Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [38]
It wasn’t easy: at times, Dorsey had been like a father to him. They’d had one of their warm moments a couple of months before, as leader and singer drove out to Dorsey’s country house in New Jersey after a gig at the Hotel Pennsylvania roof in Manhattan. Basking in the Old Man’s presence, late at night in the car, Leonard felt expansive. He asked Dorsey if he’d happened to catch Harry James’s new boy singer on the radio—each afternoon, before the evening gig at the Roseland, the Music Makers were broadcasting from the World’s Fair, out in Flushing. “They’ve got this new kid, Tommy, singing ‘All or Nothing At All.’ Have you heard him?”
At the wheel, Dorsey shook his head. “Uh-uh.”
“Well,” Leonard said, “this kid really knocks it out of the park. In fact, if you want to know the truth, he scares the hell out of me. He’s that good.”
Dorsey had cause to remember the conversation soon after Leonard walked out. One night in Chicago, the bandleader was having dinner with a pal named Jimmy Hilliard, the music supervisor for CBS, and bemoaning his boy-singer problem. “Have you heard the skinny kid who’s singing with Harry James?” Hilliard asked. “He’s nothing to look at, but he’s got a sound! Harry can’t be paying him much—maybe you can take him away.”
Dorsey had quickly filled the breach caused by Leonard’s departure with a baritone named Alan DeWitt. But DeWitt was merely adequate, and Tommy Dorsey wasn’t interested in adequacy.
Then he heard Sinatra for himself.
The band was filing through the lobby of the Palmer House when a radio playing stopped Dorsey in his tracks. The song was “All or Nothing At All.” He beckoned to his clarinetist, Johnny Mince. “Come here, Johnny, I want you to hear something,” Dorsey said. “What do you think?”
The next night he sent his manager, Bobby Burns, to Mayor Kelly’s Christmas party to hear the Music Makers. After the performance, Burns slipped Harry James’s boy singer a note scribbled on a strip torn from a sandwich bag. Frank Sinatra’s heart thumped hard when he saw the pencil scrawl on the grease-spotted brown paper: the note indicated Dorsey’s suite number at the Palmer House and the time Frank should show up. Sinatra saved that scrap of paper for a long time.
It was a careful dance, the kind of unspoken minuet men do when approaching each other on a matter of importance. Sinatra had been aware, with each mile Harry James’s rickety band bus traveled eastward, of Dorsey’s looming presence in Chicago: it was like entering the gravitational field of an enormous dark star. And Dorsey, always calculating, had registered something when Jack Leonard made his offhand comment that night in the car on the way to Bernardsville. The something moved a click when Jimmy Hilliard mentioned Sinatra, then clicked into place when Dorsey heard that song on the radio: he had already met this kid once.
Sinatra, of course, remembered the occasion intimately, as one of his great gaffes, like spilling a drink on a pretty girl’s dress or calling someone important by the wrong name: he had frozen up in the great man’s presence. It was one thing to be trying out for a new band—Bob Chester was a nice kid—it was quite another to have Himself walk in. He could freeze you with a stare, that cold puss of his. Sinatra still blushed just thinking about it.
This would be Frank’s one and only chance to set things right, his one and only second chance with the great man, and it must, it must go right. There would be no third chance. He slept barely at all that