Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [42]
And Jo Stafford, as levelheaded as they come, was seduced. Not sexually (though, as a woman, she had to have felt that thrum), but musically. She was operatically trained, a coloratura soprano, a great ear as well as a great voice, and very far from an easy sell. But she knew within a couple of bars of “South of the Border,” there in Minneapolis or Milwaukee or Rockford or wherever the hell it was, when Sinatra was so new on the band that no charts had been written for him yet, that the entire game had changed, then and there.
“Well, see,” she said, “he was doing what we call hitters. I mean, there was no arrangement for him. He just sang it, and the band picked up. So it was very impromptu. But of course, you heard the sound of the voice.”
Leaving Crosby aside, her visitor asked, could she say how Jack Leonard or Bob Eberly, for example, were different from Sinatra?
Stafford shook her head. “I don’t know. I think they made their own sounds, and they were good. They just weren’t as good as Frank.”
Why?
“There’s a whole round sound of a beautiful voice with a great tone, singing straight down the middle of that note,” Stafford said. She frowned. “I don’t think I’m very good at describing it.”
Was she aware of his expressiveness right away, the feeling that he brought to the song?
She shook her head again. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I just knew it was a wonderful, great sound, and it was not Crosby. It was a new sound and a good one, a very musical sound.”
What did Sinatra look like then? her visitor asked.
“Young.” She laughed, a surprisingly strong laugh. Even at close to ninety, she still had a beautiful voice. “Young with lots of hair, and very thin.”
She was sold; most in the band weren’t. At first the veterans, who had all been fond of the sweet-tempered Jack Leonard, simply froze the newcomer out. And then there was Buddy Rich. On Sinatra’s first one-nighter, he noticed that the bus seat next to the drummer was empty—not much of a surprise, given Rich’s abrasive personality. (When Dorsey first introduced Sinatra to Rich, it was with these words: “I want you to meet another pain in the ass.”) So Sinatra sat down. The two young men—Frank was twenty-four; Buddy, twenty-two—got to talking, and, lo and behold, they hit it off. After a few days on the road, Rich told Sinatra, “I like the way you sing.” It was extravagant praise, coming from one of the biggest egomaniacs in the business—little did Sinatra realize how truly heartfelt the comment was. (In later life, Rich admitted he had had to turn his face to hide his tears when Sinatra sang “Star Dust.”) The two became roommates. It sounds like a sweet story. It was doomed from the start.
Sinatra’s days as an only child set the pattern: he had never been much for sharing a room—or much of anything, for that matter. (Traveling with the James band over most of the first year of his marriage, he had barely lived with his young wife.) The end to the Sinatra-Rich honeymoon came when Sinatra insisted on clipping his toenails in their hotel room at 2:00 a.m. Remarkably, Rich told his biographer Mel Tormé that the insomniac singer had also kept him awake by reading till all hours. Among all the big-band personnel crisscrossing the United States in the late 1940s, Sinatra and Artie Shaw may have been the only two men keeping late