Frank

by James Kaplan

  In fact, three days a week, Jimmy was working as a test pilot at Lockheed’s Burbank plant, flying P-38s and C-60s, under the name Edward Chester Babcock. The other four days, he was writing movie tunes at Paramount with Johnny Burke, under his professional name. No one at Lockheed knew about his other career, and nobody at the studios was wise, either. As Burke said, “Who wants to hire a guy to write a picture knowing he might get killed in a crash before he’s finished it?”

  And there were plenty of crashes: wartime production was so breakneck that quality control was haphazard. Test piloting was a dangerous business. “I was at Lockheed more than two and a half years and I was scared shitless all of the time,” Jimmy later said. But he never told Sinatra.

  It was Eat, Drink, and Be Merry time: the Wilshire Tower suite quickly became a twenty-four-hour free-for-all of poker, booze, and sex. The hookers paraded in and out while Cahn and Crane and Silvers sat around the card table, cracking wise, and Stordahl puffed serenely on his pipe. Once, all jaws at the table dropped when Frank walked in with his arm draped over the shoulder of none other than Marlene Dietrich. Forty-two years old, and dazzling as ever. Hello, boys, she said, in that German accent. And then, bold as brass, to Sinatra: Well, Frank? She took his hand, smiling, and they closed the bedroom door behind them. Just like that. The poker continued—but not before Sammy Cahn, ever the P.S. 147 wiseacre, stage-whispered what he’d heard about Dietrich’s sexual specialty.

  Phil Silvers gave him a look. Hearing was as close as Sammy was gonna get.

  Soon afterward Sinatra brought another visitor, the dark, entrancingly beautiful starlet Skitch Henderson had introduced him to at MGM in 1941. As in one of those romantic comedies, Ava Gardner and Frank kept bumping into each other around town. The funny thing was that when he brought her up to the Tower, it turned out to be for a cup of coffee only. She was a smokingly sexy kid—but she was a kid, and she had a certain dignity to her; her heels weren’t round. She appeared to be ambivalent at best about what every other girl in town was obsessed with: getting ahead at any cost. Therefore, there was no leverage, and in a funny way this was perfectly fine with Sinatra. He was content to stare at those cheekbones, those shy and haughty green eyes.

  George Evans had his hands full in New York—he had other clients besides Sinatra, hard as that was to believe sometimes. So he deputized a West Coast pal, a firecracker of a young publicist named Jack Keller, to ride herd on Frank in Hollywood, a more than full-time job. The twenty-eight-year-old Keller was a character: a hard-drinking, chain-smoking, impeccably tailored former pro golfer who looked like Jackie Gleason. He had a fierce work ethic and a ferocious loyalty to his clients, both of which were good things where Frank Sinatra was concerned. After dropping by the Wilshire Tower suite once or twice, Keller quickly realized he had his work cut out for him. Some wholesome diversion was called for, to throw Hollywood snoops like Hedda Hopper and Lolly Parsons off the trail of any potential scandal.

  Sunshine and fresh air, Keller thought. And then … softball!

  Some of the movie stars had an informal league that played Sunday afternoons in a field behind the Hollywood Bowl. It was good for a few laughs and plenty of wholesome publicity photos—there were lots of nice shots of suntanned hunks and pretty girls in tight cheerleader shirts (real girls didn’t play ball in those days).

  Sinatra, Keller decided, would start a softball team. It would be called—but of course—the Swooners.

  Evans agreed it was pure genius. He had hired the right man.

  Keller had uniforms made up, and for a few Sundays, till Frank got bored (which never took very long), the Swooners took the field. Styne and Cahn and Sanicola and Crane played (Phil Silvers, not much of an athlete, preferred to kibitz from the sidelines), along with a couple of Frank’s new movie pals, Anthony Quinn and Barry Sullivan. At 119 pounds, Sinatra didn’t cut much of a figure in a baseball uniform—but the same couldn’t be said of the Swooners cheerleaders in their official T-shirts: Lana Turner, Virginia Mayo, Marilyn Maxwell, and, oh yes, Miss Gardner.

  Who was on deck? In play? You needed a scorecard to figure it all out.

  Just a few days after his son was born, Frank performed at a benefit for the Jewish Home for the Aged, at the Roosevelt Hotel. It was an unusual cause for Sinatra: maybe he was thinking of his dear old babysitter Mrs. Golden—or maybe his new agents at MCA, Messrs. Friedman and Wasserman, convinced him that the men who ran the town would eat it with a spoon.

  After the interminable pious speeches, amid the red-velvet drapery and clink of coffee cups and crystal, Sinatra, stick thin in his monkey suit, stared out at the spotlight with moist eyes and gave them a giant ladleful: his version of “Ol’ Man River,” with a brilliant correction—Oscar Hammerstein’s offensive phrase from the 1927 verse, “Niggers all work on de Mississippi,” changed to the clunky, but patently uncontroversial, “Here we all work on the Mississippi.”

  Out in the audience, the emotional eyes of the most powerful man in Hollywood, the tiny, rectitudinous Louis B. Mayer, also grew moist. The former scrap-metal salvager from Minsk who had created a white-picket-fence vision of America (and had had amphetamine-laced chicken soup fed to Judy Garland to keep her thin and peppy) thrilled to what he was hearing. As Sinatra’s magnificent voice soared to the final “just keeps rollin’ along,” Louie B. turned to an aide and stage-whispered, “I want that boy.”

  He got him, of course. And it cost him, of course. In February—just as Step Lively was wrapping—Lew Wasserman and Harry Friedman sat down with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s lawyers and, over the next three months, hammered out one of the sweetest movie deals in history. The five-year, $260,000-per-annum contract would allow Sinatra to make one outside picture a year and sixteen guest appearances on the radio; it would give him the publishing rights to the music in every second film he made with the studio. As a final fillip, MCA got MGM to relax the terms of its famously strict morals clause.3

  As for the seven-year contract he’d signed with RKO just six months earlier … well, thanks to MCA’s iron fist, velvet glove, and fast-dancing legal tap shoes, it was more or less movie history. With the exception of one short subject (The House I Live In, 1945) and two loan-out features, one bad (The Miracle of the Bells, 1948) and the other worse (Double Dynamite, 1951), Sinatra wiped his hands of Radio-Keith-Orpheum. And, as with Dorsey, there was never any uncertainty about who wound up with the sweet end of the deal. True, RKO wouldn’t languish without Sinatra: the studio rode out the 1940s on a spate of B pictures and star loan-outs from other studios. But B was the key initial for RKO Radio Pictures, Inc., and A plus was the only grade Frank Sinatra was interested in. MGM was the top of the heap, and now so was he.

  Except—with Sinatra there was always an except—there was a fly in the ointment. His fame was still based on his records, and since July 1942 he hadn’t cut a single side—V-Discs excepted—with an orchestra. As the American Federation of Musicians strike dragged on, vocal backgrounds were getting monotonous and annoying. Stordahl’s arrangements for the radio orchestra were more beautiful every week: imagine the records he and Sibelius could cut together!

  Even more annoying was the fact that other record labels, Bing Crosby’s Decca in particular, had signed agreements with the AFM. Der Bingle was back in business—as were Eberly, Haymes, and Como. Sinatra was losing ground, artistically at any rate. He was nervous, and when he was nervous, he grew testy.

  On February 10, 1944, Manie Sacks sent a letter to Frank:

  I have just received word from Bill [Richards, Columbia’s West Coast recording director] that you are not interested in making records with vocal backgrounds of tunes I sent. I’ve been hearing through many of your friends that you weren’t going to make any more records with vocal backgrounds, but I always felt it was an over-exaggerated rumor and I took it with a grain of salt until Richards told me about it today. The thing that hurts me is the fact that you must have told others but never said a word to me. You don’t t
hink, do you, that I would tell you to do anything that would in any way impair your future? I feel badly that you would make a quick decision on such an important matter without even mentioning it to me first. I am not going to get into any long discussions, but I do want to go on record and point out a few things to you. If we were able to sell millions of Frank Sinatra records with vocal backgrounds, I don’t think now is the time to stop. I admit they are not as good as instrumental backgrounds, but they are acceptable to the public, and they’re the ones that count.

  Sinatra’s typewritten reply to Manie, dated February 18, 1944, was warm, almost conciliatory. Frank understood that Manie was upset. If he had told anyone that he wasn’t going to record anymore—and he didn’t quite admit that he had—“it was in complete innocence, believe me!” If he had spoken, he had spoken impulsively, he insisted. He would never hide an opinion from Manie.

  On the other hand, Frank wrote, he was genuinely distressed about having to use the vocal backgrounds. He understood record sales had been good, “but, being very much an artist rather than a financial genius or a cold businessman,” didn’t see why he had to be artistically hamstrung just because Columbia couldn’t strike a deal with the musicians. But, he said, he realized the situation was immutable, so he would stay disgruntled.

  Having lodged his complaint, Frank sent along his best to Columbia president Ted Wallerstein and vice-president Goddard Lieberson, and signed—assertively, in blue fountain pen—with love and kisses.

  It’s a remarkable letter: articulate and affectionate and disingenuous and blunt, all at once. And exceedingly practical. Frank was wise enough to vent his anger only indirectly at his esteemed friend the warmhearted Manie.

  While a truly cold businessman, the ice-blooded Wasserman, hammered away at RKO and MGM on his behalf, Sinatra traveled east to attend his son’s christening. It was a joyous occasion, but not a happy trip. First the priest gave him a hard time about naming a Jew—Manie, who else?—as little Frank’s godfather. Sinatra simply stared the watery-eyed old cleric down. Nancy was another matter.

  His housebound wife, effectively a single mother, had built up a lot of unhappiness she couldn’t express on a staticky and expensive transcontinental phone call (with God knows what starstruck operators listening in). The moment she saw her wandering husband, she let loose. Even though she knew she was on a tightrope, that they had had this baby to try to save what was left of their marriage, Nancy also knew that she was still Frank’s wife, and still Mike Barbato’s daughter. She would say whatever the hell she wanted to say. She did not intend to raise their children alone—what were his intentions?

  At the same time, George Evans was on his case: Frank was a family man, and a family man lived with his family. If his life was in California now, that’s where his family had to be.

  So the hounds he’d been keeping a sweet three thousand miles away had caught up with him. As Frank looked around at the Sinatras and Garaventas and Barbatos (and little Chit-U, smiling at nobody) jammed into his living room for the christening party, he realized that Nancy and Evans were right. He was a family man. In the first flush of excitement at home ownership (it felt like a hundred years ago), he and Nancy had named the little Cape Cod at 220 Lawrence Avenue Warm Valley. (The sentimental Frank had even fashioned a plaque with the name on it, making the letters out of sticks he’d picked up in the park, gluing the sticks onto a varnished board. A fan stole the sign.) Now the house felt like a claustrophobe’s nightmare. He needed a big place to match his big new life, and he knew his family had to be there with him.

  He took Nancy aside while her mother cooed over the baby. The look in his wife’s large expressive eyes was complex: full of love and distrust, anger and hope. He said he wanted them to live in a great big house in California. That was where the movies were, and that was where his family should be.

  She stared at him. What about her family?

  She could bring ’em out. Why not?

  And what on earth was she going to do in California? She couldn’t even drive a car.

  He’d buy her the biggest goddamn Cadillac she’d ever seen. And driving lessons to go with it. She’d be the queen of Hollywood.

  She shook her head: he was full of shit. But she didn’t say no.

  “Joe E. Lewis, the only comedian who doesn’t do an impression of Frank Sinatra [the handwritten invitation reads], invites you to be a guest at a farewell cocktail party for the Voice on the eve of his departure for Hollywood, Friday, May 12th, at 4 p.m. in the cocktail lounge at Monte Proser’s Copacabana, 10 East 60th Street.4 Being quite a man with the ladies himself, Joe has induced the lovely Conover cover girls (and they really are beautiful) to take care of the charm department. They’ll all be here, and Sinatra has promised to swoon for the girls just to confuse everybody. Drop in—but not without the card!”

  Those Conover girls—they really were beautiful …

  January 11, 1944: Franklin Wayne Emanuel Sinatra is one day old. Margaret Hague Maternity Hospital, Jersey City. Photographers dressed as doctors capture the blessed event. Frank is in Hollywood, otherwise engaged. (photo credit 13.2)

  14

  Rowdy sailors on shore leave throw tomatoes at Sinatra’s image on the Paramount marquee, October 15, 1944. “It is not too much to say,” historian William Manchester wrote, “that by the end of the war Sinatra had become the most hated man in the armed services.” (photo credit 14.1)

  He was at once the most loved and the most reviled man in the country: the line seemed to fall squarely between the sexes. SINATRA 1-A WITH US GIRLS, RATED 4-F BY ARMY DOCTORS, ran a typical headline. And men ran the newspapers. In the spring of 1944, as the Fifth Army fought inland from Anzio to Rome, much of America’s civilian and military press mounted an offensive against Sinatra. And a columnist named Westbrook Pegler, flush from a 1941 Pulitzer for his exposés of racketeering in Hollywood’s labor unions, and recently signed up by the FDR-hating Hearst Syndicate, began to make a special project of laying into the FDR-loving, “bugle-deaf Frankie-boy Sinatra.”

  Another newspaper writer named Lee Mortimer, the entertainment columnist for the Hearst-owned New York Daily Mirror, also got into the act. Mortimer, like his colleague Winchell a closeted Jew (né Mortimer Lieberman), was ambivalent about Sinatra at first—he’d apparently once tried, unsuccessfully, to sell Frank a song he’d written. His early columns about the singer accordingly seem strangely sycophantic. “Even I grow humble before the compelling force [of Sinatra’s impact],” Mortimer wrote. “It is inexplicable, irrational but it has made him the most potent entertainer of the day … I’ll go further. I think Frank is a showman without peer, he has a unique and pleasing personality plus talent of the first luster.” Then this uncomfortable man found the stone in his shoe. “I love Sinatra but my stomach is revolted by squealing, shouting neurotic extremists who make a cult of the boy. As a friend [!], I call on the Hero of Hasbrouck to disown his fanatics. Neither they nor his projection onto the political scene can help his brilliant theatrical career.”

  Where his fans were concerned, Frank, who knew where his bread was buttered, didn’t mind the idolatry a bit. He let everyone in show business know exactly what he thought of Lee Mortimer, and word got back fast. Spurned, the columnist used his platform to stick it to the singer at every opportunity. Sinatra, Mortimer wrote soon afterward, “found safety and $30,000 a week behind a mike” while Real Men were overseas fighting Krauts and Japs. And as for those fans, they were worse than neurotic extremists: they were nothing but “imbecilic, moronic, screaming-meemie autograph kids.”

  The columns weren’t just personal. Much of Mortimer’s and Pegler’s invective was politically motivated: right-wing and intolerant at its core. Even amid the patriotism of the war, America was a deeply divided country. Great numbers of people, many of them moneyed, detested Franklin Roosevelt for the equalizing policies of the New Deal. To many—William Randolph Hearst significantly included—FDR’s policies were leading the co
untry straight toward Communism.

  Sinatra had been a fervent Democrat since boyhood, when he’d helped ward boss Dolly stump for local Democratic candidates, and a Roosevelt lover since the early 1930s. The Democrats had established themselves at the beginning of the century as the defenders of America’s minorities, and FDR, transformed by crippling polio from a shallow playboy to an avatar of noblesse oblige, was every bit as charismatic as Frank himself.

  The situation was not without its complexities. For one thing, Hearst and Louis B. Mayer were extremely close. For another: not long after the beginning of World War II, Roosevelt ordered the FBI’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, to compile a list of possible threats to national security, and one of the bureau’s first responses was to round up some fifteen hundred Italian aliens. Dolly put the blame for this unpleasant act squarely on FDR, and took her son to task for his ardent support of the president.

  Some have contended that Sinatra’s crusade against racial and religious intolerance was opportunistic, a convenient publicity stunt. Some charged that the ardently pro-Roosevelt George Evans encouraged Frank’s enthusiasm for FDR. And while it’s true that it didn’t hurt his image to support the president, it’s also true that one of the singer’s proudest possessions was a large autographed photo of Franklin D., which he hung prominently in the foyers of his residences at least until his politics veered sharply right in the late 1960s.

  In fact, Sinatra was a convenient lightning rod for all kinds of antipathies. It’s hard to imagine in this age of diversity what a strong hold white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males once had over America. Ethnics were an essential ingredient in the Great Melting Pot: they could be acknowledged sentimentally and smiled at condescendingly, but essentially were not to be trusted. (Of all the slurs against FDR, one of the strangest was that he was secretly a Jew named Rosenfeld.)