Frank

by James Kaplan

  This is remarkably self-knowing. Frank was pathologically impatient, a characteristic that power and fame aggravated. (It was on Anchors Aweigh that his hatred of doing anything more than once, especially where the movies were concerned, earned him the nickname “One-Take Charlie.”) Underneath was always a panicky uncertainty. He could be sweet when he was unsure: when he stepped on the actress Pamela Britton’s toes during a dance number, he “quickly apologized,” he recalled. Whereupon Britton “smiled bravely and said, ‘Oh, that’s all right. You’re very light on my feet.’ ”

  But more to the point was another confession: “Because I didn’t think I was as talented as some of the people who worked [at MGM], I went through periods of depression and I’d get terribly embarrassed.” When Frank felt humiliated, his first reaction was to bark commands. If others were humiliated in the process, all the better.

  His hot-blooded reactions endeared him to no one, even the Job-like Kelly. “We used to play mean, nasty tricks on Frank Sinatra, because he was always a pain in the neck,” Kelly’s assistant on the film, the dancer Stanley Donen, told his, Donen’s, biographer. “He didn’t want to work and was very quixotic and quick to anger, so we used to take great pleasure in teasing him.”

  Kelly and Donen came up with a great practical joke, revolving around the MGM commissary, where they broke for lunch every day with Sinatra:

  The MGM commissary had square tables with blue plastic tops, pushed against the walls, like in a cafeteria. Every table was square, all but one, and that belonged to Gerry Mayer [Louis B.’s brother, who ran the studio’s physical operations].

  So one day, mean bastards that we were, Gene and I said to Frank, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could have a round table? It’s so much nicer that way, because then we could sit closer together.” As soon as Frank heard us say that, he said, “You watch, I’ll get us a round table.”

  There was no way Frank was going to get us a round table. We knew that. Then, when he was told to forget it, he got into this huge argument. He steamed and he fumed and threw fits and said he was going to quit. All this for a round table.

  Early in the shoot of Anchors Aweigh, Sinatra, insecure about how he was coming across in the movie (and probably worried about all those single takes), asked to see rushes. Pasternak told him that this wasn’t done. When actors saw themselves on-screen, the producer said, they always asked for retakes, which cost time and money. Sinatra exploded; Pasternak relented. “Listen,” he said, “I’m not supposed to do this, but I’ll make an exception and let you see them. Just you, though, and nobody else.”

  Sinatra arrived for the secret screening with an entourage. This time Pasternak was the one who got furious. “I said just for you,” he told Frank. “Not for half a dozen.”

  Frank announced, once again, that he was walking off the picture. Pasternak told him to go right ahead. Sinatra walked—then, not wanting to test his expendability, came back the next day.

  But the pattern had been set. One afternoon, a United Press reporter who was on the set to interview the pianist José Iturbi got more than he bargained for: a choice outburst from a frustrated Sinatra. “Pictures stink and most of the people in them do too,” he told the writer. “Hollywood won’t believe I’m through, but they’ll find out I mean it.”

  He had already pushed the limits by insisting on Cahn and Styne and upsetting the producer with his special needs. This blasphemous tantrum was the kind of thing that could get an actor, even a high-paid one, run out of town. Sinatra’s team quickly went into damage control. “It was the hottest day of the year,” his manager Al Levy told the press. “Naturally he was tired, but that crack was never intended for that fat fellow with the glasses [the reporter].” And Jack Keller quickly placed a statement by Sinatra (written by Keller) in the papers:

  It’s easy for a guy to get hot under the collar, literally and figuratively, when he’s dressed in a hot suit of Navy blues and the temperature is a hundred and four degrees and he’s getting over a cold to boot.

  I think I might have spoken too broadly about quitting pictures and about my feeling toward Hollywood.

  To say the least. And while it could certainly get hot under the klieg lights of a soundstage, especially in those pre-air-conditioned days, the summer of 1944 was in fact a typically temperate one in Culver City. In fact, as the war raged across Europe and the Pacific, it was a lovely summer in Los Angeles—a city of low white and pastel buildings, smogless in those days, full of fragrant blossoms and, for every working actor and screenwriter, five unemployed ones. Frank knew this, even as the black headlines blared of invasions and battles. Hollywood had its charms, and Sinatra was not about to lose them. Despite the aggravation of working at MGM, there were too many compensations: One day when the gaffers had taken around an hour too long to light the set, Frank simply got up and walked off the soundstage, into the studio alley. Turning right, down another alley to another soundstage, he went through another heavy door, with its sign saying QUIET PLEASE, past gaping extras, and up to a petite blonde deliciously filling out a tight WAC uniform. Her back was to him, but when she saw the reaction of the assistant director she’d been speaking to, she turned: it was Lana. She was in the midst of shooting another service comedy, this one about the Women’s Army Corps and titled Keep Your Powder Dry. She was also in the midst of leaving her second husband for the second time (long story), and seeing Peter Lawford, Bob Stack, and the exotically handsome Turhan Bey. But her big grin at Sinatra said she wouldn’t mind seeing a lot more of him, soon. And quite soon, she was, he was, they were.

  Even as he exhausted himself rehearsing dance sequences (and stepping out with Lana), Sinatra continued to do his radio shows that summer: it was important to maintain his multimedia presence. It was also expensive. Lucky Strike allowed him to broadcast his Your Hit Parade segments from the West Coast on the condition that the singer pay out of pocket for studio rental, Stordahl’s orchestra, and the AT&T phone feed to New York. The total was $4,800 per show, $2,000 more than his weekly salary.

  Even Sinatra couldn’t be everywhere at once. In July, he had to cancel a scheduled return to the Riobamba in Manhattan; to replace him, MCA sent a kid whom the agency’s man in Cleveland had spotted singing with the Sammy Watkins Orchestra. The tall, dark, athletically handsome twenty-seven-year-old, out of Steubenville, Ohio, had been christened Dino Crocetti, but naturally that wouldn’t do for a stage name. Wrote the ever-perceptive Lee Mortimer in the Daily Mirror, “In Sinatra’s singing spot is a chap by the name of Dean Martin, who sounds like him, uses the same arrangements of the same songs and almost looks like him.” In a later blurb, Mortimer added a fillip: “Sings and looks like Sinatra—only healthier.”

  Frank and Gene Kelly play a couple of sailors on shore leave in MGM’s Anchors Aweigh, 1945. (photo credit 14.2)

  15

  Sinatramania. The Paramount, October 12, 1944. Frank’s publicist, George Evans, hired an ambulance to park outside the theater and issued the ushers bottles of ammonia “in case a patron feels like swooning.” (photo credit 15.1)

  In Hollywood, Sinatra was just one star in a galaxy (not to mention an official pain in the ass); in New York he was king. And, after finishing Anchors Aweigh in September, he came east to reclaim his crown. He was about to begin a new stand at the Paramount, the first in over a year. On the long train ride east, while Sanicola and Al Levy and Stordahl and his bodyguard Al Silvani played gin rummy, drank, and stared out the window, Frank read.

  It was a habit he had picked up on the Dorsey bus, during the long rides through the night from city to city. He’d begun with dime novels, but quickly grew bored with the cheesy writing and flimsy plots. He wanted more than diversion; he wanted to improve himself. Now and then on the road he had been introduced to witty people who wanted to do more than gossip—they wanted to talk about the Depression and the New Deal and the labor movement. And while Sinatra had strong, inchoate emotions about the things they were discussing, to h
is embarrassment he lacked both the words and the hard knowledge to participate fully.

  He began to read newspapers—not just the news, but the editorials and reviews. He was hungry for knowledge and the tools to express it. (He even began doing crossword puzzles, was pleased to find he was good at them.) When Frank thought about what moved him, he kept coming back to the times he had been made to feel small for who he was.

  Everywhere he went, he felt revolted by the casual way Negroes were belittled and excluded. It helped to be white, but as soon as people found out he was Italian, things changed. If you were Italian, in fact, by many people’s definition you weren’t quite white anyway. When you had a name that ended with a vowel, it was easy to feel you weren’t a full-fledged American.

  Except that he knew he was. Just as he knew that Billie and Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson and Lester Young and all the other great musicians he met on Fifty-second Street and in Harlem were too.

  Now Frank read to express these thoughts. He worked his way through thick books about prejudice: Gunnar Myrdal’s American Dilemma, Gustavus Myers’s History of Bigotry in the United States, Howard Fast’s novel about Reconstruction, Freedom Road. When Sanicola and Levy saw him sitting in his train or plane seat with his nose in a tome, they’d shrug. “Frank,” they’d say with a sigh, meaning that was just the way he was. He also washed his hands twenty-five times a day, for Christ’s sake.

  But when George Evans saw what his client was reading, he knew he had a gold mine on his hands. It wasn’t just that Evans, a dyed-in-the-wool liberal himself, agreed with Sinatra; it was that a right-minded, crusading Sinatra would make people forget all about the Sinatra who had dodged the draft.

  This time when he reached the city, Dolly demanded to see him the second he got off the train. Frankie winced ever so slightly as his mother reached up to pinch his thin cheek.

  Jesus Christ! Didn’t they fucking feed him anything out there?

  After he saw his parents, he made another call, one that Dolly wouldn’t be very happy with.

  A good pal of Sinatra’s, the frog-voiced, backslapping Times Square saloon keeper Toots Shor, badly wanted to meet the president. This wasn’t just a wild dream—Shor was a world-class character, and his restaurant was a crossroads for manly men from many walks of life, the Democratic National Committee chairman, Robert Hannegan, among them. It was election season, the ailing FDR was running for a fourth term, and Hannegan knew that the weary Roosevelt was up for some diversion. He told Shor he was welcome to come to tea at the White House if he didn’t mind a bit of a crowd—twenty people or so.

  Tea at the White House! “Could I bring Sinatt?” Shor croaked, taking out his cigar and grinning. He pointed to the round table where Sinatra was holding court. “And could I bring Rags?”

  Rags Ragland, a hulking former truck driver, boxer, and burlesque comic, was currently employed as a character actor in Hollywood. He had played a lovable cop in Anchors Aweigh and hit it off with Sinatra, who always liked having tough guys around. Now Rags was part of the entourage.

  The motley little crew flew down from La Guardia the next day, and at 3:00 p.m. they were escorted into the White House’s Red Room, where FDR himself sat, laughing that famous laugh at something a pretty lady was saying to him. Despite his gallantry, he looked like death warmed over. The war, the presidency itself, the polio—it all had desiccated him. The circles under his eyes were almost as dark as his suit. In fact he would live six months and two weeks from that day.

  But Sinatra couldn’t help himself: he had goose bumps just at the sight of the great man. Then Hannegan was introducing him, and FDR was staring up at Sinatra with those black-bagged eyes, grinning with his crooked gray teeth, shaking his hand. The two most famous men in America regarded each other.

  The president turned to his secretary, Marvin McIntyre. “Mac, imagine this guy making them swoon. He would never have made them swoon in our day, right?”

  Sinatra’s smile tightened just a fraction. Implicit in the pleasantry was an ethnic dismissal: this skinny little guinea … Roosevelt was a democrat as well as a Democrat, but he was also a patrician, with ingrained prejudices. And Sinatra, beneath all his bravado and arrogance, was still a little guinea. This was the old order of things: the Founding Fathers were square-jawed white men, with noble heads and noble accents. Frank decided to love his president anyway.

  On the flight home that night, Sinatra delved deeper into his Gustavus Myers. The next day, on Evans’s recommendation, he made a substantial donation in his and Nancy’s name to the Democratic campaign fund. (This was a far rarer act in those pre-media-saturated days than now. Most entertainers then, fearful of the effects political alignment might have on their careers, stayed studiously neutral. And the size of Sinatra’s gift, $7,500—the equivalent of $90,000 today—was a surprise to Evans and especially to the purse-string-holding Nancy, who asked her husband on the telephone that night if he was out of his mind.)

  With Evans’s and Keller’s encouragement, Sinatra accepted invitations to join the political action committee of the radical Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and the Independent Voters Committee of the Arts and Sciences for Roosevelt (Fredric March, Bette Davis, and Eddie Cantor were all members, as were John Dewey, Van Wyck Brooks, and Albert Einstein). Frank made radio broadcasts for FDR and spoke at rallies at Carnegie Hall and Madison Square Garden. But his largest audience by far would be in Times Square.

  When he opened at the Paramount it was as though a dam had burst. Sinatra had gone to California to become a movie star, but while he returned regularly, it was generally not to perform. The teenage girls who made up the first critical mass of his success knew that he had changed his base of operations, that he had gone Hollywood. They had waited faithfully by their radios, dreaming … But now he was back, and they came out in force, thousands upon thousands of them, lining up the night before to buy their tickets, packing Times Square, forcing the police department to send out reinforcements: detectives, traffic cops, and a dozen mounted men, 421 patrolmen and 20 patrolwomen in all.

  Then came the first show, at ten o’clock in the morning on Wednesday, October 11, and Bob Weitman, the Paramount’s manager, ignoring the fire laws, let almost five thousand fans (almost all of them girls) into a theater designed to seat thirty-five hundred. They brought sandwiches, apples, bananas, Cokes; they settled in and made themselves comfortable.

  And ten thousand still waited restlessly outside.

  The movie was Our Hearts Were Young and Gay—a Cornelia Otis Skinner biopic, of all things—with Charles Ruggles and Beulah Bondi in the starring roles. It might as well have been a documentary about wheat farming. The warm-up acts were Hit Parade singer Eileen Barton (Ben Barton’s daughter), dancers Pops and Louie, impressionist Ollie O’Toole. They performed to the sound of coughs and rustling sandwich bags.

  Then, with a soft hum and sleek hiss of silken pistons, up rose the great hydraulic platform bearing the forty-piece Raymond Paige Stage Door Canteen Radio Orchestra, and the screaming began.

  Paige raised his baton, the orchestra struck up the first strains of “This Love of Mine,” and the screams got louder.

  Suddenly that unmistakable head—the face still bore the traces of a California suntan—poked through the curtain, and the screams reached a deafening crescendo. The curtain parted; the slim figure in a dark suit and floppy bow tie emerged and strode to center stage. Ten thousand feet stamped the floor in unison. The screaming was white noise. The few boys in the audience (their ratio was one to ten) grimaced and held their hands to their ears.

  George Evans stood in the wings, awestruck at what he and his client had wrought.

  Frank grinned and blew the crowd a kiss. The pandemonium continued for minute after minute, undiminishing. He held up his hands, trying to say something.

  Finally the screaming quieted ever so slightly. “Please, please, please,” Sinatra was saying. He glanced around the huge theater. In all the world, ther
e were few gazes this intense.

  “Oh, Frankiee!” one shrill voice among the many cried—and the tumult cranked up once more.

  He raised his hands. And then, after a moment, just audibly: “Do you want me to leave the stage?”

  “No, no, no!” they chanted. “No! No! No!”

  “Then let’s see—”

  “No! No! No!”

  “Let’s see if we can’t be quiet enough to hear a complete arrangement,” Frank said forcefully.

  They quieted down just a little, and he began to sing.

  After an exhausting forty-five minutes of battling them, he sang his closing number, “Put Your Dreams Away,” bowed, threw some more kisses, and walked off the stage. The great platform slowly descended into the pit as Paige and his orchestra continued to play.

  Of the more than forty-five hundred in the theater, only a scattering stood up. In all, perhaps two hundred departed, a disproportionate number of them boys. The girls who filed out (no doubt having bowed to intense parental pressure) trudged with eyes downcast, as if they’d been expelled from paradise. Back in the seats, those who had stayed unwrapped more food, chatted with friends, filed their nails.

  Outside, the huge line inched forward two hundred places and stopped. The crowds, slowly growing aware of the monstrous injustice, pressed against the stanchions. The cops looked nervous.

  The theater doors closed.

  The girls behind the police lines pushed, shouted, wept in disbelief. Several fainted and had to be passed through the crowd to waiting ambulances. In the jammed side streets leading to Times Square, cabbies got out of their stopped vehicles and scratched their heads.

  There were six shows that day, and something like two full audiences got to see the show. But twenty, then twenty-five, then thirty thousand waited outside—screaming, shoving, crying hysterically, pissing their pants. During one of the shows, a cordon of cops suddenly burst from the theater, flanking a skinny, grinning eighteen-year-old boy in a double-breasted gray suit. His name was Alexander J. Dorogokupetz, and he had come to the Paramount to see what the big deal was about this little singer that the girl he was stuck on was stuck on. As the band had struck up “I Don’t Know Why (I Just Do),” a tender Fred Ahlert and Roy Turk ballad (Frank exquisitely aspirated the h’s in “why,” just as John Quinlan had taught him), Dorogokupetz had taken aim from third-row center and hurled an egg that hit the curtain and dropped on the stage. Sinatra barely saw it fly by. Then the second egg struck him smack in the face. The shell fragments stung like hell, the yolk and albumen dripped down his chin and onto his collar, but he managed to keep singing.