Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [40]
Finally, James put down the magazine and asked his singer what was eating him.
Sinatra told Harry that he’d rather open a vein than say what he was about to say. Then he said it.
James whistled, soft and low. He reached out a bony hand. Sinatra took it. James smiled and told Frank he was free. “Hell, if we don’t do any better in the next few months, see if you can get me on, too.”
It was a bittersweet moment. At not quite twenty-four, Harry James was nothing like the father figure Dorsey was to Dorsey’s band—to Sinatra, he was more like a brother. Still, the singer, who always had vast respect for musical talent, and was voraciously open to musical influences of all kinds, “learned a lot from Harry,” Louise Tobin said many years later. “He learned a lot about conducting and a lot about phrasing.”
He’d also learned a lot about jazz, and how to sing up-tempo numbers. But Sinatra also knew—as he would his whole life—precisely when to move on.
There was one final gig with the Music Makers, two weeks in late December and early January at Shea’s Theatre in Buffalo (also on the bill were Red Skelton and Sinatra’s co-star-to-be in From Here to Eternity, Burt Lancaster, a grinning young acrobat at the time, half of a trampoline act, dreaming of being in the movies someday). And even though Frank Sinatra had learned what he could from Harry James, and even though by some accounts Frank had been a loner on the Music Makers bus (“he dozed, read magazines, and seldom said anything,” one bandmate recalled)—despite all this, in later years Sinatra would recall his parting from the band with nostalgia and regret. “The bus pulled out with the rest of the boys at about half-past midnight,” he said. “I’d said goodbye to them all and it was snowing. There was nobody around, and I stood alone in the snow with just my suitcase and watched the taillights disappear. Then the tears started, and I tried to run after the bus. There was such spirit and enthusiasm in that band, I hated leaving it.”
It’s a beautiful description, snow and taillights and tears. For whom, and about what, precisely, was he crying?
Dry-eyed and with an entourage yet, Sinatra joined the Dorsey band on the road just a few days later. Accompanying him were his old pal Hank Sanicola, to play rehearsal piano and swat off pests, and his Hoboken friend named Nick Sevano, to lay out Frank’s clothes and run for coffee. How the singer could afford not one but two hangers-on at $75 a week is an almost theological question, answered nowhere in the vast body of Sinatriana—did Christ pay the disciples? And as to whether Sinatra met up with his new boss in (as has variously been reported) Minneapolis or Sheboygan or Milwaukee or Rockford, Illinois, there is no consensus. This much is universally agreed, however: he knocked the socks off of all who were fortunate enough to be present.
“The first time I heard him, we were on stage in Milwaukee, and I had not even met him,” Jo Stafford recalled. “Tommy introduced him and he came out and sang ‘South of the Border.’ ”
Her visitor was perplexed. Many accounts said the number was “Star Dust.”
Stafford, though a very old lady now, shook her head vigorously. “ ‘South of the Border,’ ” she insisted.
Almost seventy years earlier, at twenty-two, she had helped form Tommy Dorsey’s perfect storm. It began for Stafford during the summer of 1938, when Dorsey tried out a young singing octet called the Pied Pipers on his radio show in New York. The lead singer and the group’s only girl, Stafford had the purest soprano Tommy had ever heard.