Frank

by James Kaplan

  This is disingenuous. In fact, Sinatra’s true goal on that summer Wednesday was not eluding the crowds but meeting them, and the waiting throng—probably closer to a few hundred than five thousand—had been lured by a radio “whisper” of the singer’s arrival. As the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Super Chief pulled in to the little Mission-style depot, a loudspeaker was blaring “All or Nothing At All.” The whole event had been carefully orchestrated by the Evans office (Margaret Divan, Los Angeles representative), working in league with the West Coast Sinatra fan clubs and the RKO publicity department. Another photograph taken that day shows Sinatra standing on a ladder in the midst of an enthusiastic but notably restrained throng; a couple of female hands are proffering autograph books, but none are ripping at his clothing. The ladder is clearly stenciled “RKO GRIP DEP’T.”

  His fans weren’t the only ones thrilled to see him. RKO executives were hoping Sinatra could help lift Radio-Keith-Orpheum Pictures out of the financial trough into which another young genius, Orson Welles, had sunk it with his brilliant but money-losing epics Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons.5

  It was astonishing: Frank was about to sign a seven-year movie contract, and nobody really even knew whether he could act. He had appeared, very briefly, in three motion pictures to date: Paramount’s Las Vegas Nights (1941), MGM’s Ship Ahoy (1942), and—released earlier in 1943—a Columbia musical with the perky, patriotic title Reveille with Beverly. In Las Vegas Nights and Ship Ahoy, Sinatra had been a mere singing extra, the male vocalist for Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra, and while he was featured in Reveille, it was only as the singer of one number, “Night and Day” (accompanied by six female pianists).

  Still, whether he could play Hamlet was hardly the point. He had been playing one role, brilliantly, for almost ten years. He didn’t have to act. He was Frank Sinatra.

  The staid Chandler family’s Los Angeles Times gave front-page treatment to the new star’s arrival. SECRET OF LURE TOLD BY CROONER—IT’S LOVE, read the two-column headline. The story reported that Sinatra had come not only to start his movie career but also to play a concert with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl. L.A. classical music aficionados were outraged, the paper said, even though Sinatra’s appearance promised to give the orchestra, and the bowl, a badly needed financial boost. One of the naysayers had been the Times’s distinguished music critic, Isabel Morse Jones, a portly old-guard Angeleno who ventured bravely out to that besieged garage in Pasadena. It wasn’t just the howling fans Ms. Jones was nervous about; it was Frank himself. “My objections to swooner-crooner singing in sacred precincts [had recently] hit the wires and reached him in New York,” she wrote. But Sinatra smiled that smile at her, and practically from the moment she opened her reporter’s notebook, Isabel Morse Jones was a goner. Frank knew just how to play the ladies, young and pretty or middle-aged and plump. And if the lady in question was a distinguished classical music critic, why, all the better. He spoke softly, and she listened carefully.

  “I expect to get the thrill of my life Saturday night,” he told Ms. Jones. “Oh, yes, I can be just as enthusiastic about classical music as those kids out there are about my kind. What do you suppose I have 500 albums of symphonies and so on for?”

  Five hundred albums of symphonies … One can see the music critic’s eyes widening, her features softening… “It’s the words of a song that are important,” Sinatra went on. “I pick my songs for the lyrics. The music is only a backdrop. I sing love songs and mean them. They’re meant for two girls, both named Nancy. One is my wife, aged 24, and not jealous and the other is my three-year-old.”6

  “He is just naturally sensitive,” Isabel Morse Jones wrote, her fingers flying over the typewriter keys, when she got back to the office. “He is a romanticist and a dreamer and a careful dresser and he loves beautiful words and music is his hobby. He makes no pretensions at all.”

  Another one bites the dust.

  He handled his first meeting with Louella Parsons, a few days later, with equal skill. Here was another small, pudgy female columnist, except that this one was a real dragon lady: a personal favorite of her employer, William Randolph Hearst, and the most feared woman in Hollywood. Her forty million readers gave her tremendous power. Yet even Lolly Parsons’s knees wobbled in Sinatra’s presence. She wrote that he had, “Noah Webster forgive me, humility. He was warm, ingenuous, so anxious to please.” He would grow less eager to please as his own power grew. Parsons and Sinatra would have a love-hate relationship over the years, until her clout waned and he decided he didn’t need her anymore. Long afterward, she would reflect: “Sinatra couldn’t have been so boyishly unspoiled, so natural and considerate. But I have to admit he was. After I met him, I was enrolled in the Sinatra cheering squad. And I stayed in a long, long time.”

  Two days after Sinatra’s arrival in Pasadena, a radio listener in San Jose wrote a letter to the FBI:

  Dear Sir:

  The other day I turned on a Frank Sinatra program and I noted the shrill whistling sound, created supposedly by a bunch of girls cheering. Last night as I heard Lucky Strike produce more of this same hysteria I thought: how easy it would be for certain-minded manufacturers to create another Hitler here in America through the influence of mass-hysteria! I believe that those who are using this shrill whistling sound are aware that it is similar to that which produced Hitler. That they intend to get a Hitler in by first planting in the minds of the people that men like Frank Sinatra are O.K. therefore this future Hitler will be O.K. As you are well aware the future of some of these manufacturers is rather shaky unless something is done like that …

  Crazy as it was, the letter was notable for one reason: it was the beginning of what would become a 1,275-page FBI dossier on Sinatra.

  He rented a bungalow at the Garden of Allah, where the parties never stopped. Five years earlier, Sheilah Graham had moved Scott Fitzgerald out of the complex so he could get some work done. Sinatra, who had come to Hollywood not only to start a movie career but also to have some serious fun, had picked his new residence deliberately. He took some vocal coaching from his new neighbor Kay Thompson. And he commuted to Culver City to make Higher and Higher.

  The picture was a trifle, the kind of silly B fluff the studios cranked out by the ton in the 1930s and 1940s. The upstairs-downstairs comedy, such as it is, is set in motion when the wealthy Drake family loses its money and Mr. Drake conspires with the servants to marry the scullery maid off to the rich boy next door … Who, in an unconsciously inspired bit of casting, is played by none other than the Hoboken Kid, as himself. His first line, ever, in the movies, to the maid who opens the Drakes’ door: “Good morning. My name is Frank Sinatra.” (The maid faints.)

  The big surprise about Sinatra in Higher and Higher is not how well he can hold a big screen, but how beautiful he is. Not handsome—any Joe Blow can be handsome. The twenty-seven-year-old Frank Sinatra, shot in rich black and white by cinematographer Robert De Grasse, is resplendent. Lovingly lit, photographed in slightly soft focus (and largely from the camera’s left, his right, to avoid the bad profile), he glows through his every scene, all cheekbones and wide, wide eyes. He’s like Bambi with sex appeal.

  As for his acting—it scarcely matters: you simply can’t take your eyes off the guy. A great deal has to do with the undismissable fact that this is Frank Sinatra. Had he been killed in a plane crash in 1947, or had his career come to an end (as it almost did) in 1950 or thereabouts, maybe Sinatra wouldn’t have glowed quite so luminously.

  But Frank endured. He became, for better and worse, a kind of god, and it’s particularly interesting to observe him in the celluloid guise of a bashful young swain. The role, of course, was just a slight variation of the role he played when he sang. Watching Higher and Higher (in which Sinatra also gets to perform five numbers7), you can understand why the girls went bonkers: the guy was gorgeous and magnetic and achingly vulnerable. Quite simply, he was phenomenal—way too much so for little RKO Ra
dio Pictures, a fact of which Frank Sinatra, doubtless, was sharply aware. Surely he had his people working frenziedly on contingency plans to extricate him from the studio even as he wrapped his first film with them. After all, contracts, seven-year and otherwise, were only pieces of paper.

  Another contract, one that grew progressively more irksome as Sinatra’s earnings skyrocketed, was the onerous severance agreement he had signed with Tommy Dorsey. Having initially boasted he would simply stiff the steely-eyed bandleader, Frank now decided to toss Tommy a bone: reportedly, about $1,000 in commissions. Predictably, this was not an amount that made Dorsey happy—and he grew increasingly unhappy hearing Sinatra brag to the press how much he was raking in.

  In response, Sinatra, under the brilliant aegis of Evans, was turning the dispute into a cause célèbre, having his radio writers inject comic jabs at the bandleader into his sketches (at the sound of a few out-of-tune bars of “I’m Getting Sentimental over You”: “It’s Dorsey, coming to collect his commission!”) and paying bobby-soxers to carry picket signs (“Dorsey Unfair to Our Boy Frankie!”) outside Tommy’s show in Philadelphia, while eager newspaper photographers immortalized the event.

  Battered in the public arena, Dorsey would have been down for the count—except for the fact that Tommy Dorsey took no shit from anyone. There was also the fact that Dorsey was represented by that rising giant, the Music Corporation of America (MCA), which was desperate to also represent Frank Sinatra. Despite the imaginative formulations of both Mario Puzo and Sinatra, the whole affair was resolved in the most Byzantine (and peaceful) way possible.

  The Godfather, of course, was the vehicle that elevated the whole contretemps to the realm of myth. In the novel, Puzo relates how the fictional bandleader Les Halley pressures the fictional singer Johnny Fontane into an impossibly severe personal-services contract. When Fontane approaches his godfather, Don Corleone, and asks him to intervene on his behalf, the don goes to Halley and offers him $20,000 to release Fontane from the contract. Halley refuses to play ball. Even after Don Corleone ominously drops his offer to $10,000, the bandleader won’t budge.

  The next day [Puzo writes] Don Corleone went to see the band leader personally. He brought with him his two best friends, Genco Abbandando, who was his Consigliere, and Luca Brasi. With no other witnesses Don Corleone persuaded Les Halley to sign a document giving up all rights to all services from Johnny Fontane upon payment of a certified check to the amount of ten thousand dollars. Don Corleone did this by putting a pistol to the forehead of the band leader and assuring him with the utmost seriousness that either his signature or his brains would rest on that document in exactly one minute. Les Halley signed. Don Corleone pocketed his pistol and handed over the certified check.

  Still wincing from his portrayal as the sniveling Fontane, but loftily refusing to acknowledge it, Sinatra took the high road when Sidney Zion asked him in 1986 about the Dorsey contract. “The man who straightened it out was named Saul Jaffe,” Sinatra told Zion. “He’s a lawyer who now is retired. Mr. Jaffe was the secretary of the American Federation of Radio Artists, and Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra would play from hotel [ball]rooms around the country on radio programs. I told [Jaffe] the whole story, and he went to Mr. Dorsey and he said to him, ‘I represent Frank Sinatra in this case that you and he are involved in.’ He said, ‘I think we can come to a settlement quite simply.’ Tom said, ‘No no, I want one-third of his salary for the rest of his life.’ So Jaffe said to him, ‘Do you enjoy playing music in hotel [ball]rooms and having the nation hear you on the radio?’ [Dorsey] said, ‘Sure I do.’ [Jaffe] said, ‘Not anymore, you won’t.’ ”

  Whether other, darker forces were brought to bear—and if they were, whether Sinatra knew anything about it—are questions that will forever remain unresolved. The answers are tied up in Frank’s relationship to the Mob, and mobsters, in 1943 and for the rest of his life: a teasing, conflicted, flirtatious dance on both sides.

  Jerry Lewis had another version of the Dorsey-Sinatra brouhaha. He asserted that, based on the Mafia’s early adoration for Sinatra, a summit consisting of Frank Costello, Albert Anastasia, Willie Moretti, and the Murder Inc. hit man Frankie Carbo got together and went to Dorsey to make him that offer he couldn’t refuse. “Frank told me years later—laughing—how that talk went,” Lewis remembered. “Carbo said, ‘Mr. Dorsey, could you play your trombone if it had a dent in it? Could you play it if you didn’t have the slide?’ It was all just like that, and Dorsey got the idea.”

  One kernel of truth in this account would seem to be the participation of Sinatra’s Hasbrouck Heights neighbor Willie Moretti, a.k.a. Willie Moore, the boss of North Jersey. Moretti was short, plump, bald, wisecracking, gregarious—and, as his job demanded, dangerous. He had his fingers in many pies, paid close attention to such profit centers as the Meadowbrook in Cedar Grove, the Riviera in Fort Lee, and the Rustic Cabin, and apparently took quite a shine to Sinatra. Still, whether that makes Moretti (who was about as different from the noble Don Corleone as it was possible to be) Sinatra’s godfather, and whether Moretti interceded personally with Dorsey (who was, after all, a North Jersey resident himself), is another question.

  Peter J. Levinson, in his Dorsey biography, tells us that the “Bergen Record entertainment editor and syndicated writer Dan Lewis, [who] knew Moretti personally … once asked [the gangster] if there was any truth to these reports. Moretti smiled and, in a rare departure from omertà, answered, ‘Well, Dan, let’s just say we took very good care of Sinatra.’ ”

  In fact, Moretti had a reputation for making frequent departures from omertà. He was an infamous blowhard whose garrulity—perhaps abetted by an advanced case of syphilis—would eventually lead to his elimination.

  To complicate matters further, Dorsey’s daughter, Levinson writes, “vividly remembers her father telling her about getting a threatening telephone call at dinnertime early in the Sinatra-Dorsey contretemps. The anonymous caller implied ominous consequences if Dorsey didn’t ‘cooperate’ by letting Sinatra out of his contract. He was reminding Dorsey that he had two children, and that he wouldn’t want anything to happen to them. That’s when Dorsey responded by putting up barbed wire atop the wall surrounding [his house], installed sweeping searchlights that bathed the property on a nightly basis, and constructed an elaborate electric fence at the entrance to the property.”

  There is yet another story, told by an old Hoboken pal of Sinatra’s, one Joey D’Orazio, that possesses a seriocomic ring of truth. D’Orazio asserted that Hank Sanicola sent two rough customers, “not real underworld characters but just some frightening fellows that he and Sinatra both knew,” to threaten Dorsey if he didn’t release the singer from the contract. Sanicola claimed that in order to protect Sinatra should things go wrong, he never told him about the two thugs.

  But, according to D’Orazio, when the two threatened to break Dorsey’s arms if he didn’t sign legal papers to let the singer go, the bandleader “laughed in their faces … [saying] ‘Oh, yeah, look how scared I am. Tell Frank … I said, “Go to hell for sending his goons to beat me up.” ’ ”

  Dorsey then told the men, “I’ll sign the goddamn papers, that’s how sick I am of Frank Sinatra, the no good bum. The hell with him.”

  “It wasn’t much of an intimidation,” D’Orazio said. “In fact, one of the guys was so excited about meeting Tommy Dorsey, he had to be talked out of going back and asking the guy for his autograph after they left his office.”

  The story seems just too charming not to be true.

  There was little charm, however, once the lawyers and agents got involved. Saul Jaffe, who was indeed the secretary of the American Federation of Radio Artists, actually did threaten Tommy Dorsey with exclusion from the airwaves, and Dorsey—who perhaps had already been softened up by a threatening telephone call and a threatening visit—took his point. All that remained was the paperwork. MCA was able to snatch Sinatra away from his former agency, Rockwell-O’Keefe, by brokering th
e deal—which essentially just meant moving money around. Dorsey got $60,000 ($700,000 today) to finally cut Frank loose: $35,000 of it came from MCA itself, advanced to its new client; Columbia Records advanced the remaining $25,000 to its new recording artist.

  Lawyers, agents, executives, goons, mobsters, gofers—all dancing attendance on the Golden Boy, who yawned, picked his teeth, and winked at the next beautiful girl at his dressing-room door, while his publicist pulled out what remained of his hair.

  By the end of 1943, Frank Sinatra had ascended from mere teen idol to bona fide American superstar, one of only a handful of such creatures who had existed up to that point in history—think Caruso, Chaplin, Valentino, Crosby—but one who possessed unprecedented power and influence. Sinatra was a radio and recording star; he was soon to break through in the movies. He had smashed attendance records at the Paramount and wowed the snooty nightclub crowds at the Riobamba—and then, historically, in October, he knocked them dead at the Waldorf-Astoria’s Wedgwood Room, a venue of such high tone that Cole Porter himself descended from his thirty-third-floor suite to take in the show (and, presumably, forgive the singer for blowing the lyrics to “Night and Day” back at the Rustic Cabin).8 Sinatra had vocalized along with the Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles philharmonics. Soon he would pay a call on the president of the United States—his idol Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who would ask Sinatra to clue him in on the winner of that week’s Your Hit Parade). But he still had a big problem.

  Along with sixteen million other young men, Sinatra had first registered for the draft in December 1940. As a new father, he had been granted an exemption from service, but now, in the fall of 1943, with the United States throwing every resource into the conflicts in Europe and the Pacific, the government was about to abolish deferments for married fathers. Meanwhile, Sinatra was already catching flak from resentful soldiers (“Hey, Wop. Why aren’t you in uniform?”), and George Evans was doing plenty of scrambling to keep his prize client from looking like a slacker, making sure the press knew he was singing “God Bless America” at war-bond rallies (lots of them), and on American Forces Radio shows, and on unbreakable vinyl V-Discs to be sent to soldiers and sailors overseas.