Sinatra

by Anthony Summers

  the patient stated that he was “neurotic, afraid to be in crowds, afraid to go in elevator, makes him feel he wants to run when surrounded by people. He has somatic ideas and headaches and has been very nervous for four or five years. Wakens tired in the A.M., is run down and undernourished.” The examining psychiatrist concluded that this selectee suffered from psychoneurosis and was not acceptable material from the psychiatric viewpoint.

  The diagnosis, of “psychoneurosis, severe,” was not added to the list. Notation of “emotional instability” was made instead. It was felt that this would avoid undue unpleasantness for both the selectee and the induction service.

  Weintrob’s widow, Beverly, recalled that her husband had thought Frank “not physically able.” Her knowledge was not contemporaneous, since she did not marry the doctor until much later. She remembered, though, that Sinatra had social contact with Weintrob after the war, and saw to it that he had tickets for his concert appearances.

  A Sinatra friend, Maxwell House coffee heir Robert Neal, said their intimate times together led him to conclude that Frank “should have gone on in. He had something with the eardrum and he used it. He just used that, to escape. . . . He did not serve, and I think he was sorry he didn’t.”

  IN THE MIDST of the furor about his draft status, Frank told journalists that he was just like any other young American. That had long since ceased to be true, especially given the way that, unusual for an entertainer in those days, he was now a figure on the political landscape.

  He had been “indoctrinated” in Democratic politics, as he put it, when his mother took him to election parades as a small boy. In the wake of his first triumph at the Paramount, she had gotten him to sing at an election rally in New Jersey. As the war ended, he said in an interview that he was preparing himself for “some kind of public service.” Meanwhile, the boy who had flunked out of school had started devouring serious books.

  Frank had begun reading into the night while singing with Dorsey, the start of a lifelong habit. “He always had these big books, the sort of books he thought he should read,” said the singer Peggy Connelly, who was one of his lovers in the 1950s. On planes and in rare moments of peace on transcontinental trains, he steeped himself in modern American literature. Asked in a wartime interview which books had most influenced him he mentioned: One God, by Florence Mary Fitch— “You’d never raise your hand or your voice against another man’s religion after you read that”; History of Bigotry in the United States, by Gustavus Myers—“a great book”; An American Dilemma, by Gunnar Myrdal—“I read that one twice”; and Freedom Road, by Howard Fast— “sensational . . . everybody in the United States should read that one.”

  A postwar interviewer would notice in Frank’s Hollywood dressing room—alongside Webster’s Dictionary—Franz Werfel’s The Forty Days of Musa Dagh and Margaret Deland’s The Way to Peace. He read deeply in literature about racism, religious prejudice, and oppression. There was also The Roosevelt I Knew, by former Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins. The president’s attitude toward Italy had alienated some older Italian-Americans, including Dolly Sinatra, in the 1930s. By 1944, to his mother’s irritation, FDR’s principled social policies inspired in Frank a devotion that, one observer thought, “almost amounted to worship.”

  He made gestures large and small, appearing at a huge war bond auction on Roosevelt’s birthday, naming his son after the president, keeping two color photographs of him in his bedroom, letting it be known that he had voted as a Democrat in 1940. The very political George Evans encouraged Frank to involve himself directly in Roosevelt’s 1944 reelection campaign, and Frank plunged in with enthusiasm. He offered his services to Democratic Party headquarters and to organized labor’s Political Action Committee and, in the fall, asked an acquaintance to deliver a personal note to Roosevelt.

  My dear Mr. President,

  Are those guys [the Republicans] kidding? We’re winning the war.

  Frank Sinatra

  Days later, Frank received a last-minute invitation to an afternoon reception at the White House. He was one of many guests, but a pack of reporters was waiting for him when he emerged at the East Gate. “He kidded me about the art of how to make girls faint,” he said then of his meeting with the president. The president had joshed with him, Frank recalled. “When I neared him in the line he cried ‘Look who’s here!,’ and when we shook hands he laughed in his unforgettable way and whispered: ‘How about telling me what’s first on the Hit Parade this week. I won’t tell.’ ” In private, though, Roosevelt seemed puzzled about the Sinatra craze. “Imagine this guy making them swoon,” he murmured to an aide. “He would never have made them swoon in our day, right?” Yet the president reportedly received Frank on at least one other occasion.

  Following the first White House visit, Republicans and conservative columnists derided FDR for meeting a mere crooner. In response, at one of his concerts, Frank sang a parody of the song “Everything Happens to Me”:

  They asked me down to Washington To have a cup of tea: The Republicans started squawking They’re mad as they can be! And all I did was say hello To a man called Franklin D. Everything happens to me!

  Frank and Nancy contributed $7,500 ($75,000 today) to the Democratic campaign fund. One afternoon in New York, just by turning up outside the Waldorf as Roosevelt’s opponent, Thomas Dewey, was speaking, Frank drew most of the crowd off along Park Avenue in his wake. Young people began sporting buttons reading: “Frankie’s for FDR and so are we.” “Roosevelt in 1944,” a Democratic flyer solemnly quoted Frank as saying, “will make Young America’s dream a reality.”

  Show business people across the country were becoming involved in politics as never before. The studio bosses made news with huge contributions. Humphrey Bogart, Danny Kaye, Charles Boyer, and Bette Davis were part of a Hollywood Is for Roosevelt committee. Edward G. Robinson chaired a union meeting. Rita Hayworth campaigned on the radio and her husband, Orson Welles, who was close to the president, traveled the country making speeches. It was Sinatra’s star, though, that shone most brightly for the Democrats.

  Frank made broadcasts supporting the president, and spoke at a Carnegie Hall meeting during the month of his tumultuous return to the Paramount. On October 29, a week before the election, he appeared at Madison Square Garden with FDR’s running mate, Harry Truman, cabinet members, and the mayor of New York. He managed a moving little speech.

  “I said I was for Roosevelt,” he recalled, “because he was good for me. He was good for me, and for my kids and my country, so he must be good for all the other ordinary guys and their kids. When I got through I felt like a football player coming off the field—weak and dizzy and excited, and everybody coming over to shake hands or pat me on the back. I’m not ashamed to say it—I felt proud.”

  In the last days of the campaign Frank stopped working at the Paramount and appeared at two or three political events a day. According to his agent he also made several broadcasts in Italian, evidently prepared for him, since he was not fluent in the language. On election eve he was at the Astor Hotel addressing three thousand Democrats at a Broadway for Roosevelt rally. The following night he spent drinking with Orson Welles at Toots Shor’s restaurant on West 52nd Street, waiting for the returns to come in. Welles and Shor celebrated Roosevelt’s victory by hoisting the featherweight Frank in the air.

  Such was the elation of those days, and Frank’s sense that he had made a major contribution, that he imagined a future for himself in a very different sort of spotlight. “When I go someplace to talk,” he told the magazine PM in the spring of 1945, “I’m Frank Sinatra citizen, not entertainer. . . . I guess I’ll retire from show business some day. But when I do, I won’t be sitting under any trees. I want to go into some kind of public service work. . . . If some wardheeler that didn’t mean the community any good was running for an office, and I couldn’t beat him any other way, then I’d run for an office. Sure.”

  Frank was not able to attend Roosevelt’s i
nauguration. He and George Evans set off by plane from California only to be thwarted by airline delays. Three months later, he was one of millions stunned by the news that FDR was dead, felled by a cerebral hemorrhage. Frank was working at Columbia Records when he heard, and wept. Then, with a little group of bobbysoxers at his heels, he went to St. Patrick’s Cathedral to light a candle. He would later travel to Roosevelt’s home at Hyde Park, New York, to attend a memorial service.

  There were those, of course, who did not grieve over Roosevelt’s passing. His opponents had seen the president’s economic and social reforms as betrayal, his talk of helping the “third of the nation, ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished” as communism thinly veiled. They loathed some of his key supporters, including Frank.

  “Poverty,” Frank said in his PM interview, “that’s the biggest thorn. It comes down to what Henry Wallace said, to what he meant when he said every kid, every kid in the world, should have his quart of milk a day.” Frank admired Wallace, FDR’s vice president during his third administration, who advocated advancement for women and blacks and increased public housing, favored closer relations with the Soviet Union, and doubted its commitment to world revolution. To the right, though, Wallace was a communist.

  The Political Action Committee that Frank joined during the campaign was part of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Its registration drive, under the slogan “Every worker a voter,” was given much of the credit for the large turnout that resulted in the Democrats’ election victory. Many Republicans regarded PAC and its Lithuanian-born leader, Sidney Hillman, as red. A limerick submitted to one anti-Roosevelt newspaper included:

  Political pots have a lid,

  Beneath which the cooking is hid.

  But it’s easy to tell

  From the Bolshevik smell

  Which stew was concocted by Sid.

  In the weeks before the election Frank had become a member of the Independent Voters Committee of the Arts and Sciences for Roosevelt, which later became the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions (ICCASP). “We should keep an eye on this outfit,” FBI director J. Edgar Hoover scrawled on a press clipping about the group, “as the names of some of its members indicate they range from legitimate liberals to fellow travelers and Commies.”

  Political affiliations aside, Frank was behaving without restraint, as though he could do as he wished with impunity. On election night, while drinking with Orson Welles, he had reportedly declared that he wanted to “beat up” the powerful anti-Roosevelt columnist Westbrook Pegler. Pegler, like Sinatra and Welles, was staying at the Waldorf. One source had it that Frank tried and failed to find Pegler, then trashed Pegler’s room instead. Pegler denied that, but said Frank had been “shrieking drunk” and had to be subdued by a policeman. One of the columnist’s staff said his boss had needled Frank from inside the room, calling out: “Are you that little Italian boy from Hoboken who sings on the radio?” Frank had then gone back to his own suite, smashed up the furniture, and threw a chair out the window.

  Welles said there had been no incident of any kind. Frank admitted having “had a few drinks” and having gone to Pegler’s room, but said he departed peacefully on finding he was out. A few nights later, ignoring a warning by Hank Sanicola that Pegler was “too powerful to mess around with,” he contrived to keep the columnist out of his show at the Waldorf’s Wedgwood Room. Pegler’s version of the election night saga had it that Frank had spent time at PAC headquarters, which, he wrote, “were the Communist headquarters too.”

  Frank had shrugged off warnings that getting involved in politics could damage his career. “The way I saw it,” he said, “if you live in a country—if you’re a father and you’ve got kids—if you love your country . . . If I want to have my say as a citizen, and doing it is going to hurt me in show business, then, I said, ‘To hell with it!’ ”

  Having his say, along with the way he conducted his personal life, was soon to make Frank dangerous enemies.

  10

  Citizen of the Community

  FRANK’S MIGRATION to Hollywood had been a move not only to glitz and glamour but to a political hornet’s nest. There was an unmistakable buzz rising from the studios and many of the grand homes in the surrounding hills, the buzz of liberal and left-of-liberal zeal. “All phases of radical and communistic activities,” a congressional investigator had declared in 1938, “are rampant among the studios of Hollywood.” By 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee was beginning its inquisition in earnest, and taking aim at Hollywood.

  The committee and the FBI were the right’s effective fist. Hoover smelled in Hollywood “the dank air of Communism.” Other foes of the left in the world of movies ranged from conservative stars and directors to nervous studio bosses to interfering crackpots. Not yet thirty, outspoken, self-consciously working-class yet fabulously rich, an idol of youth constantly in the public eye, Frank was a prime target. Since the mid-1930s, when Moscow exhorted communists in the West to work with liberals to form a “popular front” against Hitler and fascism, and during the war when America and the Soviet Union were allies, the Communist Party had seemed acceptable to many on the American left. Energetic and committed, Hollywood’s couple of hundred card-carrying members exerted an influence disproportionate to their number.

  American communists had supported Roosevelt, presenting themselves, as the journalist Ronald Brownstein has written, for all the world “something like very left-wing Democrats.” With the war over, though, and the Soviets trying to foment subversion in the United States and steal military secrets, the right was ready to pounce.

  Frank’s political philosophy was simple, naive even. Roosevelt had spoken up for “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid,” a concept with which Frank identified. “The thing I like about the President,” he had said, “he’s pretty fond of the little man. Well, I’m one, even with all my good fortune.” Frank repeatedly declared himself “a little guy from Hoboken,” one of the “ordinary guys. . . .” “I am not a heavy thinker . . .” “not the kind of guy who does a lot of brain work about why or how I happened to get into something. I get an idea— maybe I get sore about something. And when I get sore enough, I do something about it.”

  In 1945 and 1946, in between some thirty recording sessions that produced, most memorably, “These Foolish Things,” “All of Me,” and “Put Your Dreams Away,” Frank loudly supported causes that were suspect in the eyes of the right. He was a sponsor of a concert in aid of the Committee for Yugoslav Relief, soon to be on the attorney general’s list of subversive organizations. He made a large contribution to a Croatian committee deemed by the FBI to be a “communist front” group. His name was linked to anti-Franco groups, the Action Committee to Free Spain Now and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

  Delegates to the World Youth Conference in London had said Frank helped pay their expenses, and he had contacts with American Youth for Democracy. Both these groups were also labeled as red by conservatives. When the American Federation of Radio Artists elected him to its board, an informant told the FBI he was “a follower of the left-wing faction” of the association.

  In February 1946, Frank was elected vice chairman of ICCASP, and soon after to the same office with HICCASP, the group’s Hollywood affiliate. These were pressure groups with their roots in mainstream Democratic election campaigns, boasting former Interior Secretary Harold Ickes as national chairman, FDR’s son James as director, and Albert Einstein as a member. By that summer, though, HICCASP was in crisis. “The Commies,” one HICCASP member told Time, “are boring in like weevils in a biscuit,” and the group did indeed include Party members. After a stormy meeting at which members traded epithets— “capitalist scum” and “Fascist” countered by cries of “enemy of the proletariat” and “witch-hunter”—some leery liberals resigned. Frank, though, was still vice chairman when, months later, the organization called for “universal disarmament,” the lifting of
secrecy on atomic energy research, and opposed the ending of the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union.

  Of the more than one thousand pages in the FBI dossier on Sinatra, almost a quarter relate to his left-wing connections. In 1944, a year after the bureau began collecting material on him, it received a report quoting Sam Falcone, a prominent union member in upstate New York. Falcone, a member of the Communist Party, had suggested “Sinatra come to Schenectady to be on a fundraising program, inasmuch as Sinatra was an old member of the Young Communist League and would come for the Communist Party at a nominal rate.” Another informant later claimed that Frank “formerly held membership in the American Youth for Democracy organization of New Jersey, but has recently been admitted to the New York branch of the Communist Party.”

  The government intercepted letters from Frank when monitoring mail received by communists and others deemed to be security risks. His name even cropped up during surveillance of a suspect in one of the great postwar Soviet espionage cases. The FBI was following up on the confessions of Elizabeth Bentley, who for six years had been a courier passing information from high-level Washington sources to superiors in the communist underground. She was working for agents of the NKVD, an arm of Soviet intelligence, which code-named her Clever Girl. Bentley told American interrogators of a contact known in the underground as “Charlie,” a “Russian-Jewish” dentist who served as a conduit for “certain material.”

  FBI agents strongly suspected the traitor was Dr. Abraham Weinstein, a New York dentist of Russian extraction. Weinstein denied being a communist, but did admit to having treated American communist functionaries and a Soviet consular official, and to having contributed to American-Soviet organizations. It did not escape the FBI’s notice, meanwhile, that Sinatra—who by 1946 sported a set of very white capped front teeth—was one of Weinstein’s patients. Or that he had arranged for Weinstein and his wife to see his show at the Waldorf-Astoria.