Word: sinatras
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...Sinatra would appear onstage, looking, as one contemporary described him, "like a terrified boy of 15 in the presence of his first major opportunity." He would hang for a moment on the microphone, holding it itchily, as if it were a snake. "His face was like a wet rag." His chest caved in, as if from the weight of the enormous zoot shoulders it bore, and a huge, floppy bow tie hung down like the ears of a spaniel. For a moment he would look among his audience, pleadingly, as if searching for his mother, and then he would begin...
...through all these carefully acquired characteristics ran a vital streak of Sinatra. He was the first popular singer to use breathing for dramatic effect. He actually learned to breathe in the middle of a note without breaking it (an old trick of the American Indian singers), and so was able "to tie one phrase to another and sound like I never took a breath." He carried diction to a point of passionate perfection. But what made Sinatra Sinatra, when all came to all, was his naive urgency and belief in what he was saying. As one bandleader...
Scrawny Piper. He believed them, and suddenly large numbers of young girls began to believe Sinatra. They began to make little ecstatic moans when Frankie sang. The boys in the band laughed, and moaned right back, but Frankie took it all in ferocious earnest. He knew his hour had struck, and he asked Dorsey for a release of contract. Tommy refused, but in the end, in return for a fat piece of Frankie's future, let him go, and Frank was booked into the Paramount...
...squealing young things who wanted his autograph. The crowds grew until, after some weeks, traffic in Times Square was stopped cold by the massed oblation of thousands of wriggling female children. Out came the riot squad, up went the headlines: FIVE THOUSAND GIRLS FIGHT TO GET VIEW OF FRANK SINATRA. A scrawny, wistful little piper had come to town, and the younger generation was following him in far greater numbers and enthusiasm than ever it had shown for the Hamelin original-or for Rudolph Valentino himself. Wherever he went, fans mobbed him. Even at home, Sinatra was not safe...
...Frank was the first great bedroom singer of modern times," says a nightclub columnist. "He was the first singer to reach the-er-great body of American women." Frank disagrees. "I don't really think it was sex," he says, and many psychiatrists agree. "Mammary hyperesthesia," muttered one. Sinatra's voice, said another doctor, was in the early days "an authentic cry of starvation." Far from least, there was the late George Evans, Sinatra's pressagent, who more than any man helped to pull Frank up by his bobby-sox. He organized all the excitement into...