Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [77]
He would record nine of the instrumentless singles between June and November 1943, and the fans would dutifully buy them (five of the numbers hit the Billboard best-sellers chart), but none of the records had anything like the impact of a disc that Sinatra had cut an eon ago, with Harry James—and that Manie Sacks had the good sense to reissue on June 19. The song was “All or Nothing At All.” Only eight thousand people had bought the record when it was first released in June 1940. This time it sold a million.4
Since Axel Stordahl was an orchestra arranger, and organizing the voices of a small chorus so they would sound something like a band of actual instruments was a highly specialized problem, Sacks brought in a new man to arrange and conduct Sinatra’s Bobby Tucker sessions. His name was Alexander Lafayette Chew Wilder—Alec for short. He was an upstate New Yorker, thirty-six years old, and a genuine American eccentric: a self-taught composer who wrote both serious music and popular songs, Wilder lived alone in the Algonquin Hotel, passed his days doing crosswords and jigsaw puzzles, and spent his evenings drinking, smoking, drinking some more, and dazzling New York’s best and brightest with his encyclopedic knowledge of more or less everything. “He is acutely aware of what is happening in the world and why it happens,” read the liner notes to an album of Wilder’s orchestral music released several years later—an album that would loom large in Sinatra’s life. “He is passionately fond of living in hotels, riding on trains, and reading detective stories; he is equally enamored of sitting still in a small town, attending to a garden, and talking to children.” Wilder was mustached and handsome in an old-money way, with a beetling brow and a distracted, kind of sideways, manner. The first time Sinatra laid eyes on him, he called him by the only possible nickname: the Professor.
Working with Sinatra would have been a big deal for Wilder, if Wilder hadn’t been above caring about such matters. But oddly enough, working with Alec did feel like a big deal to Frank. In Sacks and Wilder, Frank Sinatra was rubbing elbows with a new caliber of talent. Manie may have hung with the crew, have smiled at the hijinks, but ultimately he kept himself to himself. His integrity was inviolable. And as charmed as Alec Wilder was with Sinatra—and as bowled over by his musical gifts—he had absolutely no interest in joining the Varsity, or any fraternity at all. He might, out of anthropological curiosity, tag along to a Friday-night prizefight; he might, just as likely, spend the next evening drinking with Alexander Woollcott and Dottie Parker.
Both Sacks and Wilder had that ineffable quality that Frank Sinatra thought of as Class. He wanted the same thing of those who had it that those who lacked it wanted of him. Class didn’t necessarily have anything to do with wealth: the rich stiffs who flocked to see him at the Riobamba mostly lacked the elusive quantity entirely, as far as he could see. (Though in later years, cleverer stiffs, primarily in Hollywood and Palm Springs, would gain access to Sinatra by assuring him that their money was no greener than his.) It was easy to feel superior to some jackass with dough; Sinatra never, for one second, felt superior to Manie or the Professor. If anything, it was quite the opposite. Which made things kind of complicated sometimes, but never stopped him from longing for just a little bit of what they had.
On August 11, 1943, Frank Sinatra made his grand entrance to Hollywood—except that it wasn’t Hollywood. It was Pasadena. Nancy Sinatra writes, in Frank Sinatra: An American Legend, “Traveling by train to Los Angeles, Dad tried to avoid the waiting crowds by deboarding [sic] in Pasadena, but it was no use: A huge throng of bobby-soxers mobbed the station, and he was rushed