Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [64]
The bargaining then—if you could call it that. What happened next was a Mephistophelian sit-down between the singer and Dorsey and Dorsey’s agent Leonard Vannerson, a meeting at which each side felt, not quite accurately, that it was holding a hand full of aces. In exchange for Sinatra’s release, plus an advance of $17,000 (at least $225,000 today) to start his solo career, Dorsey and Vannerson had Frank sign a piece of paper—one can almost smell the sulfurous fumes rising from it—that made Dorsey his manager, and guaranteed not just a 10 percent agent’s fee to Vannerson but also 33.3 percent of Sinatra’s gross earnings to Tommy, either (by some accounts) in perpetuity or for the next ten years. The truth of the matter is that in those days, ten years might as well have been perpetuity. A singer going out on his own in 1942 might as well have been sailing over the edge of the earth in 1492. And there was a war on! God knew where anyone would be after all that time—ten years meant Frank Sinatra would still be performing in … 1952. Who could imagine such a thing?
Frank Cooper, the agent to whom Manie Sacks had sent Sinatra, took one look at that Faustian contract and blanched. Not only would the singer be forking over 43.3 percent to Dorsey and Vannerson, but he’d also have to pay Cooper’s 10 percent. Plus income tax.
Sinatra smiled at the poor, sputtering mortal. “Don’t worry,” he told Cooper. “I’m not paying him a quarter.” Meaning Dorsey.
Dolly’s son had learned his lessons well.
Sinatra made his last radio broadcast with the Dorsey band on September 3, at the Circle Theater in Indianapolis. On the intro to “The Song Is You,” you can sense the chaos under Tommy’s steely-smooth, slickly cadenced patter. “After tonight,” the bandleader told the Hoosier audience, “he’s going to be strictly on his own. And Frank, I want to tell you that everyone in the band wishes you the best of luck.”
“Thanks, Mac,” Sinatra says, using the nickname Jimmy Dorsey had given his brother when the two were boys. The singer’s voice sounds very young, very Hoboken, and—surprisingly—soft with emotion. “I’d like to say that I’m gonna miss all you guys after kickin’ around for three years. And ladies and gentlemen, I’d like you to meet the boy who’s gonna take my place as the vocalist with Tommy and the band—he’s a fine guy, a wunnerful singer, and he was good enough for Harry James and Benny Goodman, and—that’s really sayin’ plenty. Folks, I’d like you to meet Dick Haymes.”
After a nice round of applause, Haymes pipes up: “Well, Frank, I don’t know if anyone can really take your place with this band. But I’m gonna be in there tryin’. You can bet on that. As for you, well, I know that you’ll be knockin’ ’em dead on your own hook.”
Then it’s almost as if Dick Haymes actually gets the hook—Dorsey jumps right back in, just about cutting him off: “I agree with you there, Dick, and thanks a lot, Dick Haymes—Frank, before you hit the road, how ’bout one more song just for—auld lang syne.”
“That’s all right with me, Tom,” Sinatra says. “Gimme the beat on our arrangement of ‘The Song Is You,’ and I’ll see what I can do with it.”
It’s all old-style showbiz corn, phony modesty an inch thick, but when Sinatra shifts from those Hoboken street tones to the first few bars of the Kern and Hammerstein masterpiece, you do a double take: the Voice is that rich, gorgeous, and expressive.4 Look out world, here I come, is the clear message—along with a quick Good luck, kiddo to Dick Haymes. And a quick thumb of the nose to Tommy Dorsey.
The way he ends the song—an ethereal falsetto high F—has an infinitely vulnerable sound: as always, his emotions were powerful and complicated. Dorsey told a magazine writer years later that at a party backstage after the show, Sinatra “was literally crying on my shoulder … depressed about what would happen to his career.” Depressed? Good and scared was