Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [100]
Then came the first show, at ten o’clock in the morning on Wednesday, October 11, and Bob Weitman, the Paramount’s manager, ignoring the fire laws, let almost five thousand fans (almost all of them girls) into a theater designed to seat thirty-five hundred. They brought sandwiches, apples, bananas, Cokes; they settled in and made themselves comfortable.
And ten thousand still waited restlessly outside.
The movie was Our Hearts Were Young and Gay—a Cornelia Otis Skinner biopic, of all things—with Charles Ruggles and Beulah Bondi in the starring roles. It might as well have been a documentary about wheat farming. The warm-up acts were Hit Parade singer Eileen Barton (Ben Barton’s daughter), dancers Pops and Louie, impressionist Ollie O’Toole. They performed to the sound of coughs and rustling sandwich bags.
Then, with a soft hum and sleek hiss of silken pistons, up rose the great hydraulic platform bearing the forty-piece Raymond Paige Stage Door Canteen Radio Orchestra, and the screaming began.
Paige raised his baton, the orchestra struck up the first strains of “This Love of Mine,” and the screams got louder.
Suddenly that unmistakable head—the face still bore the traces of a California suntan—poked through the curtain, and the screams reached a deafening crescendo. The curtain parted; the slim figure in a dark suit and floppy bow tie emerged and strode to center stage. Ten thousand feet stamped the floor in unison. The screaming was white noise. The few boys in the audience (their ratio was one to ten) grimaced and held their hands to their ears.
George Evans stood in the wings, awestruck at what he and his client had wrought.
Frank grinned and blew the crowd a kiss. The pandemonium continued for minute after minute, undiminishing. He held up his hands, trying to say something.
Finally the screaming quieted ever so slightly. “Please, please, please,” Sinatra was saying. He glanced around the huge theater. In all the world, there were few gazes this intense.
“Oh, Frankiee!” one shrill voice among the many cried—and the tumult cranked up once more.
He raised his hands. And then, after a moment, just audibly: “Do you want me to leave the stage?”
“No, no, no!” they chanted. “No! No! No!”
“Then let’s see—”
“No! No! No!”
“Let’s see if we can’t be quiet enough to hear a complete arrangement,” Frank said forcefully.
They quieted down just a little, and he began to sing.
After an exhausting forty-five minutes of battling them, he sang his closing number, “Put Your Dreams Away,” bowed, threw some more kisses, and walked off the stage. The great platform slowly descended into the pit as Paige and his orchestra continued to play.
Of the more than forty-five hundred in the theater, only a scattering stood up. In all, perhaps two hundred departed, a disproportionate number of them boys. The girls who filed out (no doubt having bowed to intense parental pressure) trudged with eyes downcast, as if they’d been expelled from paradise. Back in the seats, those who had stayed unwrapped more food, chatted with friends, filed their nails.
Outside, the huge line inched forward two hundred places and stopped. The crowds, slowly growing aware of the monstrous injustice, pressed against the stanchions. The cops looked nervous.
The theater doors closed.
The girls behind the police lines pushed, shouted, wept in disbelief. Several fainted and had to be passed through the crowd to waiting ambulances. In the jammed side streets leading to Times Square, cabbies got out of their stopped vehicles and scratched their heads.
There were six shows that day, and something like two full audiences got to see the show. But twenty, then twenty-five, then thirty thousand waited outside—screaming, shoving, crying hysterically, pissing their pants. During one of the shows, a cordon of cops suddenly burst from the theater, flanking