Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [21]
Amazingly, Frankie would live under his parents’ roof for three more years.
But he wasn’t malingering—quite the opposite. Motivated as much by anxiety as ambition, he shifted into high gear, exploring every conceivable singing opportunity in North Jersey, paid and unpaid—and in the process, staying out of the house as much as possible. He did $2-a-night gigs at the Elks; he worked again at the Cat’s Meow and the Union Club (whose owners could now advertise “Major Bowes Radio Winner”1); he took his mike and sparkly speaker to political rallies and weddings; he dragged Matty Golizio back to WAAT in Jersey City.
But, most important, he now had the maturity and knowledge to begin his assault on Manhattan. If the years 1935 through 1937 were, as Sinatra later said, his “panic period,” they were also a time of intense connection—the kind of connection that simply wasn’t possible on the left bank of the Hudson. Jersey certainly had talented musicians, but the Big Apple was a different universe, and Tin Pan Alley, just north of Times Square, was the red-hot center of it.
It was also a moment of intense transition for the music business: a business that, for over half a century, had been built upon the sale of sheet music—the content of the day—to the piano-playing, parlor-singing American public. Now, with the rise of radio and phonograph records, power had shifted to the bandleaders who conveyed the content—and, still to a lesser extent in the 1930s, the band singers. Few, if any, important vocalists were out on their own yet. The music publishers of Tin Pan Alley employed singer–piano players (the so-called song pluggers, most of them themselves aspiring songwriters) to sell the publishers’ songs to the performers.
Sinatra was barely a performer. In the universe of the music business, he was just a cosmic speck, one of the hundreds of “kolos”—the term of art in those days for wannabe singers and musicians—who haunted Tin Pan Alley music publishers, hoping to latch onto hot new material. In the usual food chain of the business, kolos pestered song pluggers, and song pluggers looked over the kolos’ shoulders for somebody really important. But here was a kolo who acted as if he already were important, strutting around announcing to one and all that whatever the current reality, he was going to be the next big singer.
Two pluggers in particular were impressed. One, a short, stocky kid from the Bronx with a prematurely receding hairline and the arms of a blacksmith, was named Hank Sanicola. The other, a tall kid from upstate New York with a brilliant keyboard technique and an equally recessive hairline, had the improbable moniker of Chester Babcock. His nom de piano was Jimmy Van Heusen.
Both, like Sinatra, were in their early twenties; each would become central in the singer’s life. Sanicola was a salt-of-the-earth character, a workmanlike aspiring songwriter who knew enough about music to understand his limitations, and to recognize real talent when he heard it. Van Heusen had real talent.
Edward Chester Babcock, of Syracuse, was a paradox: foul-mouthed, obsessed with sex and alcohol, but a songwriter of deep and delicate gifts, verging on genius. Some of the melodies that would one day make his reputation had been in his head since puberty. Meanwhile, he bided his time trying to sell other men’s tunes at Remick and Company, the music publisher.
While Van Heusen watched for his shot as an in-house songwriter, he sat at his piano facing a daily tide of would-be bandleaders and vocalists. One of the latter was this starved-looking kid from Hoboken, so cocky he walked around in a yachting cap in imitation of his idol Bing Crosby. Van Heusen listened to the kid, and liked what he heard. He liked Frank Sinatra, period. The two young men (Jimmy was about three years older) had much in common: an eye for