Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [30]
“So,” Tobin recalled many years later, “I woke Harry and said, ‘Honey, you might want to hear this kid on the radio.’ ”
Act Two
HARRY
AND
TOMMY
6
Frank broadcasting with the Harry James Orchestra, August 1940, at the Roseland Ballroom, New York City. Left to right: Frank, unidentified, band manager Pee Wee Monte, Harry James, vocalist Bernice Byers. (photo credit 6.1)
It was a typical day in the life of a touring swing band: long. Motor down the pike from New York to Philadelphia, play a tea dance at the Benjamin Franklin Hotel, turn around, and head home. On the way out of Manhattan that morning, riding ahead of the band bus in his big Chrysler, Harry James had stopped on Riverside Drive to pick up his new girl singer, a petite seventeen-year-old dynamo from Florida with a big voice, a sparkly personality, and a laughably impossible name: Yvonne Marie Antoinette JaMais. As they rolled south through the Jersey farmlands with the band manager, Pee Wee Monte, at the wheel, James clacked a stick of Black Jack gum and squinted in deep thought at the problem of rechristening her for the stage. Rhymes with Yvonne … In a moment, he had it: Connie!
Connie what?
“Connie Haines!” he suddenly crowed. He had a high, squeaky voice and a Texas accent. The bandleader smiled in triumph: it went perfectly with Harry James.
So Connie Haines it was, and as the Chrysler sped north through the New Jersey night, the newly named singer, exhausted and elated after a successful first engagement with the band, was amazed to see that Harry was still full of beans, bouncing around in the front passenger’s seat, clacking his gum, tapping in time on the dashboard to the staticky song on the radio. Suddenly he turned around, resting his long chin on his long fingers on the back of the seat.
“Hey, Connie Haines,” he said with a wink. “How you doin’ back there?”
Fine, she told him. Maybe a little tired.
That was just what he wanted to talk to her about, he said. He wanted to make one little stop before they crossed the bridge. There was this boy singer he wanted to hear.
Harry James was the same age as Frank Sinatra—in fact he was three months younger. But even given Sinatra’s tour with Major Bowes, all the gigs in dumps and dives, the radio shows, the women, the arrests—James had done a lot more living in his twenty-three years than Sinatra had in his. To begin with, Harry Haag James was a son of the circus. His mother was a trapeze artist whose specialty (“The Iron Jaw”) was dangling from a wire far above the sawdust by her teeth; his father was a cornetist and bandmaster. Harry himself had started performing as a drummer for the Christy Brothers Circus at age three; at the tender age of five, he became a contortionist known as the Human Eel. At eight he began playing the trumpet, and by the time he was twelve, he was leading the circus’s number-two band. At fourteen, young Harry was drinking hard and taking his pick of the innocent girls who came to gawk at the big top’s spectacles.
James was a superbly gifted natural musician whom the circus had schooled to play loud, hard blues. It was a style equally apt for the midway and the dawning of the Swing Era in the mid-1930s. By 1935, the nineteen-year-old James was married to the seventeen-year-old Louise Tobin (and cheating on her every chance he could get) and playing with a band led by the Chicago drummer Ben Pollack; by the end of 1936, he had signed with Benny Goodman, the capo di tutti capi of American bandleaders. They made a formidable combination. On the occasion of the great clarinetist’s death in 1986, the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen vividly recalled a Goodman concert of fifty years earlier as “bedlam. Gene Krupa riding his high hat like a dervish. Harry James puffing out his cheeks till surely they must burst, the rhythm always burning and churning and driving you out of your mind, and then, just when you thought