Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [18]
“… Hoboken Four, singing and dancing fools,” the Major announced.
A little wise guy they’d met before the show, his name lost to history, piped up from the wings: Why did the Major call them fools?
The sour-faced Bowes actually gave a half smile. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess ’cause they’re so happy.”
And with that as their cue, Fred, Skelly, and Pat skipped out onto the giant stage like schoolboys on holiday, Frankie trying his best to walk along behind them.
The Major greeted them. Why not introduce themselves and tell the folks where they worked? This last, of course, was key to establishing their amateur status. Frankie saw Tamby taking charge, doing all the talking, but didn’t hear the words that were coming out. All he was aware of was the roar of blood in his ears and the voice in his head: What, in Christ’s name, could Tamby say about him?
Nothing, as it turned out. After a deadly second of dead air, suddenly ten thousand eyes were staring at little Frank Sinatra.
“What about him?” the Major said.
“Oh, he never worked a day in his life,” Tamby said.
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The Hoboken Four on Major Bowes’s Original Amateur Hour, circa 1935. Left to right: Fred Tamburro, Pat Principe, Bowes, “Skelly” Petrozelli, Frank. (photo credit 4.1)
And then they sang, thank God, for that was one thing Frank knew how to do. Or thought he did: while the other three tootled along, doing their best Mills Brothers imitation, Frankie, trying to keep the smile fixed on his lips, jumped in with the nearest thing to Bing’s improvising he could muster:
Just because—my hair is curly
Just because—my teeth are pearly.
And yet, more clearly than ever, he realized that what Crosby made sound like falling off a log was in fact nigh unto unattainable: the absolute ease and richness of the voice, the effortless skipping around the beat, never ever putting a foot wrong.
It simply wasn’t Frank. Ease wasn’t his to feel or feign; singing was an urgent matter. A personal matter. Vocalizing in chorus was possible, though not desirable. Skipping around the beat was somebody else’s idea of fun.
He did his best.
Which, miraculously, was all right. The gong never sounded! And when the four of them finally finished, the gigantic beast out in the dark—ten thousand eyes, ears, hands—exploded with delight, sending the needle on the big onstage applause meter far over to the right and keeping it there. The Major looked pleased. He kept nodding, like the old snake-oil salesman he was. These fellows had “walked right into the hearts of their audience.”
Amazingly enough, they had. They had won the contest. The radio-audience votes out in America agreed with the meter: the night of September 8, 1935, belonged to the Hoboken Four. Which entitled them to become a cog in the great Bowes machine. Entertainment colossus that he was, the Major ran a small army of Original Amateur Hour companies, conglomerations of acts that had succeeded on the show, whom he then signed to crisscross the nation by bus and train, entertaining burgs large and small, generating a steady river of cash, and keeping the Bowes brand name ever fresh. It was a brilliant idea, allowing the Major to stay close to the home office in New York while he raked in the hundreds of thousands. Fifty simoleons per week of which, apiece, now went to the Hoboken Four—meals, accommodations, and travel included. One week after their radio performance, they joined the Major Bowes Number Five tour unit, a motley troupe of bell ringers, jug blowers, harmonica players, yodelers … hard-r’d characters from out in the country someplace, among whom four Italian boys from Hoboken, New Jersey, might as well have come from—well, from Italy.
Which was not necessarily a bad thing, at least in Frankie’s case. After a couple of stops he learned