Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [55]
“Oh! Look at Me Now,” Sinatra doing the vocal, a big hit. “Without a Song,” with Sinatra, a big hit. “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” and “Little Brown Jug,” sans vocals: nowheresville.
“This boy’s going to be big,” Durgom told Kahn, “if Tommy doesn’t kill him first. Tommy doesn’t like people stealing the show—and he doesn’t like people who are temperamental like himself.”
In May, Billboard named Sinatra Male Vocalist of the Year. Over Crosby.
George T. Simon of Metronome, who less than two years earlier had thought the singer sounded like “a shy boy out on his first date,” now found him “insufferably cocky.”
He was insufferably cocky. (And insufferably charming.) He walked fast, talked fast, chewed gum fast, signed autographs fast … the only thing he did slowly (very slowly) was sing. He grinned, then stormed. He hurled out orders to his homeboys Sevano and Sanicola. “Match me,” he’d command, and his cigarette would be lit, just like that. He wasn’t a boy singer anymore. It was all coming true. The pipe, the yachting cap, the blazer and ascot … the costumes he’d tried on fit him perfectly. Bing himself had touched his shoulder. It was almost as if he had everything.
But he would never stop yearning, because he could never get what he truly wanted.
And he could never—ever—get it fast enough.
He was the one they came to see. Gradually at first, and then suddenly, a great national tide of girls surged up, their freshly sprouted breasts swelling with passion for him. Only a minute earlier, they’d been flat-chested kids, playing with their dollies in the dry dust of the Depression. Now they wore calf-length skirts and ankle-length white socks—bobby socks—with saddle shoes or Mary Janes, and they had a little bit of money in their purses: the Depression was over. Some newspaperman called them bobby-soxers, and it stuck.
And soon enough, the war would start, and the sad ballads he sang would hit them all the harder.
But he was the one they wanted. Kids still danced to Glenn Miller and Kay Kyser and Bob Crosby; they bounced to Benny Goodman’s jazz. Artie Shaw could stir up the girls with his handsome face and clarinet wizardry, but then, he was never much for sentiment. And he had a strange relationship with his audiences: there had been the time, not so long before, when right in the middle of a concert, he’d decided the jitterbugs out on the floor were idiots, and said so, walking right off the bandstand and out of the business for a few months.
Yet right now the white-hot center of the business was the unlikely-looking Sinatra, his big Adam’s apple bobbing over those floppy bow ties that Nancy, the good wife, made right at home.3 When he sang the long, long lines of those slow ballads, sounding as though his heart might burst any second, why, those girls felt as though their hearts might burst, and they just had to cry out—
Frankiee!
Dorsey stood, ramrod straight and incredulous, the first time it happened. They were screaming, pretending to faint, really fainting, for Christ’s sake, like Holy Rollers at a revival meeting. Tommy smiled indulgently (they were ticket buyers, after all), but actually felt a kind of genteel horror: What in the goddamn hell was the world coming to?
“I used to stand there on the bandstand so amazed I’d almost forget to take my solos,” the bandleader remembered years later. “You could almost feel the excitement coming up out of the crowds when that kid stood up to sing. Remember, he was no matinee idol. He was a skinny kid with big ears. And