Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [68]
Actually, the sound and smell were what hit him at first. The place was absolutely packed with hysterical teenage girls, almost five thousand of them, fire laws be damned (a few hundred slipped into the right hands earned Bob Weitman a lot of extra money). They were jamming the seats, the aisles, the balcony—all but hanging from the rafters. And hanging raptly on the words to the song the starved-looking kid in the spotlight at center stage was singing—
Be careful, it’s my heart …
and going nuts when he hit that last word:
It’s not my watch you’re holding, it’s my he-art.
The (by now very practiced) catch in his voice, the tousled spit curl on his forehead (no Dorsey anymore to order him to comb it), the help-me look in his bright blue eyes (always, pointedly, laser focused on one girl or another in the audience)—it all set them off like dynamite. The air in the great auditorium was vibrating, both with earsplitting screams (FRANKIEEE!!! FRANKIEEE!!!) and with the heat and musk of female lust. Evans could smell perfumes, BO, the faint acrid tang of urine (the girls would come for the first show at 9:15 a.m. and stay for show after show, determined never to relinquish a precious seat even if it meant soaking it), and something else. They were like a great herd of female beasts, he thought with wonderment, all in heat at once …
As Evans hovered close to the stage, openmouthed (Sevano just behind him, grinning knowingly), a girl in an aisle seat stood and tossed a single rose, its long stem wrapped in protective paper, up to the singer. The flower hung for a second in the whirling beam of the spotlight—and then, with a graceful movement, Sinatra caught it, smiled at her, and closed his eyes as he sniffed the blossom, sending the whole theater into yet another paroxysm. The publicist’s ears picked out one sound above the din: a low moan, emanating from a lanky black-haired girl standing next to the rose thrower. It was a sound he had heard before—only in very different, much more private, circumstances.
Then and there George Evans decided he would represent Frank Sinatra.
He had been in the business for ten years; he had represented Russ Columbo and Rudy Vallée at a time when such sappy crooners could capture the hearts of America’s females—and when hearts were the only part of the female anatomy in play. Now the game had clearly advanced, and Sinatra was clearly the man responsible.
Evans knew at once he could take the game still further.
He stuck around for three more shows, taking careful note of what he saw and felt, his mind racing at the possibilities. This was something the publicist had never seen the likes of before. It was a great whirlwind, and he was being offered carte blanche to step in and harness it. But how?
He noticed—because each audience, after all, is a different animal—that not every show was successfully hysterical. Sometimes there were odd lulls in the tumult; sometimes the crowd got in its own way (and the singer’s), just screaming, creating a massive wall of sound, preventing Sinatra from doing what he did best: singing. Pandemonium was all well and good if it served the purpose at hand—namely, making this boy a star like no other before him.
But Evans saw that Sinatra’s visual appeal, while unique, was limited. What got to the girls was that voice—specifically, the unique blend of that personality and that voice. Other singers were better to look at. Others had winning personalities and terrific voices. But no one, absolutely no one, got his personality into the voice like this kid. He sold a song, and told a song, like nobody else. Especially, of course, if the song was a ballad. He yearned in front of thousands of females, making every girl in the place want to mother him or screw him—Sinatra had each and every one of them in a dither about which. But he had to be heard.
Then George