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like a hummingbird. In February he reported, yet again, to his draft board in Jersey City, playing out the unfunny comedy a little further, getting reclassified yet again, to 2-A, which meant he was not only physically unfit to serve but also employed in an occupation “necessary to the national health, safety, and interest.” IS CROONING ESSENTIAL? one headline asked. And then, on March 5, the draft board announced it had all been a mistake, that 4-F was the real classification. The headlines and editorials fulminated some more … but Sinatra was too fast for them. On March 6, he was back in the studio in Hollywood, recording four more numbers, including a Norman Rockwell poster of a tune Gordon Jenkins called “Homesick, That’s All”:

I miss the times I had to set the table,

I miss the rolls my mother made when she was able.

Sinatra gave the song his tenderest reading, pitching it shamelessly both to the audience that hated him most, the millions of men who were still far from home, and to the audience that adored him: the women who kept the home fires burning. Nancy, of course, heard it, too.

But she wouldn’t get to see him: the moment he finished the session, he turned on a dime and headed right back east. There was a Western Union telegram, dated March 8, 1945, from Manie:

MR. FRANK SINATRA, 1051 VALLEY SPRING LANE, NORTH HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA. JUST READ IN WINCHELL’S COLUMN THAT YOU AND COLUMBIA RECORD EXECUTIVES ON THE OUTS. WHAT IS IT ABOUT? THINK GOOD IDEA TO WIRE WINCHELL TELLING HIM THAT SOMEONE IS GIVING HIM WRONG INFORMATION. SEE YOU MONDAY. LOVE AND KISSES, MANIE.

But the next day, by return wire, Frank jokingly affirmed Winchell’s position, telling Manie to look out for a punch in the nose when he got back to town. He, too, signed with love and kisses.

Frank’s recording was going beautifully, the recording business, less so. Columbia was crimping him on studio charges, charging him for copying, arrangements, Axel’s conducting fees. Crimping him, Sinatra!

Still, there is no evidence that he gave Sacks anything but a hug when they met in New York: Sinatra never was one for personal confrontation. Besides, even where Manie was concerned, Frank had someplace else to be—a radio show, a dinner at Toots’s, a speaking engagement at the World Youth rally at Carnegie Hall. He was a blur of motion. Making the spots. Staying out late. Talking.

Strangely enough, one of the glamour girls Sinatra had claimed he could live without—in Phil Silvers’s lyric at least—had started spending time at 1051 Valley Spring Lane, mostly when the man of the house wasn’t there. Lana Turner had struck up a conversation with Nancy at the New Year’s Eve party, and the odd couple had hit it off: the petite blonde from Idaho with the checkered past and the even more petite brunette from Jersey City with the practical turn of mind and an artist’s hand in the kitchen. They had laughed together that night, at Lana’s lightly scathing comment about the anatomical shortcomings of one of the handsomest men there. The remark let Nancy breathe easier about her own shortcomings, her new hometown’s unrelenting tyranny of beauty.

Lana, of course, was almost impossibly beautiful, but something in her brown eyes spoke of pain and a restless sadness. Hollywood was nothing but a boiler factory as far as she was concerned, her privileged place in it notwithstanding. The men were all fairies or hounds, sometimes both. (Not Frank, of course. Nancy had a real man—maybe ’cause he didn’t look like all those cookie-cutter hunks.) And the women were all out to slit each other’s throats.

That was why Lana liked Nancy: she was someone she could really talk to. She played with a strand of Nancy’s hair. And Lana loved the way she looked, too.

Nancy smiled, accepting the compliment. Finally she felt a little less lonely. And she was delighted to tell her family and her friends back in Jersey: At last she had a real friend in Hollywood, and they wouldn’t believe who it was. Lana Turner!

Inconceivably—he had been president since Frank was seventeen—FDR died in