Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [32]
Since Harry had created Connie Haines that morning, he was feeling lucky. Sinatra was too Eye-talian, he said. How about Frankie Satin? It went nice with that nice smooth voice of his.
Just a moment before, Sinatra recalled in later years, he had been grasping James by the arm, incredulous at the offer, making sure his main chance didn’t get away. Now, as Connie Haines remembered sharply sixty-seven years after that night, the singer’s eyes went cold. “Frank told Harry, ‘You want the singer, take the name,’ ” Haines said. “And walked away.”
Sinatra had good reason to be insulted. His father’s boxing alias, Marty O’Brien, had been not a whim but a forced decision: an Italian surname would have gotten him barred from training gyms. In perception and reality, the Irish stood above the Italians on the American social ladder, a heavy foot firmly planted on all upturned faces. Even as late as the 1940s, the Italian-American author Gay Talese recalled, “The Irish kids were the ones who called me ‘wop.’ ” And as Pete Hamill, a Sinatra friend who has analyzed the underheated melting pot from the Irish-American point of view, wrote: “In those days it would not have been strange for a boy to believe that the man was ashamed of being Italian. His father’s split identity surely explains, at least in part, Sinatra’s … vehemence about keeping his own name when Harry James wanted to change it.”
Sinatra had already tried an anglicized stage name—Frankie Trent—very briefly, a couple of years before. Very briefly because once Dolly got wind of it, she gave him both barrels—maybe she hit him with the bat. In any case, while “Frankie Trent” was bad enough, “Frankie Satin” was much, much worse—it made “Connie Haines” look like sheer genius. It wasn’t even anglicized; it was 100 percent corn oil. As Sinatra told Hamill, “Can you imagine? Is that a name or is that a name? ‘Now playing in the lounge, ladies and gennulmen, the one an’ only Frankie Satin’ … If I’d’ve done that, I’d be working cruise ships today.”
But when Frank walked away, James came right after him. The defiantly unrenamed Frank Sinatra joined the Music Makers on June 30, as they opened a weeklong engagement at the Hippodrome in Baltimore. He was so new that he wasn’t even listed on the bill. Still, some girls in the audience quickly got the idea. “After the first show, the screaming started in the theater, and those girls came backstage,” Connie Haines told Peter J. Levinson for his Harry James biography, Trumpet Blues. “There were about twenty of them … it happened, it was real, it was not a gimmick.”
Not a gimmick at all. The Voice—might as well start capitalizing it here—was simply working its spooky subliminal magic. Did it help that the singer was clearly in need of a good meal, that his mouth was voluptuously beautiful, that his eyes were attractively wide with fear and excitement, that he knowingly threw a little catch, a vulnerable vocal stutter, into his voice on the slow ballads? It helped. It whipped into a frenzy the visceral excitement that his sound had started. But the sound came first. There was simply nothing like it.
The singer was a genius, the trumpeter-leader a kind of genius. The band was terrific (and light-years from the rinky-dink six-piece outfit at the Rustic Cabin). The world would fall at both men’s feet in a few years. But not everyone was thrilled at first: both Sinatra and Harry James seemed to be simply ahead of their time. James blew hot and hard, a style that delighted critics—Down Beat had voted him America’s number-one trumpeter in 1937, over the headiest of competition: Louis Armstrong, Bunny Berigan, and Roy Eldridge—but didn’t always sit well with country-club and society-ballroom and nightclub audiences. They didn’t want to listen; they wanted to dance close and slow, and go home and make babies who would grow up and go to country clubs and society ballrooms and dance close and slow … A nice society band, a Lawrence Welk or