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wore those floppy bow ties, and believes she knows where he got the idea: her. She used to sew ties like that for her husband, Shorty Sherock, she said. “I remember this particular print, I thought Shorty was brave to wear it—and he came home one day, and he’d been in the elevator at the Brill Building, and Frank got on and looked at Shorty and menacingly said, ‘Who wrote the lyrics to that tie?’ And the next thing we know, we saw photographs of him with a kind of artist-looking bow tie” (Bach, in discussion with the author, March 30, 2006).

SOURCE NOTES

4 “Dad was in”: Nancy Sinatra, American Legend, p. 43.

5 “I hated missing”: Frank Sinatra, interview with Sidney Zion, Yale University, April 15, 1986.

6 “Frank would tap”: Summers and Swan, Sinatra, p. 69.

7 “It must have been”: Kelley, His Way, p. 56.

8 “Tommy Dorsey came”: Ed Kessler, in discussion with the author, May 2006.

9 “They were in”: Ibid.

10 “I remember him”: Ibid.

11 “they got at it”: Jo Stafford, in discussion with the author, Feb. 2006.

12 “went at each other”: Tormé, Traps, the Drum Wonder, p. 62.

13 “I can live”: Ibid., p. 63.

14 “coldly efficient”: Ibid.

15 “If Tommy Dorsey”: Cahn, I Should Care, p. 131.

16 “Nothing meant anything”: Levinson, September in the Rain, p. 114.

17 “I kept thinking”: Sinatra, interview.

18 “All they wanted”: E. J. Kahn, “The Voice,” New Yorker, Nov. 9, 1946.

19 “This boy’s going”: Wilson, Sinatra, p. 31.

20 “a shy boy”: Summers and Swan, Sinatra, p. 58.

21 “Match me”: Kelley, His Way, p. 111.

22 “I used to stand”: Hanna, Sinatra, p. 16.

23 “He was hanging”: Connie Haines, in discussion with the author, Jan. 2006.

CHAPTER 10

1. As would be another important Sinatra arranger, Quincy Jones.

2. And, a couple of years later, it would be hasta la vista to Lana. The way was paved one night during that same fateful January 1942, when Sinatra stopped in at the brand-new, star-studded L.A. nightclub Mocambo (palm fronds, cockatoos in cages), where he once again encountered the gorgeous Ava Gardner, nineteen and newly married to Mickey Rooney. When Rooney “introduced” her to the singer—both she and Sinatra remembered, but failed to mention, the earlier meeting at MGM—Sinatra said, flirtatiously, “Why didn’t I meet you first?” She blushed at the inside joke, and both filed away the compliment (Server, Ava Gardner, p. 174).

3. Sinatra had registered for the draft in December 1940 but, as a married father, was granted a deferment. The loophole protected him from the draft—but not the contempt of much of the public and many men in uniform—until the fall of 1943, when the deferments were ended and he was reclassified 1-A. Shortly afterward, to nationwide hoots, he was reclassified yet again, to 4-F, for a punctured eardrum.

In August 1942, after Lana Turner impulsively married a Hollywood wannabe named Steve Crane (who, it would inconveniently turn out, was already married at the time), a heartbroken Buddy Rich enlisted in the Marines and left Dorsey.

4. Although Hoboken lives on robustly in his dentalization of the t’s in the lyric: “I hear music when I look at you/A beautiful theme of ev’ry dream I ever knew.” His pronunciation of “beautiful” sounds like something that might come out of the mouth of a sensitive gunsel in an old Warner Brothers gangster picture.

5. In appearance and bearing, Goodman was almost Dorsey’s Jewish counterpart: bespectacled, tough, egomaniacal. Musically, though, he was deeper and more virtuosic: Goodman was esteemed as both a classical and a jazz musician. In the late 1940s, as Dorsey continued to wax sentimental, Goodman even developed an interest in bebop.

SOURCE NOTES

6 “Lucky Strike green”: Jones, From Here to Eternity, pp. 754–55.

7 “almost tubercular”: Kelley, His Way, p. 60.

8 “Frank was not like”: Shaw, Twentieth-Century Romantic, p. 30.

9 “He was so excited”: Levinson, Tommy Dorsey, p. 151.

10 “Frank sat on a stool”: Summers and Swan, Sinatra, p. 73.

11 “Lana was the love”: Tormé, Traps, the Drum Wonder, p. 74.