Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [44]
Ultimately, Sinatra took to cultivating Dorsey—though he insisted that it was a matter of compassion. “Tommy was a very lonely man,” he said. “He was a strict disciplinarian with the band—we’d get fined if we were late—yet he craved company after the shows and never really got it … We all knew he was lonely, but we couldn’t ask him to eat and drink with us because it looked too much like shining teacher’s apple.
“Anyway,” Sinatra recalled, “one night two of us decided to hell with it, we’d ask him out to dinner. He came along and really appreciated it. After that he became almost like a father to me … I’d sit up playing cards with Tommy till maybe five-thirty every morning. He couldn’t sleep ever: he had less sleep than any man I’ve ever known.”
If you detect a sneaking similarity to the ring-a-ding-ding Sinatra of the mid-1950s through the early 1960s, the infinitely lonely kingpin who couldn’t bear to be alone, especially in the deep watches of the night, the man who would forcibly restrain (through force of personality, that is, which in Sinatra’s case was every bit as powerful as physical force) his drinking buddies from going to sleep before he did—usually at or past the hour when Mr. and Mrs. America were waking up to go to work—then you understand. It’s not enough to say that from the moment Sinatra joined the Dorsey organization he deliberately set about remaking himself in the bandleader’s image: the process was both conscious and unconscious. Tommy Dorsey was the most powerful male figure Sinatra had ever encountered—everything the younger man wanted to be, the strong father he had never had.
But in a certain way, Dorsey was also the mother he did have. To begin with, Dorsey was more feared than loved, and fear was a key part of Sinatra’s makeup. The bandleader had a hot temper, as did Sinatra, but it stemmed from a different source: Dorsey’s anger was black-Irish and bloody-minded; Sinatra’s was the rage of a child who is terrified he will be slapped down—or worse, ignored. Sinatra once said that the only two people he was ever afraid of were his mother and Tommy Dorsey—a flip comment but also a sincere and deeply significant one.
With both the uncertainty was torturous, but in another way it must also have been thrilling, even sexually exciting. There’s a psychological term for the attraction: identification with the aggressor. Rumors of sadomasochistic tendencies have always hovered around Sinatra, and it’s not hard to see why. In many ways, Frank would become both Dolly and Dorsey, and the royal road to his fixation on the bandleader was his addiction to his mother.
Marty too was ingrained in Sinatra’s psyche, but probably in a negative way—by his absence rather than by his presence. In later years Sinatra would sometimes drop a comment about how his father had kept him in line, yet those comments had a way of feeling like a sop to the old man, a tacit admission that the non-reading, non-writing, non-speaking Marty should have been more of a dad than he really was. In post-Dorsey years, Sinatra would pick up several more father figures here and there, but Tommy was the first and the most powerful.
Still, there was one thing all the father substitutes had in common: Sinatra always left them before they had a chance to leave him.
In the beginning, Sinatra set out to learn everything he could from Dorsey, personally and musically. (“There’s only one singer,” the bandleader told Frank early on, “and his name is Crosby. The lyrics mean everything to him, and they should to you too.”) Some of the personal lessons would take years, even decades, to achieve their full effect. The singer first experienced leadership himself amid his gradually expanding crew of cronies and gofers. His next subjects were musicians—but he only gained power with his players when, after Columbia Records dropped him, he was signed by Capitol and started to record in Los Angeles. (The producer George Avakian, who worked on