Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [51]
So now Frank had added a blazer and ascot to the yachting cap. Yet while his teenage dreams of stardom, as symbolized by the Crosby pipe and headgear, had come closer to reality, Sinatra wasn’t quite there yet. He was suddenly well-known, but still not nearly on the level of Dorsey or Crosby. He was anything but rich. (He received a flat bonus of $25 for each recording session with the band, and—of course—no royalty for discs sold.) He was hovering on the doorstep of true fame, but still living in the third-floor walk-up, making payments on the Buick convertible. Yet he was watching Dorsey. He was learning from Tommy’s example how to be a real star. Practicing.
And no matter his financial reality in the summer of 1940, Frank felt a yawning gulf between himself and the everyday, eight-to-five world of black or gray Chevys and Plymouths. Regular hours were for squares. He was the man that got away.
Dorsey loved Dolly, and Dolly loved Dorsey. They had more than one thing in common. Tommy used to take the band over to the Garden Street house for big Sunday-night dinners, linguine and marinara sauce.
More often than not, Nancy was absent.
The two strutting cocks of the Dorsey band couldn’t get off each other’s case. One muggy August night, backstage at the Astor, Buddy Rich decided he had finally had his fill of wielding the brushes, practically nodding off as he kept ultraslow time behind Sinatra’s ballads. He called Sinatra a son-of-a-bitch wop bastard. And the next thing Jo Stafford knew (she was sitting at a table nearby, writing a letter to her mother), “they got at it.”
Sinatra was standing near a waiter’s table laden with pitchers of ice water. Furious, he picked up one of the pitchers and shied it at Rich’s head. Rich ducked just in time. “If he hadn’t,” Stafford said, “he probably would have been killed or seriously hurt. The pitcher hit the wall so hard that pieces of glass were embedded in the plaster.”
She laughed. “It splashed on my letter, which irked me pretty good. I left a few drops to show Mama what it was.”
Stafford shook her head. “I don’t even know what they were fighting about. I wasn’t paying any attention to them.”
They were fighting about the same thing they always fought about. This time, though, it was physical. Sinatra had never been much of a one for actual, as opposed to talked-about, fisticuffs, but these days, with his testosterone levels soaring, he was becoming fearless. The second after Rich ducked the flying pitcher, he flew at Sinatra, and the two bantamweights, Rich’s biographer Mel Tormé writes, “went at each other … all the pent-up bad feelings exploding into curses and swinging fists. Luckily they were separated by members of the band before any real damage could be done. But it wasn’t over.”
After the dustup, Dorsey sent Sinatra home. “I can live without a singer tonight, but I need a drummer,” he said. The bandleader had exacted a worse punishment than he could have imagined. It was humiliation, it was exile—it was home. Sinatra stewed, but not for long.
A few nights later [Tormé continues], Buddy [went] over to Child’s restaurant, just south of the Astor, for a bite between sets. As he was returning to the Astor, he felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned, and the night exploded.
The front page of Down Beat, September 1, 1940, trumpeted:
BUDDY RICH GETS FACE BASHED IN
New York—Buddy Rich’s face looked as if it had been smashed in with a shovel last week as Buddy sat behind the drums in the Tom Dorsey band at the Astor Hotel.
No one was real sure what had happened except that Buddy had met up with someone who could use his dukes better