Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [63]
In advance of a rumored American Federation of Musicians strike over the summer, Dorsey also wanted to record as much as possible, to stockpile sides that could be released if there was a strike. Sinatra was happy to comply: he knew his freedom was imminent.
With the war raging in Europe and the Pacific (and not going well at first), millions of young men, including dozens of musicians, were joining up.3 One of them was Artie Shaw, who’d enlisted with the Coast Guard in early 1942, and had promptly bequeathed his entire string section, eight players in all, to Dorsey. Buddy Rich was disgusted; Sinatra, delighted. The poignancy of string-backed ballads like “Just as Though You Were Here,” “There Are Such Things,” and “In the Blue of Evening” fit the country’s anxious mood—and the singer’s career plans—perfectly. It was as if Dorsey were rehearsing Frank for the next stage in his professional life.
Just as though you were here. (“I’ll wake each morning, and I’ll promise to laugh/I’ll say good morning to your old photograph.”) Now and then that spring, Frank popped up at home—new, nicer digs in a two-family house on Bergen Avenue in Jersey City—to pay a visit to two-year-old Nancy and Big Nancy, who was taking off the weight and looking at him hopefully. He tried to summon up some of the ardor he’d once felt, then gave her a good-bye peck on the cheek: he had places to go.
Many years later, Nancy junior would remember the civil-defense blackouts of 1942: “The curtains drawn. The lights turned off. And Mom and I sitting on the floor, holding each other in the darkness. Daddy was busy, I guess. He was, it seemed, a voice on the radio most of the time, or a picture in the newspaper … a figure composed of a bow tie and two black patent leather shoes, who was always going away.”
After another eight-week run at the Astor roof in May and June (the prom girls wailing around the bandstand, a few getting lucky afterward), the band went back on the road. In Chicago, in July, Sinatra, feeling expansive, asked Dorsey if he wanted help finding a new singer. Frank mentioned as a possibility—poetic justice—his replacement with Harry James’s Music Makers, Dick Haymes. Haymes was a good-looking blond guy who’d gone to Hollywood to try to break into pictures, and wound up singing instead. He had a romantic light baritone, and the girls loved him—but not the way they loved Sinatra. Haymes made them sigh; Sinatra made them nuts.
Despite the fact that he’d already given his notice, the suggestion did not go down well. “[Tommy] said, ‘No no no, you’re not going to leave this band,’ ” Sinatra recalled. “ ‘Not as easy as you think you are.’ Well, words began to be back-and-forth, and finally he made it very difficult—and I left the band anyway.”
Thus began the anger phase. Dorsey, who was drinking heavily that summer (he’d inaugurated the Astor roof engagement by getting into a boozy backstage fistfight with his brother Jimmy), promptly stopped speaking to Sinatra, and didn’t start again until the end of August, when it became clear that the singer was going to leave no matter what. Acceptance had finally set in. “Let him go,” Dorsey said with a shrug. “Might be the best thing for me.”
What definitely wasn’t the best thing for the bandleader was that Sinatra had yanked Axel Stordahl right out from under him, making the arranger an offer he couldn’t possibly refuse: $650 a month, five times what Tommy was paying him. It was money Sinatra didn’t have—yet—but it was a brilliant