by James Kaplan
Frank Sinatra was definitely an ethnic; what’s more, he was a small, rich, cocky, sexually potent ethnic. This didn’t ingratiate him with much of the press. None of America’s editorial writers were getting on John Wayne’s case for not enlisting. But then Wayne wasn’t Italian or liberal.
In May 1944, the Army newspaper Stars and Stripes, which had already waxed indignant about Sinatra’s draft status, ran an article on the singer by one Sergeant Jack Foisie. It is a fascinating document, written in wisecracking forties slang, dripping with envy and contempt. Foisie strives for some sort of objectivity but at every turn battles, not very energetically, his own distaste for the singer:
Dateline New York. There is no denying, gentlemen, this guy Frankie Sinatra has something we ain’t got. Most everyone is trying to discover what that something is, and the few who claim to know can’t find the words to express themselves. So until a better explanation comes along, the homefront is simply calling this 26-year-old [sic] Hoboken-born crooner a national phenomenon. However, if one must get analytical, Sinatra, otherwise known as the Voice, has certain definite things which we ain’t. For instance, he pulls down about ten-hundred thousand bucks a year, says press agent George B. Evans, carefully adding that about $930,000 goes back to the government in taxes …
Secondly, Evans estimates that The Voice has about 50 million bobby-sock followers and other less fanatical fans. The Sinatra fan mail averages 2,000 letters weekly, of which 40% are from other than young (14 to 18 years) girls. Of this 40%, a lot is from servicemen, but—Evans admits—very little is from servicemen overseas.
His bobbysock brigades are the most fantastic people. At the very sight of ‘The Voice’ they break into screams … This screaming has become Sinatra’s trademark. At first encouraged, if not suggested by Sinatra’s press agents, the practice now is very much frowned upon. Before each Lucky Strike Hit Parade radio performance, the 5-foot-10 1/2-inch [sic], 140-pound [sic] crooner pleads with his high school dumplings to please, oh please, just be nice girls, and applaud, but don’t scream. He tells them that the War Department doesn’t like them to have screams show up on his program recordings for overseas consumption. It is bad on the combat GI’s morale, the WD figures …
Now that I’ve seen Sinatra myself, I still can’t imagine why he does what he does to people, especially girls. Yet 50 million Americans can’t be wrong.
People will argue day and night over whether he has a voice or not. The people who can hear him say he has, but the people who can’t hear him, especially when he has to compete with the volume of Mark Warnow’s band on the Lucky Strike Hit Parade, say he hasn’t.
On August 4, 1943, he appeared with the [Philadelphia] Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra. The crowd, containing a larger percentage of bobbysocks than ever before seen in a concert hall, thought he was good, but the music critics almost universally did not. They were not so much annoyed by his voice as by his reference to the musicians of the Philharmonic as “the boys in the band.”
Sinatra is 4-F because of a punctured eardrum. As a civilian crooner, his friends point out, he is doing a lot more for the country by packing them in at bond rallies and the like than he could do in a uniform, an argument raised on behalf of many entertainers, and seemingly a satisfactory one to the Selective Service Boards.
In answer to my question whether he was planning any overseas tours, Sinatra said: “I would like to if I can stand it physically …”
Frankie is now in Hollywood, fulfilling his RKO contract. Even in the city of movie stars, the fans single him out for special attention. That he is married and has two babies doesn’t seem to matter.
This last is especially pointed—the military reader would have known at once exactly which fans were singling Sinatra out, and just what kind of special attention they were giving him. All in all, it was an article expressly designed to make soldiers’ blood boil, and it was symptomatic of a spreading feeling about the singer. Despite George Evans’s heroic efforts, the public was starting to sniff out things it didn’t like about Frank Sinatra. He was a hedonist, in a nation under wartime restrictions. He was a man apart, in a time when men were supposed to be supporting their buddies. He was having the time of his life, while his countrymen were fighting and dying overseas.
And thanks to MCA, he was no longer working for the piddling RKO but starting his new contract with MGM, one that, according to Evans, helped make him the highest-paid entertainer in the world. This may have been close to the truth. By Sinatra’s own later estimation, he earned $840,000 in 1944, the equivalent of over $10 million today.
Still, it wasn’t just the money. He was now officially with the studio that had “more stars than in the heavens.”1 Back on the Coast in April from Frank junior’s christening, he attended a party given by Mayer for the twenty-six-year-old Henry Ford II, freshly mustered out of the Navy and soon to take over the family business. (The record doesn’t show whether young Ford agreed with his grandpa Henry’s notorious anti-Semitic writings, but Mayer was never one to scruple where Americanism was concerned.) No doubt the event was a crashing bore except for the presence of several of the studio’s loveliest, their morals clauses all atwitter at the sight of Frankie, and one other interesting party: a very handsome, quite funny, ever so slightly world-weary twenty-year-old English contract player named Peter Sydney Ernest Aylen Lawford.
Peter Lawford liked to give an impression of charming superficiality, but Sinatra was intuitive enough to see at once that like him, the young actor was a complex and layered personality and, also like him, carried scars both visible and unseen. For one thing, Lawford had a slightly deformed right arm, the result of a childhood collision with a glass door; ironically enough, the deformity was as much a source of his success as his good looks and suave manner, for it had kept him out of military service. Metro was currently keeping him very busy shooting war movies, in which he was a natural to play the sensitive young English pilot or Tommy Atkins, or even, in 1942’s A Yank at Eton, a bullying young snob, opposite Ava Gardner’s husband, Mickey Rooney. Mr. Mayer loved Lawford, though he was less fond of the young actor’s eccentric stage mother, Lady May Bunny, who had a title but not a farthing, and who had tried (and failed) to prevail on Mayer to pay her a salary as her son’s assistant. Lady May, young Lawford would reveal at the drop of a hat, had dressed him in girl’s clothing until age eleven.2
On the surface, Sinatra and Lawford couldn’t have been more different, but they had a natural affinity. Both had overbearing mothers; both had minor physical deformities. Both were beguiling and sexually voracious. Each had qualities the other envied.
Lawford—whose status consciousness as a Brit on the low end of the Hollywood pecking order was acute—was fully aware of Sinatra’s status. And Sinatra seemed aware of everything. The singer’s wide blue eyes surveyed the whole crowded room and took in everything at once—Greer Garson’s lovely posterior (she was forty, for Christ’s sake); the sonorous Louie B.’s awareness of same, even as he chatted up the moonfaced young Ford.
But the singer, for all his ability to snap his fingers and order up any woman in the room (the young Brit saw them gazing at him as if their knickers were already halfway down their thighs), saw that Lawford had something even Frank could never have—that six-foot height, those impossibly handsome good looks.
Frank regarded Lawford and shook his head. If he looked like that, he’d be—
Lawford’s eyes crinkled. Dick Haymes?
The singer bent double at the waist, laughing hard. Then he straightened up and pointed at Lawford in a way that the young Englishman had always been taught was rude. Hey, Chauncey here was all right.
On the golf course I’m under par,
Metro-Goldwyn have asked me to star.
They arrived on June 1 at the Union Pacific station in Pasadena, Nancy and four-year-old Little Nancy and the baby, along with Nancy’s twenty-one-year-old sister, Constante—known as Tina—whom she’d brought along for company, a
nd also to fill in on official Frank Sinatra letter-writing duty while Nancy tended to the kids. Mike and Jennie Barbato, as well as their four other daughters, along with husbands, would soon follow. A whole cockeyed caravan, and they had to be put up somewhere while the new house was being prepared. With a sigh, Frank checked out of his private bachelor pad at the Art Deco Sunset Tower (where John Wayne and Bugsy Siegel also had suites) and into the Castle Argyle, a nice residential hotel conveniently located a stone’s throw from the CBS Studios.
Sinatra had bought the new house at 1051 Valley Spring Lane sight unseen: a big pale pink Mediterranean-style stucco pile on Toluca Lake in the San Fernando Valley, ten miles from Hollywood—a posh suburb, orange-blossom-sweet, in those pre-freeway days. Bob and Dolores Hope lived just down the street. Bing and his brood weren’t far away.3 That spring, oddly enough, Sinatra’s future arranger Gordon Jenkins had written an upbeat, gospel-flavored hit called “San Fernando Valley,” which Sinatra sang on the Vimms show:
I’ll forget my sins
I’ll be makin’ new friends …
It was a lovely song, and one very much of its era: wholehearted, full of the American promise of rebirth through moving west. Crosby recorded it around the same time, and his version is a thing of beauty—the forty-year-old Old Groaner at the top of his game, playing with the number’s spiritual flavor, then reaching down low to kick it home. Still, it’s a middle-aged reading. Sinatra’s version—lighter, more youthful, and genuinely optimistic—has that unique quality that Haymes and Eberly, for all their appealing masculinity, simply couldn’t bring off: the quality of conversation. Frank had lasered in on the lyric and, as his old teacher Quinlan had taught him, understood its depths. As a result, the singer was able to tell the song as an irresistibly charming story.
It was an irresistible story to Frank himself. In his westward relocation, he was reinventing and expanding himself, moving onto a larger canvas. The new house was of a piece with the expansion. It was full of big rooms: an antidote to his claustrophobia. On the wall of his new den (his own den!) was a framed quotation from none other than Schopenhauer: “Music is the only form of Art which touches the Absolute.”
The musician, however, did not himself wish to be touched: the house was surrounded by a high wall, to keep fans at bay. There were other lovely perks. Tied up at Sinatra’s private dock was a new single-masted sailboat, a gift from Axel Stordahl. And whenever the phone’s incessant ringing began to get to him, Frank could swim or sail out to a wooden raft and play poker with cronies. Hasbrouck Heights’s Warm Valley, with its little rooms and lingering cooking smells and close-in neighbors, was a distant memory.
Frank and Nancy named the new place Warm Valley too, in hopes of importing some domestic good luck (not that that had been in high supply back in Hasbrouck Heights). But it might not have been a good omen that the house’s previous owner was the bedroom-eyed actress Mary Astor, whose lurid private life had been a tabloid playground in the mid-and late 1930s.
Life remained complicated. Dolly was furious at being left in the dust of the Barbatos’ mass westward exodus. Over each successive month in the last five years, less and less love had been lost between her and Nancy; now, to all appearances anyway, her snip of a daughter-in-law had triumphed. And gone Hollywood. The Sunday-afternoon long-distance phone calls between the dutiful son and the irrepressible Dolly grew increasingly tense. Her anti-Nancy vitriol cannot have failed to leach into her son’s system. Even as he was making a game effort at reviving his domestic situation, Sinatra was increasingly skeptical about his marriage.
And rhapsodize as he might about reinventing himself, Frank knew the West was alien soil. “When I arrived at MGM, I was a nobody in movies,” he later told his daughter Nancy. “What was I? Just a crooner. A guy who got up and hung on to a microphone in a bad tuxedo and brown shoes.” Hollywood is traditionally inhospitable to presumptuous strangers, no matter how celebrated they may be elsewhere, until they have demonstrated both fealty and mastery.
Sinatra, of course, had demonstrated neither. He had done two features for RKO (only one of them released to date), and he had garnered some respectable reviews. He had wowed Old Man Mayer and entered the MGM stable. He hadn’t really produced. He might be a national phenomenon, but he wasn’t a Hollywood phenomenon. Then as now, Hollywood made its own rules.
And Sinatra broke them virtually from the get-go. He was due to start shooting his first MGM feature, a musical called Anchors Aweigh, in mid-June, but before he even began work, he insisted that the studio hire his pals Styne and Cahn to write the songs. Producer Joe Pasternak shook his head. Mack Gordon and Harry Warren, they were movie songwriters. Burke and Van Heusen, they were movie songwriters. But Gordon and Warren and Burke and Van Heusen were all profitably engaged elsewhere, and Styne and Cahn’s big movie credit was Step Lively, a little RKO picture that hadn’t even been released, and MGM wasn’t buying.
Sinatra, for whom business and friendship were inseparable, dug in his heels.
“It came to such an impasse,” Sammy Cahn wrote in his autobiography, “that Lew Wasserman, head of MCA, came to me to plead, ‘Unless Frank gives in, he’ll lose the picture. Won’t you talk with him?’ I of course went to Frank and said, ‘Frank, you’ve already done enough for me. Why don’t you pass on this one? There’ll be others.’ He looked at me … and said: ‘If you’re not there Monday, I’m not there Monday.’
“I was there Monday. So was he.”
Frank was there, but he wasn’t happy. He was in over his head and he knew it. This wasn’t RKO; he couldn’t just float through a picture on charm and a few songs. He would get to sing in Anchors Aweigh, but he was also going to have to do something he had never done before: dance. And not just dance, but dance alongside Gene Kelly.
Kelly was three years older than Sinatra, and the same height, but forty pounds heavier. The forty pounds was all muscle, and there began the differences between Frank Albert Sinatra of Hoboken and Eugene Curran Kelly of Pittsburgh, who was unlike anybody Sinatra had met in Hollywood. Handsome, tough, cheerful, and athletically brilliant, Gene Kelly was a walking paradox: a blue-collar jock who happened to be a superlative dancer, the opposite of the slim, ethereally elegant Fred Astaire. (Even years later, when Sinatra and Astaire might have become friends, Frank remained intimidated by the dancer’s aura. “Frank thought Fred was the class act of all time,” said the director Bud Yorkin, who worked with both men at different times. “He said, ‘I can’t be Fred Astaire.’ ”) Sinatra was intimidated by Kelly, too—not by his classiness, but by his sheer dancing ability. Very fortunately for him, though, Kelly shook the singer’s hand, looked him in the eye, and decided to help him out.
Every meeting between two men, and especially between two men who might reasonably see themselves as competitors, is essentially an encounter between Robin Hood and Little John—a joust on a log over a stream, with one bound to wind up on his behind in the water. Kelly, who was both starring in Anchors Aweigh and directing its dance sequences, maturely decided that if he held Frank Sinatra’s hand rather than kicked his ass, they would both come out the better for it.
What conditioned Kelly’s decision was not just professional wisdom but confidence. He wasn’t worried about yielding his position to Sinatra. (For one thing, though he had enlisted in the Navy early in the war, the Navy decided Kelly could best serve by making propaganda films, and allowed him to act in Hollywood on the side.) Sinatra saw his self-assurance, and respected it. And so it was settled in a split second: the two men decided to like each other.
The movie was directed by a boy wonder named George Sidney (who, four years earlier, had produced Ava Gardner’s screen test—and would go on to direct Annie Get Your Gun, Show Boat, Bye Bye Birdie, and Viva Las Vegas). Anchors Aweigh was a standard MGM musical of the 1940s, built around the idea of two sailors on leave in Los Angeles—kind of a run-through for the much more successful On the Town, four years later. A tongue-in-cheek Kelly played th
e wolf of the fleet, and Frank was the goofily shy former church choirmaster Clarence Doolittle.
The ace MGM scenarist Isobel Lennart wrote the inspired characterization, which might as well have been cooked up by George Evans. Sinatra got to wear a uniform that at once flattered his slim physique and countered the draft-dodger image. (So flattering was that sailor suit that Frank would find it difficult to get out of it for the rest of his brief career at MGM.) And he got to act like a complete dunce around women. He was sweet and convincingly gentle.
The picture had several dance sequences, most notably a groundbreaking scene in which Kelly tripped the light fantastic with the Hanna-Barbera-animated mouse Jerry, of Tom and Jerry fame. But making Jerry Mouse move gracefully merely involved hand painting thousands of cels. Making Frank Sinatra dance was something else again.
Kelly did his heroic best. As Sinatra told his daughter Nancy:
I was born with a couple of left feet, and I didn’t even know how to walk, let alone dance. It was Gene who saw me through. We became a team only because he had the patience of Job, and the fortitude not to punch me in the mouth because I was so impatient. Moviemaking takes a lot of time, and I couldn’t understand why. He managed to calm me when it was important to calm me, because we were doing something that we wanted to do. Apart from being a great artist, he’s a born teacher, and he taught me how to move and how to dance. We worked hard and he was a taskmaster. Rehearsal for each routine took eight weeks every day. I couldn’t dance exactly like he danced so he danced down to me. He taught me everything I know.