Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [101]
Then a third egg hit him smack in the eye. And a fourth landed on his bow tie. The music stopped. “I vowed to put an end to this monotony of two years of consecutive swooning,” Dorogokupetz said later, sounding for all the world like an apprehended assassin. “I took aim and threw … it hit him … his mouth was open … I felt good.”
SINATRA HIT BY EGGS, read a headline the next morning. THE VOICE SCRAMBLES SONG.
That afternoon, a gaggle of sailors on leave, inspired by the reports in the papers and more than a few Knickerbocker beers consumed in a Times Square bar, arrived in front of the Paramount with a bag of overripe tomatoes and began slinging them at the giant image of a standing Sinatra on the marquee. By the time they were through, the singer’s face was streaming with red juice.
Backstage, Dolly was fielding reporters’ questions. “He may be famous now, but he’ll always be a baby to me,” she told them, waiting till everybody had stopped writing before she began talking again. “And I always told him to be nice to people as he goes up the ladder, because they’re the same people he’ll pass coming down. So far,” she said, looking around wryly, “he has followed my instructions.”
Forty years later, a Long Island society girl named Mary Lou Watts, a special friend of Sinatra’s since the Dorsey days, recalled the scene in his dressing room at the Paramount. “[It] was always jammed,” she said, “especially when Frank’s mother was there. She was a great big bossy lady and towered over her husband, who was about the size of a mushroom. He was as little as Frank, but that mother of his was huge and very domineering. Scare you to death.”
Dolly had doubtless put on some extra padding since the days when she weighed ninety-odd pounds, but she still stood an inch under five feet zero. Her size was all in the eye of the beholder. Which didn’t make her one bit less intimidating.
The Paramount engagement was both a first and a last. Mass hysteria like this had never existed—not since the Children’s Crusade, the newspapers noted. The events of October 11, 1944, came to be known, collectively, as the Paramount Riot, or the Columbus Day Riot. Little did anyone know at the time that in fact a template was being set: the scene would virtually repeat itself five years later when Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis played the Paramount, then would recur at successive intervals of seven years (for Elvis) and eight years (for the Beatles). Mass culture was inventing itself as youth came into power; only the avatars would change—until the explosions of the late 1960s burst the culture into a million glittering fragments.
For Sinatra, that stand at the Paramount was a kind of culmination, the final explosive orgy of his cult of youth. His fame would continue to grow until the inevitable backlash set in, but its character would change: several factors, including the war, the movies, even the musicians’ strike, combined to broaden his appeal to a more adult audience. Whatever his official bio said, the singer himself was rapidly approaching thirty.
When Columbia Records finally struck a deal with the American Federation of Musicians in November, Sinatra and Stordahl rushed to Liederkranz Hall, orchestra in tow, as eager as honeymooners. Over the next month, they literally made beautiful music together, recording