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Whatever Sinatra's secret, he possesses one of the best microphone techniques in the business. It is studiedly informal, effortless, little-boyish. His tone quality is liquid, his delivery easy. He is also young enough and sentimental enough to believe the words he sings.
Banana Splits & Babies. These attributes were vaguely apparent to Band leader Harry James when he hired Sinatra from a New Jersey roadhouse in June 1939. Up to that moment the crooner had passed a rather combative childhood in Hoboken's tenements (his grandparents were Italians, his father a Hoboken fireman), a stretch as a cub sports writer, and some unpaid time on the radio. Tommy Dorsey got him away from James and made him the best-known dance-band voice in the country.
Although Sinatra has made around $100,000 from radio, cinema, personal appearances since leaving Dorsey last October, it has not affected him much. He likes — and is like — the youngsters who idolize him, and he is smart enough to know that if he is lucky they will be his adult public ten years from now, will buy the cereals, cigarets, radios, cars which he hopes to sell.
The impact of his supercolossal success has only slightly disarranged the Sinatra household at Hasbrouck Heights, N.J. His wife suffers it ("I'd have to be very much in love with him to take this kind of thing"), cooks his spaghetti every day, addresses him as "You great big public figure, you!" Sinatra spends most of his free time at home, has his own underground for discovering drugstores which have the now rare banana splits (his principal vice), plans to have seven more children (he has one now). Of his status as America's No. 1 microphone lover, he observes: "It's a kinda exaggerated affair."