Sinatra

by Anthony Summers

  In the fall of 1945, Frank went to Benjamin Franklin High in Italian Harlem, where there had been fighting between Italian-American and black students. The saxophone player Sonny Rollins, who was one of them, recalled how “Sinatra came down there and sang in our auditorium . . . after that things got better, and the rioting stopped.”

  In Gary, Indiana, white students at Froebel High had rioted and gone on strike over a ruling that black students could study alongside whites, use the same library and cafeteria, and swim in the school pool. Many white parents and local businessmen supported the rioters. Frank, who arrived to give a talk, discovered the white students’ leader had “three secretaries,” and concluded “there must be somebody behind him.” On the podium, undeterred by local dignitaries’ attempts to interrupt, he accused two prominent local white men of having orchestrated the strike. He then pressed on aggressively until someone brought down the curtain. “I kinda gave ’em hell, didn’t I,” he said as he was hustled away, and years later he recalled the event as “in a way the most important show I ever gave.”

  Days later, in Philadelphia, Frank denounced the trouble in Gary as “not spontaneous. It is political. The people behind it are some of the most powerful in the country. It is just staggering.” Had he felt any pressure or repercussions since joining the anti-racist struggle? “No, not yet,” Frank responded. “But I’m just waiting. I expect it any day.” Soon after he made those comments, an FBI informant in Philadelphia alleged he had recently joined the Communist Party. It was just weeks later that Gerald Smith asked the Un-American Activities Committee to investigate him.

  Frank came into contact with communists as he campaigned against race hatred. The composer of “The House I Live In,” Earl Robinson, was a Party member, as was lyricist Abel Meeropol, who was later to adopt the orphaned children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg following the couple’s execution as Soviet spies. So, at the time, was Albert Maltz, who wrote the movie. All three men were to be denied work during the red-baiting years.

  Frank shrugged off the suggestion that he himself “spoke like a Communist.” “You know,” he said, “they called Shirley Temple a Communist. Me and Shirley both, I guess. . . . The struggle against this race hatred is widespread. I’m only one person trying to do my best in a thing I believe to be the most important thing. Put down the fact that I’m a father and I want my children to grow up in a decent world. . . . This is a fight I intend to stick with. I’m in it for life.”

  “FRANK DIDN’T CARE if you were purple or green, blue or black,” the entertainer Sonny King said. “Every black artist had great respect for this man.” Sammy Davis Jr., whom Frank met as a teenager and nurtured from obscurity, said as much to anyone who would listen. He had suffered vile abuse in the army because of his skin color. He had performed at a top-class Las Vegas hotel where he could not stay as a guest or even hail a cab at the entrance; where they drained the pool if a black person had been in the water. “Frank wouldn’t go into the Sands or any other place in Vegas,” said King, “if Sammy wasn’t accepted exactly the same way he was.”

  Frank applied the same standard in all situations and whatever the status of his companions. “The roof blew off,” Frank Jr. recalled, when restaurant staff tried to avoid serving his father’s black valet, “and it was Dad who set off the dynamite.”

  “Billy Eckstine became the first black who ever worked the Copacabana,” Billboard’s Hal Webman remembered, “when Sinatra got sick in 1950 and he picked Eckstine as his replacement. It was over everyone’s dead body, but Sinatra insisted—he had the right to under his contract—and eventually they went along with it.” He insisted, too, that his black arranger, Sy Oliver, got to stay at the same “whites only” hotel as he did. The management of the Court Club in Miami Beach forbade Jo Thompson, a black cabaret singer, to sit with white customers when not performing. When Frank came in, he made a point of inviting her to sit at his table. “I think he did it on purpose,” said Thompson. “He was one of the white people with a different attitude.”

  The musicians’ unions were long segregated in Hollywood, and Frank fought that. “The film and television industries were very racist,” the trombonist Milt Bernhart recalled, “and when Frank had a record date he bent over backwards to try and find black musicians who could play the music.” “He insisted on having an integrated orchestra,” said guitarist Al Viola; the union barrier was broken after Buddy Collette, a black flautist, was hired for Sinatra dates.

  In 1956, when Nat “King” Cole was attacked by racist thugs while on stage in Birmingham, Alabama, Frank phoned from Europe to commiserate. Soon after, in a long article on prejudice for Ebony magazine, he described Cole as “a first-rate citizen, a very classy gentleman who honors his profession wherever he appears. I am proud to count him as a friend.” There was a stir over the fact that Frank would even write for a black magazine. “His public position on race in the Ebony article,” an editorial writer declared in Jet magazine, “was the most significant stand taken by a famous white person since Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt gave support to the cause of racial justice and equality when she wrote an article titled ‘If I Were a Negro’ in Negro Digest in 1943.” Wilberforce University, one of the first such institutions for black Americans, honored Frank with an honorary doctorate, citing his “practice of true democracy.”

  His position, Frank had written in Ebony, was that “an entertainer’s function is to entertain. But he is also a responsible citizen with the same rights and obligations as the next man. . . . I hold certain definite opinions about some of the problems currently dividing our nation and frequently I feel the urge to speak out.”

  He did so through his craft, too. Fourteen years after The House I Live In, he made Kings Go Forth, a 1958 film about the white-black issue between the sexes. Produced on a tight budget—movie executives feared it was too “daring”—the film was forgettable except for what Frank called its “great but simple message,” that “love can conquer anything, including racial and religious differences.” He stood by the precept, controversially, by acting as best man at the marriage of Sammy Davis Jr. and May Britt a few years later.

  Frank joined himself to Martin Luther King Jr.’s crusade in the 1960s, raising huge sums by singing at benefits for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Congress of Racial Equality, and the American Civil Liberties Union. Tears streamed down King’s cheeks once as he listened to Frank singing “Ol’ Man River.” Nancy Sinatra remembered how her father “suffered” on hearing the news that King had been assassinated.

  His commitment was sincere, but he had no time for political correctness. He made racist jokes cheerfully and effectively, on the principle that humor broke the silence about bigotry and ridiculed it. The jokes ranged from the playful to the outrageous.

  “We’ll dedicate the next song to Ben-Gurion,” Frank said of the Israeli prime minister during one performance, “and call it ‘There Will Never Be Another Jew.’ ” Most of the jokes were aimed at Sammy Davis, whom he liked to call “Smokey the Bear,” sometimes even “jungle bunny”: “You’d better wash up ’cos we can’t see you in the dark.” “Here’s a little black boy who will sing for us.” When Davis did his take-off of Frank singing “All the Way,” Frank commented, “He’s just, excuse the expression, a carbon copy.” Davis joked back in kind.

  In 1974, Frank took things to a gratuitous extreme. “The Polacks are deboning the colored people,” he said from a stage in Las Vegas, “and using them for wet suits.” That had the power to shock, even in a time when audiences were becoming blasé.

  There was an outcry from anti-apartheid groups in 1981 when Frank sang at a resort in Bophuthatswana, a so-called black homeland created by the racist regime in South Africa. Many artists, including Shirley Bassey, Liza Minnelli, Johnny Mathis, Ray Charles, Glen Campbell, the Beach Boys, Cher, Dolly Parton, and Neil Sedaka, also performed in South Africa in the early eighties. Jesse Jackson, however, accused Frank of “tradi
ng his birthright for a mess of money.” Yet the contract for the concerts had stipulated that anyone, black or white, could attend. “If there’s any form of segregation,” he said, “I wouldn’t play. Because I play to all people, any color, any creed, drunk, sober, anything.”

  Duke Ellington admired Frank as a “primo non-conformist” and more. “I don’t know of anyone else,” Ellington wrote in his autobiography of Frank’s initiatives in the 1940s, “who would have done anything to jeopardize his position so soon after reaching a peak of success, but Francis Sinatra decided to do what is usually considered dangerous and damaging to a budding career. . . . He’s an individualist. Nobody tells him what to do or say.”

  FRANK HELD SIMILARLY STRONG VIEWS on religious freedom— with a generational emphasis on the struggles of the Jews. In 1942, when the first reports of Nazi atrocities reached the United States, Frank had hundreds of medallions made bearing the image of St. Christopher on one side and the Star of David on the other. They went to servicemen overseas, friends, and associates—even policemen who had acted as bodyguards at concerts. “If the war has any blessings at all,” Louella Parsons wrote after discussing the medals with Frank, “it is the realization that has come to many people of importance that all religions are good and each one has its part in our world, and we must all respect the other fellow’s beliefs.”

  In Hollywood two years later, Frank sang at a benefit for elderly Jews. For years he had worn a mezuzah, an inscribed scroll in a little metal case, that his Jewish neighbor Mrs. Golden had given him as a child. At the Catholic baptism ceremony for his son, he threatened to walk out when the priest tried to block his choice of Manie Sacks, a Jew, as godfather. The priest backed down. On discovering that some golf clubs excluded Jews, Frank became only the second gentile to join a club with an overwhelmingly Jewish membership.

  Where Jews were concerned, his commitment went beyond the fight against religious prejudice. To him, as to many of his contemporaries, establishing a state of Israel seemed a humane response to the horrors of the Holocaust. In September 1947, when the United Nations was moving toward agreement on the establishment of a Jewish state in the Middle East—to the distress and anger of Arabs—he sang at a rally at the Hollywood Bowl attended by twenty thousand supporters of the Zionist cause. The following year, with the U.N. decision made and fighting between Jews and Arabs raging in Palestine, he even did some cloak-and-dagger work for the Jewish underground.

  The Copacabana in New York shared a building with the old Hotel Fourteen, which the Haganah, one of the main military arms of Zion-ism, was using as a headquarters. A key part of the Haganah mission was to get arms to Jewish fighters in Palestine in defiance of an American embargo on sending arms to the Middle East. In March 1948, in the bar at the Copacabana where Haganah operatives mingled with entertainers, Frank was recruited for a secret operation.

  “I had an Irish ship captain sitting in the port of New York with a ship full of munitions destined for Israel,” recalled former Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek, who in 1948 ran clandestine Haganah operations in the United States. “He had phony bills of lading and was to take the shipment outside the three-mile limit and transfer it on to another ship. But a large sum of money had to be handed over, and I didn’t know how to get it to him. If I walked out the door carrying the cash, the Feds would intercept me and wind up confiscating the munitions.

  “I went downstairs to the bar and Sinatra came over, and we were talking. I don’t know what came over me, but I told him what I was doing in the United States and what my dilemma was. And in the early hours of the following morning I walked out the front door of the building with a satchel, and the Feds followed me. Out the back door went Frank Sinatra, carrying a paper bag filled with cash. He went down to the pier, handed it over, and watched the ship sail.”

  According to Kollek, the bag Frank carried contained about $1 million ($7 million today). Two Israeli prime ministers, David Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin, were one day to thank him privately for what he had done. “It was the beginning of the young nation,” Frank told his daughter Nancy. “I wanted to help, I was afraid they might fall down.”

  Frank remained a champion of Israel, though he did make some effort to be evenhanded. He established the Frank Sinatra International Youth Center in Nazareth to help Arab as well as Jewish children. Nevertheless, Arab League countries for years banned Sinatra records and movies.

  Like much else in Frank’s life, his commitment to Israel was impulsive, on occasion irrationally so. While in Tel Aviv in 1965 for the shooting of Cast a Giant Shadow, a movie about a hero of the conflict that accompanied the founding of the Jewish state, he indulged in an extraordinary outburst. Rock Brynner, whose father, Yul, also starred in the film, remembered it vividly.

  “We’re in the hotel. It’s midnight, and we’re drinking,” Brynner said. “Suddenly, after only twenty-four hours in Israel, Frank becomes a Jew. He’s got to ‘get them suckers for the Holocaust deal.’ Who could he blame since Hitler’s not around? He’d once met Alfried Krupp von Bohlen, the armaments heir, who’d been convicted for using slave labor during World War II. So he picks up the phone after midnight and tells the hotel operator: ‘Get me Krupp von Bohlen.’ And she says: ‘Where does he live?’ And Frank turns to me and says ‘Where does von Bohlen live?’ And I said Essen, in Germany, and the operator starts trying to explain—this is 1965—that there’s no connection during the night. No way.

  “But Frank wouldn’t listen, and suddenly the operator is a Nazi collaborator disguised as a Jewish phone operator. He’s hammering the coffee table with the earpiece of the phone saying: ‘I want Krupp von Bohlen in Essen, Germany!’ And I go down and try to tell the operator that Mr. Sinatra isn’t feeling well. And when I get back Frank has this little ring of plastic in his hand, with a bouquet of wires sticking out of it—all that is left of the phone—still shouting: ‘Get me Krupp von Bohlen in Essen, Germany!’ ”

  During the same trip, at the Sinatra Youth Center—and sober— Frank expressed the simpler, worthy goal of his crusade against prejudice. “I don’t know what’s wrong with the adults and why they act the way they do, but I think I understand kids. If we can get them together when they’re young enough, maybe when they get big they’ll be smarter than we have been.”

  As the years proved him wrong, Frank seemed to understand that not all the blame could be laid at the Arabs’ door. “He came to the realization,” Brad Dexter said, “that Israel was too dominant. He thought the U.S. should show equal support to the Palestinians, because they had a right to a homeland as well.” Frank became skeptical about American policy in the region. “We’re talking about making peace,” he told an interviewer, “and what we’re doing is giving them tools of war. We’re giving Jordan airplanes, Israel airplanes. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”

  At times of crisis, though, Frank supported Israel. In 1967, on the eve of the Six Day War, he wired President Lyndon Johnson urging him to condemn the “outrageous” actions of Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. “I hope they catch that Arafat,” he said in 1982 during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, “and have a proper trial before they execute him.”

  At positive moments during the long Middle East agony, Frank made hopeful gestures. He performed in the shadow of the Pyramids to raise funds for Egyptian war wounded, lauding President Anwar Sadat as a “great man who’s laying the cornerstone of peace for all the Arab nations.” Frank raised funds for an International Student Center on the campus of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. This, too, bore his name and was intended for the use of Arabs as well as Jews. A terrorist bomb devastated the center’s cafeteria in 2002, killing and maiming Arabs and Jews alike.

  The two most infamous Arabs had divergent views on Sinatra’s work. According to a former mistress of Saddam Hussein, he liked to dance to “Strangers in the Night” in the privacy of his Baghdad palace. His liking for the song was known, and owners of fashionable restaurants had it played regularly to i
ngratiate themselves with the regime. Osama bin Laden, by contrast, was reported in the Iraqi press to “curse the memory of Frank Sinatra every time he hears his songs.”

  12

  The Philanderer

  DESPITE HIS hectic political activity in 1945 and 1946, in those two years Frank sang on 160 radio shows, completed thirty-six recording sessions, and made four movies. At one point in 1946, moreover, he was also performing on stage forty-five times a week, singing up to a hundred songs a day. The same year, a new Sinatra record reached the stores every month. Six made the top ten, and total record sales were estimated at 10 million. At one point Frank earned $93,000 ($850,000 today) for just one week on stage.

  He was taking care, meanwhile, to work with quality musicians and to break new ground. The advent of the long-playing record was still two years away, but an innovative album set composed of eight 78 rpm Sinatra records appeared that spring. The Voice of Frank Sinatra, which included “These Foolish Things” and “Someone to Watch Over Me,” offered a cohesive musical mood in one package. It was the first of the “concept albums” that Frank would produce for decades.

  Frank had been exploring the musical disciplines. He recorded with a gospel group and with Xavier Cugat, a classical violinist turned rumba bandleader. He listened to some experimental recordings made by Alec Wilder, an eccentric composer whose work floated somewhere between jazz and classical. Wilder could get no one to record them commercially, but Frank said, “I think I can conduct. . . . Using my name, maybe we can do you some good. Let’s call Manie.”

  At Columbia, Manie Sacks thought the notion preposterous, pointing out that Frank could not even read music. Frank insisted, however, and soon a recording date was set, an orchestra assembled. The musicians, who thought Frank a “crooner,” were skeptical bordering on hostile. “I’ve never seen Frank look as frightened as he did that night when he got up to conduct those men,” Wilder remembered. “But he admitted his weaknesses right off. ‘Gentlemen,’ he added, ‘I need your help. And I want to help this music.’ ”