His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [32]
Nancy saw little of her husband during the week; she went to work early in the morning and came home around dinnertime. That’s when Frank was getting ready to go to the Rustic Cabin, where he stayed until early morning. Many days when she arrived, he wouldn’t be home, having spent the day in New York, before going to work in Englewood Cliffs.
Nancy soon grew resentful of the hours her husband spent away from home with his men friends like Hank Sanicola, a former boxer and now a song plugger from the Bronx, who played the piano for Frank on all his singing dates.
“Hank was the only guy Frank ever feared, or at least did not double-cross,” said Nick Sevano. “He knew that Hank feared nobody, and I mean nobody! He was a rough guy, Hank was. He was Frank’s muscle man for years. That’s why Frank kept him on his side.”
Frank was not at all athletic. He was too frail and too thin to hold his own in the ring like the father and uncles he looked up to. Even his childhood friends had to do his fighting for him. But he grew up admiring brute strength, and Hank Sanicola treated him like a kid brother from the beginning.
“I was always his right arm, the strong right arm,” he said. “I know how to fight. I was an amateur fighter. I used to step in and hit guys when they started ganging up on Frank in bars.… We were both of Sicilian origin, both Italians, so we became good friends. When Frank wasn’t working, I would arrange a club date for him and go along to accompany him. We knew, both of us, that it was only a question of time until somebody bought Frank.”
That somebody was Harry James, a fiery trumpeter who had left Benny Goodman’s band to start his own, and who was looking for a singer when he heard Frank on the radio. The next night he went to the Rustic Cabin to see the singer in person. At first, Frank didn’t believe that Harry James had come to the small-time madhouse, and Harry James did not believe that the singer he’d heard on the radio was simply a waiter.
“This very thin guy with swept-back greasy hair had been waiting tables,” he recalled. “Suddenly he took off his apron and climbed onto the stage. He’d sung only eight bars when I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rising. I knew he was destined to be a great vocalist.”
In June 1939, James, whose band was only four months old, offered Frank a two-year contract as the featured male vocalist for seventy-five dollars a week. Frank accepted immediately without mentioning that he had already auditioned with Jack Miles, trombonist with Guy Lombardo, who was forming his own band, and had started practice workouts with Bob Chester, also starting his own band.
“All I could think of was ‘Lock the doors! Board up the windows! Don’t let this guy out!’ ” Frank said later. “I had hold of his arm so tight, his fingers went numb.”
Harry James had already hired a female vocalist, Marie Antoinette Yvonne Jamais, and changed her name to Connie Haines. Now he said “Frank Sinatra” might sound too Italian and suggested that Frank become “Frankie Satin.”
When Frank told his mother, Dolly raised her hefty fist and bellowed, “I’ll give him ‘Frankie Satin’ with a shot to knock him cold. Your name is Sinatra, and it’s going to stay Sinatra. So tell him to fuck off with this ‘Frankie Satin’ crap.”
The next day, Frank phoned James and said if he wanted the voice, he’d have to take the name with it.
That same June, Frank made his first appearance with Harry James and his Music Makers at the Hippodrome Theater in Baltimore, where he sang “Wishing” and “My Love for You.” Then the band headed for the Roseland Ballroom in New York City, where it played most of the summer, breaking for a three-week stint at the Steel Pier in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
After three months, Frank complained to Harry James that the music critics were ignoring him.