Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [75]
Suddenly, rather than having to try to hear him over screams, audiences—grown-up audiences—were hanging on the caress of his voice. He had made them come to him. Overnight, Frank Sinatra had become an adult phenomenon.
The word traveled like lightning around Manhattan, and within a week it was standing room only at the Riobamba, even for the 2:30 a.m. show. Just as Frank had predicted. Within a week, Sheila Barrett was history—the club had put her under Sinatra on the bill; she walked—and Walter O’Keefe followed quickly. “When I came to this place,” O’Keefe told the audience on his final night, “I was the star and a kid named Sinatra, one of the acts. Then suddenly a steamroller came along and knocked me flat. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the rightful star—Frank Sinatra!” Just like that, the joint was all Frank’s. His pay was doubled, and his gig extended.
And no one was less surprised than Sinatra. To a young reporter, he said, “I’m flying high, kid. I’ve planned my career. From the first minute I walked on a stage I determined to get exactly where I am; like a guy who starts out being an office boy but has a vision of occupying the president’s office.”
Frank “was a sensation, doing extra shows,” Sammy Cahn remembered, “and I went to the two-thirty a.m. show with a stop first in his dressing room. The moment he saw me he put his arms around me and said, ‘Did I tell ya? Did I tell ya?’
“He had them in the grip of his hand,” Cahn said. “One of my vivid memories is, while he was singing, some gorilla coughed. A giant guy, like two hundred fifty pounds. He turned and looked at this guy, and the guy didn’t know what to do with himself. Do you understand what I’m trying to say? Frank had power, menace … It was an incredible experience.”
Only a week or two earlier, he had been backed up trembling against the club’s piano; now he was staring down tough guys. His bravado was a self-fulfilling prophecy: bluster away the terror; then, when victorious, strut and gloat and bully. It was unattractive, but Dolly’s teaching had left him little middle ground. The triumphant present was maximum revenge on the past, on the days when the Flashes had used him as a punching bag. Suddenly he was the alpha-dog leader of a pack of hangers-on self-dubbed the Varsity.
The group was the first of its kind, the 1943 forerunner of a hip-hopper’s posse, complete with camel-hair overcoats, golden bling, and nights at the fights. Among them were Sanicola and (for the time being) Sevano; Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen when they were in from the Coast; Manie Sacks; the singer’s music-publishing partner, Ben Barton; two pugilists (and crowd-control specialists) named Al Silvani and Tami Mauriello; and another Jimmy, Tarantino, a shady character who wrote for a boxing magazine picturesquely called Knockout. They would swagger around Manhattan, from watering hole to watering hole, the little man at the center of the group, protectively cordoned, the functionaries at the periphery greasing the way with crisp new bills. It was the beginning of a pattern that would continue for the next thirty-three years of Sinatra’s life, until he slipped the wedding ring onto the finger of his fourth and final wife—who, in a self-preserving power play, proceeded, with ruthless efficiency, to force out the sycophants, cronies, and enablers, one by one.
In the meantime, for a long time to come, he was King, with all that that entailed. The oboist and conductor Mitch Miller, who would one day produce Sinatra’s records at Columbia, recalled: “Jimmy Van Heusen once canceled dinner with me by saying, ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve got to eat with the Monster.’ Everyone called Sinatra the Monster.”
They called him that because he acted like that—not always, but too often