Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [50]
If that last sentence looks incomplete, it’s because Sinatra didn’t finish the thought.1
Frank and Big Nancy, as she would now forever be known, named Tommy Dorsey as Baby Nancy’s godfather. Of course, it was Frank’s idea.
Four nights later, on an NBC radio broadcast from the Astor roof, Sinatra sang “I’ll Never Smile Again” to another houseful of upper-crusters. The air check of the number reveals a small but striking difference from the recording: on the radio version’s out-chorus (the last words sung in the song), as Sinatra sings “Within my heart, I know I will never start/To smile again, until I smile at you,” he uses the vocal trick he’d discovered back at the Rustic Cabin, a breathy little catch in his voice, in this case before the initial h of “heart.” It’s a small thing, a showman-like touch that would have made no sense on a recording but all the sense in the world before a live crowd—a naked play for the hearts of the rich girls in the audience. Calculated, and thoroughly effective.
They watched him, and he watched them. Taking five during the fast numbers, standing by the piano, “Frank would tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Check the action out!’ ” Joe Bushkin recalled. “Some gal with a lot of booze in her would be shaking it up on the dance floor … Whenever he could take a shot at a woman he would.”
In the beginning it had been both pretty ones and not-so-pretty ones. He didn’t have to settle so much anymore. They were getting prettier all the time.
“It must have been sometime in 1940,” Sammy Cahn wrote in his memoir. “He told me how unhappy he was being a married man. I gave him the George Raft syndrome. ‘George Raft has been married all his life. Put it this way—you’re on the road all the time, you at least can go home to clean sheets.’ He kind of understood that.”
“Tommy Dorsey came up to see the baby,” Ed Kessler remembered. “I thought my sister was gonna fall out the window.”
Kessler was twelve in the summer of 1940. His family lived in a brown-brick apartment building at 12 Audubon Avenue in Jersey City; Frank and Nancy Sinatra, and now Baby Nancy, lived just upstairs. It was a nice, leafy neighborhood, around the corner from the State Teachers College and just across from Bergen Park.
“They were in a three-room apartment on the third floor,” Kessler said. “We were upscale from them, five rooms on the second floor. My mother was very class-conscious—unless you were Jewish and lived within a certain area of Jersey City, you didn’t count. She thought the Sinatras were low-class.”
The kids disagreed. Kessler’s sister, five years older than Ed, was agog when Sinatra moved in. And while young Eddie hadn’t been entirely sure at first exactly who this singer was, he quickly took note of him. For one thing, there was his car. “About a quarter to a third of the tenants in our building owned automobiles,” Kessler recalled. “Those who owned, owned Chevys, Fords, Plymouths, in black or gray. Sinatra had a two-toned blue-and-cream Buick convertible.”
And then there was another impressive fact. “He didn’t keep regular hours,” Kessler said. “Most people in the apartment had jobs that were eight-to-five.”
At first, Kessler’s observations were simply those of a curious twelve-year-old. “But then,” he said, “I got asked to baby-sit.”
Suddenly he was in. What did he see? “I saw Nancy Sinatra naked!” Kessler laughed. (He was speaking, of course, of the baby.) Other than that, though, the household was depressingly ordinary: “reasonably neat, not very fancy,” he recalled. “I can’t remember any distinctive artwork or books—it was very working-class. They paid scale—twenty-five or fifty cents an hour.”
And the young marrieds?
“Nancy was pleasant,” Kessler said. “Very short, heavyset—what you might call a typical Italian-looking woman.”
In all fairness,