Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [61]
Connie Haines remembered listening to Sinatra’s “Night and Day” with some of the rest of the band, not long afterward: “Frank sat on a stool. He had on one of those hats Bing Crosby had made popular. It was slouched down over his head at just the right angle, and he had a pipe in his mouth … As the last note ended, we all knew it was a hit. The musicians rose to their feet as if one. They cheered. Then I heard him say, ‘Hey, Bing, old man. Move over. Here I come.’ ”
Bing wasn’t the only one who had to move over. Lana Turner, who Buddy Rich sweetly believed only had eyes for him (“Lana was the love of Buddy’s life,” said Rich’s sister. “And he was the only one that didn’t know about her”), was methodically sleeping her way up the band’s hierarchy. First came a musician or two, then Dorsey himself, and then the man Turner was canny enough to realize now stood at the pinnacle. Tommy, the anti-sentimentalist, knew all about it: one night he bribed a waiter at the Hollywood Plaza to put his dirty dinner dishes, instead of the romantic supper Sinatra had ordered up for Lana and himself, under the food covers on the room-service cart.
So much for Alora Gooding.2
The story of Frank Sinatra’s life is one of continual shedding, both of artistic identities and of associates and intimates who had outlived their usefulness. The saga of his disentanglement from one of his most powerful relationships, his deep emotional and artistic bond with Tommy Dorsey, is complex and bewildering. Out of forgetfulness, self-protection, and self-mythification, Sinatra sowed no small amount of the confusion himself. When a man he admired, Sidney Zion, was bold enough to ask him, in front of an audience at Yale Law School, about the fabled role of organized crime in the tale, Sinatra parried with a genteel vagueness that befitted the surroundings—and that let himself more or less completely off the hook.
“Now, in the story that is told in The Godfather … about how you happened to get let out of the contract of Mr. Dorsey …, somebody came there and put a gun at his head or whatever,” Mr. Zion said. “There’s been a million stories. I heard one the other day from a guy who said …, ‘It wasn’t the Italians, the Jews did it, and they put a trombone down Harry James’s throat.’ I said, ‘Are you sure it was a trombone or a trumpet down Harry James’s throat?’ So he had that a little wrong. But there’s been a lot of stories about this, made famous through the years, and I think it would be interesting to set it straight.”
Sinatra, seventy and dignified now, smiled in a distinguished way and proceeded to set the record anything but straight. “Well, it’s quite simple, really,” he said. (It was anything but.) “It got so blown out of proportion that it took a long time to clarify it … I’ll tell you here now, for your edification, as to what happened with it—if it’s important at all. Really, it’s passé, it’s so old now.”
Shut up, he explained.
“The reason I wanted to leave the orchestra,” he continued, “was because Crosby was number one, way up on top of the pile, and in the field … were some awfully good singers with the orchestras. Bob Eberly with Jimmy Dorsey’s Orchestra was a fabulous vocalist. Mr. Como was with Ted Weems, and he still is such a wonderful singer. I thought if I don’t make a move out of this band and try to do it on my own soon, one of those guys will do it, and I’ll have to fight all three of them, from Crosby all the way down to the other two, to get a position. So I took a shot and I gave Mr. Dorsey one year’s notice. It was in September whatever year. I said, ‘I’m going to leave the band one year from that day.’ Beyond that year, I had another six months to do in the contract. He said, ‘Sure.’ That’s all he said, was ‘Sure.’ ”
Sure.
In fact, Mr. Sinatra gave Mr. Dorsey his notice in February 1942, with ten months left to run on the three-year contract he’d signed in January 1940, and he would continue to sing with the Dorsey band for just seven of those months, and it is quite unlikely that Tommy Dorsey