Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [23]
The teacher passed him along to another coach desperate enough to charge half the price.
John Quinlan had sung tenor for the Metropolitan Opera before getting bounced for drinking. Even now, at 10:00 a.m., he had that Major Bowes barroom bouquet about him. He was a big, solid fellow, his thin sandy hair slicked straight back from a high forehead, his collar slightly askew around a meager tie knot, plenty of dandruff on his shoulders. He spoke with an English accent that wasn’t quite English—there was something tough about it. Irish? Turned out he was Australian, far from home. Quinlan listened to Frank sing, and nodded.
There was something to work with; that was a relief. But the first thing they had to do was get him to stop sounding like a stevedore from—where the Christ did he say he was from?
Week in and week out, Frankie did the vocal exercise: “Let us wander by the bay,” running up the scale and back down, in all twelve keys. Quinlan could do accents, could mimic Caruso in perfect Italian, sing Carmen in French, speak the King’s English. He taught Sinatra that “brother” had an r at the end, a th in the middle. “While” began with an exhalation, as if the h came first.
Puff the air out, Frank.
Frank needed to work on his t’s—the tip of his tongue was touching the back of his teeth instead of the roof of his mouth. Crisp t’s, Frank. Tut tut tut.
Dut dut dut.
And so—even though his t’s, over the next sixty years, would never become entirely crisp—the Hoboken began to drain from his voice. Not in day-to-day speech; rather, it was a trick, something he could, increasingly, do at will. At first, though, it drew the discomfiture of old friends and acquaintances. But even as they mocked him, they envied him. Suddenly he could sound almost like the people in the movies and on the radio: people who were never without a trenchant observation or a witty rejoinder, people who were never sad or hard up or horny or just sitting around picking their noses, bored. Most especially, people in the movies and on the radio were never, ever bored.
Frank was singing with more confidence. He’d begun to find regions of his chest he never knew existed; his increasing poise with diction was bringing the words alive a little bit.
He learned to look at the lyric on paper and think about it. Somebody had written those words for a reason—he tried to imagine what that reason might have been. He began to see: you can’t sing it if you don’t understand it.
I don’t want you
But I hate to lose you.
The songs were almost all about love, but the implicit and compelling argument—in that era—was that love was the ultimate human subject, and could therefore encompass absolutely any idea or shade of emotion: euphoria, sorrow, lust, hate, ambivalence, cynicism, naughty fun, surprise, surrender. The best lyricists were akin to poets. A singer who could comprehend their work would understand their brilliance and polish it, even add to it. Would, in optimal circumstances, take temporary possession of the song, making it seem like something that had just been thought up and uttered, most compellingly.
For the time being, the best Frank could hope for was to begin to understand. He saw now how hollow his earlier efforts had been—trying to ape Bing and Rudy and Russ Columbo, wanting the rewards of acclaim without truly comprehending what he was doing. He began to see the differences between poor and fair and good and great songs.
But it seemed the more he learned and the harder he tried, the less work he could find. Sometimes it felt as if he had had his shot, his moment in the national sun with the Major, and maybe it would all be downhill from there. He spent his nights at the Onyx Club and the Three Deuces on Fifty-second Street strictly as a spectator, a nobody from nowhere, his nose pressed against the glass. He was stuck in Hoboken like a fly on flypaper, still singing for chump change at bars and social clubs and weddings,