by James Kaplan
Stafford laughed. “That’s OK, Tommy. Four quit to try and earn an honest living. There are only four of us now.”
The Pipers joined the band in December 1939, while Sinatra fulfilled his obligation to Harry James. And they were sitting on the stage in Milwaukee or Sheboygan or Minneapolis or Rockford when he appeared, straight out of the blue.
Had Stafford even heard him on the radio at that point?
“Never even heard of him,” she said. “But I sure knew this was something. Everybody up until then was sounding like Crosby, but this was a whole new sound.”
Was it ever. To get a sense of what Stafford heard that night, skip forward a few months and listen, side by side, to Bing’s version of a corny yet completely seductive number called “Trade Winds” and then Frank’s. The two recordings were made just four days apart—and Sinatra’s was first, on June 27, 1940, in New York City, with Dorsey and orchestra, including the still-unfired Bunny Berigan (like Beiderbecke, a fatally self-destructive lush) on trumpet, Joe Bushkin on piano, and Buddy Rich on drums. Crosby laid down his track the following Monday, July 1, in Los Angeles, with Dick McIntire and His Harmony Hawaiians.
Amazingly, both versions are equally strong. The thirty-seven-year-old Bing had been at the very top of his game for the better part of a decade, the biggest star in America and a vocal force of nature. On this number, as always, his matchlessly rich baritone was simultaneously romantic and (ever so slightly) ironic. Other men could try to sing like him—and many did try—but that voice, utterly of a piece with his elusive personality, was simply inimitable.
As was Sinatra’s.
As young as he was—not yet twenty-five—he carried the flyweight tropical number off with complete aplomb. Unlike Crosby’s version, which, as a superstar deserved, was an out-and-out vocal from beginning to end, Sinatra’s was a band singer’s dutiful turn, coming on the heels of Dorsey’s supersmooth trombone intro. His voice was nowhere near as deep and rich an instrument as it would become in the 1950s, and the Hoboken accent was still defiantly unreconstructed, the r’s dicey and the t’s a little adventure in themselves (“trade” became “chrade”).
Yet Frank was lilting, persuasive, and assured. He didn’t sound remotely like anyone else—and he knew it. Even that Hoboken accent was part of his arsenal. While Bing’s power was his cool warmth, Frank’s was his unabashed heat.
In fact, Bing’s days were numbered.
Not commercially. Buoyed by his movie career, his matchless radio presence, and his ever-rising record sales, Crosby’s stock was headed nowhere but up, and would continue to flourish for more than twenty years. But a new ballad singer had taken the field, and though America didn’t know it yet, its heart hung in the balance. Bing had specifically instructed his lyricist, the great Johnny Burke, never to put the words “I love you” into any of his numbers: It simply wasn’t a sentiment the star could carry off head-on. His humor—America loved him for his dry humor—would have been undercut by it. His wooing was more oblique. There was nothing oblique about Frank Sinatra.
“Frank really loved music, and I think he loved singing,” Jo Stafford said. “But Crosby, it was more like he did it for a living. He liked music well enough. But he was a much colder person than Frank. Frank was a warm Italian boy. Crosby was not a warm Irishman.”
So, suddenly, in the land of Crosby sound-alikes, in the year of Our Lord 1940, when Americans heard their president speak on the radio in godlike aristocratic tones, when they heard American movie actors declaiming in indeterminate English-y accents—here was something utterly new: a warm Italian boy. A boy with a superb voice that was also a potent means of communicating all kinds of things that white popular singers had never come close to: call it romantic yearning with hints of lust behind it, or call it arrogance with a quaver of vulnerability. In any case, it was a formula absolutely irresistible to blindsided females—not to mention to impressed males, who very quickly began using Sinatra as background to their wooing. As Daniel Okrent wrote in a 1987 Esquire article, “Sinatra knew this: the male of the species has never developed a more effective seduction line than the display of frailty.”
And Jo Stafford, as levelheaded as they come, was seduced. Not sexually (though, as a woman, she had to have felt that thrum), but musically. She was operatically trained, a coloratura soprano, a great ear as well as a great voice, and very far from an easy sell. But she knew within a couple of bars of “South of the Border,” there in Minneapolis or Milwaukee or Rockford or wherever the hell it was, when Sinatra was so new on the band that no charts had been written for him yet, that the entire game had changed, then and there.
“Well, see,” she said, “he was doing what we call hitters. I mean, there was no arrangement for him. He just sang it, and the band picked up. So it was very impromptu. But of course, you heard the sound of the voice.”
Leaving Crosby aside, her visitor asked, could she say how Jack Leonard or Bob Eberly, for example, were different from Sinatra?
Stafford shook her head. “I don’t know. I think they made their own sounds, and they were good. They just weren’t as good as Frank.”
Why?
“There’s a whole round sound of a beautiful voice with a great tone, singing straight down the middle of that note,” Stafford said. She frowned. “I don’t think I’m very good at describing it.”
Was she aware of his expressiveness right away, the feeling that he brought to the song?
She shook her head again. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I just knew it was a wonderful, great sound, and it was not Crosby. It was a new sound and a good one, a very musical sound.”
What did Sinatra look like then? her visitor asked.
“Young.” She laughed, a surprisingly strong laugh. Even at close to ninety, she still had a beautiful voice. “Young with lots of hair, and very thin.”
She was sold; most in the band weren’t. At first the veterans, who had all been fond of the sweet-tempered Jack Leonard, simply froze the newcomer out. And then there was Buddy Rich. On Sinatra’s first one-nighter, he noticed that the bus seat next to the drummer was empty—not much of a surprise, given Rich’s abrasive personality. (When Dorsey first introduced Sinatra to Rich, it was with these words: “I want you to meet another pain in the ass.”) So Sinatra sat down. The two young men—Frank was twenty-four; Buddy, twenty-two—got to talking, and, lo and behold, they hit it off. After a few days on the road, Rich told Sinatra, “I like the way you sing.” It was extravagant praise, coming from one of the biggest egomaniacs in the business—little did Sinatra realize how truly heartfelt the comment was. (In later life, Rich admitted he had had to turn his face to hide his tears when Sinatra sang “Star Dust.”) The two became roommates. It sounds like a sweet story. It was doomed from the start.
Sinatra’s days as an only child set the pattern: he had never been much for sharing a room—or much of anything, for that matter. (Traveling with the James band over most of the first year of his marriage, he had barely lived with his young wife.) The end to the Sinatra-Rich honeymoon came when Sinatra insisted on clipping his toenails in their hotel room at 2:00 a.m. Remarkably, Rich told his biographer Mel Tormé that the insomniac singer had also kept him awake by reading till all hours. Among all the big-band personnel crisscrossing the United States in the late 1940s, Sinatra and Artie Shaw may have been the only two men keeping late hours with, now and then anyway, a book.
But the real reason the singer and the drummer split was that each felt he was Dorsey’s true star. (Tommy Dorsey knew he and he alone was the star, another problem altogether.)
Of course, Dorsey’s name was printed in the biggest type on the band’s posters, but the leader decided whose name would be featured under his, an honor with purely commercial underpinnings that depended on—and, in a circular way, determined—which band member was hottest. Often it was Bunny Berigan; lately, in early 1940, it had been the new star, Rich. But soon enough, it would be Sinatra all the way.
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/> The Old Man shows ’em how. Frank with Tommy Dorsey and the orchestra, December 1, 1941. Connie Haines is front row far right, jitterbugging. (photo credit 8.1)
The life of a traveling band, even a highly successful band, wasn’t for sissies. If the Music Makers had been a jaunty but slightly depressed boys’ club, the Dorsey organization was like a well-disciplined Army platoon. They even wore uniforms—different suits depending on the venue. (College shows meant blue blazers, tan trousers, and brown and white saddle shoes.) Dorsey’s musicians would play up to nine shows a day, then ride all night on their dilapidated former Greyhound bus, sometimes four hundred miles or more at a clip (at forty and fifty miles per hour, on two-lane blacktop), with infrequent rest stops, sleeping in their seats, the Old Man right up front, where he could keep an eye on everybody. “I can still see Tommy in the second seat on the right aisle with the hat on, riding through the night,” Jo Stafford said.
Stafford recalled “lots and lots of laughs and good times together” on the Dorsey bus, but Sinatra’s memories of those long rides are strikingly unpeopled: especially in later years, he would reminisce again and again about learning how to keep the crease in his suit while sitting in his seat, about falling asleep with his cheek pressed against the cold glass. “For maybe the first five months,” he said, “I missed the James band. So I kept to myself, but then I’ve always been a loner—all my life.”
He was naturally aloof, but he was also taking his cues from the man in charge. Tommy Dorsey was anything but hail-fellow-well-met: he was the model of a tough commander who kept his distance from his troops—except for occasional, fumbling attempts at intimacy. There was the time, during a long, cold drive across Pennsylvania (“a Greyhound bus is not the greatest place to spend winter in the East,” Stafford noted drily), when Dorsey had the driver stop at a general store and bought the whole band scarves, earmuffs, and mittens. In warmer months, there were frequent band baseball games—though the Old Man seems always to have been mindful of his lofty status: Jean Bach, who was married to Dorsey’s trumpeter Shorty Sherock, recalled one such game, at Dorsey’s house in Bernardsville, in which the band members drank warm beer and sweated on the diamond while the leader relaxed in the shade of his porte cochere and sipped chilled champagne. Dorsey also loved practical jokes—a particularly sadistic form of amiability, usually involving liquid. He would leave wet sponges on his instrumentalists’ seats, spray them with a fire hose from the wings, squirt seltzer down the cleavages of his girl singers. There were ambivalent smiles.
Sinatra watched and learned. And frequently rebelled. Curfews and deadlines were not for him. He also had a habit of letting a lock of his luxuriant hair droop over his forehead—a look that drove the girls wild, and made Dorsey furious. The bandleader kept his new pain in the ass in line through a combination of kindness and menace—much like a certain petite redhead from Hoboken. When the boy singer got too cocky (and it’s hard to imagine Sinatra tamping down his natural style), Dorsey took to threatening to replace him with a smooth-voiced, and better-behaved, band singer named Bob Allen. “Once,” Will Friedwald writes, “Sinatra walked into the band’s dressing room … and discovered the other singer’s tuxedo draped over his chair. After another session of pleading and shouting with Dorsey, Sinatra went on that night.”
Ultimately, Sinatra took to cultivating Dorsey—though he insisted that it was a matter of compassion. “Tommy was a very lonely man,” he said. “He was a strict disciplinarian with the band—we’d get fined if we were late—yet he craved company after the shows and never really got it … We all knew he was lonely, but we couldn’t ask him to eat and drink with us because it looked too much like shining teacher’s apple.
“Anyway,” Sinatra recalled, “one night two of us decided to hell with it, we’d ask him out to dinner. He came along and really appreciated it. After that he became almost like a father to me … I’d sit up playing cards with Tommy till maybe five-thirty every morning. He couldn’t sleep ever: he had less sleep than any man I’ve ever known.”
If you detect a sneaking similarity to the ring-a-ding-ding Sinatra of the mid-1950s through the early 1960s, the infinitely lonely kingpin who couldn’t bear to be alone, especially in the deep watches of the night, the man who would forcibly restrain (through force of personality, that is, which in Sinatra’s case was every bit as powerful as physical force) his drinking buddies from going to sleep before he did—usually at or past the hour when Mr. and Mrs. America were waking up to go to work—then you understand. It’s not enough to say that from the moment Sinatra joined the Dorsey organization he deliberately set about remaking himself in the bandleader’s image: the process was both conscious and unconscious. Tommy Dorsey was the most powerful male figure Sinatra had ever encountered—everything the younger man wanted to be, the strong father he had never had.
But in a certain way, Dorsey was also the mother he did have. To begin with, Dorsey was more feared than loved, and fear was a key part of Sinatra’s makeup. The bandleader had a hot temper, as did Sinatra, but it stemmed from a different source: Dorsey’s anger was black-Irish and bloody-minded; Sinatra’s was the rage of a child who is terrified he will be slapped down—or worse, ignored. Sinatra once said that the only two people he was ever afraid of were his mother and Tommy Dorsey—a flip comment but also a sincere and deeply significant one.
With both the uncertainty was torturous, but in another way it must also have been thrilling, even sexually exciting. There’s a psychological term for the attraction: identification with the aggressor. Rumors of sadomasochistic tendencies have always hovered around Sinatra, and it’s not hard to see why. In many ways, Frank would become both Dolly and Dorsey, and the royal road to his fixation on the bandleader was his addiction to his mother.
Marty too was ingrained in Sinatra’s psyche, but probably in a negative way—by his absence rather than by his presence. In later years Sinatra would sometimes drop a comment about how his father had kept him in line, yet those comments had a way of feeling like a sop to the old man, a tacit admission that the non-reading, non-writing, non-speaking Marty should have been more of a dad than he really was. In post-Dorsey years, Sinatra would pick up several more father figures here and there, but Tommy was the first and the most powerful.
Still, there was one thing all the father substitutes had in common: Sinatra always left them before they had a chance to leave him.
In the beginning, Sinatra set out to learn everything he could from Dorsey, personally and musically. (“There’s only one singer,” the bandleader told Frank early on, “and his name is Crosby. The lyrics mean everything to him, and they should to you too.”) Some of the personal lessons would take years, even decades, to achieve their full effect. The singer first experienced leadership himself amid his gradually expanding crew of cronies and gofers. His next subjects were musicians—but he only gained power with his players when, after Columbia Records dropped him, he was signed by Capitol and started to record in Los Angeles. (The producer George Avakian, who worked on both coasts, points out that California studio musicians were far more deferential to Sinatra than their New York counterparts, who were apt to be snooty classical artists.)
And it was only when rock ’n’ roll killed his record sales and he started to tour heavily in the 1970s and 1980s that Sinatra became a true leader, in the more-or-less-benign-despot style of Dorsey. His musicians even gave him the same nickname: the Old Man. (Which, for most of the time he led a touring band, he actually was.) Frank even took up Dorsey’s model-railroading obsession: in late middle age, the unabashedly nostalgic Sinatra devoted an entire building in his Palm Springs compound to an enormous electric-train setup.
What thrilled him at the outset was simply the way Dorsey carried himself, the way he handled his fame and power: his ramrod posture, his smooth patter on the bandstand and at radio microphones, his perfect wardrobe (he was once photographed, during a summertime stand in New York, wearing tailored Bermuda shorts w
ith his jacket and tie). Not to mention his eye for the ladies and his heavy after-hours drinking. Sinatra, always an obsessive, even copied some of the tiniest details—Dorsey’s Courtley cologne, his Dentist Prescribed toothpaste.
But of course the most important lessons the singer learned from the leader were musical. Sinatra was gigantically ambitious, virtually every move he made in his life had to do with the furtherance of his career, and in this respect he saw that Tommy Dorsey had a great deal to teach him. Much has been made of the magical breath control Sinatra supposedly learned at Dorsey’s feet—or rather at his back, while he was playing his magical trombone. “I used to watch Tommy’s back, his jacket, to see when he would breathe,” he said. “I’d swear the son of a bitch was not breathing. I couldn’t even see his jacket move … I thought, he’s gotta be breathing some place—through the ears?”
Dorsey did indeed have spectacular breath control, through a combination of anatomical good fortune—he was extremely broad chested—and artful deception. His trick was to take an extra breath, when he needed one, through a pinhole he would form at the corner of his mouth and which he would shield from prying eyes with his left hand, which, in standard trombonist’s form, was held close to the instrument’s mouthpiece. Hence those sixteen-bar (or thirty-two-bar, depending on who’s telling the story) legatos.
But his long trombone lines were more than trickery or showmanship: they were the melodic essence of his art. His band’s numbers usually began with a solo by the lead trombonist, to (1) instantly announce the presence of TD, and (2) quickly tell the story of the song. Both things were crucial on the radio, which, as the main medium for mass communication of the day, had a tremendous imaginative force that all began with sound. Through long years of study, Dorsey had arrived at a method of proclaiming the artist, and his art, that was as aurally unmistakable as the call of some glorious mythological bird.
