Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [124]
At the end of March, Sinatra set out on a cross-country concert tour. He would play San Francisco, Philadelphia, Detroit, New York, and Chicago through June, then return to the Coast and perform at the Hollywood Bowl in August. Location work on It Happened in Brooklyn would proceed while he was in New York. Marilyn had planned a trip to Manhattan for early June, to clear her head and buy some clothes: they could spend days together, discussing the future.
Lana, as it turned out, was also going to be in New York, for the premiere of her big new picture, The Postman Always Rings Twice. In her career-defining role, she played a scheming adulteress to such sizzling perfection that MGM insisted her character dress all in white to mute the impression.
The concert tour was a huge success. Sinatra was at the zenith of his popularity. Anchors Aweigh had made him a major movie star; The House I Live In had made him the national voice of tolerance. In between concerts, he commuted back to Los Angeles for the weekly broadcast of his new radio show, Old Gold Presents Songs by Sinatra. Era-appropriate cigarette hawking aside (“Yes, light an Old Gold for cigarette comfort and pleasure! The comfort of extra protection against cigarette dryness, the pleasure of luxurious extra flavor!”), the show was classy—and all-Sinatra—from start to finish. He opened each program with a soulful version of “Night and Day,” slightly slowed to make it more a concert piece than a dance number. The new tempo was a powerful statement, telling the world he’d now taken full ownership of the gorgeous song whose lyrics he’d fluffed before its composer just seven years earlier at the Rustic Cabin. Frank closed each broadcast with his lovely signature tune “Put Your Dreams Away.” “Sinatra,” Friedwald writes, “featured songs for the ages as often as he did the best new numbers and his own hits, and even devoted whole programs to the works of Jerome Kern, Johnny Mercer, Irving Berlin, and their peers.”
The new album affirmed his dominance. The week he played the Golden Gate Theatre in San Francisco (along with the Pied Pipers, who had left Dorsey and become a hit act on their own) was the same week The Voice of Frank Sinatra began its ascent to number 1 on the Billboard charts. The crowds swelled. In Philadelphia, he played to a house of ten thousand at the Convention Hall (the acoustics were beside the point). And in Detroit, the mass-steria was such that even his new friends at the Federal Bureau of Investigation took notice. When Sinatra arrived in the Motor City on May 8, no less a personage than Louis B. Nichols, one of J. Edgar Hoover’s top aides, went to observe the goings-on. A few days later, the stunned G-man wrote a memo to the director:
As a symptom of the state of mind of many young people I wish to call to your attention the following incident that occurred in Detroit on last Wednesday.
Frank Sinatra arrived in Detroit around midnight and a group of bobby soxers were waiting for him at the airfield. He eluded them and they then congregated at the stage door of the Downtown Theater where he was scheduled to give his first performance around 10:00 a.m. on Thursday morning. The line started forming at around 2:00 a.m. The police started challenging girls who appeared to be under 16 and tried to send them home. However, I have been told, there was a long line of mere kids, many of whom carried their lunches, and they remained in line until the theater opened. Truant Officers started checking the lines early in the morning and were berated by the girls. There was widespread indignation on the part of numerous individuals that I came in contact with and a severe indictment [by] parents of the girls. One individual went so far as to state that Sinatra should be lynched.
Hoover was impressed. “Sinatra is as much to blame as the moronic bobby-soxers,” he scrawled across the bottom of the memo.
At the Chicago Theatre later that month, the singer was paid $41,000