Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [33]
And Frank Sinatra—well, Sinatra, for his part, was an acquired taste at first. Especially for the critics. When the band played the Roseland Ballroom on West Fifty-second Street in the summer of 1939, Sinatra begged the Music Makers’ road manager, Gerry Barrett, to beg George T. Simon, Metronome’s influential critic, for a decent review. The dutiful Barrett all but tackled Simon as he was leaving the building. “Please give the new boy singer a good write-up because he wants it more than anybody I’ve ever seen and we want to keep him happy,” he said.
Simon (whose brother Richard would found Simon & Schuster, and in a few years father a daughter named Carly, who would herself grow up to do some singing) more or less complied. In his review he effused over James’s “sensational, intense style,” and went on to praise the saxophonist Dave Matthews, the drummer Ralph Hawkins, and the arranger Andy Gibson. Then and only then did Simon give a nod to “the pleasing vocals of Frank Sinatra, whose easy phrasing is especially commendable.”
But even if the mention was obligatory (and lukewarm), it contained an important kernel of truth. When it came to that mysterious quantity known as phrasing—the emotional essence of all speech, sung or spoken—Frank Sinatra had a unique ability, composed of innate talent, very hard work, and the irrepressible obtrusion of his unruly soul. Easy? There was nothing remotely easy about any molecule of his being, especially his phrasing. Maybe what George T. Simon should have said was that, like Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio swinging a bat, Sinatra made it look easy.
A quarter century later, Simon wrote in Billboard what he really thought of Sinatra that night: “He sounded somewhat like a shy boy out on his first date—gentle, tender but frightfully unsure of himself.” Be that as it may, when the Music Makers hit the Panther Room of the Hotel Sherman in Chicago a couple of weeks after the Roseland gig, Betty Grable, whose star was rising in Hollywood (and who would in a few years replace Louise Tobin as Mrs. Harry James), dragooned a young reporter named James Bacon into going to hear Sinatra. Bacon had never heard of the guy. “I’ll never forget,” he recalled years later. “The minute Sinatra started singing, every girl left her partner on the dance floor and crowded around the microphone on the bandstand. He was so skinny, the microphone almost obscured him.”
Afterward, Bacon congratulated Harry James on his new boy singer. “Not so loud,” James replied. “The kid’s name is Sinatra. He considers himself the greatest vocalist in the business. Get that! No one ever heard of him. He’s never had a hit record. He looks like a wet rag. But he says he is the greatest. If he hears you compliment him, he’ll demand a raise tonight.”
Frank Sinatra was anything but unsure of himself. Along with his abilities, the other thing he was certain of was precisely how the girls liked him to sound. The boys didn’t always agree. During the Chicago stand, a Billboard reviewer wrote that Sinatra sang “the torchy ballads in a pleasing way in good voice,” but then went on: “He touches the songs with a little too much pash, which is not all convincing.”
Or maybe all that pash was simply unsettling because it was so new. Among the smooth-as-silk baritones of the day, led by Crosby, Sinatra was an anomaly, a hot artist rather than a cool one, a harbinger of his own singular future.
Harry James, too, was a hot artist: a hepcat, a weed-puffing wild man. He was also a strangely self-defeating character—alcoholic, remote, and persistently broke. That summer, he lost everything he had in a settlement over an auto accident. (Connie Haines, whose salary he could no longer afford, had to leave.) And in a country crowded with big-band talent—Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Charlie Barnet, Count Basie, Jimmy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Bob Crosby, Jimmie Lunceford, Glenn Miller, and Artie Shaw were all crisscrossing the land with their outfits