Sinatra

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  “Who says something like that to her husband?” he asked. “That’s ridiculous. Don’t say that, Nancy. What’s wrong with you?”

  “Well what do you want me to say, Frank?” she said, looking him straight in the eye. “You’re not gonna stop, and we both know it.”

  “You’re not supposed to like it, though,” he said angrily.

  “I don’t like it,” she shot back. “But what am I supposed to do about it?”

  “You’re supposed to not mention it at all,” Frank said as he peeled some money off a wad and threw it down at the table. “Now you’ve gone and made me feel bad in front of our friends. That ain’t right, Nancy. That just ain’t right.” Once again, he stormed off.

  Nancy was rattled. “Excuse me,” she told her friends as she ran off to the ladies’ room.

  It wasn’t that Frank didn’t love her. He did. However, he was bored. He wanted something—someone—else. New and different excited him, not the same old Nancy. Unfortunately, as we shall see, this would prove to be a perpetual problem for him. “Simply put, he was a man who was never fully satisfied,” his daughter Tina would note many years later. “He was someone who could not fully commit. Maybe he was too self-involved to commit, I don’t know. I think it’s safe to say that few men of his generation were very introspective. He just was who he was; Frank, for better or worse. Take him or leave him. If you were in a relationship with him, you had to either go along with his inability to commit or jump ship. Because he was Sinatra, most people in his life were more than happy to go along with it just to be a part of his world. For a time there, my mother certainly did just that. She would readily admit as much.”

  Though Nancy did “go along with it,” she still longed for Frank to accept the typical domestic role of husband and father and help raise a family. She well knew, though, that when he wasn’t at home in New Jersey with her and the baby, he led a fast-paced, glamorous life. When he was on tour, he actually could have anyone he wanted.

  * * *

  The hysteria Frank Sinatra and the band caused on the road was surprising even to them. In fact, something unusual had occurred: Sinatra had become a sensation.

  “I think that my appeal was due to the fact that there hadn’t been a troubadour around for ten or twenty years, from the time that Bing had broken in and went on to radio and movies,” Frank said later. “And he, strangely enough, had appealed primarily to older people, middle-aged people. When I came on the scene and people began noticing me, I think the kids were looking for someone to cheer for. I began to realize that there must be something to all this commotion. I didn’t know exactly what it was, but I figured I had something that must be important.”

  Tommy Dorsey was astounded by the reaction of the female audience members to Frank. He knew for certain he had struck gold when he signed this singer to that ridiculous contract. He once recalled, “I used to stand there on the bandstand so amazed I’d almost forget to take my solos. You could almost feel the excitement coming up out of the crowds when that kid stood up to sing. Remember, he was no matinee idol. He was a skinny kid with big ears. And yet what he did to women was something awful.”

  “Maybe if I’m more of a woman,” Nancy told Patti Demarest one night when Frank was on the road and didn’t call after the show. “Maybe I can keep him at home. Maybe if I pray to God more. That could be it. Maybe I’m not praying to God enough.”

  “Oh, he’ll come back,” Patti told her. “But you do have to try to be better. Make him know that you’re all he needs. Lose some weight, Nancy. Buy some new clothes. Get your hair done.”

  Dorothy

  Back in October 1940—about four months after Nancy was born—while Frank was in Los Angeles with the band to perform at the Palladium and to appear in Las Vegas Nights, he met a striking blonde actress, mostly an extra, named Alora Gooding. Her real name was Dorothy Bonucelli; Frank knew her as Dorothy. As well as being an extra, she worked in the casinos in Nevada as a cocktail waitress and a hat check girl. She also told Frank that she knew the mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, which intrigued him. As Frank sang “I’ll Never Smile Again” in Las Vegas Nights, it was Dorothy who posed in front of him as the girl to whom he was singing. Her day job at the time was at the Garden of Allah hotel, as a daytime greeter. While the two flirted, she mentioned her other job, and, sure enough, the next day Frank showed up at the hotel and booked a night there. Before long, they were having an affair.

  Frank became convinced that he wanted to be with Dorothy. Within a week, she had moved into his suite at the Hollywood Plaza, where the band stayed when on the West Coast.

  “He was crazy about her, really in love with her,” said his friend Nick Sevano. “She was his first brush with glamour, and he was mad for her.”

  Finally, Frank confessed to Nancy that he had fallen for another woman. Of course, she was crushed, but she was also angry. He then said he wanted out of the marriage; he wanted to be with Dorothy. Nancy wouldn’t hear of it. She knew her husband. This was just another of his silly flings, she quickly decided; he’d get over it. Meanwhile, she would just have to ride this latest affair out. Frank’s cheating had nothing to do with her, anyway—or at least that’s what she would tell some people at the time. He had his life, she would say, and she had hers. As long as he was there for her when she needed him, all was well.

  Frank was making almost $15,000 a year—decent money for the times. He was a good provider, Nancy told friends. He didn’t abuse her, at least not physically. He loved his daughter, and, she felt, in his own way he also loved her. She was reaching, of course—trying to pinpoint whatever positive aspects of their relationship she could find to not only cope with his behavior but maintain her dignity in the face of it. However, those in her tight-knit circle knew the truth: Deep down, Nancy had come to believe that she simply wasn’t enough for Frank. Doris Sevanto said, “Sometimes, she would say, ‘It’ll pass. It’ll pass. I know what I’ll do. I’ll diet. I’ll lose ten more pounds. He’ll love me then.’ ”

  Eventually, Frank told Nancy he would stop seeing Dorothy Bonucelli.

  Many years later, however, the Sinatra family would learn that Frank hadn’t really stopped seeing Dorothy at all. In fact, forty-four years from this time, they would learn that Dorothy had become pregnant by Frank and that she gave birth to his child—a girl she named Julie.

  Dispute with Dorsey

  In January 1942, Billboard named Frank Sinatra top band vocalist, replacing Bing Crosby. He had also moved Crosby out of the top of the Down Beat popularity poll, which Crosby had occupied for six years.

  On January 19, Frank cut his first records without the Tommy Dorsey band for RCA’s Bluebird label. Tommy wasn’t very happy about the prospect of Frank working alone in the studio—and with Dorsey’s arranger, Axel Stordahl—but he knew that he needed to keep the young singer happy, and Frank was eager to do some recording work on his own. Therefore, at this time, with a small, mellow band—no brass—Frank recorded “The Night We Called It a Day”; his first version of “Night and Day”;3 “The Song Is You”; and “The Lamplighter’s Serenade.”

  By this time, Frank was clearly Dorsey’s star attraction. The audience’s reaction to him was so strong that he wanted to do more as a performer and not have to work within the confines of a band. He wanted to go solo.

  “I’m gonna be the biggest singer in the business, as big as they come,” he told Joey D’Orazio one day. It was a familiar refrain. He said the same thing to Sammy Cahn, among others. When Cahn agreed, telling him, “There is no way anything can get in your way,” Frank was filled with a sense of empowerment. “You do believe, then, don’t you?” he said to Cahn, excitedly grabbing his arm. Certainly Frank believed in his own potential. But he became even more excited when he was able to convince others, and with his prodigious talent that wasn’t difficult to do.

  “Frank was making secret plans to strike out on his own,” Hank Sanicola once said. “He wanted to be bigger, better. H
e didn’t want to be Dorsey’s boy any longer. Columbia Records was interested in him. People were talking about him. But none of this was anything Tommy wanted to hear. He wanted his band members to just stay with him for life.”

  Frank had learned a lot from Tommy Dorsey, just as he had from Harry James. From Dorsey, Sinatra began to fully understand that a vocalist doesn’t necessarily have to sing a song the same way every time he performs it, though that was what most singers did at the time. Dorsey taught Sinatra to personalize a melody so that it was unique to the moment, yet still familiar to fans. Dorsey’s tip to interpret a lyric as the mood struck—to improvise and not stick solely to the written melody—went a long way toward making each of Frank’s performances interesting not only to his audience, but also to himself. Indeed, Tommy Dorsey’s influence would definitely inform the final creation of Frank Sinatra as a unique artist.

  Frank had also made some fine records with Tommy, including “Pale Moon,” “Oh, Look at Me Now,” and “Blue Skies.” However, it was time for him to move on.

  In early 1942, while the two were in a dressing room in Washington, twenty-six-year-old Frank told Tommy he was leaving the band. “I’m ready to go. I want to leave the orchestra,” Frank recalled telling him. Dorsey, always the taskmaster, looked at him with the indifference of a schoolteacher who had heard it all before from his students. “What for?” he said. “You know you’re doing great with the band, and we’ve got a lot of arrangements for you.”

  “I know that, Tommy,” Frank said. “But it’s time for me to go out on my own. I want to give you a full year’s notice. I think that’s fair.”

  “Well, I don’t think so,” Dorsey said dismissively, looking down at his sheet music. “I don’t think so at all.”

  Frank was not dissuaded. “Well, I’m leaving,” he said. “I just thought you should know. I think you might want to consider Dick Haymes. He’s a helluva singer.”

  “Listen, you’ve got a contract,” Tommy said, becoming angry.

  “Well, I had one with Harry too,” Frank said naively. “And he took it and tore it up.”

  “I’m not Harry,” Tommy shot back.

  “Again, I’m giving you a year’s notice,” Frank said before leaving. “This time next year, I’m leaving.”

  From that time on, Tommy only spoke to Frank when absolutely necessary. Frank wasn’t the least bit concerned about Dorsey’s attitude, though; he was busy planning his new career, contacting promoters, booking agents, and others in the entertainment industry who he knew would be able to assist him when the time was right. He was also taking diction classes with instructor John Quinlan in New York in an ultimately futile attempt to lose his New Jersey accent. However, he would learn to enunciate perfectly when performing. Frank was driven and would do whatever he felt he had to in order to make it in the competitive record business.

  Through Tommy Dorsey’s road manager, George A. “Bullets” Durgom, Frank would meet and befriend Emmanuel “Manie” Sacks, a recording executive from Columbia. Sacks, the head of Columbia’s artists and repertoire (A&R) division, believed he could make additional contacts for Frank in the industry and possibly even sign him to Columbia. (At the time, Frank was still under contract to RCA because of his arrangement with Dorsey.) Manie, a charming man who would make a big imprint on the music industry, would go on to become one of Frank’s dearest friends.

  Frustrated by Frank’s determination to leave the band despite his opposition, Tommy finally agreed to let him go. However, he told him that the contract—which by now Frank referred to as “a ratty piece of paper”—would remain in effect. He fully expected a third of Sinatra’s income for the rest of Frank’s life, plus 10 percent for his agent. He didn’t care that people who heard about this arrangement thought he was a crook.

  Frank decided he would deal with Tommy on the matter of the contract later. The first order of business would be to leave the band before Dorsey changed his mind.

  Frank performed his last concert with Tommy Dorsey at the Circle Theater in Indianapolis on September 3, 1942. Sinatra introduced his replacement that evening, Dick Haymes, who would stay with Dorsey for only six months before embarking on his own solo career.

  Many band singers, such as Ginny Simms, Ray Eberle, and Jack Leonard, failed to make the transition from dance band to center stage. That didn’t worry Frank. After all, he realized that they were just vocalists who stood stiffly in front of bandstands. Frank had spent years trying to excel at his craft, constantly honing his skill at breath control, lyrical phrasing, and microphone technique. Now all that time and effort was starting to pay off.

  “Sinatra-Mania”

  On Frank Sinatra’s twenty-seventh birthday, December 12, 1942, he was onstage at the Mosque Theatre in Newark. As fate would have it, Bob Weitman, manager of the Paramount Theatre, saw Sinatra perform that night. He was impressed. He then asked Benny Goodman, the so-called King of Swing, if he minded having Frank on a bill with him and his band at the Paramount, near Times Square, at the end of December. Goodman’s response: “Who the hell is Frank Sinatra?” Not many people would be asking that question, though, after Frank’s dates at the Paramount.

  During the war, the film industry flourished. Americans began to find distraction from the troubles of war in enormous movie theaters being built across the country. The urban movie theaters, in particular, were huge, with big, ornate lobbies decorated with mirrors and fancy chandeliers, plush padded seats, balconies, and uniformed ushers with flashlights to show patrons to their seats. Many theaters opened as early as eight-thirty in the morning; because so many people worked swing and graveyard shifts during wartime, schedules were turned upside down and there was always an audience available to fill the seats.

  The program was often a double feature of movies plus shorts, like the Movietone News, which included a war report. Theaters often also featured a live show, especially in the larger cities. In New York, for instance, Radio City Music Hall featured the Rockettes, a precision tap-dancing chorus line. Big bands were often part of the show, as at the Paramount, where Frank would do six, sometimes seven shows a day during his first engagement there.

  “I went to rehearsal at seven-thirty in the morning,” Frank said of opening day—New Year’s Eve—“and looked at the [Paramount Theatre] marquee, and it said, ‘Extra Added Attraction: Frank Sinatra,’ and I said, ‘Wow!’ ”

  Ironically, the film playing at the Paramount that night was Bing Crosby’s Star-Spangled Rhythm, which received top billing.

  This would turn out to be an extraordinary debut for him. The moment he was introduced on opening night by Jack Benny, the young girls in the audience went berserk. They immediately started crying out, “Frankeeeeee, Frankeeeee.” It was so sudden, this adulation, that everyone was taken by surprise.

  “What the hell was that?” Benny Goodman wondered.

  “Five thousand kids, stamping, yelling, screaming, applauding,” Frank remembered. “I thought the roof would come off.”

  “I thought the goddamned building was going to cave in,” Jack Benny said.

  The audience—mostly comprised of teenage girls, who were known as “bobby-soxers” because of the white socks they wore4—simply wouldn’t leave after the show; they would attempt to stay through several performances, and the only way to get rid of them was for the theater’s manager to screen the dullest films he could find, along with Star-Spangled Rhythm, between shows.

  Frank had become an overnight sensation. Word about him had spread as a result of his recordings and radio appearances, creating a fan base of youngsters who were growing more and more interested in him, until it suddenly exploded into a cultural phenomenon at the Paramount. With the show a record-breaking success—primarily because of Sinatra’s contribution—the original two-week engagement was extended for two more months.

  Frank was so grateful to his new fans for their support, he had his assistant road manager, Richie Lisella, buy dozens of turkey sandwiches at W
algreens for the girls who stayed in their seats all day long rather than risk losing them to newcomers. He never pandered to this audience, either, by compromising his vision simply for acceptance and applause. In other words, he didn’t restrict his show to songs the audience knew and loved. Instead, he sang intelligent, poignant love songs chosen for their lyrical content, regardless of their recognition factor—though in fact they were rarely heard over the din of the audience’s response.

  Although “Sinatra-mania,” as it was immediately dubbed by the press, did affect some older women, and men of all ages, thirteen- to fifteen-year-old girls became his biggest fans. What accounted for this sudden phenomenon? One theory was that his new audience was too young to have boyfriends and Frank provided a stand-in love object. Even though they knew he was married and a father—on Nancy’s birthday there were enough gifts sent by fans to fill an orphanage—he was “safe” because he was unattainable. On the other hand, even though he was older, he was so thin and boyish-looking he could have been one of them.

  “Psychologists have tried to go into the reasons why, with all sorts of theories,” Frank said of the pandemonium he had caused. “It was the war years, and there was a great loneliness. I was the boy in every corner drugstore, the boy who’d gone off to war.”

  His more ardent fans went to great lengths to secure a piece of him. In the winter, girls were known to dig up snowprints of his feet and take them home to their freezers. Ashes from his cigarettes became prized mementos. Hotel maids were bribed to let his fans lie between his sheets before they made the bed in which he had slept. He very quickly ended up with two thousand fan clubs.