Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [29]
But with Sinatra, ambition trumped shame every time. And twenty years later, during the making of High Society, Porter would recall the night, and smile.
One afternoon that winter, Frankie stopped by the Sicilian Club in Bayonne and found Frank Mane, an alto sax player he knew from WAAT, rehearsing some songs with a ten-piece pickup band. When he asked Mane what he was practicing for, the sax player told him he was trying out for a spot with a Los Angeles outfit, Clyde Lucas and His California Dons. He was going over to Manhattan to make an audition record.
“Cheech, could I go to New York with you and sing with the band?” Frankie asked.
Mane shrugged. “Sure, why not?”
And so on March 18, all atingle, Frankie set foot for the first time in a recording studio—Harry Smith’s, 2 West Forty-sixth Street, a large office tower today. It was a Saturday afternoon: the city was quiet; studio time was cheap. After Mane and his band cut a couple of instrumentals, the musicians took out the sheet music to something called “Our Love”—corny lyrics grafted onto Tchaikovsky’s theme for Romeo and Juliet. Then, with a nod from the guy in the glass booth, the band hit the first notes and Frankie began to sing. He couldn’t help grinning at the freedom and ease, the rightness of it: he was making a record!
Our love, I feel it everywhere …
Our love is like an evening prayer.
A little while later, he was able to listen to a 78-rpm demo platter with his very own voice on it. It was a respectable-enough debut: the sound was a little scratchy, the band’s tempo plodding, but Frankie had sung on key and hit all the high notes. To him it was a miracle: he would have listened to the disc over and over again if Frank Mane had let him, so entranced was he at the sound of his own voice.
It wasn’t just narcissism. His ear, after all, was part of his genius. He was literally amazed at himself—the voice worked. Technically speaking, there were much better instruments out there: the Eberle brothers, Bob (who spelled it “Eberly”) and Ray; Dick Haymes—all, at that point, could sing circles around him. They had bigger, richer baritones; they sounded like men. He still sounded like a boy.
But this was what worked for him—he didn’t sound like anyone else. He was a boy, and he was vulnerable (and would remain so, as long as Dolly was alive), and he could carry a tune, in both senses of both words. He made good and goddamn sure that he understood the words to every song he sang, made sure (like Mabel, like Billie) that his audiences knew he was telling a story. And his audiences (and especially the women in them) wanted to hear him telling it.
The iconic mug shot. Defiance, style, and the astonishing intelligence of the pale, wide-set eyes. A man with full knowledge of his own importance. (photo credit 5.2)
A woman happened to hear him on the radio one night that spring—the WNEW wire from the Rustic Cabin, the Dance Parade. Her name was Louise Tobin, and she was a band singer herself—young, black haired, gorgeous, and newly married to a freshly minted young bandleader, a tall, rail-thin, hatchet-headed Texas trumpeter named Harry James. Tobin and James were in their room at the Lincoln Hotel, at Eighth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street; Tobin was preparing to catch a late train for a gig in Boston; James was lying on the bed, resting up after his appearance at the Paramount.
Tobin was standing at the mirror, watching herself putting in an earring, wearing that abstracted look women get, holding the earring post in her mouth, when she heard this kid singing “Night and Day” through the Philco’s cheesy speaker. (This time he knew the words.) The voice stopped her. The kid had something. It wasn’t the most stupendous