by James Kaplan
The hell of it was that she was still in love with him. She knew him: to her, he was still the boy with the ukulele who had courted her down the shore so long ago. Every once in a while, when the clouds lifted for a second and he smiled, she could see that boy. She knew about the other women, and she hated it, but what could she do? She had asked Frank to be discreet, but now they were in Hollywood, capital of indiscretion, where the night and the day had a thousand eyes. He was so cold lately: she knew exactly what was going on.
But what could she do about it?
It went without saying that when Frank went out, he went out without her. Once he left the house, he never wanted for company. Sanicola and Silvani were with him at all times, to fend off the riffraff; and he could always summon the posse—Cahn, Stordahl, Styne, Silvers, Chester. Other stars might create a stir when they walked into a joint, but no one else walked in with such a retinue. One blossom-heavy night in May 1945, Sinatra and company stopped by Preston Sturges’s restaurant, the Players, on Sunset across from the Garden of Allah. There, in a banquette near the front door, sat a man Frank genuinely idolized, Humphrey Bogart, with his beautiful young bride, Betty Bacall.
Sinatra took immediate notice of Bacall: Bogart’s fourth wife was just twenty, with lazily insinuating feline eyes, voluptuous lips, and perfect skin. She smiled at Sinatra, he smiled back at her, and Bogart took it all in. He was jealous—what man wouldn’t be?—but he also wore an air of carefully maintained irony. He was a world-weary forty-five years old, with a rapidly receding hairline, bags under his eyes, and a perpetual cigarette between nicotine-stained fingers. Humphrey Bogart looked at Frank Sinatra and, smiling that wolfish smile, said, “They tell me you have a voice that makes girls faint. Make me faint.”
Frank grinned. The world’s toughest tough guy was giving him the full treatment. He accepted the compliment. “I’m taking the week off,” he told Bogart.
Bogart liked his sand, asked him to sit down for a minute and have a drink.
But there were other nights when Sinatra was out with Marilyn—or, since she was, after all, married (for whatever that was worth in Hollywood), any one of a dozen other girls, at Ciro’s, the Trocadero, Mocambo—and Hedda and Louella and their colleagues had to write something. “What blazing new swoon crooner has been seen night clubbing with a different starlet every night?” ran one blind item. Another: “Wonder if the wonder boy of hit records tells his wife where he goes after dark.”
In a small town, a company town, Wonder Boy’s wife was all too aware, and it was killing her inside, but what could she do?
She did her best. In a land of extreme, overbearing beauty, Nancy Barbato Sinatra of Jersey City was mousy at worst, merely lovely at best. She did her best. She had more work done on her teeth, and, as much as she hated spending all that money (she could never forget the days when she’d slaved as a secretary at American Type Founders in Elizabeth), Nancy bought some Jean Louis gowns for those rare occasions when he took her out. She tried to look as good as she possibly could, but deep down she knew she was Jersey City and always would be. She was both ashamed of it and proud. She took care of her babies, she talked for hours with her mother and sisters, and—having taken the driving lessons but still unwilling to scratch the new Cadillac convertible—she tooled around town doing errands in the other new car he’d bought her, a big Chrysler station wagon. She was quite a sight in it. Petite as she was (a little taller than Dolly, but not much), Nancy could barely see over the steering wheel without sitting on a pillow.
She also took care of his business. In a handwritten letter to Manie Sacks, undated, on heavy white stationery with “FRANK SINATRA” embossed in blue across the top, she expressed concern for the record executive’s health, noted that she was returning (for unexplained reasons) a check of his, passed along household news about the children’s health and schooling (oddly, strikingly, referring to Frankie as Francis Emanuel1), and then came to the point. Frank was beginning a New York theater stand (probably the Paramount), and she asked Manie’s help in seeing that he got his rest. “I am depending on you to watch him,” she wrote, “for you know how Frank likes to make the spots … and stay out late talking.”
It would take a heart of stone not to melt. I am depending on you to watch him. Frank likes to make the spots and stay out late talking. Talking. Poor Nancy! Poor Manie!
Frank Sinatra didn’t have a heart of stone, but rather, one that was divided into a million chambers. He knew all too well how his wife felt, yet he could not change. Nancy was going thirty miles an hour; Frank was moving at the speed of sound. Even while he slept, his mind churned, calculating the possibilities: Metro. Columbia. Radio. Theater. Marilyn. Lana. Betty. Jean. Jane.
The possibilities were infinite, and he never stopped. He darted back and forth between the two coasts like a hummingbird. In February he reported, yet again, to his draft board in Jersey City, playing out the unfunny comedy a little further, getting reclassified yet again, to 2-A, which meant he was not only physically unfit to serve but also employed in an occupation “necessary to the national health, safety, and interest.” IS CROONING ESSENTIAL? one headline asked. And then, on March 5, the draft board announced it had all been a mistake, that 4-F was the real classification. The headlines and editorials fulminated some more … but Sinatra was too fast for them. On March 6, he was back in the studio in Hollywood, recording four more numbers, including a Norman Rockwell poster of a tune Gordon Jenkins called “Homesick, That’s All”:
I miss the times I had to set the table,
I miss the rolls my mother made when she was able.
Sinatra gave the song his tenderest reading, pitching it shamelessly both to the audience that hated him most, the millions of men who were still far from home, and to the audience that adored him: the women who kept the home fires burning. Nancy, of course, heard it, too.
But she wouldn’t get to see him: the moment he finished the session, he turned on a dime and headed right back east. There was a Western Union telegram, dated March 8, 1945, from Manie:
MR. FRANK SINATRA, 1051 VALLEY SPRING LANE, NORTH HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA. JUST READ IN WINCHELL’S COLUMN THAT YOU AND COLUMBIA RECORD EXECUTIVES ON THE OUTS. WHAT IS IT ABOUT? THINK GOOD IDEA TO WIRE WINCHELL TELLING HIM THAT SOMEONE IS GIVING HIM WRONG INFORMATION. SEE YOU MONDAY. LOVE AND KISSES, MANIE.
But the next day, by return wire, Frank jokingly affirmed Winchell’s position, telling Manie to look out for a punch in the nose when he got back to town. He, too, signed with love and kisses.
Frank’s recording was going beautifully, the recording business, less so. Columbia was crimping him on studio charges, charging him for copying, arrangements, Axel’s conducting fees. Crimping him, Sinatra!
Still, there is no evidence that he gave Sacks anything but a hug when they met in New York: Sinatra never was one for personal confrontation. Besides, even where Manie was concerned, Frank had someplace else to be—a radio show, a dinner at Toots’s, a speaking engagement at the World Youth rally at Carnegie Hall. He was a blur of motion. Making the spots. Staying out late. Talking.
Strangely enough, one of the glamour girls Sinatra had claimed he could live without—in Phil Silvers’s lyric at least—had started spending time at 1051 Valley Spring Lane, mostly when the man of the house wasn’t there. Lana Turner had struck up a conversation with Nancy at the New Year’s Eve party, and the odd couple had hit it off: the petite blonde from Idaho with the checkered past and the even more petite brunette from Jersey City with the practical turn of mind and an artist’s hand in the kitchen. They had laughed together that night, at Lana’s lightly scathing comment about the anatomical shortcomings of one of the handsomest men there. The remark let Nancy breathe easier about her own shortcomings, her new hometown’s unrelenting tyranny of beauty.
Lana, of course, was almost impossibly beautiful, but something in her brown eyes spoke of pain and a restless sadness. Hollywood was nothing but a boiler factory as far as she was co
ncerned, her privileged place in it notwithstanding. The men were all fairies or hounds, sometimes both. (Not Frank, of course. Nancy had a real man—maybe ’cause he didn’t look like all those cookie-cutter hunks.) And the women were all out to slit each other’s throats.
That was why Lana liked Nancy: she was someone she could really talk to. She played with a strand of Nancy’s hair. And Lana loved the way she looked, too.
Nancy smiled, accepting the compliment. Finally she felt a little less lonely. And she was delighted to tell her family and her friends back in Jersey: At last she had a real friend in Hollywood, and they wouldn’t believe who it was. Lana Turner!
Inconceivably—he had been president since Frank was seventeen—FDR died in April. Frank, in New York, went to light a candle at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, then drove up to Hyde Park for a memorial service. He felt deeply sad, as though he had lost a beloved uncle; he felt sorrow with the rest of the country. You couldn’t avoid it; it was in the air like the weather. But somehow the sadness didn’t get Frank where he lived. He was young, in the vibrant prime of life; Roosevelt had been an old, sick man.
Still, Frank had shaken his hand, looked in his eyes … Death was such a strange thing: it gave him the creeps. Best not to think about it.
Less than a month later, with the nation still in mourning, the war in Europe was over, and grief turned to joy. It would still be months before the hundreds of thousands of troops came home, and George Evans and Jack Keller agreed that the time had come at last for Sinatra to go over and entertain them. It would quell the jingoistic newspapermen—not to mention the gossip columnists.
Frank’s daughter Nancy has written that her father was unable to travel overseas before the end of the war because the FBI, suspicious of his left-wing activities, prevented him from getting a visa. In fact, J. Edgar Hoover didn’t get really interested in Sinatra until after the war, and when he did, it wasn’t just because of the singer’s liberal sympathies.
The truth is that Sinatra hadn’t gone abroad during the war because he’d been scared.
As he had every right to be. He read the papers. He had seen Stars and Stripes, even after Evans and Keller tried to keep it away from him. He had seen the tomatoes speckling his picture on the Paramount marquee, had heard the catcalls in the street, had felt it when he did USO shows Stateside: not all of the servicemen hated him (he could win them over when he was in a room or a theater with them)—but an awful lot did. He was the ultimate cuckolder: He might not have actually screwed their women (still, who knew? rumor had it the guy really got around), but he was in their heads. Their wives and girlfriends wanted him, and that was bad enough.
For the troops overseas, it was much worse. Missing home and missing nooky most of all, they were convinced their women were stepping out on them—and in many instances, of course, they were right. Sinatra the draft dodger was the lightning rod for their insecurity. When Evans and Keller floated the idea of a post V-E Day Sinatra tour, the Hollywood Victory Committee, the group of Screen Actors Guild worthies who ran the Canteen, weighed right in. “There might be some unpleasantness,” they said. Frank had heard rumors that the troops would throw eggs at him, maybe worse … These guys had guns, for God’s sake.
Evans and Keller had a brilliant idea.
They’d seen Phil Silvers doing shtick with Sinatra at the Hollywood Canteen: making fun of Frank’s skinniness, pinching his cheeks and pulling his ears, teaching him to sing. This last bit was particularly funny—the droopy-eyed comedian would go on and on about how Sinatra’s tones weren’t round enough, would play with his mouth to get his lips to form just the right shape … and no matter what Sinatra did, it was wrong. Silvers, who had come up through baggy-pants vaudeville, was brilliant, and the bit was hilarious.
Evans called Phil and asked him to oversee Sinatra’s USO tour, introduce him at every stop. Do the same stuff he did with him at the Canteen. Make plenty of fun of him. Push him around a little. Silvers would be doing everything those GIs really wanted to do to him, and he’d be getting them on Frank’s side in the process.
It worked like a charm. In June, Sinatra and Silvers flew to Casablanca on an Army C-47, along with the pianist Saul Chaplin, the actress and singer Fay McKenzie, and the dancer Betty Yeaton. At every dusty camp they played, Silvers slapped Sinatra’s cheeks, and the soldiers roared. He ordered him offstage—“Go away, boy, you bother me. The Blood Bank’s down the street”—and they guffawed. By the time the comedian was done with Frank, the GIs were begging to hear him sing. Not an egg was thrown. “The singer kidded himself throughout the program and had the audience on his side all the way,” the New York Times reported. The troupe played bases in North Africa, then flew to Rome, where the singer had an audience with Pope Pius XII, who didn’t know who Sinatra was (“Are you a tenor, my son? Which operas do you sing?”), though he had heard of Crosby. They played Rome and Caserta and Foggia and Venice. And then they flew home. They had done seventeen shows in ten days, entertained ninety-seven thousand servicemen and servicewomen.
The minute Sinatra stepped off the plane at La Guardia, he stuck his foot in his mouth. The USO and Army Special Services were incompetent, he told the crowd of reporters. “Shoemakers in uniform run the entertainment division,” he said. “Most of them had no experience in show business. They didn’t know what time it was.”
What was his problem? Maybe the lighting cues had been off, or a few microphones hadn’t worked. Maybe the dressing rooms had been insufficient; maybe he was still grouchy about the pope. (Or just the dirt. It couldn’t have been easy for a true obsessive-compulsive, a man who was in the habit of showering and changing his underwear several times a day, to deal with military amenities in dirt-poor North Africa and Italy.)
He later defended himself by saying that GIs had asked him to complain about how poorly organized and presented most of the shows were. There was plenty to gripe about in a theater of war, even after the big show was over. But Sinatra, who could turn irritable if the wind shifted, was the wrong person to do the griping. His momentarily silenced critics got right back into gear. “Mice make women faint too,” sneered the Stars and Stripes. “He is doing an injustice to a group of people who are for the most part talented, hardworking, and sincere. There have been, of course, the usual prima donnas who have flown over, had their pictures taken with GIs, and got the hell home.” And dependable Lee Mortimer jumped on the bandwagon, calling Sinatra’s post V-E Day mini-tour a “joy ride,” comparing him unfavorably to “aging, ailing men like Joe E. Brown and Al Jolson [who] subjected themselves to enemy action, jungle disease, and the dangers of traveling through hostile skies from the beginning of the war.”
George Evans took it all with apparent calm. Even though his heedless client had innumerable ways of ratcheting up the publicist’s blood pressure, even though Sinatra often seemed to work overtime at being his own worst enemy, the Sinatra machine looked unstoppable.
In mid-July, Anchors Aweigh came out, and it was a huge hit, with the critics and at the box office. Even the Times’s reliably crusty Bosley Crowther waxed grudgingly enthusiastic (after first giving well-deserved raves to Gene Kelly, “the Apollonian marvel of the piece”): “But bashful Frankie is a large-sized contributor to the general fun and youthful charm of the show.”
The show made big money, and Louis B. Mayer’s thin smile grew broader. He had been right about that boy.
Meanwhile, Evans and Keller plunged ahead with a new campaign. If the public was going to hear a lot of nonsense about the starlets Frankie was stepping out with in Hollywood and the ungracious remarks he persisted in making about worthy organizations like Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and the U.S. Army, the public was also going to see another side of him: Frank Sinatra was going to be a humanitarian.
It wasn’t phony. He was a humanitarian at heart. (Or at least in one of the many chambers of his heart.) He hated intolerance—first, of course, because it had smacked him personally in the face many times, but also
because it attacked people he genuinely loved. Hadn’t Mrs. Golden clasped him to her substantial breast and cooed to him in Yiddish? Didn’t he love Manie like a brother? A couple of years earlier, when intimations of the Holocaust first started to emerge, Frank had had dozens of medals made up with the cross of Saint Christopher on one side and the Star of David on the other (a daring gesture in those days). He had given them out left and right.
And where Negroes were concerned, anyone who was half a musician couldn’t even begin to be prejudiced. Sinatra had encountered far too many black geniuses to feel anything but pity and contempt for the thickheaded smugness of racist America. He had kissed Billie Holiday the way she ought to be kissed one night outside a Los Angeles club; he had dreamed of doing much more. He would always have a thing for black women, though, in truth, this, like everything else about him, was complicated: by his misogyny, his own feelings of inferiority.
His feelings of compassion were purely emotional. But when he talked about them with George Evans, the publicist realized Frank was being honest. And those feelings were golden. Evans repped some of the greatest entertainers in the business, yet none had Sinatra’s capacity to become a great American. Evans talked about it with Keller, and they agreed on a strategy: they would flood out the bad with the good. They sent their boy out to thirty speaking engagements in 1945, many of them at high schools in the throes of racial tension. In the fall, Frank went to Benjamin Franklin H.S. in Italian East Harlem, where there had been fistfights among the integrated student body. The future jazz giant Sonny Rollins, then a sophomore, recalled many years later, “Sinatra came down there and sang in our auditorium … after that things got better, and the rioting stopped.”