Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [39]
At 2:00 p.m. on the dot, Dorsey greeted Frank at the door of his suite, wearing a silk dressing gown over suit pants, shirt, and a tie. He exuded a manly whiff of Courtley cologne. His square gold cuff links were engraved TD.
Sinatra felt weak in the knees.
A strong handshake and that icy stare, from slightly above, with the very faintest of smiles. “Yes, I remember that day when you couldn’t get out the words.”
And damned if it didn’t almost happen again: Frank’s mouth fell open, and for a second nothing came out. He had to clear his throat to get his heart started again, and with that sound, miraculously, a sentence emerged.
Well, he’d been pretty nervous that day. He was pretty nervous today, too.
The smile warmed just a degree or two.
Dorsey told Frank to call him Tommy. He told him he’d like to hear him sing. Did Frank think he could manage that?
He had a few of the boys waiting up in the ballroom, Dorsey said. Did Frank know “Marie”?
Frank had only heard Jack Leonard sing it about a million times with that band behind him, had only imagined himself in Leonard’s place about a million times. And Sinatra knew he could leave Jack Leonard in the dust. If he could get the words out.
And that was what Tommy Dorsey heard that afternoon in the Palmer House ballroom, as Sinatra stood by the piano, not nervous at all now, but as excited to be following Dorsey’s dazzling trombone lead-in as he had ever been excited by a widespread pair of silky thighs … And you can hear it too, if you listen, back-to-back, to Jack Leonard performing “Marie” on disc 2 of the Tommy Dorsey Centennial Collection and Frank Sinatra singing the number with the Dorsey band on disc 5 of The Song Is You. First comes Leonard’s strictly serviceable, utterly forgettable vocal, a pallid instrument among more interesting instruments, a lead-in, really, to the main event, Bunny Berigan’s astonishing trumpet solo.
Then comes Sinatra. Or rather, first comes Dorsey’s trombone chorus, and then the rather startling sound of the bandleader’s waspish voice speaking a corny intro: “Fame and fortune. [Fame and Fortune was the name of the NBC radio show on which the song was being broadcast.] One simple little melody may turn the trick. I know—for you’re listening to the tune that had a great deal to do with sending us on our way to fame. And here to bring you a listening thrill is Frank Sinatra, to sing the ever-popular ‘Marie.’ All right, Frank, take it.”
Frank takes it. Crooning the melody against the rollicking background of the band’s chanted antiphony (“On a night like this/We go pettin’ in the park … Livin’ in a great big way/Oh, mama!”), a background that would have overwhelmed a lesser artist, Sinatra sings with superb authority and subtle swing, having his sweet way with the rhythm and generally making you feel as if he were letting you in on a story he might have just made up then and there.
Dorsey nodded, almost smiling, as Sinatra sang his audition; seeing his reaction, Sinatra smiled and sang even better.
When Frank was done, Tommy told him he wanted him to come sing with the band. If Harry would let him go. Dorsey couldn’t pay him a lot to begin with—just seventy-five a week—but they could talk later.
Sinatra didn’t even hear the figure. He only registered the first sentence: I’d like you to come sing with the band. The Dorsey band. He called Nancy from a phone booth in the Palmer House lobby. The distant phone rang, then Nancy answered, far away. She sounded alarmed to hear his voice—but it was good news, he told her. The best.
What about Harry? she asked.
And of course she was right. Nancy, ever practical and straightforward, was always right. And he was wrong so much of the time … except about what he knew he needed.
Harry was in his hotel room with the door open, sitting back in an easy chair reading Metronome,