BANDLEADER ARTIE SHAW, master of the clarinet, whose version of “Begin the Beguine” beguiled Americans in the 1940s, was Sinatra’s predecessor as Ava Gardner’s husband. The odd fact intimates a point worth reiterating. When Sinatra arrived on the scene, the bandleader was the most glamorous position in the music world. I think immediately of Shaw, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Dorsey, Harry James, Glenn Miller, Count Basie, Duke Ellington. Let me dwell for a moment on just three of these remarkable fellows.
Start with Harry James of the handsome looks and the two first names. The trumpeter, who earned his stripes on Benny Goodman’s bandstand before setting up shop for himself married the pinup girl with the million-dollar legs whom GIs on both fronts yearned for during World War II. Betty Grable mentions her bandleader husband enthusiastically in How to Marry a Millionaire, an in-joke in the spirit of Lauren Bacall (Mrs. Humphrey Bogart) when she refers in the same movie to “the old guy” in The African Queen. Listen to James’s rendering of “You Made Me Love You.” I think of it as virtually a translation of Judy Garland’s vocal (from her “Dear Mr. Gable” days) into the language of a trumpet solo. The lanky bandleader also appeared as himself in movies.
Then there’s Artie Shaw—that is, Abraham Arthur Arshawsky. Artie Shaw excelled at all he did. He was a legitimate intellectual but also a crack marksman, a skillful fly fisherman, and an ornery cuss who could simply walk away from a triumphant gig, disband his group, go to Mexico, return with “Frenesí,” vow never to play again, quit, and feel nothing but disdain for the public, his fans included. Artie’s amour-propre may help explain his appeal to the ladies. He was married eight times—to Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, and Jerome Kern’s daughter, Betty, among others. On his honeymoon with Gardner, he brought along Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which makes a certain kind of intellectual sense when you think about it, but is not the usual fare of lovers on a spree. Darwin’s great-grandson deemed Ava to be “the highest specimen of the human species.” But Artie thought she was a dummy, and she was desperately in love with Artie. “I don’t think he ever really understood the damage he did,” Ava said about Artie Shaw. When the conversation touched on serious matters, he would tell her she wasn’t entitled to an opinion because she had not read Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann, and Flaubert, not to mention Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Well, as Sammy Cahn observed, if Frank had treated her the way Artie Shaw did, he might have held her.
Some connoisseurs prefer Shaw’s clarinet even to Goodman’s, but bespectacled Benny was the public face of swing from the time of his Carnegie Hall concert in 1938. The Goodman band made exceptional music and featured exceptional personnel (the arranger Fletcher Henderson; the singers Peggy Lee, Martha Tilton, and Helen Ward; the drummer Gene Krupa; et al.) The self-absorbed clarinetist was, in Helen Forrest’s judgment, “by far the most unpleasant person I ever met in music.*” I believe it. After his death, Benny’s musicians started a joke: The good news is, the great bandleader has died. The bad news is, he didn’t suffer. Even so, no one caught the sound, the drive, and the tempo of the era better than the Goodman band playing “Sing, Sing, Sing.”
After Sinatra, the position of bandleader was never again what it had been—a symbol of male glamour on a par with home run–hitting centerfielders, astronauts, and Hollywood stars.