Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [49]
Of course he wasn’t like other singers. And on the next number, the hypnotically beautiful “Begin the Beguine,” the stage, and the song, were all his. And, as the twenty-three-year-old pianist Joe Bushkin, who’d just joined the band in April, recalled: “He wound it up with a nice big finish, and the place went bananas!” The formerly jaded crowd, which had stopped dancing to listen, was screaming for an encore—but “Begin the Beguine” was the only solo feature Sinatra did with Dorsey at the time.
Canny showman that he was, Dorsey put his own ego on hold and stopped the band. If they wanted an encore, they’d get one. “Just call out the tunes,” he told Sinatra, “and Joey will play ’em for you.”
This went fine for three or four numbers, Bushkin said—until Sinatra turned around and said, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” The lovely Kern-Harbach tune has a notoriously tricky middle section, a chord modulation that looks great on paper but can be hell to pull from memory. Under pressure, Bushkin simply blanked. “Next thing I know,” he said, “Frank was out there singing it all by himself … a capella. I was so embarrassed. I mean, Jesus, all the guys were looking at me, so I just turned around and walked away from the piano!”
The cream of New York society—gents in dinner jackets; dames in gowns; a few hundred fancy prom kids, all dressed to the nines—stood hushed, craning their necks to see, while the skinny boy with the greasy hair filled the big room with song, all by himself.
“And that is the night,” Joe Bushkin said, “that Frank Sinatra happened.”
Just two days later, Dorsey, and a stripped-down core unit that he called the Sentimentalists, went into the RCA recording studio in Rockefeller Center and took another stab at a number they had tried, without much success, a month earlier. The song, a mournful ballad written by a pianist named Ruth Lowe in memory of her late husband, was called “I’ll Never Smile Again.” The May 23 version moves at a dreamy-slow tempo. It begins with a piano intro, followed by the perfect five-part harmony of the four Pied Pipers, plus Sinatra, singing the first stanza and a half—“I’ll never smile again, until I smile at you/I’ll never laugh again”—and then Sinatra comes in alone: “What good would it do?” he sings, aspirating the initial “wh” of “what” with such plummy, Quinlan-esque precision that it comes out “hwat,” a pronunciation that would not have sounded amiss to any of Cole Porter’s society swells.
It sounded just great to America. When the record came out five weeks later, it quickly shot to number 1 on the Billboard chart—the first number 1 on the first Billboard chart—and stayed there for twelve weeks, turning Frank Sinatra into a national star. Meanwhile, on the strength of Frank’s éclat, the Dorsey band’s initial booking of three weeks at the Astor was extended to fourteen.
Did Tommy Dorsey come up with more solo ballads for Sinatra to sing? You bet he did. Just like that, the cart was pulling the horse.
Frank with Dorsey and the band in his first MGM musical, Ship Ahoy. Buddy Rich is on the drums, Tommy leads, Jo Stafford and her fellow Pied Pipers are behind the piano. (photo credit 8.2)
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“Hey, Bing, old man. Move over. Here I come.” Recording with Dorsey’s musicians, but, pointedly, no Dorsey. Frank is the star on this session. Los Angeles, January 19, 1942. (photo credit 9.1)
Meanwhile. On a Saturday evening, June 8, Nancy Sandra Sinatra was born at the Margaret Hague Maternity Hospital in Jersey City. “Dad was in Hollywood with the band,” Nancy Sinatra writes in Frank Sinatra: An American Legend. In fact, Dad was not in Hollywood with the band—he was at the Hotel Astor with the band, Broadway and Forty-fourth Street, six miles as the crow flies from Jersey City, a million miles as the native son flies.
“I hated missing that,” Sinatra told an interviewer years