Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [31]
It was rock ’n’ roll with big-band arrangements. And two years of maximum national prominence with Goodman had turned Harry James into the 1930s equivalent of a rock star. He was itching to fly on his own. At the end of 1938, bankrolled by Goodman, the trumpeter started his own outfit, Harry James and His Music Makers.
Musical gods were different then. For one thing, teenagers of that era didn’t demand that their musical idols be, or look like, teenagers. By the spring of 1939, Harry James was a very famous, accomplished, and self-assured twenty-three-year-old—and with his hawk nose, piercing blue eyes, pencil mustache, and big-shoulder suits, he didn’t remotely resemble any twenty-three-year-old we would recognize today. At twenty-three he looked as if he were well into his thirties. He had star quality to burn, and when he strode into the Rustic Cabin that blossom-heavy night in early June 1939, the crowd parted before him like the Red Sea before Moses.
The Cabin’s owner, Harry Nichols, came up, grinning, his cigar hanging from his lower lip, and told James to take any table he’d like. Drinks on the house, of course.
James winked at him. How about that boy singer his wife had heard on the radio the other night? Was he here?
Nichols frowned. “We don’t have a singer,” he said.
James frowned back. “That’s not what I heard.”
“Well, we do have an emcee who sings a little bit …”
“This very thin guy with swept-back greasy hair had been waiting tables,” James recalled many years later. “Suddenly he took off his apron and climbed onto the stage. He’d sung only eight bars when I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rising. I knew he was destined to be a great vocalist.”
This has all the verisimilitude of an MGM musical, and the tin-can ring of hindsight, but Harry James surely heard something that night, especially if, as he later reported, Sinatra really performed Cole Porter’s notoriously difficult, 108-bar epic “Begin the Beguine.” Any twenty-three-year-old who could bring that off would indeed be something special. But in a way it doesn’t matter what Sinatra sang that night—it was the way he sang it, the voice itself, that got Harry James where he lived.
“It’s an interesting thing,” the singer and musicologist Michael Feinstein says. “You can look at the vibration of somebody’s voice on a machine—whatever the machines are called—and it looks like this; someone else’s voice will look the same. You can match up graphs that look the same, but they don’t sound the same. The point is that there is something that cannot be defined in any way scientifically.
“You can’t explain what it is about the sound of Sinatra’s voice,” Feinstein says. “I mean, you can try, and you can get very poetic in describing it. But there is something there that is transcendent, that simply exists in his instrument. He developed it, he honed it, he understood it himself, he knew what he could do, and he used it to his best advantage. That was something that people responded to.”
The voice was still developing in the spring of 1939—it would continue to develop for the next fifty years. It wasn’t as rich as it would be even five years later. But its DNA was there, the indefinable something composed of loneliness and need and infinite ambition and storytelling intelligence and intense musicality and Hoboken and Dolly herself, the thing that made him entirely different from every other singer who had ever opened his mouth.
And Frank Sinatra had one more astounding thing at twenty-three: a plan. He was going to knock over Crosby. He knew it in the pit of his gut. Not even Nancy knew the true height of his hubris.
Harry James, believing that whatever Sinatra had was worth signing him up for, offered him a contract on the spot: $75 a week. It was quite an offer: three times what Sinatra was currently making, more than he and Nancy were earning together. What James neglected to mention