Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [17]
But that was only the beginning. After seeing the footage, the Major himself sent word up to the Bronx: he wanted to audition the Flashes for his nationally broadcast radio show.
Tamby, Skelly, and Pat talked among themselves, grumbled. They wanted in the worst way to shake this superfluous banana off the tree. Across the studio floor, Frankie got a gander at the confab, knew at once what was going on.
This time Dolly didn’t have to march. She sent word via drugstore telephone to a friend on Adams Street, who passed the word to the phone-less Tamburros, in Mezzogiorno dialect: Dolly Sinatra would be very disappointed if her son were not included in the audition for the great Major Bowes. No visit necessary this time; her absence as effective as her presence.
And so the four of them gathered, wearing budget-busting white suits with black silk pocket squares, in Major Bowes’s midtown office, in—of course—the Chrysler Building. As they cooled their heels nervously in the waiting room, the door popped open, startling them all. It was the Major himself, gray haired and dyspeptic, with a big red nose and a square jaw and a dark three-piece suit like a senator in the movies. Like W. C. Fields without a sense of humor. His eyes were old and watery; a faint distillery smell hung about him.
They jumped to their feet, shook his hand.
And what did the boys call themselves again?
The Thr——uh, Four Flashes.
Hmm.
They looked at each other while he stroked his chin. And shook his head. His personality, all business, was not what you’d call electric. But he was Major Bowes.
The Four Flashes sounded like the Hot Flashes. Or the Four-Flushers. Where were they from?
Thus the freshly christened Hoboken Four (though tiny Patty Principe was technically from West New York) filed into Bowes’s office and cleared their throats to sing. Their audition piece was “The Curse of an Aching Heart,” a syrupy, barbershop relic from 1913.8 The Major liked them but hated the song.
He’d put them on. But they’d need something more up-to-date. Something to lift the hearts of Mr. and Mrs. America.
When they reconvened, Frankie pulled out his ace in the hole, sheet music for “Shine,” a big hit for Bing Crosby and the Mills Brothers a couple of years earlier. It was a minstrel song, all about curly hair and pearly teeth and shiny shoes and not much else, an ideal vehicle for the wildly talented, instrument-imitating (and African-American) Millses, who pumped along in close-harmony background while Bing led, then scatted his fool head off. A white man scatting!
Frankie told his fellow Flashes that he could do Bing’s part.
The other three looked at each other. He had them over a barrel and they knew it. He had the sheet music and the car and he could sing. The worm had officially turned.
On September 8, 1935, a Sunday evening, Frankie stood in the wings of the Capitol Theater at Fifty-first and Broadway with the other former Flashes, literally unable to stop his knees from shaking. It was the second-largest theater in the entire world, at fifty-three hundred seats—five aisles in the orchestra, an ocean of faces out there. The fact that the Roxy, a block south, was a few hundred seats bigger was no consolation. Frankie’s nerves were like nothing he had ever felt before. Even the stolid Major, he’d noticed before the show, was giving off an extra-strong whiskey odor.
But once the show began, Major Edward Bowes strode out to the center of the stage as if he owned the place (which, in point of fact, he did), took his position beside the big gong,9 and—as the buzzing crowd obediently went dead silent—spoke firmly into the microphone. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Original Amateur Hour.” He sounded like a tired old insurance salesman, but—Frankie peeped out through a crack in the curtain—the audience gazed up at him as if he were Jesus Christ himself. It hit him: Every goddamn sound that went into that big square mike