Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [74]
Podell croaked his indignation. So the kid had had Times Square tied in knots for two months; so what. Fuck Times Square. Fuck all those little girls, and fuck Frankie Sinatra. Frankie Sinatra would not play the Copacabana. Sophie Tucker played the Copacabana. Jimmy Durante played the Copacabana. Fuck Frankie Sinatra!
A year later, Podell would be kissing Sinatra’s pinkie ring. But for now, the singer’s people, in a bind, had to do the best they could—which in this case was a Copa knockoff (right down to the Mob ownership), only smaller: a glitzy jewel box of a joint on East Fifty-seventh called the Riobamba. Unlike the Copacabana, however, the Riobamba was on its uppers, largely due to depressed wartime business. (There was also the minor detail that its proprietor, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter of Murder Inc., was in Leavenworth awaiting execution.) The club was delighted to book Sinatra—it needed a quick injection of whatever it could get—but the most it could pay was a cut-rate $750 a week, half of what he was earning at the Paramount.
Sinatra was angry, and scared. (The two usually went hand in hand with him.) He could make the bobby-soxers scream by raising an eyebrow; the Upper East Side snobs who frequented the Riobamba might not react so favorably, and he hadn’t played a nightclub since his days with Dorsey. Moreover, the Riobamba was an intimate place—no stage, just a piano on a little dance floor. Sinatra would be out there on his own, the patrons at their tables close enough to see him sweat.
Typically, he turned fear into bluster. When the club’s manager showed Sinatra the tiny setup, he said, “You better push the walls of this joint out. I’m gonna pack ’em in.”
But then he got scared all over again. He really was going to have to prove himself. The club’s ads for his appearance didn’t even bill him first: he was listed as “SPECIALLY ADDED,” under Walter O’Keefe (a monologist and comedian) and Sheila Barrett (a singer and comedian). On opening night, in honor of the sophisticated surroundings, Sinatra came out in a tuxedo instead of his Paramount uniform of suit and floppy bow tie. He had to make his entrance right across the nightclub floor, sidling among the tables, trying his best not to bump into anyone. Literally shaking with stage fright, he backed into the protective curve of Nat Brandwynne’s baby grand and began to sing. That was when things started going his way.
“Frank was in a dinner jacket,” Earl Wilson wrote, “and he was wearing a wedding band. He had a small curl that fell almost over his right eye. With trembling lips—I don’t know how he made them tremble, but I saw it—he sang ‘She’s Funny That Way’ and ‘Night and Day’ and succeeded in bringing down the house … It was a wondrous night for all of us who felt we had a share in Frankie … The New York Post’s pop-music critic, Danny Richman, leaned over to me and said, ‘He sends me.’ ”
That night Frank didn’t have to make his lips tremble: he was that terrified.1 Many years later he would confess that he felt sick with fear every time he walked out onto a stage. The same is true of many other performers (“If you’re not scared, it means you don’t care,” Jerry Lewis has said), but unlike most Sinatra never bothered to try to hide his vulnerability. Wide-eyed with trepidation and excitement, he gave an audience naked emotion. Dick Haymes or Perry Como or Bob Eberly would have made a very different presentation: a nightclub audience would have admired the handsome face and voice, the musical grace, the thoroughgoing professionalism. But what the swell crowd at the Riobamba got was a jolt of sheer electricity.
Life magazine wrote: “Three times an evening, Sinatra steps into the baby spotlight that splashes on to the dance floor. In a come-hither, breathless voice, he then sings such songs as ‘You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,’ ‘That Old Black Magic,’ ‘She