Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [59]
And they were young (many of them not that much older than Lana Turner) and wild and dangerous and brilliant—the rock stars of their day. Except that they could read music. (Well, except for Buddy and Frank.)
Buddy felt Lana was smiling at him and only him that night. A couple of the others felt the same way.
There was alcohol by the gallons at her house, and the sweet reek of reefer—especially around Joey Bushkin, giggling as he sat at her white grand piano, playing dirty songs and funny songs and beautiful songs. There were a few other girls, there were games and filthy jokes and hilarity, there was quite a bit of misbehavior, and then there was unconsciousness. Buddy ended up in Lana’s bed (the sheets were still warm), but he had drunk too much to get it up, and you could have lit her breath with a match by that point anyway: he’d never found that very sexy.
The sun rose over Brentwood to the sound of snoring in the big Tudor. A few hours later, a black Plymouth coupe pulled up in front of the house, and Lana Turner’s mother, Mildred, a rawboned Arkansas lady with a history of tragedy and pain, got out, a worried look on her long, plain features. She had been calling and calling, but nobody would pick up the phone. Now she opened the house’s heavy front door with her own key, sniffed the pungent air, and frowned at the sight of snoring musicians draped every which way—over the couches and easy chairs and carpet. Her daughter was going to hell in a hand-basket, and so, apparently, was the world: she had come to bring the news that the country was at war.
Lucky Strike green has gone to war. Yes, Lucky Strike green has gone to war … Don’t look for your Luckies in their familiar green package on the tobacco counters. No, your Luckies are wearing a different color now.
Who the hell knew what was going to happen? The world was turning upside down, and Frank had to grab whatever he could. The word was buzzing along the musicians’ grapevine: Bob Eberly, with Jimmy Dorsey’s band, was thinking about going out on his own. Eberly was kind of a handsome lug, and he could really sing. He had a rich, supple baritone, and he and Helen O’Connell had just done a version of “Green Eyes” that sounded as if they were going to hop right into the sack the second they were through.
But if you listened closely, it was a trick. Eberly was just a voice—a terrific voice, it’s true; a ballsy voice. He sounded like a man. But there was no ardor there, no yearning. There wasn’t anybody around, with the exception of Crosby, who could put across a song, could make you feel it, the way Sinatra could. Bob Eberly wasn’t half the singer Frank Sinatra was, and Sinatra knew it. But did the public? He didn’t want to wait around to find out.
And so he began to pester Tommy relentlessly, always mentioning the Down Beat poll (and never Manie Sacks): Dorsey had to let him record a few on his own. Why not? They’d sell some records!
Dorsey finally said yes just to shut him up.
Frank rehearsed constantly for the next three weeks, afternoons at the Palladium before Tommy showed up, just he and Lyle Henderson or Joey Bushkin on the piano behind him, in the huge quiet stillness of the empty dance hall. He knew exactly which songs he wanted to cut. They were all ballads, of course, all dripping with romance: There was “The Night We Called It a Day,” by these new kids Matt Dennis and Tom Adair, who’d written “Let’s Get Away from It All” and “Violets for Your Furs.” There was a sweet Hoagy Carmichael number that hadn’t been recorded much, “The Lamplighter’s Serenade.” And then two classics: Kern and Hammerstein’s “The Song Is You” and Cole Porter’s equally immortal “Night and Day,” whose lyrics he’d blown in front of the great man himself.
He had told Dorsey that he wanted strings. Oh, how he wanted them. The last time he’d had the chance to sing with a string section had been at the end of 1938, right around the time