His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [39]
“She said, ‘Miss Watts, come in here this minute. The girls tell me that they have just come from Chapel Hill, where they saw the gentleman that you are entertaining. They say that his name is not Frank Steel but Frank Sinatra.’
“You have no idea of the trouble I got into as a result of that! I was campused for weeks, and the school wrote a letter to my mother asking if she realized that I was going out with Frank Sinatra. The school was shocked and incensed. Not because Frank was a married man, which I didn’t know at first, or because he was eight years older than me, but because he was a singer! Well-bred young women simply didn’t go out with show-business people. They were declassé and beneath the consideration of ladies. My mother was wonderful about it. She wrote me back and said that she trusted me completely, and, by the way, who is Frank Sinatra? She’d never heard of him.”
After Mary Lou was graduated from Mount Vernon and living at home again, Mrs. Watts soon became acquainted with Frank, for he started calling her daughter at three o’clock in the morning. Those early morning phone calls rang on the phone in her bedroom, and Mrs. Watts had to get up and walk down the hall to her daughter’s room to tell her she was wanted on the telephone.
“At that hour of the morning, I’d know that it was Frank and that he’d just gotten off the bandstand and finished work for the evening,” said Mary Lou. “My mother would shake her head. ‘I simply don’t understand anybody who works at this hour of the night,’ she’d say.”
Entranced by the big bands, Mary Lou Watts enjoyed socializing with Frank. “We’d sit around and talk about the band,” she said. “Frank hated Buddy Rich, who was uncouth and common, and he couldn’t stand Connie Haines either. I don’t know why. You didn’t ask. If he didn’t like them, you didn’t like them either, and that was it. If he didn’t talk to them, you didn’t talk to them.
“After he got off work, we’d go out to fun places like Jack White’s Club 18 and to Harlem to hear Billie Holiday sing. He took me to publicity benefits and to a lot of recording sessions. I remember, they’d rehearse in the worst places, and they’d practice a long time before they ever recorded one song.”
By now, Mary Lou was engaged to the man who became her husband. Nick Sevano said he spent many hours consoling her fiancé when he’d cry to Nick about Mary Lou’s being out with Frank.
But she had her fiancé with her when she decided to help the unschooled singer from Hoboken by introducing him to café society. They took him to the Stork Club, where he met their friends. “Maybe we taught him how to eat,” she said. “He learned, and he was always nice to everyone.” She felt rewarded for her efforts.
“Frank sang beautifully, but he spoke with ‘deze, dem, and doze’ diction,” she said. “He had a terrible New Jersey accent, but it didn’t show in his singing. It’s like the Japanese who sing English and sound just like us. If you can string it out into syllables, it will sound right, and that’s what Frank did, I guess. I always knew that he was going to be a great success someday because he was absolutely determined to become a star. He had amazing confidence in himself. He was torn about leaving Tommy Dorsey, though, and kept asking me if he should do it. It was a terrible decision for him.”
In May 1941, Frank, age twenty-five, was named the top band vocalist by Billboard, and girls started swooning. Every time they did, Dorsey had his musicians stop the music and swoon right back at them. “This inspired the girls to go one better,” said the bandleader, “and the madness kept growing