Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [43]
But the real reason the singer and the drummer split was that each felt he was Dorsey’s true star. (Tommy Dorsey knew he and he alone was the star, another problem altogether.)
Of course, Dorsey’s name was printed in the biggest type on the band’s posters, but the leader decided whose name would be featured under his, an honor with purely commercial underpinnings that depended on—and, in a circular way, determined—which band member was hottest. Often it was Bunny Berigan; lately, in early 1940, it had been the new star, Rich. But soon enough, it would be Sinatra all the way.
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The Old Man shows ’em how. Frank with Tommy Dorsey and the orchestra, December 1, 1941. Connie Haines is front row far right, jitterbugging. (photo credit 8.1)
The life of a traveling band, even a highly successful band, wasn’t for sissies. If the Music Makers had been a jaunty but slightly depressed boys’ club, the Dorsey organization was like a well-disciplined Army platoon. They even wore uniforms—different suits depending on the venue. (College shows meant blue blazers, tan trousers, and brown and white saddle shoes.) Dorsey’s musicians would play up to nine shows a day, then ride all night on their dilapidated former Greyhound bus, sometimes four hundred miles or more at a clip (at forty and fifty miles per hour, on two-lane blacktop), with infrequent rest stops, sleeping in their seats, the Old Man right up front, where he could keep an eye on everybody. “I can still see Tommy in the second seat on the right aisle with the hat on, riding through the night,” Jo Stafford said.
Stafford recalled “lots and lots of laughs and good times together” on the Dorsey bus, but Sinatra’s memories of those long rides are strikingly unpeopled: especially in later years, he would reminisce again and again about learning how to keep the crease in his suit while sitting in his seat, about falling asleep with his cheek pressed against the cold glass. “For maybe the first five months,” he said, “I missed the James band. So I kept to myself, but then I’ve always been a loner—all my life.”
He was naturally aloof, but he was also taking his cues from the man in charge. Tommy Dorsey was anything but hail-fellow-well-met: he was the model of a tough commander who kept his distance from his troops—except for occasional, fumbling attempts at intimacy. There was the time, during a long, cold drive across Pennsylvania (“a Greyhound bus is not the greatest place to spend winter in the East,” Stafford noted drily), when Dorsey had the driver stop at a general store and bought the whole band scarves, earmuffs, and mittens. In warmer months, there were frequent band baseball games—though the Old Man seems always to have been mindful of his lofty status: Jean Bach, who was married to Dorsey’s trumpeter Shorty Sherock, recalled one such game, at Dorsey’s house in Bernardsville, in which the band members drank warm beer and sweated on the diamond while the leader relaxed in the shade of his porte cochere and sipped chilled champagne. Dorsey also loved practical jokes—a particularly sadistic form of amiability, usually involving liquid. He would leave wet sponges on his instrumentalists’ seats, spray them with a fire hose from the wings, squirt seltzer down the cleavages of his girl singers. There were ambivalent smiles.
Sinatra watched and learned. And frequently rebelled. Curfews and deadlines were not for him. He also had a habit of letting a lock of his luxuriant hair droop over his forehead—a look that drove the girls wild, and made Dorsey furious. The bandleader kept his new pain in the ass in line through a combination of kindness and menace—much like a certain petite redhead from Hoboken. When the boy singer got too cocky (and it’s hard to imagine Sinatra tamping down his natural style), Dorsey took to threatening to replace him with a smooth-voiced, and better-behaved, band singer named Bob Allen. “Once,” Will Friedwald writes, “Sinatra walked into the band’s dressing room … and discovered the other singer’s tuxedo