Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [24]
Then he heard about something he really wanted.
The Rustic Cabin, whose parking lot he knew all too well from his days chauffeuring the Flashes, had an opening for a singing waiter and emcee. Fifteen dollars a week—not so great, even at the bottom of the Depression. But the wire to the radio station was still there, and now the station had a new broadcast, WNEW Dance Parade, featuring the Cabin’s band and singer. A golden opportunity. Frankie drove the familiar route up to Englewood Cliffs, strolled into the club—the dark interior had log-cabin walls, booths with high split-log partitions (ideal for tête-à-têtes and trysts), a dance floor, and a bandstand—and found himself face-to-face with Harold Arden. Not Harold Arlen the immortal songwriter, but Harold Arden the bush-league bandleader, who wore a mustache with long waxed tips and bore a passing resemblance to the supercilious actor Franklin Pangborn. Arden, for some reason, had taken an instant dislike to Sinatra: maybe it was the yachting cap; maybe it was the way he carried himself. In any case, as soon as Frankie, standing by the bored piano player, had finished singing his latest hit, “Exactly Like You,” Arden gave the owner, Harry Nichols, a lemon-sucking look. Nichols took out his cigar.
They’d keep him on file.
Dolly, of course, was standing by the door when he got home, waiting to ask if he’d gotten the job. Girlie, his miniature collie, came up to greet him, and before Dolly could get the question out, Frank swooped the dog into his arms, pounded up the stairs to his room, and slammed the door.
Dolly stood in the front hall, stymied. Twenty-two years old, living at home, no trade, no money in his fucking pocket except what she put there—useless for everything, in short, except warbling tunes for spare change.
And bawling like a little girl.
Yet she knew not what he could be—she hadn’t the ear for that—but that there was nothing else he could be. So he was high-strung. So what?
This time she picked up her white telephone and rang a Democratic Party pal named Harry Steeper, who was the mayor of North Bergen, between West New York and Cliffside Park. He was also head of the New Jersey musicians’ union—and, as such, a good pal to James Caesar Petrillo, the man who was swiftly rising toward absolute power in the American Federation of Musicians. Petrillo was a mediocre trumpet player but, as his middle name foreordained, a vastly ambitious man whose chief abhorrence in life was the phonograph record. As James Caesar Petrillo saw it, the phonograph was an invention whose sole purpose was to put honest musicians out of work. And Petrillo (whose path would cross with Frank Sinatra’s in an important way in just a few years) was a Friend of the Musician, and Harry Steeper was a friend of James C. Petrillo’s.2
So—surprise—Frankie got the job. Harold Arden could wax the tips of his mustache with that.
5
Frank fronting Bill Henri and His Headliners at the Rustic Cabin, early 1939. Harry James would discover Sinatra here in June. (photo credit 5.1)
The universe, in Dolly Sinatra’s view, was a well-ordered place as long as she had anything to do with it. Within her realm, she could control the miracle of birth itself and all the machinations of the day-to-day world. But certain areas threatened her: Frankie’s temperament, for one. She possessed