Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [92]
Dateline New York. There is no denying, gentlemen, this guy Frankie Sinatra has something we ain’t got. Most everyone is trying to discover what that something is, and the few who claim to know can’t find the words to express themselves. So until a better explanation comes along, the homefront is simply calling this 26-year-old [sic] Hoboken-born crooner a national phenomenon. However, if one must get analytical, Sinatra, otherwise known as the Voice, has certain definite things which we ain’t. For instance, he pulls down about ten-hundred thousand bucks a year, says press agent George B. Evans, carefully adding that about $930,000 goes back to the government in taxes …
Secondly, Evans estimates that The Voice has about 50 million bobby-sock followers and other less fanatical fans. The Sinatra fan mail averages 2,000 letters weekly, of which 40% are from other than young (14 to 18 years) girls. Of this 40%, a lot is from servicemen, but—Evans admits—very little is from servicemen overseas.
His bobbysock brigades are the most fantastic people. At the very sight of ‘The Voice’ they break into screams … This screaming has become Sinatra’s trademark. At first encouraged, if not suggested by Sinatra’s press agents, the practice now is very much frowned upon. Before each Lucky Strike Hit Parade radio performance, the 5-foot-10 1/2-inch [sic], 140-pound [sic] crooner pleads with his high school dumplings to please, oh please, just be nice girls, and applaud, but don’t scream. He tells them that the War Department doesn’t like them to have screams show up on his program recordings for overseas consumption. It is bad on the combat GI’s morale, the WD figures …
Now that I’ve seen Sinatra myself, I still can’t imagine why he does what he does to people, especially girls. Yet 50 million Americans can’t be wrong.
People will argue day and night over whether he has a voice or not. The people who can hear him say he has, but the people who can’t hear him, especially when he has to compete with the volume of Mark Warnow’s band on the Lucky Strike Hit Parade, say he hasn’t.
On August 4, 1943, he appeared with the [Philadelphia] Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra. The crowd, containing a larger percentage of bobbysocks than ever before seen in a concert hall, thought he was good, but the music critics almost universally did not. They were not so much annoyed by his voice as by his reference to the musicians of the Philharmonic as “the boys in the band.”
Sinatra is 4-F because of a punctured eardrum. As a civilian crooner, his friends point out, he is doing a lot more for the country by packing them in at bond rallies and the like than he could do in a uniform, an argument raised on behalf of many entertainers, and seemingly a satisfactory one to the Selective Service Boards.
In answer to my question whether he was planning any overseas tours, Sinatra said: “I would like to if I can stand it physically …”
Frankie is now in Hollywood, fulfilling his RKO contract. Even in the city of movie stars, the fans single him out for special attention. That he is married and has two babies doesn’t seem to matter.
This last is especially pointed—the military reader would have known at once exactly which fans were singling Sinatra out, and just what kind of special attention they were giving him. All in all, it was an article expressly designed to make soldiers’ blood boil, and it was symptomatic of a spreading feeling about the singer. Despite George Evans’s heroic efforts, the public was starting to sniff out things it didn’t like about Frank Sinatra. He was a hedonist, in a nation under wartime restrictions. He was a man apart, in a time when men were supposed to be supporting their buddies. He was having the time of his life, while his countrymen were fighting and dying overseas.
And thanks to MCA, he was no longer working for the piddling RKO but starting his new contract