That Old Sweet Song

In CBS's Manhattan playhouse, at the Paramount, at the Lucky Strike Hit Parade, hundreds of little long-haired, round-faced girls in bobby socks sat transfixed. They were worshipers of one Francis Albert Sinatra, crooner extraordinary. Their idol, a gaunt young man (25), looked as if he could stand a square meal and considerable mothering. A composite picture of his idolaters' reactions to his public appearances last week:

As Sinatra intoned Night-And-Day-You-Are-The-One, the juvenile assemblage squealed "Ohhhhhhh!" He aimed his light blue eyes and careless locks at a front row devotee. It was too much; she shrieked:

"Frankie, you're killing me!" An usher gently shook her; she came to for a moment, relapsed into reverie. A girl in the second row held a pair of powerful field glasses glued to her eyes. Another minced to the stage, raised herself on tiptoe and tenderly deposited a white flower at the crooner's feet.

Cocking his head, hunching his shoulders, caressing the microphone, Sinatra slid into She's Funny That Way, purring the words: "I'm not much to look at, nothin' to see." "Oh, Frankie, yes you are!" wailed the audience. The song over, Sinatra started to leave the stage. "Don't go!" whimpered the little girls. He gave them an encore, mooned: "The mate that fate had me created for." Thereupon a delegation of them rose, whinnying: "Here I am, Frankie!" "Frankie, look at me!" The band had to play the Star-Spangled Banner to get him off the stage.

Shades of Valentino. In various manifestations, this sort of thing has been going on all over America the last few months. Not since the days of Rudolph Valentino has American womanhood made such unabashed public love to an entertainer. It started with Frank Sinatra's first solo appearance at the Paramount theater last December, flowered when he moved on to Manhattan's Riobamba club. The press noted his impact on every woman present, recorded the phenomenon loudly and long.

That was what Sinatra's pressagent, George ("I like to keep their wings flapping") Evans, was waiting for. He pulled out all the publicity stops, began to multiply the inevitable fan clubs. There are hundreds of them now -- from Moonlight Sinatra to the Frank Sinatra Fan and Mah-Jong Club, an association of 40 middle-aged women who meet to play their favorite game to the sweet warblings of "Our Boy."

Headaches v. Technique. Incredulous newspapermen, on whom the Sinatra voice has little effect, canvassed his harem to discover what Sinatra did to them. Some of their answers:

"Right now all my insides hurt me and I got a terrible headache -- just from listening to him."

"Once I was sitting on the arm of the seat. He looked at me and I fell right into the seat."

"When I hear Frankie sing, I have to let go. . . . Mother's terribly worried and wants me to see a psychiatrist. I guess I better had."

"My sister saw him twice and she's afraid to go again because she's engaged."

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."

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