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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.
S-day, Dec. 31, 1942, dawned bright. After Frank's first performance, the stage door was congested by some 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. His house in Hasbrouck Heights, N.J. was ringed all day and half the night by gazing girldom. Originally white, its sides were soon smeared with lipstick. Sometimes the girls made human ladders and peered into his bedroom, and when he got a haircut the clippings were claimed. When Sumatra was bombed bobby-soxers panicked.
Worse still, they started to swoon. It began at the Paramount when a teen-aged girl, who had stood all night outside the theater and then sat through seven shows without food, quite naturally passed out in her seat. The tabloids screamlined the story. After that they were dropping in the aisles like flies. At the height of the swoon syndrome, Frankie Boy got around 250,000 letters a year.
He Reached the Body. What was the cause of it all? Nobody is sure. "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 the pigtail platoon that pushed Frank over the top.
The whole world was at war, but there in the headlines was The Voice, The Verce, The Larynx, The Tonsil, The Bony Baritone, The Sultan of Swoon—"none other" (as Jimmy Durante expressed it) "than Moonlight Sinatra." Radio comics gnawed ecstatically on the famous skinnybones. "The pipestem Caruso." "He has to pass a place twice before he casts a shadow." "I know the food here is lousy," cracked Phil Silvers as Frank walked onstage in their Army show, "but this is ridiculous!"