His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [48]
“Frank was a sensation, doing extra shows, and I went to the two-thirty A.M. show with a stop first in his dressing room,” recalled Sammy Cahn. “The moment he saw me he put his arms around me and said, ‘Did I tell ya? Did I tell ya?’ Of course, after that show, we all hugged and laughed and shouted. For us it was proof that the ‘B’ group now had an ‘A’ singer, which was the wire I promptly sent to the other members of the ‘B’ group back on the coast. The ‘A’ group of that era was Bing Crosby and Company.”
The next month, Frank returned to the Paramount, where he was besieged by thousands of screaming, swooning youngsters. They stormed the theater and broke down the doors to get inside, sweeping aside the police and security men as if they were cardboard cutouts.
“It was absolute pandemonium,” said Nick Sevano. “This time, they threw more than roses. They threw their panties and their brassieres. They went nuts, absolutely nuts.”
The critics were flabbergasted. “The hysteria which accompanies his presence in public is in no way part of an artistic manifestation,” said the Herald-Tribune. “It is a slightly disturbing spectacle to witness the almost synchronized screams that come from the audience as he closes his eyes or moves his body slightly sideways, because the spontaneous reaction corresponds to no common understanding relating to tradition or technique of performance, nor yet to the meaning of the sung text.”
“Hysteria to the point of swooning is definitely harmful,” said a New York psychiatrist. “This is a nervous disease and a harmful thing. Apparently such singing upsets nerves that are already keen.”
“Mass frustrated love without direction,” said a sociologist.
“His voice is an authentic cry of starvation,” said a doctor.
“It’s mammary hyperesthesia,” said another.
“Purely mass psychology built up by his press agent,” said a Brooklyn analyst. “They all work on one another. It’s an emotional situation no different from the Holy Rollers.”
The head of the New York Police Department’s missing persons bureau blamed Frank for the problem of runaway girls and recommended that he be exiled to New Guinea.
The education commissioner of New York City threatened to press charges against him for encouraging truancy, because thousands of girls were skipping school to hear him sing. “We can’t tolerate young people making a public display of losing control of their emotions,” he said.
One member of Congress excoriated him as “the prime instigator of juvenile delinquency in America.”
Frank thrived on the controversy he was creating and laughed when a magazine described his singing as “a kind of musical drug … an opium of emotionalism.” He was not at all amused, though, when his voice was characterized as “worn velveteen,” and he swore at the critic who wrote that “listening to The Voice is like being stroked by a hand covered with cold cream.”
He snapped angrily at reviewers who said that he usually sang a half note or so off-key. “Nuts,” he said. “If they knew music or at least knew enough to realize what I’m doing when I sing, they’d never say it. Those characters just don’t know.”
He scolded the critic who suggested that Tommy Dorsey and his band had made him a star. “Now when I sing, there is nothing to distract from me,” he said. “Thirty-three musicians in the Dorsey band. It was like competing with a three-ring circus. Now I’m up there alone.”
Frank was spending little time at home. Every bit of energy was directed toward his career, and he let nothing get in the way of that ambition.
Still, he also did nothing to protect his voice. On the contrary, he drank and smoked and sometimes did five shows a day. There wasn’t much time for rehearsals, but he squeezed some in. He was constantly working, constantly in motion—whipping himself to glory.
He became so accustomed to the adulation of his young fans that he resented anything less from anyone else. If he read a negative review, he threw it on the floor of his dressing room and started ranting at whoever was standing there.