Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [70]
In the first two weeks of 1943, the hysteria at the Paramount built. At one show, thirty girls keeled over; only some of them had been prepped to do so. The crowds outside the theater were equally worked up. Times Square had become a twenty-four-hour Sinatra-thon. Wartime swing shifts abetted the overnight, around-the-block ticket lines for the 8:45 a.m. shows. The girls pushed and shoved, endangering each other and everything in sight. “I saw fans run under the horses of mounted policemen,” recalled Sinatra’s assistant road manager Richie Lisella. “I saw them turn over a car.” Cordons of cops did their best to contain the hysteria. And George Evans did his best to fan it.
The publicist coined a whole new lingo, 1940s glib and gumsnappingly brash, to describe the phenomenon he was guiding. Winchell, Earl Wilson, and the other columnists could now refer to the singer as “Swoonatra,” and to his bobby-soxed idolaters as “Sinatratics.” (Which was easier to read than to say.) The anguished pleasure they suffered in his presence was “Sinatrauma”; the specific physical reaction Dr. Evans had noted in one moaning female fan was, unsubtly enough, a “Sinatraism.” (“Sinatrasm” might have been a little too on the money.)
George Evans was brilliant at leveraging publicity. No outlet was too insignificant—although it helped, in the case of high-school newspaper editors, if you could get a couple dozen of them in a room together to interview the star. Evans worked overtime planting Sinatra items—some of them lightly factual, most heavily laced with fancy—in the gossip columns and the news. Evans told reporters: Over a thousand Sinatra fan clubs have sprung up in the U.S.A.! (Who was counting? A thousand was a nice round number.) You had, among many, many others, your Sighing Society of Sinatra Swooners, your Slaves of Sinatra, your Flatbush Girls Who Would Lay Down Their Lives for Frank Sinatra Fan Club. And let us not forget that glorious (and likely fictitious) gaggle of middle-aged aficionadas, the Frank Sinatra Fan and Mahjong Club.
Publicists have sown such corn since the Theodore Roosevelt administration, but this was a bolder variety, and the soil in which it took root was particularly fertile. The war was raging on two fronts, and America was hungry for upbeat stories. And it’s always easier to make up good news than find it, and George Evans was delighted to oblige.
His greatest work of fiction was Sinatra’s first publicity bio, a text that would have done Parson Weems (George Washington’s early biographer and the inventor of the cherry-tree myth) proud. To establish greater solidarity with teenage fans, Evans first chopped a couple of years off the singer’s age: Frank Sinatra had been born, it was now asserted, in 1917.2 He had been raised poor but proud in the slums of Hoboken, narrowly avoiding mayhem at the hands of vicious street gangs. He had triumphantly graduated, rather than dropped out, from A. J. Demarest High, where he had not only lettered in football, basketball, and track but also sung in the glee club. The sports reporter’s chair he had so hungered for at the Jersey Observer was now his. And in a truly inspired invention, Evans transformed Dolly from a cussing midwife-abortionist-political fixer into a former Red Cross nurse in World War I—from Mammy Yokum to Catherine Barkley in a single swoop.
And that was only the beginning. In Evans-world, the present-day Frank was a model suburban husband and dad, mowing the lawn, washing the car, patiently teaching Little Nancy chords on the family’s upright piano. To document all this Potemkin domesticity, the publicist dispatched photographers to the Sinatras’ new house, the cute Cape Cod at 220 Lawrence Avenue, Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey. It was an upward-aspiring