Following in His Father’s Footlights
Always, it seemed to him as a boy, there was music. It didn’t hurt that his family was Italian, but it helped even more that his father was an opera singer. And so, particularly on Sunday mornings, young Frank Daniele would be out in the yard of the family house in Anaheim and his father Saverio’s rich baritone would come soaring through the open window.
Frank Daniele is 47 now. He says he closes his eyes and can still hear the sound, just as he remembers the smell of his mother’s pasta cooking on the stove. That would be a nice little story all by itself, even if the grown-up Daniele had stayed in the real estate business.
But he didn’t.
Turns out he couldn’t shake that sound in his head.
Daniele loved his father’s voice, even though Saverio Daniele left his opera career behind when he moved the family, including 6-year-old Frank, from Italy to America. Here in Southern California, Saverio Daniele worked for the federal government. Young Frank never disavowed his father’s music, but wanting “to be an American,” he also gravitated to the Beach Boys and Beatles. Unlike other kids, however, he also knew the names Caruso and Pinza, and in his private moments, he’d put on the music that sprang from his genes.
But he wouldn’t sing. “I’d always dreamed about singing, but I was very, very shy as a young kid,” he says. So he didn’t sing in any kind of public setting -- even the school choir -- and his father didn’t push.
When he was 11, the music around the house lost its voice. Saverio Daniele came down with muscular dystrophy and eventually couldn’t sing. Before the disease took his father’s life in 1980, Frank told him he’d take a shot at a singing career. Frank doesn’t want that to sound like a maudlin pledge, but he knew his father wanted to hear it and he knew it wasn’t phony: His own love for Italian music ran true and deep.
Then, like a lot of people, he sat on the dream. And sat. Until a morning about 12 years ago, when he and his wife, Susan, were talking. “I told her how sick I was of the business. She asked, ‘If you could do anything, what do you really want to do?’ I said, ‘I’d sing.’ She said, ‘Why don’t you do it? I’ll support you.’ ”
I wish I had the space to recount what it takes to make a life’s dream a reality. Suffice it to say that Daniele made good on his promise; the dots since 1992 connect all the way to the Orange County Performing Arts Center, where eight days ago he kicked off a 13-concert tour in support of his CD titled, “Follow Me,” produced by his voice coach, Robin Follman. His next local appearance will be March 27 at the Richard McDonald Gallery & Sculpture Garden in Laguna Beach, where he made his public debut in 1988.
In a way you just know Saverio would approve of, Daniele sings Italian art songs in an operatic style. He hasn’t “made it” in the way he once did in real estate, but he says life would be sweet if he never had to sell another property to make money.
The dream-chasing continues. There are those among us who would swear to the death that is a virtue unto itself. I ask Daniele why he took the plunge.
“It gets to the point in people’s lives where if you don’t do it, when are you going to do it?” he says. “Believe me, it wasn’t easy. I remember sweating bullets just in vocal classes.”
He knows now he’s got the voice; he wonders if the breaks will follow.
“I’m so obsessed with this, you have no idea,” he says. “I practice all the time.”
That suggests something to me -- a circle completed, perhaps. The Danieles have a 10-year-old son, so I ask Frank if he sings around the house, like Saverio used to.
“I sing all the time,” he says, laughing. “It drives my son crazy.”
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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821, at dana.parsons@latimes.com or at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.