Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [71]
It was also a crowded street, now that Swoonatra had moved in. There were all those publicity photographers, for one thing; for another, there was now a more or less nonstop procession of teenage girls tiptoeing up the driveway, hiding behind the bushes, swiping Frank’s under-shorts from the clothesline, writing love notes in lipstick on the garage door, or casting discretion to the winds and simply pressing their noses against the glass. “I’d look out my bedroom window and there would be somebody’s face,” Big Nancy recalled. “They’d sit out there on the lawn for hours. We tried asking them to go home, but they wouldn’t leave. It scared me, but finally I’d feel so sorry for them I’d send out doughnuts and something for them to drink.” As magnanimous as she was, it’s hard to imagine Mrs. S. sending out those doughnuts and drinks more than once or twice before putting her foot down. Publicity, she was quickly learning, cut two ways.
So did fame, though if Sinatra had any regrets, he hid them well. The threadbare private life glimpsed by the twelve-year-old babysitter Ed Kessler in the Audubon Avenue apartment (a life in which, even then, Sinatra participated only sporadically) was now quite thoroughly a thing of the past. Private life for Frank Sinatra had simply winked out like a light, ceased to exist—or rather, he found what little privacy he could in his trysts, and in the wee hours with his pals. It was as though he had stepped out of his front door and into the basket of a hot-air balloon. As he ascended over the landscape of everyday reality, Mr. and Mrs. America got up early, went to work, punched a time clock, listened to the radio, worried about the bills. Far above, Frank Sinatra smiled amid the unimaginably sweet breezes of his new life.
It was a life that seemed somehow inevitable. He had done his share of hard scrabbling, and then some. “People call me an overnight success,” he said. “Don’t make me laugh.” But when real success did come, it came fast. In early January, when RCA Victor released “There Are Such Things,” one of the Dorsey-Sinatra recordings the bandleader had stockpiled in anticipation of the American Federation of Musicians strike (which had been in full swing since August), the record instantly went to number 2 on the Billboard chart. By the middle of the month, it had risen to number 1, knocking off Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.” As a result, the Paramount held Sinatra over for another four-week run, a nearly unprecedented honor (only Rudy Vallée had accomplished it before). And on the strength of the Paramount run and the record sales, CBS, whose recording arm, Columbia, was about to sign the singer, named Sinatra the star of its flagship radio show, Lucky Strike’s Your Hit Parade.
Your Hit Parade was based on a simple formula: bean counters somewhere would supposedly tabulate the week’s top-selling songs,3 and the studio orchestra and singers (Sinatra’s female counterpart was the now-forgotten Joan Edwards) would perform the top dozen or so of them in reverse order, saving the biggest hit for last. Sandwiched in between were plenty of commercials for Lucky Strikes, with the brand’s mystical, mellifluous slogan (L.S.M.F.T.—“Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco”) and its catchphrase (“so round, so firm, so fully packed”): magic words that made you feel, if you happened to smoke the brand, part of an elect.
The show was hokey, and over Sinatra’s two tenures there (1943–44 and 1947–49) many of the songs were dogs (not even Sinatra could do much with “Red Roses for a Blue Lady”). But radio was everything then, and Sinatra’s selection as the star of Your Hit Parade was a direct weekly injection of his name into the American consciousness.