Frank: The Voice by James Kaplan Page A

the night, my cloak of blue/Here comes the night, with dreams of you”) and two takes of a new song by Arthur Altman and Jack Lawrence. The number was called “All or Nothing At All.”
    It is impossible to listen to the song today and not think of all it would become: a huge hit, a trademark tune for Sinatra, a cliché so delicious that the animator Tex Avery would put singer and song in an MGM cartoon (in which a skunk dressed as Frankie croons it to a bunch of swooning bunnies).
    It was not a great song. But it was a powerful song of the period, and an exceptional one: rather than just taking a chorus in the middle, as was customary with band vocalists of the era, Sinatra vocalized all the way through, to powerful and passionate effect. He was in great voice, his breath control was superb, and the twenty-three-year-old’s assurance, against the rock-solid background of James’s band, was extraordinary. There were minor gaffes: On both “half a love never appealed to me” and “if your heart never could yield to me,” his dentalization of the
t
in “to” is so extreme as to be laughable—that
t
could have walked straight off the graveyard shift at the Tietjen and Lang shipyards. And for a heart-stopping half second on the final, operatic high F (“all—or nothing at
alllllll
!”), Sinatra’s voice, at the height of passion, slips upward, a half note sharp.
    And yet he had laid down a track for the ages, and on his seventh time out. 1
    Meanwhile, his boss simply couldn’t catch a break. Harry James’s management, the Music Corporation of America, didn’t know what to do with him. Bookings were scattershot. The band’s morale was sinkingfast. Then, while the Music Makers played the Hotel Sherman, James finally got some good news: MCA had landed them a big gig at a big venue, the famed Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles, where Benny Goodman and his band had started the Swing Era overnight with a fabled performance in August 1935. There were smiles on the bandstand at last.
    On October 4, 1939, the Palomar burned to the ground. (Charlie Barnet lost all his orchestrations, barely escaped with his life.) When Harry James’s band bus pulled out of Chicago ten days later, it must have felt a little like the Flying Dutchman.
    Frank Sinatra wasn’t on the bus. Rather, he and his young wife had traveled west in his green Chrysler convertible. As the self-professed greatest vocalist in the business, Sinatra would have appreciated the symbolic value of separateness, not to mention the convenience of having his own wheels. Yet as an already established cocksman, with an already shaky commitment to the institution of marriage (“an institute you can’t disparage,” he would sing, jauntily, in 1955—at a moment when his second marriage had collapsed irreparably and he was entering his longest period of bachelorhood), he had to have felt ambivalent, at the very least, about taking the little woman along on the road.
    But there is every likelihood that the dignified and self-assured Nancy Sinatra simply demanded it. She had seen the girls clustering around the microphone. And there was something else: in October 1939, she was just a little bit pregnant.

    The band’s spirits had nowhere to go but up. And morale soared when, after the Palomar fire, MCA snagged the Music Makers an alternate engagement, at a Beverly Hills dining and dancing establishment called Victor Hugo’s, run by a character named Hugo Aleidas. Unfortunately, the restaurant turned out to be a small stuffy joint, with canaries in gilt cages decorating the room: the kind of place where dulcet society bands like Guy Lombardo’s fit in just fine. Harry’s band didn’tjust play hot and sweet, they played
loud
. At first the management tried erecting a canopy over the bandstand to muffle the sound. When that proved insufficient, the horn players were asked to stuff cloth napkins into the bells of their instruments. By the end of the week, customers were