Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [62]
We have this last from no less an authority than Art Linkletter—yes, the Art Linkletter of 1950s afternoon-television fame, who as a young reporter in February 1942 went backstage at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Theatre to interview Tommy Dorsey, and found that Sinatra had just given notice, and that Dorsey was not happy. “He’s such a damn fool,” the bandleader vented to the kid journalist. “He’s a great singer, but you know, you can’t make it without a band … Does he think he can go out on his own, as good as he is? It upsets me because he’s an important part of our band.”
What Dorsey wouldn’t say—or couldn’t bring himself to say—was how betrayed he felt by Sinatra. This was a boy he had taught his deepest art, a boy he had elevated to national fame! A boy who had sat up till all hours playing cards with him … one who, despite the mere ten years’ difference between their ages, had been like a son to him—and who had treated him, in many ways, like a father. And now, inevitably, the youth was leaving the nest. The bandleader was a tightly wound, thickly self-protected man, one who nursed his hurts deep in the sub-basement of his soul, and this was a wound that would stay with him till the end of his days.
Sinatra himself hadn’t come to his decision lightly. Where his career was concerned, he never did anything lightly. He tormented Sevano and Sanicola—when he wasn’t complaining of hypochondriacal symptoms, he was telling his minions, “I gotta do it, I gotta do it.” Sevano recalled: “He kept telling me, ‘I gotta do it before Bob Eberly does it.’
“He was like a Mack truck going one hundred miles an hour without brakes,” Sevano said. “He had me working around the clock. ‘Call Frank Cooper [an agent at the management company General Amusement Corporation, recommended by Manie Sacks]. Do it now. Don’t wait until tomorrow … Send my publicity photos to Walter Winchell. Get my records to the Lucky Strike Hit Parade.’ ”
Those he couldn’t order around, he seduced. “I was sitting with Sinatra, and we were talking,” Sammy Cahn remembered. “And he says, ‘I’m going to be the world’s greatest singer.’ And I looked at him, and I’ll never forget it, I said, ‘There’s no doubt in my mind. You are the world’s greatest singer.’ He said, ‘Do you mean it?’ I said, ‘What do you mean, do I mean it? You’re the best. You’re the best. There’s nobody better than you. You’re the best.’ ”
This was a complicated moment, an intricate dance between two talented men. In part Cahn was being obsequious: as a lyricist, he had a career to further, and he correctly sensed that Sinatra could be an important part of it. But as a friend, he was also being utterly honest: Sinatra was the best.
Was Sinatra—Do you mean it?—being coy? Of course he was. He knew exactly how good he was.
But as always, the one who understood Frank Sinatra most deeply was his chief victim and champion, the girl who had known him when. “Tommy was a good teacher because he had a great band, and he had wonderful vocalists with him, and they were great together,” Nancy Barbato Sinatra said. “But without Tommy I know it still would have happened … Frank had a master plan for himself, and he worked at getting there. I think he always had it in the back of his mind that this was a stepping stone.”
As was she. As was almost everyone with whom Sinatra ever had a significant relationship. He would step on or over everyone in his path until he grasped the brass ring. The master plan for himself was exactly that: for himself. Alone.
His master plan now included Manie Sacks of Columbia, who had formally agreed to sign Sinatra the moment he was legally divorced from Dorsey and RCA.
In the months after Sinatra gave notice, Tommy Dorsey went through the classic five stages of grief. There was denial, anger, bargaining, depression—and eventually acceptance, but only after ferocious resistance (on Dorsey’s part), legal maneuvering (on both sides), and the possible introduction (by parties unknown) of a firearm.
In the meantime, Sinatra