Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [321]
12 “Now, in the story”: Frank Sinatra, interview with Sidney Zion, Yale University, April 15, 1986.
13 “He’s such a damn”: Levinson, Tommy Dorsey, p. 152.
14 “I gotta do it”: Ibid., p. 155.
15 “I was sitting with Sinatra”: Friedwald, Sinatra! p. 110.
16 “Tommy was a good”: Levinson, Tommy Dorsey, p. 155.
17 “I’ll wake each”: Lyrics from “Just as Though You Were Here,” words by Edgar De Lange, music by John B. Brooks (New York: Yankee Music, 1942).
18 “The curtains drawn”: Nancy Sinatra, My Father, p. 35.
19 “[Tommy] said, ‘No’ ”: Sinatra, interview.
20 “Let him go”: Wilson, Sinatra, p. 35.
21 “Don’t worry”: Levinson, Tommy Dorsey, p. 156.
22 “After tonight”: Tommy Dorsey, The Sentimental Gentleman of Swing: Centennial Collection (RCA, 2005). Set of three compact discs.
23 “Well, Frank”: Ibid.
24 “was literally crying”: Summers and Swan, Sinatra, p. 74.
25 “I hope you fall”: Nancy Sinatra, American Legend, p. 51.
26 “I was now free”: Sinatra, interview.
27 “this skinny kid”: Shaw, Twentieth-Century Romantic, p. 40.
28 “He said, ‘What are you’ ”: Sinatra, interview.
29 “I was in New York”: Nancy Sinatra, My Father, p. 44.
30 “There were about five”: Ibid., p. 45.
31 “What the fuck”: Kelley, His Way, p. 40.
CHAPTER 11
1. Including the band’s girl singer, a blond, pug-nosed twenty-two-year-old from North Dakota named Norma Deloris Egstrom, a.k.a. Peggy Lee.
2. Interestingly, one of the first buyers of the new and improved Sinatra age was none other than E. J. Kahn Jr. in “Phenomenon,” the three-part 1946 New Yorker profile—prepared with the aid of that magazine’s legendary fact-checking department—that was the basis for his 1947 book, The Voice.
3. Or, as the announcer would intone: “Your Hit Parade survey checks the best sellers on sheet music and phonograph records, the songs most heard on the air and most played on the automatic coin machines, an accurate, authentic tabulation of America’s taste in popular music” (Brooks and Marsh, TV’s Greatest Hits, p. 280).
SOURCE NOTES
4 “EXTRA ADDED ATTRACTION”: Friedwald, Sinatra! p. 123.
5 “Be careful, it’s my heart”: Lyrics from “Be Careful, It’s My Heart,” words and music by Irving Berlin (New York: Irving Berlin, 1942).
6 “a kid was given a ticket”: Kahn, Voice, p. 67.
7 “certain things were”: Ibid.
8 “George was a genius”: Jerry Lewis, in discussion with the author, March 2008.
9 “in case a patron”: Kelley, His Way, p. 67.
10 “I saw fans run”: Nancy Sinatra, My Father, p. 47.
11 “I’d look out my bedroom”: Nancy Sinatra, American Legend, p. 54.
12 “People call me an overnight”: Frank Sinatra, interview with Sidney Zion, Yale University, April 15, 1986.
13 “Frankie is a product”: Kelley, His Way, p. 75.
CHAPTER 12
1. Another hypothesis, lip-wise: starting in the early 1940s and until the end of his career, Sinatra had a habit, during vocalization, of periodically pulling his mouth to the right and lowering his eyelids—an expression that signaled emotional transport, but that also might have been his version of the corner-of-the-lips pinhole that Tommy Dorsey used to sneak a breath.
2. In fact he was the president of his congregation, Temple Beth Israel in Philadelphia.
3. Ben Barton, as a young supplicant, had brought the song to Frank backstage at the Paramount, initiating a thirty-year business and personal relationship.
4. The figure isn’t universally accepted: some have pointed out that “All” never won a gold record, as, for example, Glenn Miller’s “Chattanooga Choo Choo” had the year before. Still, sales were brisk. And, it should be noted, the fact that Harry James himself had broken through in a big way didn’t hurt a bit. Not long after Sinatra made his big splash at the Riobamba, James—now divorced from Louise Tobin and dating Betty Grable—and the Music Makers, now twenty-seven strong (including an eight-piece string section and two French horns), opened at the Paramount, causing almost the same kind of hysteria that Frankie had.
5. The studio’s pointed new slogan: