by James Kaplan
He had less luck in early November in Gary, Indiana, where a thousand white students at Froebel High had walked out of school, smashing windows with bricks, after a new principal declared the school’s 270 black students free to take classes, play in the orchestra, and share the swimming pool with everyone else. Sinatra, with Evans and Keller along for support, walked straight into a powder keg: a tough steel town where the white students’ fathers feared that blacks had come to take away their jobs. The kids were their parents’ outriders in hate; the whole city was united in toxic fury.
But of the five thousand Garyites who came to hear Sinatra sing—and speak afterward—at the city’s Memorial Auditorium, four thousand were women and girls. (He wore a bright blue bow tie—it went so well with his eyes—and a chrysanthemum presented to him by one of the students.) And while the overwhelmingly female audience assured he would get a sympathetic hearing, the event made no guarantee of strides toward racial tolerance in Gary, Indiana. Years afterward, Jack Keller offered a stirring version of the scene:
George and I were standing in the wings, and although we had told Frank what to say, we were skeptical and pretty damned frightened as to what might happen. Frank walked out onstage and stood dead center while all these rough, tough steel workers and their kids started catcalling and whistling and stamping their feet. Frank folded his arms, looked right down at them, and stared for a full two minutes, until there was a dead silence in the room. Evans and I were nervous wrecks wondering what in hell he was going to do.
Without smiling, Frank … finally unfolded his arms and moved to the microphone. “I can lick any son of a bitch in this joint,” he said. Pandemonium broke loose as the kids cheered him. They thought he was right down their street, and from then on, it was terrific.
According to Keller, Sinatra continued:
“I implore you to return to school. This is a bad deal, kids. It’s not good for you and it’s not good for the city of Gary, which has done so much to help with the war for freedom the world over.
“Believe me, I know something about the business of racial intolerance. At eleven I was called a ‘dirty guinea’ back home in New Jersey. We’ve all done it. We’ve all used the words ‘nigger’ or ‘kike’ or ‘mick’ or ‘Polack’ or ‘dago.’ Cut it out, kids. Go back to school. You’ve got to go back because you don’t want to be ashamed of your student body, your city, your country.”
A contemporary newspaper account, under the headline GARY HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS COOL ON SINATRA’S APPEAL, gave a more tempered view of the occasion. “The audience came to hear Sinatra sing and stayed to listen to what he had to say about the high school strike,” reported Illinois’s Edwardsville Intelligencer. “But at the soda fountain where some of the bobby sockers gathered after the meeting there was doubt that Sinatra’s appeal had worked. The strike leaders had not attended the meeting, and few of the striking students who were there stayed even throughout the program.”
This is somewhat at odds with the picture of the tough little singer facing down a roomful of hostile steelworkers. Maybe (it’s a great story) Frank did offer to lick any son of a bitch in the joint; maybe the quote was a product of Keller’s fertile imagination.2 Nevertheless, Sinatra (perhaps emboldened by the warmer than expected response of the GIs in North Africa and Italy) must be given points for going to Gary at all. And in the weeks that followed—even though the Froebel strike continued after he left—he racked up even more points, collecting an honorary scroll from the Bureau of Intercultural Education in New York (Eleanor Roosevelt, with whom Frank would form a warm bond, was the keynote speaker); the Philadelphia Golden Slipper Square Club’s annual unity award; the Newspaper Guild’s Page One Award; a citation for “outstanding efforts and contribution to the cause of religious tolerance and unity among Americans” from the National Conference of Christians and Jews; et cetera, et cetera.
Evans and Keller were thrilled. All those awards washed out a lot of nasty gossip, given the public’s short attention span. For the time being, anyway.
But it wasn’t just the high-school visits that lent Sinatra new moral substance. Over the summer, at the suggestion of former MGM production chief Mervyn LeRoy (“You could reach a thousand times more people if you’d tell your story on the screen”), he’d made a fifteen-minute movie short called The House I Live In. Sinatra plays himself in the RKO featurette, appearing first in a recording studio, singing “If You Are But a Dream,” and looking magnificent—slim, suntanned, and sleek (even shot from his bad side, though probably through gauze, by Robert De Grasse, who’d made him look so resplendent in Higher and Higher and Step Lively). His face, at this point in its development, is a long triangle beneath those sculpted cheekbones. He mugs shamelessly for the camera, acting the song, feeling the song, being the song—in short, dreaming. His eyebrows rise expressively, that beautiful mouth trembles passionately. Then he switches gears.
When he steps outside for a smoke, he encounters a gang of boys who have cornered another kid with dark hair and Semitic features.
“What’s he got? Smallpox or somethin’?” Sinatra asks.
“We don’t like his religion!” one of the gang responds.
“His religion?”
“Look, mister,” another boy pipes up. “He’s a dirty—”
“Now, hold on!” Sinatra interjects. He softens. “Look, fellas,” he says. “Religion makes no difference. Except maybe to a Nazi, or somebody that’s stupid. Why, people all over the world worship God in many different ways. God created everybody.”
As he explains it to them, he’s acting as passionately as he acted while he sang in the recording studio, only now it’s in a slightly different key—now, rather than being romantic, Frank is being kind and thoughtful and gentle but strong: ultimately persuasive. You’d never guess in a million years that this is a man with a temper so violent and unpredictable that his best friends, including Sammy Cahn and Phil Silvers, are terrified of him. The man in The House I Live In is Sinatra’s best self, twenty-nine years old and beautiful and solid and thoughtful. This self existed, not just on celluloid. Seeing him reasoning with the tough kids and persuading them, you just want to give this guy a prize of some sort.
Then, before long, he’s breaking into song again, to the kids this time. It’s the title number, a paean to tolerance. What was America to him?
All races and religions
That’s America to me.
And it was dynamite. Looking at the film (and listening to the song) three generations later, you can’t help thinking: Okay, this is corny in a lot of ways, but what’s wrong with it? How far have we really come since then? It’s that well done.
Mervyn LeRoy directed the short. The Hollywood leftist Albert Maltz wrote the script, and the New York leftist Abel Meeropol, under his pen name Lewis Allan, wrote the title song’s lyrics. The little film had great impact. It got people talking about tolerance; the liberal press ate it up. Practically overnight, as Tom and Phil Kuntz write in The Sinatra Files, an analysis of the singer’s huge FBI dossier, Sinatra became “a darling of the American left.” LeRoy, the producer Frank Ross, Maltz, Meeropol, and Sinatra were all nominated for honorary Oscars, and they took them home in early 1946.
But the right-wing press, as powerful just after World War II as it is today, smelled a rat. Weren’t Maltz and Meeropol, no matter what name he was hiding under, both not only leftists but also card-carrying Commies? (They were. And defiantly so: Maltz would become one of the Hollywood Ten; Meeropol, who’d also written Billie Holiday’s great 1939 antilynching song, “Strange Fruit”—a number so hot Columbia Records wouldn’t release it—would eventually adopt Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s two orphaned sons.) The tolerance Sinatra was preaching looked, to Hearst’s Westbrook Pegler and the America First Party’s Gerald L. K. Smith and the Knights of Columbus’s Gerval T. Murphy, among others, like a newfangled cover for old-fashioned socialism. (In fact, much of the conservative criticism leveled at The House I Live In
was a newfangled cover for old-fashioned anti-Semitism: virtually everybody involved in the short, not to mention almost everyone running Hollywood, was Jewish.)
It was directly in the wake of The House I Live In that FBI interest in Sinatra perked up again. On December 12, 1945, the special agent in charge of Philadelphia sent J. Edgar Hoover a memo advising the director that a confidential informant had identified “FRANK SINATRA, well known radio and movie star,” as a member of the Communist Party. The informant, the memo continued,
advised that the reason SINATRA was discussed was because of the recent article which appeared on him in “Life” magazine, setting forth his position on racial hatred and showing SINATRA talking before a Gary, Indiana, high school group.
On November 25, 1945 a full page article appeared in the Sunday [Communist newspaper] “Worker” on FRANK SINATRA. This article was written by WALTER LOWENFELS, Philadelphia correspondent for the “Worker.”
In the Sunday “Worker” dated December 2, 1945 under “Pennsylvania News” the following item appeared: “FRANK SINATRA is going to get a gold medal and a silver plaque at the Broadwood Hotel, December 10. He will receive the first annual Golden Slipper Square Club Unity Award for his contribution to racial and religious tolerance.”
This information is being furnished for whatever action is deemed advisable.
The war was over, but the country was shell-shocked. The atrocities in Europe and the Pacific were emerging in their full horror. The U.S.A. focused on new enemies. In 1945, the House Un-American Activities Committee, having heretofore convened on an ad hoc basis, became a standing committee. And in January 1946, Gerald L. K. Smith—white supremacist, Jew hater, Holocaust denier—testified before HUAC that Frank Sinatra was acting “as a front” for Communist organizations. He spoke of “Hollywood’s left-wing cabal” and called Sinatra “Mrs. Roosevelt in pants.” It all would have almost been comical if much of America, at the moment, hadn’t been taking Smith and the like so seriously. And Joseph McCarthy, campaigning for the Senate, was waiting in the wings.
At first Sinatra brushed off the right-wing rhetoricians like so many pesky flies. “You know,” he told Walter Lowenfels, in the above-mentioned Worker interview, “they called [seventeen-year-old] Shirley Temple a Communist. Me and Shirley both, I guess.” Yet soon he was tempering his cockiness. “I don’t like Communists,” he told another reporter, “and I have nothing to do with any organization except the Knights of Columbus.”
But there was another organization—to the extent that it actually was organized—that remained a constant in Frank’s life. His connection to gangsters should be neither overemphasized nor underplayed. As many entertainers who came up in the great era of nightclubs (the 1930s through the early 1960s) have pointed out, it was impossible to play the clubs and not come into contact with the Mob. The Boys backed the clubs, often secretly owning them and hiring front men to present a legitimate face to the public. They operated the clubs as glamorous profit centers for many of the businesses in which they took a direct interest: entertainment and liquor and cigarettes and gambling and prostitution. Every enterprise touched on a dozen others. Organized crime during Frank Sinatra’s early career, and prior to the U.S. government’s tardy but assiduous attempts to break it up, was a vast, darkly shimmering American under-culture—an alternative economy so huge that the über-criminal Meyer Lansky was able to boast, famously, “We’re bigger than General Motors.” The problem with the remark being the small but crucial word “we.” What was called organized crime was actually something far more complex—and less organized.
Unlike General Motors, organized crime was not publicly held; it did not elect a board of directors or issue stockholders’ reports. Unlike privately held businesses, it wasn’t formally incorporated. It was ten thousand businesses, an enormous shape-shifting cluster of enterprises under the control of whoever happened to be in control until someone more powerful came along and took over, displacing or (often) eliminating the previous owner: an infinite chain of big fish eating smaller fish. It could be argued that while legitimate business operates under the nominal oversight of the law, it is actually subject to the survival of the fittest; illegitimate business merely eliminates the oversight. Yet organized crime, lacking any checks and balances or a structural superego, functions under brute power. This may seem glamorous to outsiders who have to live by (or at least contend with) society’s rules. It seemed alluring to Frank, who in becoming a man sought stronger role models than his weak father. But to the men who live it, it is simply the Life. They swim like sharks: sometimes in pods or schools, sometimes alone, now and then turning to attack each other out of sheer bloodthirstiness.
Frank Sinatra’s old Hasbrouck Heights neighbor Willie Moretti was one such. Another was Benjamin Siegel, who grew up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the early twentieth century, a remarkably bold and clever and comely youth who quickly saw crime as the only chance he would ever have to get rich. Siegel turned thirteen—bar mitzvah age—exactly at the beginning of Prohibition and, around the same time, met seventeen-year-old Meyer Lansky, who was little and ugly and tough and brilliant: he could memorize and calculate great strings of numbers, useful skills. The two boys appreciated each other’s qualities. Soon they were literally thick as thieves: running numbers and rum together, stealing cars, breaking heads. Lansky was fearless but not enamored of violence for its own sake; Siegel, whose pale blue eyes sometimes took on a crazed gleam, actually enjoyed bludgeoning, stabbing, and shooting. Crazy as a bedbug, they said. And so Benny Siegel acquired a nickname—Bug, or Bugs, or Bugsy.
Siegel and Lansky soon formed alliances with Charles “Lucky” Luciano and Frank Costello. During the Castellammarese War among the New York gangs in the early 1930s, Siegel participated in the killing of the old-time Mob boss Salvatore Maranzano that elevated Luciano to supreme power. For this, Luciano was grateful. Having made an enormous amount of money from bootlegging, Siegel married, moved to Scarsdale, and began a family. For a while, he lived as a kind of commuter-gangster. But in 1937, when his partners asked if he might be interested in relocating to Los Angeles to set up a gambling operation, he jumped at the chance.
Most of the thugs connected to the various crime syndicates around the country were built along the lines of Lansky and Luciano: small, homely men, born in poor circumstances in the Old Country or in the teeming ghettos of the American cities to which their parents had immigrated. Undernourished as children, they were street fighters: short, big nosed, scar faced, fearsome. Benjamin Siegel was something else again, far more handsome and magnetic than anyone in his line of work had a right to be. He gravitated naturally to Los Angeles because Los Angeles meant Hollywood, and Siegel was good-looking enough to be a movie actor. He made show-business connections as soon as he got to town—most notably the tough-talking Harry Cohn, founder of Columbia Pictures, fellow Jew, and an inveterate racetrack gambler frequently in need of large sums of money. The two men were drawn to each other for symbiotic reasons. For Cohn it was the cash. For Siegel it was Cohn’s ready access to actresses. Siegel had moved his wife and two young daughters west, but he was also happy to acquire a string of glamorous mistresses.
Even before Frank Sinatra come to California, Siegel’s legend loomed large. He was a star in a town of stars, possessing something no movie actor had: an aura of real danger. Bogart and Cagney and Eddie Robinson were only tough on the screen. George Raft had shady connections, but he was a lover, not a fighter. Siegel looked as good as any of them, and—it was whispered—he really killed people. Then it was more than whispered. In 1939, he was tried for the murder of a fellow L.A. hoodlum (and childhood friend) named Harry Greenberg; the newspapers covered the trial extensively, and though he got off, Siegel, who had been attempting to pass as a legitimate racetrack operator, was revealed as an authentic mobster. The papers loved to throw around his nickname, which he had come to hate. The word “Bugsy” alone could trigger the madness that had engender
ed the name.
When Sinatra came to town, there he was, the handsome criminal with the killer temper and the long-lashed blue eyes and clean jawline and slicked-back hair and beautiful sports jacket, sitting right across the aisle at Chasen’s, winking at him. The man who (Sinatra would have known from Willie Moretti) had personally pushed the button on Maranzano. Who had grown up with Luciano and Lansky. Who still ran the West Coast.
Which was better, to be loved or feared?
Both.
Hello, Frank.
Hello, Mr. Siegel.
Please—Benny.
Benny.
“Phil and Frank were enthralled by him,” said Phil Silvers’s first wife, Jo-Carroll, of Siegel. “They would brag about Bugsy and what he had done and how many people he had killed. Sometimes they’d argue about whether Bugsy preferred to shoot his victims or simply chop them up with axes, and although I forget which was his preference, I will always remember the awe Frank had in his voice when he talked about him. He wanted to emulate Bugsy.”
In the case of a competitor named Louis “Pretty” Amberg, Siegel covered all bases, setting Amberg’s car ablaze after shotgunning him and hacking him with an ax, not necessarily in that order.
Tough guy. Frank poses for a publicity shot in 1947, the same year he allegedly knocked down the virulently anti-Sinatra columnist Lee Mortimer with one punch. (photo credit 16.2)