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• Frankie had finished a Hit Parade broadcast and was dashing out of the studio when two guys came toward him, a soldier and a sailor. They were smiling kind of tentatively, and he grinned back at them vaguely; and then they came nearer, and he saw their faces. He ran up to them and held out his hand. “Golly,” be said, “It’s swell to see you guys.” They were a couple of buddies from the old days. Two of the kids who used to think he could sing way back when he hardly thought so himself. He remembered their names and their brothers’ names, and when they asked if he’d have his picture taken with them, he coralled the photographers and posed with them for five flash-bulb blinding minutes. |
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A couple of days later when the pictures were developed, he took time out at lunch to scrawl a few sentences on each one and to put them in the mail for the kids. “Why the fuss over those two?” A fellow at his table in the commissary asked him. “Who the heck are they?” Frank looked across the table at him coldly. “They’re my pals,” he said simply. Tell that to the next dope who tries to say that Sinatra’s gone Hollywood. Tell them that, and stick your tongue out at them for us. The Frankie Sinatra who lives in the lovely old house on Toluca Lake, who wears custom-made clothes and drives a long, lean Cadillac, is fundamentally the same little guy who used to sing for free with the Demarest High Band. |
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That’s not saying he hasn’t developed a fondness for caviar and good tweeds which he could never afford before. Or that he hasn’t switched from third balcony seats at the Stanley in Jersey City to loges at Grauman’s Chinese. But in his heart he hasn’t changed, and that—considering the roller coaster ride of the past few years—is really something. The events leading up to said ride have been told so many times you must know them by heart, but like all good legends, Frank’s improves with the telling. His mother, you know, was a nurse, and his dad a fireman (recently made a Captain), and Frank grew up unspectacularly in Hoboken, N. J. A skinny kid who loved a fight and frequently got one. A fiercely loyal, generous little demon who was in and out of more trouble than your own kid brother or that rascal down the street. He outgrew a lot of the devilment, but fortunately not the loyalty or the generosity. The same open-heartedness that made him squander his life-savings at the age of five to get his mom a bottle of five-and-ten perfume for Mother’s Day, is still with him knocking hell out of his bank account. He can’t go by a jewelry store, a toy shop, a florist, without getting something for someone. A musical doll for Nancy Sandra, silver foxes for his mom, a new ring for Nancy, the gal he’s been in love with for nearly ten years. love in bloom... He met her the summer he graduated from Demarest, and cornily enough, it was love at first sight. They were both vacationing at Long Branch, New Jersey—Frank with his mother and father; Nancy with her parents and six sisters. She had on a pink bathing suit, he remembers, the first time he saw her, and her dark hair was down over her shoulders. She looked like a sea nymph or a cover girl. No, better than that. She was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. He wasted no time asking her out, and when she said, “yes,” the angels sang. They were together every day after that, and every evening. They swam, and they danced, and they lay on the beach for hours talking and talking. Frank discovered he could tell her things he wouldn’t have dared tell anybody else. The way he felt inside about the world, his half-baked seventeen-year-old philosophy, this crazy ambition he had to sing. And she listened and cared about what he thought. She listened to him sing, and she thought he was good. By the time he went home that summer, he’d decided that the engineering degree his parents so wanted him to have wasn’t for him. He’d get a job and bide his time, and some day a good band would come along and sign him as vocalist. He worked hard that fall and winter and all the next spring. He covered sports or the Jersey Observer by day, studied shorthand and journalism at Drake Institute by night. There was no time for women, and—more important—no money. So he put Nancy in a dark corner of his mind and tried to forget about her. It didn’t work very well. He thought about her so much, he went around in a fog half the time. Finally, his cousin, Frank Sinatra (known now as Junior) lit into him about it. “What’s with you?” he asked him bluntly one day. “Nothing. What are you talking about?” “That puss. Like a sick cow. C’mon, squirt, what does?” Okay, he asked for it. He got it. There was this babe who lived Jersey City. He’d kidded himself that was just a summer romance, but now he knew. Only she was such a queen. And imagine courting a gal by way of the Jackson Avenue trolley and then not having any dough to take her any place. Junior soothed him instantly. “Take it easy. Take it easy,” he told him. “I’ve got a car, haven’t I? We can take her for a ride, and you can stake her to a coke or something, can’t you?” So Frank and Nancy, and Big Frank and his wife became a foursome. They played poker at the Big Franks’ apartment. Danced in their tiny living room. Ate spaghetti in their kitchen. On the nights Frankie took her out alone, there were long walks, ice cream sodas and an occasional movie. One night they saw a Bing Crosby picture, and on the way home, Frank told Nancy, “That’s for me, honey. I’ll never be happy till I’ve got a singing job.” “Of course. I know you won’t,” she told him quietly. “What are you going to do about it?” Next day he quit his job at the Observer. An audition with Major Bowes was the first step, and when he won First Prize for his “Night and Day,” he thought, “Oh golly, this is it. I’m famous.” Only the tour with the Bowes unit took him thousands of miles from Nancy, and after three months, his loneliness was too big to bear, and he came home. He got auditions with a number of radio stations and was eventually heard on eighteen sustaining shows, getting not a thin dime for any of it, except his seventy cents carfare. He was ashamed that he could never take Nancy any place, but now their love for each other was so deep and strong that a wee thing like poverty didn’t really bother them. Nancy’s family adored him, and he felt warm and relaxed in the big, noisy girl-jammed house. Nancy’s younger sister Tina, was his greatest booster, and he was as fond of her as if she were his own sister. He kept wishing there was something big he could do for her, and eventually there was. One summer, Tina saved enough money to go away to camp, and Frank and Nancy took her over to the train. At the actual moment of departure, all her enthusiasm forsook her, and she looked at them with great tragic eyes. She’d never been away from home before. She’d never wanted to be. Frank knew how she felt, and he knew if he said anything sympathetic, she’d have been lost. He just dug into the pocket of his slacks and came up with sixty-five cents. “Here,” he said quickly, shoving it at her. “Have yourself a time on the train. You know, gum, magazines and stuff.” And then the train was moving, and Tina was waving at them and smiling and throwing a kiss to Frank. She’s never forgotten him for that. Giving all the dough he had in the world to a scared, silly kid. She didn’t know it then, but he was giving her, too, the things he’d learned the hard way-courage and the ability to stand on her own feet. Walking away from the train, Nancy spoke. “What are you going to do for carfare tomorrow?” she asked him gently. “Don’t you worry about it,” he told her brusquely, which was by way of saying “Shut up. Forget it. Pretend you didn’t notice anything.” To this day he’s embarrassed if anyone catches him doing a good deed. He’d have you believe he’s so tough. Such a mug. Oh, Frankie, we know better. His break came at last in the winter of 1938 when he got a job at $25 a week singing at the Rustic Cabin, and on February 4, 1939, he and Nancy were married. There was a family tussle about it, believe it or not. You’d have thought after four long years their families would have seen the handwriting on the wall. But no. Both families threw their hands up in the air. The Sinatras thought Frank was too young, and the Barbatos thought likewise about Nancy. They bowed to the inevitable, of course, and after the first shock, they were very happy about it. Even went so far as to furnish the newlyweds’ three-room apartment in Jersey City. When Frank and Nancy came back from their three-day honeymoon, they were like two kids living in a dream. Mr. and Mrs. Francis X. Sinatra. They’d keep saying that over and over and giggling like fools at the wonderful sound of it. Nancy had a job in a store, and Frank had to be out at the Cabin at dinner time, so there were few evenings together. But there was all of Sunday, and an evening here and there. And what did they want? Egg in their beer? It was enough just to be married, and the magic of it grew and grew until it used to scare them, they were so happy. One night while Frank was doing his stint at the Cabin, a long guy eased into the place and hung around for hours listening to him sing. It was Harry James, and when he offered him a spot with his band, Frank rocked back on his heels. “Who, me?” he said incredulously. “Hell, yes,” boomed James. It was a deal. this dream’s on us... They were out of the woods at last, Frank and Nancy. Paying their light and gas bill on time and putting money in the bank just like regular people. That summer their little girl Nancy Sandra was born, and their cup of happiness ran over. It was only the beginning of good things, though. After James, came Tommy Dorsey, and after Dorsey, Frankie struck out on his own. We all remember the way he sent those kids at the Paramount in the fall of ’42. How he was signed for two weeks and held over for eight, breaking a fifteen-year record at the theater. We remember the shrieks, the swoons, the scrawls on the Paramount wall. “I love you, Frankie,” written a thousand times. And the predictions of the know-nothings that he couldn’t last. That he was another fad like swimming the channel and walkathons and the boyish bob. Nancy knew he wasn’t a fad, but when she’d tell him how good he was, he’d say, “You wouldn’t be prejudiced, chum, would you?” And of course she was a little, so she just shut up and gloated silently over each passing month that found him still Mr. Big with the kids and with an increasingly large number of adults. We remember the way they loved him at the Wedgwood Room, and how he packed the place every night with names like Cole Porter and Ethel Merman. How he took over Boston in one easy chorus of “Pistol Packin’ Mama.” We remember the way they lined up outside the RKO Theater at six o’clock of a bitter December morning to get into his show. Not just the youngsters, either. The Back Bay matrons, no less. The bluebloods who reputedly speak only to God. And then there was Pittsburgh and Chicago and Hollywood, each one falling in turn like Prussian towns under a Red Army tank attack. And the strange and wonderful phenomenon is this. Half the people came to hear him prepared to scoff, and they would go away converted. Like the cops who were detailed to guard his dressing room in Boston. Before he came, they used to gripe continuously among themselves. Who the hell cared if the kids busted the door down and clawed him to death? Not them. Good riddance. But then he came, and they heard him, and heck, he was all right Gentle with the kids who mobbed him, friendly with the stagehands and the press. And gee, he always had a big grin for the Law. they had him wrong... They’d had him wrong. Before Frank left, they were smuggling him in sandwiches and soft drinks so he wouldn’t have to buffet the throng at lunch and dinner time. They were triumphantly bearing home autographed pictures to their kids. When, a week or so after he’d left Boston, they received a letter from him, thanking them and saying that Edgar Hoover couldn’t have taken better care of him, they were completely sold. The servicemen who jammed the Hollywood Canteen the night Frank appeared there came prepared to dislike him. They thought he’d be a patronizing little showoff, and when he turned out to be just a good guy who was willing to sing for them till his voice cracked, they couldn’t believe it. They kept him singing for hours, and finally, when it was very late, they lifted him on their shoulders and paraded him around the Canteen cheering louder than anything in bobby-sox has ever cheered. No one at the Canteen has ever gotten an ovation like that before or since. The even stranger phenomenon is that fame touches him so little. He’s still amazed when newspapers carry pictures of Nancy and him at a premiere instead of people like Crosby or Gene Kelly. He’s still just as wrapped up in his family as when he was not much of anybody. When he’d finally finished “Step Lively,” and his cronies with whom he’d been living (Axel Stordahl, his musical arranger; Hank Sanicola, his manager—whom he’s christened Cordell Hull; Junior, his jack-of-all-trades) wanted him to scoot up to Palm Springs with them for a week or two, he just looked at them as if they were completely out of their heads. “Are you kidding?” he asked them, and began throwing clothes into a suitcase. “You think I want to prolong this—looking at you mugs when I could be looking at that?” He gestured toward a picture of Nancy. “Don’t you know I’m going nuts to see my wife and kids?” “Okay, okay,” Axel said. “Forget we said anything. Confidentially, we can do very well indeed with no Sinatra for a while, too.” Frank paused in his packing, a pair of socks in one hand, a shirt in the other. “What’s wrong with Sinatra?” “He snores,” said Axel. “And wants too damn many windows open. ”He makes too much fuss over those couple of little setting-up exercises he does in the morning. “And he snores,” reiterated Axel. Then they all began singing “Suitcase Packin’ Papa” at the top of their lungs, and laughing so hard at themselves they couldn’t stop. What, no reverence at all in their dealings with The Voice? Well, no. And Frankie would die a thousand deaths if it were otherwise. Finally, when he could get his breath, he flung at them, “New Jersey was never like this, thank God.” Which was where he was wrong. New Jersey, it turned out upon his return, was a bit of bedlam, too. Frank had bought a house in California, and Nancy was in the throes of getting things moved. They’d agreed to take all the furniture from their Hasbrouck Heights home out to the Coast, and the noise and confusion was harrowing. Nancy Sandra and her buddy, Mary Ann, hid in packing boxes and barrels and leaped out at them. Goggle-eyed fans lined the sidewalk. His son, thank fortune, was a silent one, and when Frank wanted to get away from it all, he snuck off to the nursery and communed with the chubby little guy in the sissy bassinet. Nancy hadn’t wanted Frank to see the house completely dismantled. They were sort of sentimental about the place, and if it gave her a queer feeling to see it this way—she knew what it would do to her softie husband. “Stay at a hotel till we’re ready to leave for the Coast,” Nancy advised him. She and Tina, who lives with them and is now Frank’s secretary, and the kids could camp out on packing boxes (beds and the stove, of course, were left for last minute moving). And now, at last, they are settled. The family from whom they bought their house finally moved out, and the redecoration is practically complete. (This was a terrific job, for when they got their old furniture, they realized it wasn’t right, and they had to get all new things.) They’ve even had their house-warming. And that was a party. There were tables and tables of food—sliced turkey, whole hams, enormous bowls of spaghetti. There was a smiling bartender called Joseph to whom Frank introduced you on your arrival, and who actually remembered whether you were drinking Scotch or Pepsis. And best of all were the people who were there. Old friends mostly, like Hank, Axel and George-Frank’s personal press representative and pals one of his closest buddies. With a sprinkle of new ones—the Keenan Wynns, the Gene Kellys, gangs of servicemen Frankie had picked up in his travels that day. They had only asked the people they really wanted. There was no mob of big shots, no frantic attempt to include the right people. When the newspapers got wind of the party and wanted to send over photographers, Frank begged off. “It’s not going to be that sort of party at all,” he told the editors. “Gosh, our pals would think I was an awful ham. Skip it, will you?” They skipped it, scratching their heads. Who ever heard of a movie star passing up a nice hunk of free publicity? The photographers would have ruined its lovely un-Hollywood atmosphere. As it was—except for the abundance of the hospitality—they could have been any young couple entertaining their chums of a Saturday night. Nancy, in a sweet off-the-shoulder cotton dress, showed each new arrival over the place, beaming when they exclaimed over the lovely dubonnet and green living room with its deep couches flanking the fireplace, the gleaming concert grand, the lovely flowered wing chairs by the window. “Do you really like it,” she’d say. “I mean really. I’ve looked at it so much now I can hardly tell what it looks like.” She was thrilled when they rhapsodized over the master bedroom with the enormous bed, the pale blue quilted headboard and spread to match. The soft blue chairs and the chaise lounge. “Who decorated it for you, Nan?” they’d ask her. For in Hollywood when you buy a house someone almost invariably “does” it for you. “Us,” she’d say with that kind of breathless little girl way she has of speaking. “Oh, we had help. I asked people at the stores a million questions. But we chose the actual colors and pieces of furniture. We just couldn’t live in anything that was somebody else’s idea of a house.” Just one room did Frank insist on showing the people himself, and that was his dressing room. He couldn’t wait to let the guests do their own raving. “Isn’t it terrinc?” he’d asked them before he’d even gotten the door open. “How do you like the plaid wall-paper? Look at those built-in drawers. I designed it myself, you know.” “Obviously,” George told him drily. But he had to admit it was darned good-looking. They were both so proud of their house that night that they couldn’t stop grinning, and if anyone noticed a particularly lovely drum table or an especially striking picture, or the flowered draperies, they just about burst on the spot. swinging on a star... The party wound up in the small hours. No one wanted to go home as long as Frank’s pal, the brilliant colored pianist Cal Jackson, could be induced to play one more song. Or while Frankie would give them just one last chorus of “Swinging on a Star.” Or while their own voices held out on “Dinah” and “Casey Jones” and “Workin’ on the Railroad” and the other oldies they all loved. Now with the excitement of decorating the place and warming it behind them, life has settled down a bit. It is new and wonderful to have breakfast together every morning, even though six o’clock does come pretty early, and they aren’t too chatty. It is marvelous, too, to have dinner together most nights, and Nancy Sandra doesn’t know what to do with herself she’s so thrilled to have a “regular father like the other kids.” Frank, Jr. doesn’t say much, but he’s apparently thriving in his new surroundings. At six months, he was wearing little boy suits and weighing, his nurse Miss Hewitt spouted proudly, over twenty pounds. There are still minor crises, of course. Like the cook and maid walking out the day before the party. Like Frank calling one afternoon and saying he was bringing eight of the kids home to dinner—the one day Nancy hadn’t gone to market. pot luck pottage... “But honey,” she protested. “I haven’t anything to feed them. Just a lot of odds and ends and junk.” “Swell,” he told her. “We’ll fix our own supper.” They did, and the kids loved it, but the sight of them gorging on any old left-over aged Nancy twenty years. There was the crisis when he almost didn’t make the Hit Parade. He’d been doing a Command Performance with Bing Crosby one Saturday night, and it finished up at ten minutes to nine, giving Frank exactly ten minutes to get to the studio. He started to dash out, then he turned around and went into Bing’s dressing-room. “Hey, sit down, sit down,” said Bing, who has no idea of time and didn’t realize that Frank was practically on the air. “Can’t tonight, Bing,” Frank said. “But I just had to tell you, it’ll never stop being a thrill and thanks a hell of a lot.” He stuck out his hand, and Bing shook it hard. Then he streaked for his car and made the show by the skin of his teeth. But not before the studio had hounded the life out of poor Nancy about his whereabouts. Oh it’s not all fun, being Mrs. Sinatra, don’t think it is. She’ll sit around waiting for him to get home to dinner till she thinks she’ll go mad, and then he’ll come in and say, “Sorry, sweet. There was a gang of servicemen around the car, and hell, the least I can do is sign a couple of autographs.” Or going over their bank book with Tina, she’ll discover a check is missing and unaccounted for, upsetting the whole balance. She’ll nail him at dinner. “Oh that.” He looks embarrassed about it. “I saw a little squib in the paper that a soldier on a furlough lost his wallet with a hundred bucks in it. I figured maybe he’d want to go home or something, so I sent it to him. He’ll probably think I’m an awful horse’s neck” And what can Nancy ever possibly say to that? Maybe a benefit will come up on their anniversary, and their little binge will be cancelled. Maybe he’ll have to do retakes the week-end they planned to whip off to Palm Springs. But what the heck? Once in a while there’s a free Sunday. What do they want? Egg in their beer? | |