Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [52]
Rich told Tormé he had been attacked by two men who took nothing from him, but rather administered a “coldly efficient and professional” beating. “He told me,” Tormé writes, “that one night just before Sinatra left Dorsey (September 3, 1942) he quietly approached Frank and asked him point blank if the mugs who had flattened him two years before had done so at Frank’s request. ‘Hey, it’s water under the bridge,’ Buddy assured Frank. ‘No hard feelings. I just want to know.’ Sinatra hesitated and then admitted that he had asked a favor of a couple of Hoboken pals. Rich laughed, shook hands with Frank, and wished him good luck on his solo vocal career.”
A singular relationship. But then, they were both singular men. When the band went west in October to open the new Palladium Ballroom in Hollywood, Jo Stafford and John Huddleston rode across the country with Rich and his father in Rich’s new Lincoln Continental convertible. In these intimate circumstances, Stafford remembers, there was a good deal of talking, but she learned next to nothing about who Buddy actually was. “He was remote,” she told Tormé.
As was Sinatra. The hottest, most accessible part of each man was his bottomless need, his seething ambition. The more people around, the better. As long as they didn’t try to get too close.
I can live without a singer tonight, but I need a drummer. Ultimately, no matter how popular Sinatra got, he was dispensable. But then, that could work the other way, too.
For Dorsey, Frank was getting harder to take all the time. Sometimes he thought, My God, I’ve created a monster. Then he realized the monster was creating himself. As Sinatra’s star rose, his ego, once mostly held in check, became rampant. The band (except for Rich), and even the bandleader, began to defer to him. “If Tommy Dorsey was late to a rehearsal,” Sammy Cahn recalled, “Frank Sinatra acted as substitute orchestra leader. When Dorsey arrived, Sinatra would fix him with a glare of ‘Where the fuck you been?’ Dorsey would apologize that he’d been tied up in this and that and Sinatra’d say something quaint like ‘bullshit.’ ”
No father, good or bad, goes unpunished.
Sinatra’s third trip to the Coast was very different from his second. Just a year earlier, he had been traveling with Nancy and the destitute Music Makers, making the best of a bad situation after the Palomar burned down, then getting the hook while the caged canaries at Victor Hugo’s looked on. Now he was free as a bird, a hot young up-and-comer with a number-one record, singing to all the stars of Hollywood, Bob Hope and Tyrone Power and Lana Turner and Errol Flynn and Mickey Rooney, at the Palladium, the million-dollar pink and chrome 1940s-Moderne palace (its twelve-thousand-square-foot oval dance floor could accommodate six thousand dancers) that had risen from the ashes of the Palomar, next door to Columbia Pictures on Sunset Boulevard.
What’s more, he was in the movies. Sort of. During the Palladium stand, the Dorsey band got hired to perform four numbers in the new Paramount B musical Las Vegas Nights.2 It was the kind of picture they called a “programmer”—the sort of lesser fare studios cranked out by the dozen in those pretelevision days, to fill out double and triple features. Hollywood was a funny place: Tommy Dorsey may have been a national figure, but in the magically self-enclosed kingdom of the movies, he was an outsider, a mere beginner. This would be his first film, and he was starting small—the bandleader was barely written into the action (such as it was). For the rest of the band—even for the nation’s hottest young vocalist—it was strictly extra work, at $15 a day.
It didn’t matter to Frank. Even if the band had to play the Palladium until two in the morning and be on the set at Paramount, in makeup, four hours later; even if moviemaking turned out to be a monumentally tedious affair, with long, long waits in between anything happening at all (the musicians