:10 in the morning and finished at 2:30 Sunday morning.”

  When his family came to the theater they became part of the spectacle. Nancy was swallowed up in the throng and Dolly was pawed by the fans. “I couldn’t hear,” Marty complai
ned. “Who could hear?” It was all too much for Francesco Sinatra, by then in his late eighties. “I put him in the third row, in among the kids,” Frank remembered. “He didn’t know what the hell happened to him because when I came out on the stage everything broke loose and he just sat there. I could see his face. He was absolutely terrified. They brought him back in the dressing room after the performance, and he was so angry—that he had come that far and never heard me sing. He didn’t understand that that was the game that the kids played.”

  The original one-week appearance at the Paramount was extended, first to a month, then to two months, a theater record. Frank agreed to return in the spring. His audience was made up overwhelmingly of schoolgirls in their early or mid-teens, typically dressed in sweaters, knee-length skirts, and white socks—bobbysoxers. Webster’s defines a bobbysoxer as an “adolescent girl.”

  “The squealing yells reverberated,” Bob Weitman’s friend Armand Deutsch, the Sears, Roebuck heir, said of the fans. “It was a new sound, a screaming expression of adulation and curiously innocent eroticism. They were, Bob told me sadly, almost impossible to dislodge, fiercely fighting all eviction efforts and drastically cutting the grosses.”

  Few bobbysoxers stayed for only one performance. They came with food and drink and settled in. Theater staff often found that the girls had urinated on their seats, either out of fear of losing them if they went to the bathroom or out of sheer excitement.