Frank and Harry would again collaborate on July 19, 1951, at Columbia Records for three songs: “Castle Rock,” “Deep Night,” and “Farewell, Farewell to Love.” They would also sometimes appear in concerts together in the years to come, most notably at Caesars Palace in 1968 and 1979. They also appeared together on a John Denver special in 1976 and performed an excellent rendition of their song “All or Nothing at All.”
Harry James died in July 1983 of lymphatic cancer. He worked up until a week before his death.
Tommy Dorsey
When Tommy Dorsey finally explained the preposterous terms of Frank Sinatra’s contract, Frank was stunned. The deal Dorsey thought was equitable would mean that Frank would give up a third of his earnings for life, plus 10 percent for Tommy Dorsey’s agent. A total of 43 percent of every dime Frank was to make for the rest of his career would go to Tommy Dorsey (after the original two-year term of their contract had expired, for which Frank would make seventy-five dollars a week, though that sum would soon be doubled). Maybe Frank put it best when he said, “Dorsey was a crook. Plain and simple.”
Frank decided to accept Tommy’s terms, though he realized that the deal was terribly unfair. He wasn’t thinking of any future ramifications it might have; he just wanted to sing and be famous. He also knew that Dorsey had auditioned baritone Allan DeWitt for the position. Even though DeWitt didn’t work out, the competition served to remind Frank that there were other men in the business willing to accept such a dreadful contract just for the opportunity to work with Tommy Dorsey. (Indeed, many young singers throughout the history of entertainment have signed deals as bad, but probably none worse.)
The onerous terms of his deal aside, the future looked bright for twenty-four-year-old Frank Sinatra as he took his place on the bandstand in front of Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra in January 1940. The band was in the midst of a tour and the group’s manager sent Frank a ticket to join them. At this time, the Dorsey organization boasted a memorable lineup of musicians that included Buddy Rich, Bunny Berrigan, Joe Bushkin, and Ziggy Elman; arrangers such as Axel Stordahl, Paul Weston, and Sy Oliver; and singers Jo Stafford and the Pied Pipers—and now Frank Sinatra. Because it was so long ago, there is some discrepancy as to exactly where Frank actually joined the Dorsey orchestra. Dorsey’s press agent, Jack Egan, and Sinatra’s daughter Nancy insist it was in Indianapolis (at the Lyric Theatre on February 2). But Dorsey’s clarinetist, Johnny Mince, believes it was in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Others, like Jo Stafford, say it was either Minneapolis or Milwaukee. Frank himself said it was Baltimore, memorable to him because it occurred after he played twenty-seven innings of softball with his bandmates.
“It was like going from one school to another,” Frank remembered. “I was really kind of frightened. I was nervous, but I faked a couple of tunes, and I knew the lyrics of some songs, so we did all right with the audience.”
It wasn’t an easy transition for Frank—or even for the other musicians—when he took over as the male singer with the band. Because he was so cocky, the band disliked him immediately. Some of them mocked him by calling him “Lady Macbeth” due to his obsession with cleanliness. Still, no matter what they said about him, they couldn’t help but be awed by his sheer talent.
Of Frank’s early performances with the band, singer Jo Stafford, who joined about a month before Frank, said, “[Sinatra] was very young [with a] slim figure and more hair than he needed. We were all sitting back, like, ‘Oh, yeah? Who are you?’ Then he began to sing. Wow, I thought, this is an absolutely new, unique sound. Nobody had ever sounded like that. In those days, most male singers’ biggest thing was to try and sound as much like Bing Crosby as possible. Well, he didn’t sound anything like Bing. He didn’t sound like anybody else that I had ever heard. I was mightily impressed.”
The show would usually start with the band playing Dorsey’s theme song, “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You,” followed by the hit “Marie.” Then Dorsey would introduce Connie Haines for a number or two, followed by Jo Stafford and the Pied Pipers. After that, Ziggy Elman would do a trumpet solo, and then drummer Buddy Rich would, as they say, “take it home.” Finally, Frank would sing a big number, maybe “South of the Border.” He would also do perky duets with Connie Haines, such as “Let’s Get Away from It All” and “Oh, Look at Me Now.” Of course, the show would vary over the years, and as Frank became more popular, he would be featured much more frequently.
The band traveled by bus, as most bands did at the time. They were difficult days, but rewarding. “What can I say?” Frank reminisced. “For six months, the band gave me the cold shoulder—they loved Jack Leonard—until I proved myself. Finally, I did, and we became a unit. We worked damn hard, city after city. Just trying to get along, you know, learning about each other, learning about the road, trying to be entertaining. It was a good time. I missed my family, though. Missed Nancy. She was pregnant, so it was tough.”
On February 1, 1940, Frank recorded his first two songs with Tommy Dorsey’s band, “The Sky Fell Down” and “Too Romantic.” Then it was back on the road, to Indiana, Michigan, New Jersey, and New York City. In New York the band appeared at the Paramount Theatre from mid-March into mid-April. Then, on May 23, 1940, Frank, the Pied Pipers, and Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra recorded “I’ll Never Smile Again.”
With the war raging in Europe and threatening to involve the United States, “I’ll Never Smile Again” seemed to typify the kind of rueful resignation that would soon envelop the world. The record, with a plaintive delivery by Sinatra and elegant harmony by the Pied Pipers, would become his first big hit, and would hold the number one position on Billboard’s charts for twelve consecutive weeks. Frank would go on to perform this classic song for the next forty years, on television and in concert.2 “I got ten dollars for recording it,” said Connie Haines. “Frank got twenty-five.”
Frank’s career would never be the same after “I’ll Never Smile Again.” That record catapulted him to stardom and gave him top billing in the band, much to the chagrin of drummer Buddy Rich. In fact, a rivalry between the two erupted into physical altercations on more than one occasion. Because his ego was rising as fast as the record rose on the charts, Frank’s relationship with the other band vocalist, Connie Haines, began to deteriorate as well. He refused to share a mike with her—though he was forced to do so at times—calling her a “cornball.” Ultimately, he found himself suspended for two weeks as a result of disagreements with her. Clearly, Frank—a man not given to compromise and cooperation—didn’t belong in a group environment. He never cared for either Rich or Haines and told his friends that he despised “the both of ’em.” (In October 1944, though, after Frank Sinatra became famous, Buddy Rich went to visit him backstage at the Paramount Theatre and mentioned that he wanted to start his own band. Frank wrote a check for $40,000 and handed it to the startled drummer. “Good luck. This’ll get you started,” Frank said with a slap to Rich’s back.)
Harry James’s road manager, George A. “Bullets” Durgom, noted at the time, “This boy’s going to be very big if Tommy doesn’t kill him first. Tommy doesn’t like Frankie stealing the show, and he doesn’t like people who are temperamental, like himself.”
Broadway columnist and noted Sinatra biographer Earl Wilson went to see Frank perform around this time at the Meadowbrook Ballroom in Meadowbrook, New Jersey. Afterward, Wilson interviewed the singer. Of the experience, he remarked, “He spoke of his dreams and ambitions and said he was going to be the biggest star in the country. ‘You’ll see,’ he said. Physically, he was less than impressive. The Sinatra frame was not only slender but fragile looking. The cheeks were hollow. He wore a bow tie, a thin wool sweater, and a dark suit. He seemed still a boy, and that added a charm to his cockiness. He had a lot of hair that straggled down the upper part of his right cheek, about to the bottom of his ear. He also had a spit curl. His hair, when he came offstage, was tousled looking. ‘Sexy,’ the girls said later.”
Self–Inve
ntion
On June 8, 1940, Nancy Sinatra gave birth to the couple’s first child, Nancy Jr., at Margaret Hague Maternity Hospital in Jersey City. Her husband of eighteen months wasn’t at her side. “I was working the Hotel Astor in New York, I believe,” Frank said later. ‘ ‘I hated missing that. I did. It was just a taste of things to come, man. When I think of all the family affairs and events I would miss over the years because I was on the road. But this was really the first one.” Tommy Dorsey had been such a mentor to Sinatra that Frank chose him to be godfather of his firstborn.
Later that month, NBC hired the band to take over for Bob Hope on a summer-replacement variety show, Frank’s first national radio exposure. Because the ratings were strong, the network began airing a Dorsey series, Summer Pastime, on Tuesday nights. It ran for three and a half months and further exposed Frank to a large listening audience.
In an article he wrote for Life in 1965, Frank remembered that these days with the Dorsey band were some of the most influential on his singing style. Tommy didn’t work much with him, he remembered, because most of his attention was on the band members. Left to his own devices, Frank absorbed everything around him—including the way Dorsey played trombone—and tried to integrate it into his artistry.
As it happened, Tommy Dorsey could play a musical phrase as long as sixteen bars all the way through, it seemed, without taking a single breath. “How the hell does he do that?” Frank had wondered even before he joined the band. He knew that if he could sustain a note as long, he would be able to sing with much more dramatic impact. (He also believed that many singers ruined their songs by taking breaths in the wrong places, thereby interfering with the melody as well as the lyric’s message.)
Sinatra would sit behind Dorsey on the bandstand and watch him closely, trying to see if he would sneak in a breath. Finally, after many dates, Frank realized that Dorsey had what he called “a sneak pinhole in the corner of his mouth.” It wasn’t an actual pinhole, of course, but rather a tiny place where Dorsey was sucking in air. It was Frank’s idea to make his voice work in the same way, not sounding like a specific instrument but “playing” the voice as if it were an instrument.
He realized that in order to do this—to sustain those notes in a seamless fashion—he would need extraordinary breath control. To that end, he began an intense swimming regimen in public pools, which he would find in cities on tour. As he held his breath and took laps underwater, he would sing song lyrics in his head and approximate the time he would need to sustain certain notes.
When he was back in Hoboken, Frank would continue his training by running on the track at the Stevens Institute of Technology. He would run one lap and trot the next, singing to himself, holding notes, practicing.
“But that still wasn’t the whole answer,” he remembered. “I still had to learn to sneak a breath without being too obvious.”
Indeed, it was easier for Tommy Dorsey to camouflage his breathing technique through his “pinhole” while he was playing the trombone because the mouthpiece covered his mouth. For Frank, this would mean more work, more training. Eventually it paid off. Because his breath control had become so powerful, he was able to sing six bars—sometimes eight—without taking in air. Other singers were lucky to be able to sing two or four. Frank had learned to sneak in air from the sides of his mouth, making it appear that he could sing forever without taking a breath. When he did decide to take that breath, he would do it in as dramatic a fashion as possible, effecting a gasp of anguish when he needed it, when it suited the lyric of the torch song being performed.
All of this training was a closely held trade secret at the time; Frank never explained any of it until years later when he felt other singers could benefit from his experience. In the 1940s, though, he well understood that part of the magic of his art was to make it appear effortless. That it all looked so simple was just part of the illusion. “It was easy,” he said later. “It just wasn’t simple.”
Just as he intended, his breathing technique proved as crucial in the telling of his stories as it was in the delivery of his songs. His uncanny ability as a vocalist did not go unnoticed by those in his profession. They knew he could do astonishing things with his voice; they just didn’t know how he did them. “I’d never heard a popular singer with such fluidity and style,” songwriter Sammy Cahn once noted. “Or one with his incredible breath control. Frank could hold a phrase until it took him into a sort of paroxysm. He actually gasped, and his whole being seemed to explode, to release itself. I’d never seen or heard anything like it.”
Frank even used a microphone and mike stand—standard equipment for amplification—in a way that was unique for the times. Most singers just stood woodenly in front of the mike and hoped that their voices would be carried to the rafters. Not Sinatra. “They never understood that a microphone is their instrument,” he would say of some of his colleagues. “It’s like they’re part of an orchestra, but instead of playing a saxophone, they’re playing a microphone.”
Frank would tenderly hold the microphone stand like a considerate lover during romantic ballads or jerk it roughly if he felt he needed that kind of impact on a brassier number. He would back away from the mike when a dramatic note needed to soar to the heavens and echo, or step into it if he wanted the crowd to hear just the slightest sigh or breath. The girls would swoon in the audience when Frank was onstage, as much for his voice as for the unusual way he performed. The way he romanced a mike and mike stand was somehow erotic and became an important part of his appeal. He was just five feet ten and a half (maybe just five feet nine, depending on which family member is asked), 138 pounds, and with a twenty-nine-inch waist, but onstage he seemed like a passionate dynamo, especially when he quivered that lower lip. Paradoxically, he also seemed vulnerable, needy. The total package was irresistible.
In every way, Frank Sinatra invented the way he wanted to be, the way he saw himself, the way he wanted others to see him.
Marital Weakness
After baby Nancy was born and her mother could no longer travel with Frank, the marriage began to show some weaknesses. Frank was busy with his career, filming his first movie, Las Vegas Nights, in October 1940, for which he was paid a measly fifteen dollars a day to sing “I’ll Never Smile Again” on camera. He played another engagement at the Paramount in New York in January 1941, and the first of twenty-nine single releases with Dorsey, “Without a Song,” was recorded on January 20, 1941.
Naturally, there were other women on the road. In Frank’s mind, what Nancy didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.
But Nancy knew.
Patti Demarest was a friend of Nancy Sinatra’s at this time; they lived in the same apartment complex on Bergen Avenue in Jersey City. She recalled, “Nancy came to my door one day in tears, the baby in her arms. I said, ‘My goodness, what’s the matter?’ and she said, ‘That son of a bitch is cheating on me again.’ ‘Again?’ I asked, since this was the first I had heard of this. And she said, ‘He’s been cheating on me from the very beginning.’ ”
Many of Frank’s friends knew his marriage was in trouble early on. “It must have been sometime in 1940,” Sammy Cahn once said. “He was a restless soul even then. He told me how unhappy he was being a married man.”
Joey D’Orazio, Frank’s Hoboken friend, recalled, “We were sitting at a bar in Hoboken. Frank had just gotten off the road, he was visiting his ma, and he was a big shot now. I wanted to know what it was like for him, you know? He said, ‘Joey boy, a chump like you will never know what it’s like for me, that’s how on top of the world I am.’ I had to laugh. That was so typically Frank. Then he said, ‘I can have any dame I want. That’s the best part. They can’t get enough of me. I snap my finger when I get off that stage, and they’re at my feet, like puppies, man, lapping me up.’”
D’Orazio told Frank, “You’re a married man now. You can’t be doing that.”
Frank threw back a scotch and water and said, “Well, I can’t help myself. What
can I say?”
“Bullshit,” Joey said. “You can help yourself.”
Frank slammed his glass on the bar and looked Joey straight in the eyes. “No,” he said firmly. “I can’t. Got that? I don’t want to. And I’m not going to. So keep your mouth shut about it,” he said, his tone threatening, “because I don’t want to hurt Nancy. This has nothing to do with her. It’s no big deal.”
“Frank, it is a big deal,” Joey insisted.
“All right, I know it’s a big deal. What d’ya think, I’m stupid?” Frank said as he threw some money on the bar. “How can you understand what it’s like for me? You and I, we live in different worlds now.”
Then he got up and stormed angrily out of the bar. This certainly wasn’t the first time Sinatra would justify his bad behavior by blaming it on the pressure of his celebrity, and it wouldn’t be the last.
Nancy still loved Frank. It wasn’t easy, though, because he had become so self-centered, wanting what he wanted without any thought given to the hurt it might cause her. She attempted time and time again to overlook his faults, believing that if she was just more patient and understanding he would come around. However, what actually happened was that he began to resent her for her tolerance.
“If you want to cheat on me, go right ahead, see if I care,” she told him one night at a nightclub in New York. They were with friends, enjoying a night on the town in Manhattan. Frank had been flirting intensely with a cocktail waitress. He seemed somewhat taken aback by Nancy’s offer.
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