Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [28]
She coped. She wanted stability, and a family; she still worried about his mercurial nature. As far as other women were concerned, she knew it was not a question of if, but—Italian men being Italian men—when and how. (Mike Barbato, the tough paterfamilias, the paragon of respectability, was no exception in this regard.) But Nancy loved Frank desperately. He was infinitely sensitive; he could be so sweet and funny. And she knew he loved her. Then the slightest thing—there was no predicting—could set him off. And she had backbone: she would stand up to him. They had some terrible blowouts (the neighbors below banged on their ceiling). Then they made up. That was nice.
She wanted children. What else was marriage for? He was reluctant at first: they couldn’t afford them yet. She did everything she could to hold him—cooked him spaghetti just the way he liked it, baked him lemon-meringue pies. He loved her meals, and he loved her, but he was elusive. He had important places to go, people to see. He would rise in the afternoon and gather up his Hoboken pal Nick Sevano before getting on the ferry to Manhattan and making the rounds of radio stations and music publishers. Sanicola and Van Heusen would often join him for the evening, along with a new friend, a fast-talking, wisecracking, breathtakingly talented little lyricist named Sammy Cahn. Nobody else in the crew was married. Why were the chicks always drawn to the one that was?
He felt stalled that spring, a fly trapped in amber. He had married in haste; he wasn’t cut out for it. He loved her so much, but he wasn’t cut out for it. Much of the time—he hated himself for thinking it—Nancy was a millstone around his neck. He wasn’t getting any younger, and his career wasn’t going anywhere. The radio stations still weren’t paying, and nerves caused him to blow two important occasions: Once when he was trying out for a band run by a new leader, a rich kid from Detroit named Bob Chester, Tommy Dorsey stopped by. Tommy fucking Dorsey. Sinatra got so flustered at the sight of that cold Irish puss (he looked like a goddamn emperor or something) that he forgot the lyrics of the song he was singing and froze—literally opened his mouth and nothing came out.
And the same damn thing happened again one night at the Cabin: almost fifty years later, the horror of it would still live with him. “On a Sunday evening during the summer months, people would come back from the countryside, and stop and have a little nip before they went over the bridge to go back into New York,” Sinatra recalled, at Yale Law School in 1986.
There were about seven people in the audience, and the trumpet player—we had a six-piece “orchestra”; big sound, beautiful—the trumpet player, named Johnny Buccini, said to me, “Do you know who this is sitting out there?” I said, “No. Where?” He said, “Right out there, you dummy. Look straight ahead.” I said, “Yeah, I know that face.” He said, “That’s Cole Porter.”
I had been so infatuated with his music that I couldn’t believe he was sitting out in the audience with four or five people. I said to the orchestra leader, “I’d like to do one of Cole Porter’s songs … Let’s do ‘Night and Day’ for them, and I’ll talk about it.” So I said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to sing this song and dedicate