Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [19]
And he could sing. Even the original Flashes finally had to admit that: the farther they got on this cockamamie bus-and-train tour—Des Moines and Wichita and Oakland and Vancouver and Bellingham, Washington—the farther they got, the more comfortable Frankie became with his voice, and the more they realized he really should be the one in front. He felt what he sang, he had a way of getting inside it—which translated, once the evening’s entertainment was over, into a way of getting into the pants of the hick girls that gathered down at the front of the orchestra.
Oddly enough, this was all new to Frank. He may have lost his cherry to some girl on a Hoboken roof or on the beach down the shore in Long Branch, but he had certainly never had intercourse with a woman in a bed before. Now he was having a lot of it, in a lot of beds, with a lot of women—young ones mainly, but some older ones too, including married ones whose husbands happened to be out during the day. Now and then he thought about Nancy—with whom he’d gone just a little way down this road—but her image was quickly dimming. He was getting a rapid education in the wide range of female sexual response and emotional variability. There was just one common denominator: they all liked him, a lot.
He wasn’t much to look at—beyond the facial scars, he was still plagued with fairly severe acne—but his mouth, with its slight up curve at the corners and its extravagantly rich and wide, slightly jutting lower lip, was beautifully formed, and his eyes—those eyes!—were a little bit wild. None of the boys in Des Moines or Oakland or Bellingham looked like that.
The question of his body must also be addressed, now being as good a time as any.
Naked, Frank Sinatra stood five feet seven and a half inches tall. This was his full adult stature; he would never grow even a quarter inch more, though in later years he would give his height variously as five nine, five ten, even five eleven—the maximum he could stretch the truth without pretending to a patently absurd six feet. In later years, he wore lifts in his shoes that got him up to five nine or so; his fearsome presence, and the intense reluctance of the world at large to challenge him on any matter, made up the difference.
In an era when the average height of an adult male was five nine, there was nothing very wrong with five feet seven and a half inches. But he was also skinny, so skinny, with the kind of metabolism—as a young man, at least—that made it difficult to keep weight on, let alone gain it. He was not especially broad shouldered. He was also narrow at the hips, and his gluteus maximus was minimus—he was completely flat fannied. (And, throughout his young manhood and early middle age, self-conscious about it.) His hands and feet were well formed; in fact his hands—unlike, say, Mike Barbato’s—were soft, padded, artistic-looking: most definitely not made for manual labor. Clean, always. Sometimes they grew chapped from the many times he washed them throughout the day. His fingernails, throughout his life, were always exquisitely manicured.
Naked, Frank Sinatra was a fairly unexceptional specimen. Except.
It is literally central, an integral part of the lore, beginning with the frequently disinhibited Ava Gardner’s legendary comment (so good that she must have said it—or someone improved it along the way)—“There’s only ten pounds of Frank, but there’s a hundred and ten pounds of cock”—and continuing, in later years, with the graphic and admiring testimony of Sinatra’s valet, George Jacobs, who revealed