There is no credible evidence that Frank was a communist or in any way disloyal. FBI investigators, raking over every detail of his record years later, said as much. In 1946, following right-wing insinuations arising from a HICCASP event to aid war veterans, he reacted with characteristic exasperation. “The Committee was urging passage of legislation to provide houses for veterans,” he exploded. “If that was subversive activity, I’m all for it!” Frank was a political greenhorn, who did not understand how apparent allies might seek to exploit his famous name or enemies seek to smear it. The fact that he had chatted with President Roosevelt, and had found himself on a first-name basis with Attorney General Tom Clark, may have gone to his head. Frank was now devoting so much time to speechmaking and entertaining in aid of liberal causes that his income dipped significantly. There he was on national radio, not singing but sounding off on veterans’ rights and the Big Four conference in Paris and quoting Thomas Paine.
His closest advisers urged him on. “George Evans and I encouraged this newly developed social conscience,” said Jack Keller, “for we could see that it would certainly set Frank aside as ‘a citizen of the community’ as well as being a star.” Evans, who was close to Dr. Weinstein, according to the FBI, saw to it that Frank’s thoughts on making a “better world” were distributed to young people. He had also introduced Frank to sixty-two-year-old Jo Davidson, a fellow Roosevelt supporter and an acclaimed sculptor.
Davidson had been chairman of ICCASP since its founding. Frank held him in high esteem and heeded his counsel on political matters. Davidson thought Frank looked like “a younger Lincoln,” and was soon at work on a bust of his new friend. He and Frank were spotted sitting in on a session of the fledgling United Nations, listening to Soviet delegate Andrei Gromyko.
To the right, the Davidson connection was further evidence of what one columnist called Frank’s “veering to portside.” The sculptor, whose parents were Russian, had in his youth been close to Emma Goldman, a prominent anarchist deported from the United States as a “dangerous radical.” He would soon be described in Life as one of a number of “dupes and fellow travelers” who “dress up communist fronts.”
PM magazine, which served as a platform for Frank’s ideas before and after the 1944 election, was the organ of the Popular Front in New York. It was unmistakably left-wing, included card-carrying communists on its staff, and was viewed by some as a vehicle for “American communism.”
American communists did indeed try to harness liberal Democratic artists to their purposes. As one observer put it, they were as “earthbound” as the artists were “ethereal.” One of the first liberals to realize he and his friends were being manipulated, the screenwriter Philip Dunne, said he and many of his fellows had been “innocents.” “We were mostly virgin voices in things political,” Jo Davidson said later.
Frank’s activist friends also included Orson Welles, under the baleful eye of the FBI since his iconoclastic film Citizen Kane, and Gene Kelly, another leading member of HICCASP. Other liberals in his circle or coming into it were Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Gregory Peck, Judy Garland, and Ava Gardner. To whatever degree these friends were political innocents, there could be no casual commitment to left-wing causes once the Un-American Activities Committee turned its guns on Hollywood.
In January 1946, the prominent evangelist and racist Gerald Smith called on the committee to investigate Frank. Sinatra, he said, was involved with American Youth for Democracy, “certainly” being used by the Communist Party, and “not a naive dupe.” Frank responded bullishly. “If that means agreeing with Jefferson and Tom Paine, [Wendell] Willkie and Franklin Roosevelt, then I’ll gladly accept the title,” he said. “Let’s not just ignore Smith. . . . Let’s do what most people do with crackpots—get rid of them.”
Frank’s aides became more cautious. Months later, when American Youth for Democracy asked Frank to contribute an article on race problems, his staff pressed for more information about the organization. Frank’s “political beliefs,” an aide emphasized to the caller, “don’t run towards Communism.” Yet Frank himself did not readily cave in. “The minute anyone tries to help the little guy, he’s called a Communist,” he grumbled when a Catholic lay organization assailed him for speaking at a left-wing rally. In early 1947 he published an open letter to Henry Wallace just after the former vice president had called for a softer line toward the Soviet Union.
“Divisionist tactics,” Frank wrote, “have been able to invade the minds of people who think of themselves as liberal. . . . It was pretty easy to march with the liberals and the progressives in the years of Roosevelt. We knew he wouldn’t let us go wrong. Until another leader we can trust, as we trusted him, takes up the fight we like to think of as ours— the fight for tolerance, which is the basis of any fight for peace—it’s going to be tough to be a liberal.”
Two months later, again raking up Frank’s relations with American Youth for Democracy, then congressman Karl Mundt of the Un-American Activities Committee accused him of conduct “inimical to the best interests of America.” Soon, it was reported, Frank was going to be subpoenaed to testify in Washington. He never was, although he was one of the celebrities who formed the Committee for the First Amendment to oppose the Un-American Committee’s excesses.
In fall 1947 Frank and others met at the home of lyricist Ira Gershwin to plan protests against the Un-American Activities Committee. Those present included Bogart and Bacall, Rita Hayworth, Groucho Marx, and Gene Kelly—an FBI informant jotted down their license plate numbers as they arrived.
“Once they get the movies throttled,” Frank said in a statement, “how long will it be before the Committee goes to work on freedom of the air? How long will it be before we’re told what we can and cannot say into a microphone? If you make a pitch on a nationwide network for a square deal for the underdog, will they call you a Commie? . . . Are they gonna scare us into silence? I wonder.”
As the right kept up the pressure, many Hollywood liberals backed away from politics, fearing for their careers. Frank began to steer clear of groups that were being labeled communist fronts, ended his noisy protests, and eventually went out of his way to demonstrate his opposition to communism. In 1948 it was announced that he and other prominent Italian-Americans were to record a broadcast appeal to voters in Italy not to vote communist in the forthcoming elections. He responded furiously to continuing innuendo about his left-wing sympathies. “If they don’t cut it out,” he bridled, “I’ll show them how much an American can fight back—even if it’s against the state—if that American happens to be right. I’m right, not Left.”
In 1950, shortly before the Un-American Activities Committee began a fresh assault on Hollywood, according to the FBI, Frank sent an emissary to bureau headquarters:
to arrange an appointment to see the Director to offer his services. [EMISSARY’S NAME DELETED] pointed out that Sinatra had first been desirous of offering his services to the CIA, but that he had told Sinatra that the CIA was not the proper organization to approach . . . a friend of his in CIA told him that he should take the matter up with the Bureau . . . Sinatra was sensitive about the allegations that have been made concerning his subversive activities . . . denies any subversive affiliations or interests, but feels that in view of the publicity which he has received, these subversive elements are not sure of his position, and accordingly Sinatra feels that he could be of assistance to the Bureau.
“We want nothing to do with him,” J. Edgar Hoover scribbled on the report.
Lingering doubt about Frank’s loyalty repeatedly led the U.S. Army to reject him as an entertainer of troops, on the last occasion in 1954 in the aftermath of the war in Korea. According to an army report, General Alfred Kastner told Frank that a “serious question existed” as to his “sympathies with respect to communism, communists and fellow travelers.” Frank said he “hated and despised” everything about communism. He was, he insisted, “as communistic as the Pope.”
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sp; In early 1955, nevertheless, the FBI began a year-long probe into his background that involved nine FBI offices and numerous informants. It was triggered by a request from the State Department, which was querying Frank’s most recent application for a passport. The government was at the time refusing passports not only to communists but to anyone whose activity abroad might in its view aid communism or, casting an even wider net, be “contrary to the best interests of the United States.” Frank had said under oath that he had never been either a Party member or a member of a communist front organization. Given his background, the State Department wanted to know, had he made a false statement? If so, were there grounds to prosecute? Hoover eventually reported that the only black mark against Frank was that he had been vice chairman of HICCASP. The group had been designated a communist front only by the California Un-American Activities Committee, not by the federal government, and the authorities let the matter drop.
Years later, Frank would still be fulminating about the official pressure that had been brought to bear. In 1966 he dispatched an intermediary to Washington to “determine the identity of the ‘S.O.B.’ ” who years earlier had tagged him a “commie” and led the army to turn him down as an entertainer. Phil Silvers’s then-wife, Jo-Carroll Dennison, who often talked politics with Frank in the postwar years, said, “Many of the friends that I had, and have, were literally members of the Communist Party, dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism. But I’m confident that Frank was not like that. He was in my opinion an absolutely true liberal in the best sense of the word. He believed in civil rights, human rights, women’s rights, and put himself on the line in that way.
“Frank was ambitious and driven,” she said, “and I’m sure he was terrified, crumbling in his stomach, to think his career was in danger during the Un-American Activities Committee business. But I don’t think he backed down. Frank was very brave.”
“My first recollection of your father was during the time of Roosevelt,” former Vice President Hubert Humphrey was to write in a letter to Sinatra’s daughter Nancy. “He is a solid, devoted American liberal in the tradition of Roosevelt and Truman, Kennedy and Johnson. . . . What I recall most about your father is his great concern for the country, and particularly for black Americans who have been so long denied an equal opportunity.”
11
“What Is America?”
FRANK MAY HAVE EXAGGERATED his family’s early poverty, may have allowed publicists to embroider the facts about his youth, but he certainly had seen prejudice. In his childhood, he told a group of young people in 1945, African-American children had been dismissed as “niggers,” Jews as “kikes” and “sheenies.” He had been called “little dago” and showered with rocks by other children.
Frank blamed prejudice not on children but on parents, including his own parents. He remembered his mother pestering him about the ethnic origin of boyhood friends, his father “hating” people of different ethnic origins who might take his job away. The Ku Klux Klan had a significant membership in New Jersey during Frank’s youth, and its enmity was applied widely.
At seventeen, when Frank spent a year fending for himself in New York, he had tried to get a job as a messenger on Wall Street. “One of the questions that was on almost every form I had to fill out,” he remembered, “read ‘religion?’ It meant that whether you got a job or not—a matter of life or death with people such as I came from— depended largely on your religion.”
Hanging out on 52nd Street, he had seen for himself how deeply racial prejudice was ingrained. At the end of the 1930s, there were still few places outside Harlem where a black band could play in New York. Even when invisible to the audience, on the radio, black musicians could not play with white bands.
Conditions for entertainers reflected those in society at large, as Frank discovered when he traveled around the country. World War II changed little, though black resentment grew. Blacks were allowed to perform in some first-class hotels, but not stay there as guests. The police in Washington, D.C., would tolerate black after-hours clubs, but raided or closed them down if white women were seen entering. After complaints from white guests at a New York hotel, Billie Holiday was ordered to use the service elevator rather than the main one. Duke Ellington could record with Rosemary Clooney, but the record cover could not include a photograph of them together.
Frank detested such rules. To him, Ellington and Holiday were just two of many African-Americans he admired as colleagues and treated as friends. A 1943 photograph shows him not just sitting and laughing with the black pianist and singer Hazel Scott but, shockingly for the day, holding hands with her. Scott was not only black but an active civil rights campaigner who supported communists.
Frank reacted viscerally on encountering blatant prejudice. “When I was a kid and somebody called me a ‘dirty little Guinea,’ ” he recalled, “there was only one thing to do—break his head. . . . Let anybody yell wop or Jew or nigger around us, we taught him not to do it again.” So it was, on numerous occasions, when he became an adult. When he was with the Dorsey band, he knocked a newspaperman out cold at a party for calling another guest a “Jew bastard.” Then he had a drink and hit him again as he was being carried out.
Orson Welles witnessed a similar incident. “Sinatra went into a diner for a cup of coffee with some friends of his who were musicians,” he recalled, “one of whom happened to be a Negro. The man behind the counter insultingly refused to serve this Negro, and Sinatra knocked him over on his back with a single blow.”
On racial matters, however, it dawned on Frank that “you’ve got to do it through education.” He began subtly—though it was noticed soon enough—in his performance of the Jerome Kern classic “Ol’ Man River.” When Paul Robeson had sung it, in 1927, “darkies” all worked on the Mississippi while the white folk played. Frank’s version, from 1943, went: “Here we all work while the white folks play.” He was to sing it that way, with evident passion, time and again.
In 1944, on one of Frank’s visits to the White House, he told President Roosevelt that he intended to start talking to young people “about the need for tolerance and to point out that we mustn’t destroy the principles for which our grandfathers founded this country.” Roosevelt approved the idea, and Frank kept his word within months. In early 1945, encouraged by George Evans, he went to the Bronx to talk with schoolchildren about juvenile delinquency. In March, at Carnegie Hall, he addressed a World Youth Rally.
Frank made thirty speaking appearances that year alone. “The surprising element was that he came to speak on ‘Racial Tolerance’ rather than to sing,” Grayce Kaneda, a former student, recalled of a visit he made to Philadelphia. “Negroes, Irish, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, Jews, Catholics and Protestants, were all there together.”
“The next time you hear anyone say there’s no room in this country for foreigners,” Frank wrote in an article, “tell him everybody in the United States is a foreigner. . . . It would be a fine thing if people chose their associates by the color of their skin! Brothers wouldn’t be talking to brothers, and in some families the father and mother wouldn’t even talk to each other. Imagine a guy with dark hair like me not talking to blondes. The more you think about all this, the more you realize how important Abraham Lincoln was talking when he said: ‘Our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.’ Get that!”
Though his homilies seem trite today, they were well received. Film director Mervyn LeRoy told Frank, “You could reach a thousand times more people if you’d tell your story on the screen.” The pair found an ally in an RKO vice president and got the go-ahead to make a short movie aimed at youngsters likely to be affected by bigotry—and perhaps prepared to listen to advice from a pop singer. The result was a fifteenminute movie made in just two days, The House I Live In.
The film was built around a song that had previously been featured only by a black gospel group and seemed desti
ned for obscurity. Its first three verses:
What is America to me? A name, a map, or a flag I see, A certain word, democracy What is America to me?
The house I live in A plot of earth, a street The grocer and the butcher Or the people that I meet. The children in the playground, The faces that I see All races and religions That’s America to me.
Frank made the song powerful populist propaganda. In the movie he played himself, a crooner who emerges from a studio to find a gang of boys abusing a young Jew. “Look, fellas,” he admonished them, “religion doesn’t make any difference! Except maybe to a Nazi or a dope. . . . God didn’t create one people better than another. Your blood is the same as mine, and mine is the same as his. You know what this country is? It’s made up of a hundred different kinds of people—and they’re all Americans. . . . Let’s use our good American brains and not fight each other.”
The movie ends with the boys dispersing, tempers calmed, and humming quietly. It was good melting pot stuff and generally well received, as was the news that the proceeds were to go to charity and that Frank had taken no salary. A usually acid columnist, Harriet Van Horne, declared him “a sincere, hard-working young man with a deep sense of his brother’s wrong and a social conscience that hasn’t been atrophied by money or fame.”
“The House I Live In” won Frank and his colleagues on the movie a special Oscar, his first Academy Award and one of which he was especially proud, and he returned to the song time and again over the years. Most recently, in 2001, it was pressed back into service following the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Bill Cosby had the lights dimmed a few minutes into one of his shows as the voice of Frank, three years dead, filled the auditorium. Cosby felt the song could help heal America’s national trauma. (Others, though, turned the song into a jingoistic anthem.)
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