Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [46]
A message that was not lost on his listeners. He saw the way the girls stared at him as he sang. He was telling them something, a story of love, and they were listening. (He could continue the story whenever he wanted, on or off the stage.) They didn’t stare at Bing that way.
No one ever told the Sinatra story better than Sinatra himself. And one of the great chapters was the account of how he had developed powers of breath control even more legendary than those of the short-lived Dorsey (who—with horrible irony—died of asphyxiation, choking to death on his own vomit in his sleep after a heavy meal at age fifty-one, in 1956). After Dorsey mentioned offhandedly that he’d built up his lung capacity by swimming underwater, Sinatra decided that he too, by God, would swim laps underwater at the Stevens Institute’s indoor pool—and let the world know about it. Not only that: he would also run laps on the Stevens track. It has the feeling of a Hollywood montage (and the Stevens theme must have been meaningful for a boy who had so gravely disappointed his father by failing to become an engineer). You can practically see the big varsity S on Sinatra’s sweatshirt as he pounds the cinders of that Stevens quarter mile.
And yet, while Sinatra doubtless did some underwater swimming and ran some laps, it’s hard to imagine an inveterate night owl and hedonist, fully engaged in the grueling existence of a touring swing band, taking on any sort of concentrated training regimen.
Jo Stafford insisted that all the mythic accounts of underwater swimming were just that: mythological. The true story, she said, was anatomical. “You can have a big enough rib cage to take a deep breath,” she said. “And also, know how to let it out. You can sing a note and use half as much breath as most people do. I think that if you want to learn to do that, you can. Frank certainly could. I could. Tommy also.”
Another chapter in the Sinatra-phrasing saga hinges on a Carnegie Hall classical concert that he attended, on a whim, in early 1940. The program consisted of Brahms, Debussy, Rachmaninoff, and Ravel; Jascha Heifetz was the soloist. “I was never a great fan of the classical music,” Sinatra told Sidney Zion. “I enjoyed hearing the pretty parts of it; didn’t understand most of it.” This time, for some reason, he was ready to hear it. He was especially fascinated by Heifetz’s violin technique. He could “get to the end of the bow and continue without a perceptible missing beat in the motion,” Sinatra recalled. “I thought, ‘Why can’t I do that? If he’s doing that with the bow, why can’t I do it even better than I’m doing it now, as one who uses my breath?’ I began to listen to his records. I couldn’t afford many at the time, but I got some of them. I sat and listened to them and it worked. It really worked.”
Soon he was listening to the above-mentioned composers as well as Ralph Vaughan Williams and Delius and Glazunov and Fauré. His ear expanded with his lung capacity.
Maybe Frank did have an extra-large rib cage; maybe, once the band came east from Chicago in February 1940 (to start a New York stand that would continue through the summer), he simply shifted into a new gear, swimming and running and listening to classical music. He was twenty-four, after all: starting to leave adolescence behind at last. As soon as he got back to New York, he returned to his old voice teacher Quinlan and practiced “calisthenics for the throat,” resuming the “Let us wander by the bay” exercise that he would thenceforth practice for the rest of his career. He was gathering a huge new power, a kind of sexual supercharge. Sammy Cahn recalled watching