Frank: The Voice by James Kaplan Page B

voting with their feet—James, Sinatra, and company were playing to half-full houses. Finally, even Sinatra’s ballads were to no avail: one night, while he was in the middle of “All or Nothing At All,” no less, Aleidas ran out onto the dance floor, waving his arms and shouting, “Stop! No more! Enough!” To add insult to injury, and to underline Harry James’s perfectly bad business luck, the owner refused to pay the band.
    Things were so bad that the Music Makers had to bunk together, wherever they could hang their hats. Frank and Nancy shared a two-bedroom apartment in Hollywood with the diminutive drummer Mickey Scrima. The whole band came over for meals. Nancy cooked spaghetti and franks and beans for the musicians, including Harry. It was a desperate period; strikingly, though, both Nancy and Frank would also later remember it as one of the happiest times of their life together.
    And, seen through the lens of nostalgia, it was. Everything was simple, because they had nothing. The road lay ahead of them—beckoning, shining.
    But in that moment of loving his wife and the baby inside her, Sinatra felt a growing desperation. He had the goods and he knew it, and here he was eating franks and beans with Harry James, who weighed what he did but was six inches taller. He had learned a lot from Harry James—he loved Harry James. But he knew he needed to get out.
    He dreamed of singing with Benny Goodman or Count Basie, the way Billie had, or even Tommy Dorsey, who ran the Rolls-Royce of bands and really knew how to feature singers.
    In the meantime, the road was no place for a young wife—especially if the wife was pregnant and the band was broke. Frankie sold the Chrysler and, amid many tears, put Nancy on a train back east.Every penny they had after buying her ticket was in her purse. As the Super Chief pulled out of Union Station, she pointed at him, crying: he’d better be good.
    He nodded, crying too. He would try, for her and the baby. In his fashion.
    The Music Makers were limping home. MCA managed to get them a week at a Los Angeles movie house and another week at the Golden Gate Theatre in San Francisco, but then came the interminable drive over the Rockies and the Great Plains, the one-nighters in Denver and Des Moines and Dubuque. They lived on hot dogs and Cokes and candy bars, flirted halfheartedly with the local girls as they headed toward their next stand: a week at the Chicago Theatre, and a Christmas benefit thrown by the mayor of the Windy City, Boss Edward J. Kelly. Riding, riding through the night. As the rest of the band played cards and laughed or told dirty jokes or slept and snored, Sinatra sat by himself in the back of the bus, his jacket folded over his eyes, with one thought in mind, over the Rockies, across the Great Plains, across the unendingly huge country that did not yet lie at his feet but would: on the bill at the Chicago Theatre would be Tommy Dorsey.

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    Summit. Frank, Buddy Rich, Tommy Dorsey, circa 1941. (photo credit 7.1)
    H e was one tough son of a bitch, the second son of a horn-playing family from the coal-mining hills of eastern Pennsylvania, one of the starkest places on earth. His father, Tom Dorsey Sr., was self-taught on cornet and four other instruments, and an even tougher son of a bitch than his sons. Pop Dorsey had used his musical skills to escape the mines, had dragged himself up by his bootstraps from the worst job in the world, and was damned if his sons would have to godown in those black pits. So he pushed them, bullied them really, to learn their instruments: Jimmy, the saxophone, and Tom junior, the trombone. And they learned well, both boys, they were brilliant musicians like their dad, but like their dad they also had the devil in them, a taste for alcohol and a deep black anger, as black as the coal in the mines, as old as Ireland, as explosive as TNT. They got into fistfights with anyone they had to, and many they didn’t have to, and they fought each