Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [54]
After her stepfather started paying her visits in the middle of the night, she’d fled west, winding up in Reno, a windblown high-desert town then, full of drunken cowboys reeling down the dusty streets looking for fun. She’d done what she had to. Working as a cocktail waitress, she met a man with a hard face and tight curly hair who became obsessed with her. She strung him along as long as was necessary, then fled again, this time to L.A. It was easier to disappear in those days. She was twenty-five, a few months older than Sinatra. She told him she was twenty-two.
They lived as husband and wife the whole time he was in Los Angeles. The whole band knew; it didn’t matter. Tommy knew; it didn’t matter.
When the band prepared to return east for another big stand at the Paramount, he kissed her tears away and gave her a ring with her birthstone, an amethyst. He whispered promises, promises to return, in her beautiful ear. He would be as good as his word, more or less.
One day, amid the interminable tedium that was a movie set, there was a stirring—like a rainstorm moving across an open lake. Hardened gaffers and propmen suddenly turned and smiled real smiles; sleeping musicians stirred awake. Ralph Murphy dropped his megaphone to his side and stared at an amazing sight: Bing Crosby, in a gorgeous tweed jacket, blooming pleated trousers, and no yachting cap (no toupee, either). Crosby himself, preparing to shoot Road to Zanzibar across the Paramount lot, was stopping by to pay a call on Dorsey. As it happened, Murphy was just about to start a take of the Constance Moore–Bert Wheeler scene with “I’ll Never Smile Again” playing in the background. Crosby gave the director a nod and a wink and told him to go right ahead with what he was doing.
Murphy put the megaphone to his lips and called, “Action”: the lovers spoke their witty lines, Tommy struck up the song in the background. Bing, putting his pipe to his lips and narrowing his eyes, watched Frank carefully. After it was over, he strolled over to Dorsey. The two cool Irishmen shook hands. Just to the side, Sinatra was saying something—he hardly knew what—to Jo Stafford as, his heart racing, he watched Crosby. Crosby. Who now was nodding in his direction.
“Very good, Tommy,” Bing was saying. And, indicating Sinatra: “I think you’ve got something there.”
Then Crosby came over to Sinatra and—as Jo Stafford stood back, her eyes lighting up—shook his hand. “Real nice, Frank,” the older singer said. “You’re going to go far.” He said it with complete conviction. He didn’t bullshit you, Bing. He didn’t have to.
Going through his wallet after he returned, while he lay in bed snoring, Nancy found a snapshot of a beautiful blond girl. This girl, whoever she was, photographed well, and was smiling suggestively at whoever had taken her picture.
Nancy confronted Frank with the snapshot. He pretended to be seeing it for the first time. Her? She’s nobody. A fan, that’s all. Some kid who gave me her picture.
She stared straight into him with a look of terrible fury.
He repeated: She was nobody. Some girl who was hanging around the band.
Christmas came, and to make up for having to work over much of the holiday week—the Dorsey band was in the midst of its second big stand at the Paramount—he found ways to be extra-attentive. She wept again (she wept easily in the months after having the baby) and embraced him.
“Nothing meant anything to him except his career,” Nick Sevano recalled long afterward. “He had a drive like I’ve never seen in anybody.”
“I kept thinking to myself, ‘I’ve got to climb a little higher in this next year,’ ” Sinatra told Sidney Zion, at Yale, forty-five years later. “I gave myself calendar times. What could I do in six months? How far could I go?”
Bullets Durgom was finding out how far. Durgom, Dorsey’s short, roly-poly record promotion man (his real first name was George; he had acquired the Runyonesque handle by moving fast), had the job of visiting radio stations, in those palmy days before payola got a bad name, and doing whatever it took