Chapter 6 - Ethical Culture Fieldston School

“Mr. Sinatra Gets Rejected”
With an army of managers, publicists, and promoters, Sinatra pushed on,
expanding his dominions. A series of nightclub appearances at New York’s
Riobamba Club and the Waldorf‐Astoria in 1943 established his appeal with
older, more serious audiences. His appointment as a host of the weekly radio
show Your Hit Parade made him a household word across the country. Signed to
Metro‐Goldwyn‐Mayer, the most prestigious of the movie studios, he prepared
for his first major musical, Anchors Aweigh, by learning how to dance under the
tutelage of Gene Kelly.
But his core constituency remained the bobby‐soxers. On Columbus Day
of 1944, tens of thousands of them rioted at the Paramount, where Sinatra
returned for a series of performances, and where the refusal of those with seats to
vacate them led to the arrival of the police. By now, all the adulation generated
by “The Voice,” as he was known, had become familiar, alternately amusing and
irritating to those who constantly heard about it. Others, however, were
perplexed, even troubled. In a piece for The New Republic shortly after the
Columbus Day riot, writer Bruce Bliven groped to understand what all the fuss
was about:
My strongest impression was not that Frankie means so much to
the bobby‐socksers, as that everything else means so little. Our
civilization no doubt seems wonderful to the children of half‐
starved, dictator‐ridden Europe; our multiplicity of gadgets is the
envy of the world. And yet, if I read the bobby‐socksers aright, we
have left them with a hunger still unfulfilled: a hunger for heroes,
for ideal things that do not appear, or at least not in sufficient
21 Martha Weinman Lear, “The Bobby Sox Have Wilted, but the Memory Remains Fresh,” The New York
American History for Cynical Beginners
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