Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [48]
But it was Sinatra—“Junior,” as Crosby would soon refer to him—who would make hits of two Burke–Van Heusen numbers that year. The first was “Polka Dots and Moonbeams,” which he recorded on March 4, and which became Frank’s very first charting song, reaching number 18 in Billboard for the week of April 28, 1940.
For the whole month of March he headlined at the Paramount, the crème de la crème of big-band venues. The girls were so gaga for him that they would line up hours ahead of time for the first show at 9:00 a.m. and then, when that show was over, refuse to leave, staying for five more. Sinatra came up with the brilliant publicity stunt of bringing out a big tray of food after the first show, to tide over his increasingly fanatical public. At the end of the day, he had to be escorted by the police to the Hotel Astor, just a block south on Broadway. The last time he had been escorted by police, they had escorted him to jail.
The band was putting up at the Astor; Nancy was staying with her parents in Jersey City. A big wide river lay in between. What with six shows a day followed by 9:00 p.m. rehearsals (crazy Dorsey felt that a band simply couldn’t be too tight), plus recording sessions, Frank didn’t have much time to get home. Nor was his ever-heavier wife much inclined to schlep over to the Paramount and listen to young girls scream for her husband.
Meanwhile, a little blast from the recent past arrived in the form of Connie Haines, whom Harry James had had to let go for financial reasons the previous August, but whom Tommy Dorsey could very much afford. Unlike the Pied Pipers, who, as splendidly as they sang, were strictly background, Haines was a star, a pint-sized nineteen-year-old with big eyes, a perky figure, a thick Savannah, Georgia, accent, and a big voice. She could really sing, and swing, and audiences ate her up (and Dorsey, a great showman, knew it). And Sinatra hated her thunder-stealing guts. He was the show. “Go ahead, do your thing, cornball,” he would snarl at her as she jitterbugged, grinning, around the big stage.
But he would soon have the spotlight all to himself. Beginning in May, the band was booked to play the Astor’s gloriously posh roof garden—it had a thousand-foot tree-lined promenade, with lights twinkling like stars among the branches. For New York’s glitterati, the Dorsey stand was a much-anticipated event. Sinatra too was all aflutter. The Astor was Class with a capital C, and the singer, who from an early age craved class just about as much as he craved sex (but found it much more unattainable), was more nervous than he had ever been about a gig. It was one thing to play the Paramount, with its great sea of undifferentiated faces; it was quite something else to entertain the rich at close hand. He could depend on a certain number of swooning teenage girls (it was prom season), but the audience at the Astor would mainly consist of grown-ups—wealthy, arrogant, jaded grown-ups. With an exquisitely calibrated social sense born of deeply held feelings of inferiority—Italians had risen in the American public’s estimation since Marconi and Toscanini, but not much—Sinatra felt an entirely reasonable fear of what he was up against.
Still, fear got him excited. And on opening night, Tuesday, May 21, 1940, he got the Astor excited. The band’s first number featured Sinatra and the Pied Pipers, and—as was distinctly not the case when he shared the stage with Haines—his respect for his co-performers led him to vocalize selflessly and beautifully. It was yet another string to Sinatra’s bow. “When you sing with a group, it takes a certain amount of discipline, and Frank was excellent at it,” Jo Stafford said. “You can’t wander off into your own phrasing. You’ve all got to do exactly the same thing at exactly the same