Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [56]
Tommy smiled about it all—at first. At first, he even made fun of Sinatra. When the girls would start swooning, he would stop the band and have the musicians swoon right back at them. “This inspired the girls to go one better,” Dorsey recalled, “and the madness kept growing until pretty soon it reached fantastic proportions.”
In late August 1941, the band started its second run at the Paramount in New York, a three-week engagement that had sold out—unlike the previous year’s stand—strictly on the basis of Sinatra. The theater’s most spectacular feature was a gigantic moving stage that rose right up out of the orchestra pit when the show began and sank back down when it was over. One night, after the band closed with “I’ll Never Smile Again,” and the stage began to descend, a couple of bobby-soxers leaned over and grabbed the singer’s bow tie, one on each end, and wouldn’t let go. “He was hanging there,” Connie Haines remembered. “I ran over and screamed and hit out at their hands. Tommy ran over too and joined in too, and we got him away!”
It was nice of Tommy. After all, he must have had conflicting impulses: the great trombonist was now officially second fiddle. Dorsey took it philosophically, furiously, humorously, incredulously—he took it all kinds of ways. He was a mercurial fellow, and in the summer and fall of 1941 his world was wobbling a little bit. His wife had left him. The IRS was after him for eighty grand in back taxes—big money anytime, but especially then. The combination would have undone almost any man, but Dorsey was made of iron. Still, he drank a lot. (He had stayed on the wagon for much of the 1930s, but fell off at the turn of the decade, as he climbed toward his greatest success.) And while he was in his cups, he couldn’t help contemplating the perfidy of this kid who was like a son to him (Tommy loved Frank every bit as much as Frank loved Tommy, maybe even more), the treachery of this kid turning into a scornful adolescent and not just pulling away—that would have been bad enough—but actually overshadowing the Old Man.
And yet another father figure lurked in the wings.
In November, the band headed back to Los Angeles, to play a return engagement at the Palladium and shoot another movie. This time the picture was the real deal: an MGM musical. It was called Ship Ahoy (the original title, I’ll Take Manila, was quickly changed soon after Manila fell to the Japanese two months later). It was a piece of froth, yet it starred the incomparable Eleanor Powell, a tap-dancing powerhouse and a class act. And Sinatra got to sing three numbers in close-up, not background, this time, two with the Pipers and one, “Poor You,” more or less alone, though he had to alternate choruses with his silly old pal from Shea’s Theatre in Buffalo, Red Skelton.
It wasn’t quite a star turn, but that scarcely mattered: Sinatra was returning to Hollywood more and more frequently. One of these times he’d break through, he was absolutely certain of it. He was feeling his oats in a very big way. The big crowds at the Palladium had got the message: he was the show. He was also moving in sweller company in Los Angeles than the year before. This time he kept Alora at bay. He was back at the Hollywood Plaza, but told her Dorsey was making him double up with Joey Bushkin. It was a lie, of course. He had his eye peeled for bigger game. He had heard that none other than Lana Turner, who’d been married to Artie Shaw for ten minutes, was screwing Buddy Rich, and if Lana Turner was screwing Buddy Rich, anything was possible.
One cool morning—a rainstorm had swept through the night before; now the City of Angels sparkled like Eden itself—he was walking between