by James Kaplan
Durante, Lawford, Sinatra. February 1947. (photo credit 19.2)
But the night was still young. From Sinatra’s, she would have Lawford take her to a party at Mel Tormé’s, and then home. By three-thirty the Englishman was done for the night, and she was still raring to go. She would wind up the evening gunning her dark green Cadillac convertible up the Coast Highway with the smitten twenty-one-year-old Tormé at her side, as her long hair blew in the wind and the sky turned baby pink in the East. She was quite sure it was going to be a spectacular year.
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Louella Parsons and Frank sign autographs for servicemen at the Hollywood Canteen, August 1943. (photo credit 20.1)
Well, Frankie and I have buried the hatchet deep,” Louella Parsons wrote in her column of January 27, 1947. “He promised me he would not carry a gun, feed me poison, or otherwise harm a hair of my defenseless head if I would have luncheon with him. So I went. Frankie Sinatra, that is, and he will leave for Miami in two weeks. He then will go on to Cuba and possibly to South America, and won’t return until MGM is ready to start The Kissing Bandit, his next picture.”
Whether the part about carrying a gun was eerily prescient or merely a case of Louella’s making it her business to know absolutely everything, three days later the Los Angeles Times photographed Frank being fingerprinted by Deputy Sheriff Robert Rogers as he applied for a permit to carry a pistol.
The gun may have been a Walther, as has sometimes been reported, or it may have been a Beretta. Sinatra later told Hedda Hopper he “wanted Nancy to have some protection in case of an emergency. So I bought a little gun for the house.” (With what he was up to lately, Nancy would have been the last person in whose hands he’d want a gun.) Or maybe, as he told another reporter, he needed the sidearm “to protect personal funds.”
Whose personal funds is another question. It seems unlikely Frank meant his own. He had already begun the habit of having someone in his retinue carry his wad of crisp new twenties and hundreds, but even if he kept the money in his own pocket, a couple of thousand bucks was scarcely worth protecting with a gun. Whatever he meant to use the weapon for, it was a symbol, and not a good one, of what Frank Sinatra was in the process of becoming.
Maybe Frank was frazzled and needed a vacation; maybe he was a man on a mission, however misbegotten. Maybe both were true. Or perhaps he simply needed to get out of town.
For Nancy had found out about his meetings with Lana in New York. News travels fast in Hollywood. If Lana Turner was under the illusion once more that Frank Sinatra was going to leave his wife for her, the story would travel even faster.
Nancy had other news for Frank: she was pregnant. Was Lana Turner going to give him babies? The bitch had one already, a three-year-old bastard daughter, by the nobody she’d married twice. Did Frank really want to be that child’s stepfather? Did he really want to be Lana Turner’s third husband (and fourth marriage)? Hollywood would laugh at him.
Nancy told Frank she was going to have an abortion.
He stared at her. In the mid-1940s, a time of enforced conventionality, it was unspeakable. For a Catholic couple, it was unthinkable. And for this Catholic couple—Nancy knew it; Frank knew it—it was the stain that Dolly Sinatra had brought to their marriage.
The challenge was clear: if he left on this trip, whatever it was, anything could happen. She might do this unimaginable thing. He didn’t believe it, even as part of him feared it. He repeated to her that he had obligations in New York and Miami—a radio show, a benefit concert—and that he was going to take a few days off in Florida and then Havana. Boys only.
He told her it was all over with Lana. He had been a fool, a great fool. It was his nature. He knew Nancy understood: she was the only one in the world who really knew him. There was a loneliness deep in his soul, and he was susceptible. Lana Turner was scheming, inconstant (Frank knew about Tyrone Power), vain, and shallow. He realized she didn’t love him, and—bending the truth—he certainly didn’t love her.
He was exhausted, frayed out. He had been making bad decisions left and right, mistreating those who loved him best. He would make it up to her.
He had an inspiration: they would have a second honeymoon. In Mexico—Acapulco. Valentine’s Day. Two weeks.
The car horn was blowing in the driveway. His suitcases sat in the hall. Frank tried to kiss her, but she evaded his lips. And then he was gone.
He relaxed at the Fischetti mansion on Allison Island in Miami—cool tile floors, quiet servants, views of palm trees and the sparkling bay: a very nice place to be in February. The beautiful weather, luxurious surroundings, and pleasant company put Frank in such an expansive mood that on the night of the tenth he gave a free concert at the Colonial Inn, a gambling casino in Hallandale owned by Meyer Lansky and Joe Adonis.1 The next morning at Miami International Airport, he climbed the steps to board a shiny-skinned TWA DC-3 to Havana.
A still frame from a newsreel taken when the plane landed in Cuba shows Sinatra, having just disembarked, in the midst of a small group of fellow passengers, all male. The faces all wear that distracted, just-got-off-the-plane look. Frank, seemingly unaware of being photographed (or simply inured to it at this point), is gazing off to the side, squinting in the tropical sun. He wears a snappy tweed sports jacket, a patterned necktie, a crisp white shirt. In his right hand is a large, squarish valise. From his posture—leaning to his left to support the valise’s weight against his hip—the bag appears to be quite heavy. Behind him and over his right shoulder is a gray-templed man later identified as Rocco Fischetti. In the left foreground of the frame stands a dark-haired man in a gray suit, cigarette in his mouth, cuffs shot, his pinkie-ringed hand partially shielding his hunched head. The man looks patently like a gangster—more specifically, like the template for a 1940s gangster lovingly re-created in Francis Ford Coppola’s movie of The Godfather. There is good reason for this—Joe Fischetti was a gangster. His big brother Prince Charlie, the man who had in all likelihood invited Sinatra on this trip in June at Mary Fischetti’s Brooklyn house, luckily (or craftily) avoided the camera.
A vast amount of attention has been devoted to Frank Sinatra’s four-day trip to Havana in February 1947, at the time in newspapers and magazines and over the years in the immense body of Sinatra literature. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the sojourn achieved mythic status—which is not to say that much of what has been written about it isn’t true. Even giving Frank the maximum benefit of the doubt, it would seem that he made some very bad decisions at a very sensitive time in his personal life and his career. This was his walk on the wild side with the Mob, with the men he had come to admire for all kinds of reasons, both inexcusable and understandable.
His Cuba trip wouldn’t have become legendary had it not coincided with the Havana conference, but the coincidence was no accident. The many attendees had known for months that Frank would be coming; they had been looking forward to it. (One account has it that a Sinatra concert in Havana was, from the beginning, a cover story for the whole gathering.) Not only was the singer the biggest star in America; he was also an Italian-American. And no doubt due in part to efficient public-relations work by Sinatra’s early supporter the affable and popular Willie Moretti, Frank was widely known to be friendly where the Boys were concerned, neither a pushover nor a pain in the ass.2
Most important, though, he was respectful.
But did respect translate to compliance—or, more pointedly, complicity? Was Sinatra’s mere association with these men a form of guilt in itself? (Many have charged that it was.) Or did his sins run deeper?
It almost didn’t matter. In the court of public opinion, Frank’s goose was cooked—a predicament he owed, indirectly, to Ernest Hemingway.
In early 1947, a thirty-one-year-old Scripps-Howard columnist named Robert Ruark traveled to Cuba to visit the writer’s haunts (Hemingway owned a villa a few miles outside of Havana) and, if possible, to meet the great man himself. While in the capital, young Ruark,
who had quickly built a large readership with a lightly hard-boiled, humorous writing style that owed much to his literary idol, stumbled upon not Hemingway but the scoop of a lifetime. Fifteen years later, Ruark reminisced, in a column about the recently deceased Lucky Luciano:
A freakish accident put me in Havana one time, just after the war, when I was a rookie in the cosmic column business, and I collided with Charlie, who was conducting a sort of hoodlum’s summit with the big names of the mob …
I was young and brash and full of beans and when I ran into the aristocracy of gangland in Havana, said hoodlums being accompanied by Frank Sinatra, it seemed as newsworthy as if I had come onto Bishop Cannon consorting with [the famous madam] Polly Adler especially since Luciano was supposed to be deported to Italy, and Sinatra was the public-relations-invented leader of the nation’s youth at that particular period …
The young Ruark knew a great story when he saw one, and the moment he finished his legwork, he immediately began cranking out columns from Havana: three in the last week of February alone. They were titled, none too subtly, “Shame, Sinatra!” “ ‘Lovable’ Luciano,” and “The Luciano Myth.” In the first, dated February 20, he wrote:
Sinatra was here for four days last week and during that time his companion in public and in private was Luciano, Luciano’s bodyguards and a rich collection of gamblers and highbinders. The friendship was beautiful. They were seen together at the race track, the gambling casino and at special parties …
Staying close to the action in a seventh-floor suite at the Nacional (the floor below Luciano’s rooms), Frank rubbed a lot of elbows that week. The conference was a veritable summit of crime, with all the Jewish and Italian bosses from major and secondary American cities present. Naturally, New York and New Jersey were most heavily represented: besides Lansky and Luciano, there were Frank Costello, Vito Genovese, Joe Bonanno, Longy Zwillman, Joe Adonis, and Willie Moretti. The Fischettis and Tony Accardo represented Chicago; Moe Dalitz, Detroit; and Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcello, Tampa and New Orleans. There were closed-door conclaves on internal politics and the divisive question of narcotics trafficking: even the Jews were excluded from meetings that strictly concerned Cosa Nostra matters, and Sinatra would probably not have been privy to any business discussions. He was there to provide a cover story and, in keeping with his lifelong relationship to men like these, to admire and be admired. He was, as Luciano later said, “a good kid and we was all proud of him.”
Frank did what he was there to do, giving the attendees their promised concert in the hotel’s banquet room. There is no record of the song list. Still, wouldn’t it have been lovely to pan the house with an imaginary movie camera and watch those faces—fascinating faces, on the evidence of mug shots, but not inclined to be sensitive or reflective—while the Voice vocalized? There were probably more than a few moist eyes. “Luciano was very fond of Sinatra’s singing,” an associate later recalled.
Frank performed, he glad-handed, and he was rewarded, not just with fellowship, but with fun. Pre-Castro Havana was a twenty-four-hour fiesta of unapologetic pleasures. There was even allegedly an orgy in his suite—twelve naked women, a number of gangsters, plenty of alcohol. Improbably, a group of Cuban Girl Scouts, led by a nun, arrived in the midst of the festivities to present Sinatra with an official token of their esteem. He is said to have hustled the celebrants into another room and received the Scouts in a silk dressing gown and ascot.
It could be a slightly more ribald version of Some Like It Hot, set in the Batista Havana of The Godfather: Part II. The problem was that it was real life, and Frank’s hero worship of tough guys had gotten him in way over his head. Danger made these men magnetic, and our fascination with gangsters suggests that few of us could have been in their presence without being, on some level, thrilled. But to the American public of 1947, the men were not faces and eyes and rough handshakes but names, names to be censured. And ethnic names at that. The court of public opinion would quickly take note of Sinatra’s new friends, and would react violently.
Ruark wrote of Frank’s wild going-away party on Valentine’s Day (the day he was supposed to meet Nancy in Acapulco):
In addition to Mr. Luciano, I am told that Ralph Capone [brother of Al] was present … and so was a rather large and well-matched assortment of the goons who find the south salubrious in the winter, or grand-jury time …
The curious desire to cavort among the scum is possibly permissible among citizens who are not peddling sermons to the nation’s youth, and may even be allowed to a mealy-mouthed celebrity, if he is smart enough to confine his social tolerance to a hotel room. But Mr. Sinatra, the self-confessed savior of the country’s small fry, by virtue of his lectures on clean living and love-thy-neighbor, his movie shorts on tolerance, and his frequent dabblings into the do-good department of politics, seems to be setting a most peculiar example for his hordes of pimply, shrieking slaves.
In an era when Americans got their news almost exclusively from newspapers, when every major city had at least two dailies and sometimes three or four, Ruark’s columns, and the avalanche of follow-up coverage they triggered, had huge impact. And long legs. “It was a pretty story while it lasted, and it lasted quite a while,” Ruark wrote, in his best Hemingway-ese, in 1962. It was also George Evans’s worst nightmare: his star client, on ethnic thin ice under the best of circumstances, had done himself no favors by mingling his name with the kinds of names many Americans reflexively associated with the darker side of Italian identity. Sinatra’s first response to the attacks was weak, almost stunned—not to mention self-contradictory: “I was brought up to shake a man’s hand when I am introduced to him without first investigating his past. Any report that I fraternized with goons or racketeers is a vicious lie.”
Not long after the trip, Frank told Hedda Hopper what he insisted was “the complete story”:
I dropped by a casino one night. One of the captains—a sort of boss—recognized me and asked if I’d mind meeting a few people … I couldn’t refuse … So I went through some routine introductions, scarcely paying attention to the names of the people I was meeting. One happened to be Lucky Luciano. Even if I’d caught his name, I probably wouldn’t have associated it with the notorious underworld character … I sat down at a table for about fifteen minutes. Then I got up and went back to the hotel … When such innocent acts are so distorted, you can’t win.
The tone of persecution would crop up more frequently over the next few years as Sinatra became ever more embattled; but it’s hard to argue that Frank hadn’t brought the controversy on himself. Hedonism was one thing; lawlessness was something else. Amiability could rapidly become complicity. Very soon after that week in February, attention focused on the picture of the heavy suitcase in Sinatra’s hand. A story circulated that Frank had been acting as a courier for the Fischettis, carrying Luciano a large sum in business proceeds that had mounted up while Lucky was unavoidably out of the country. The story festered and swelled. Sinatra himself claimed, a bit absurdly, that the bag had contained painting and sketching supplies and his jewelry. (Spare pinkie rings?) In 1951 in the New York Daily Mirror, Lee Mortimer formally accused the singer of carrying $2 million in small bills to Cuba.
It was a compelling tale. Who wouldn’t like to open up a suitcase and find that kind of money? But the idea of fitting $2 million in small bills into hand luggage was patently ridiculous, and Sinatra quickly set about bashing the straw man:
Picture me, skinny Frankie [he said, in a Sinatra-bylined magazine piece in 1952], lifting two million dollars in small bills. For the record, one thousand dollars in dollar bills weighs three pounds, which makes the load I am supposed to have carried six thousand pounds. Even assuming that the bills were twenties—the bag would still have required a couple of stevedores to carry it. This is probably the most ridiculous charge that has ever been leveled at me … I stepped off the plane in Havana with a small bag in which I carried my oils, sketching material, and personal
jewelry, which I never send with my regular luggage.
But what if the bills were fifties? Or hundreds? By similar logic, since after all a $100 bill weighs the same as a single, a hundred thousand in Benjamins would weigh that same three pounds. Two million dollars in hundreds would therefore weigh sixty pounds. Which admittedly would make for one very heavy suitcase—one you’d have to lean against your hip while carrying it—but not one (even for skinny Frankie) that would require the assistance of baggage handlers.3
There were other consequences. Frank’s behavior at the end of 1946 and the beginning of 1947 had the effect of a giant electrical surge creating power outages in its wake. On February 14, the day an orgy unfortunately detained him in Havana, he sent a plaintive cable to Nancy, who was already cooling her heels in Acapulco:
WILL YOU BE MY VALENTINE?
When he finally arrived in Mexico for their romantic interlude, he made a shattering discovery: his wife, as good as her word, had aborted their third child. “She found a doctor in Los Angeles through a friend and had the procedure while my father was in Cuba,” Tina Sinatra writes. “The doctor’s prep was evident, ‘and [Nancy told her daughter] he knew immediately what I’d done.’ ”
The horror—all too uncomfortably reminiscent of the scene in Godfather II when Kay tells Michael Corleone that she has not suffered a miscarriage but aborted their child (“An abortion, Michael. Just like our marriage is an abortion”)—rings down the decades. Nancy Sinatra had exerted the only real power she had over her relentlessly wayward husband, and her single act of revenge had terrific impact.