Frank

by James Kaplan

  Tina Sinatra tells us, strangely, that her father’s reaction was to order his wife, “Don’t you ever do that again.” As though she had committed a nuisance. As though he had the upper hand. It seems more likely, given Frank’s seismic temper and Nancy’s by now steely resolve, that the result of his discovery was something more than a curt directive: that the two had a messy and furious scene soaked with tears.

  Then, Tina writes, sunlight came after the storm:

  Dad made a dramatic turnaround. He kept his road trips briefer and threw himself into home life. By day he was absorbed in his children. By night he was courting Mom all over again, with dinner and dancing at Ciro’s. He was really trying. He would make this marriage work in spite of himself.

  Soon my mother was pregnant again, in the fall of 1947.

  It’s a romantic picture, but the real story is far more complicated: 1947 would be a long, hard year.

  It seemed not to matter to him that his radio show, Old Gold Presents Songs by Sinatra, was a superb vehicle for his talents: Frank had made up his mind that the indignity of earning a mere $2,800 a week (for a half hour’s work) was too much for him. In January he had publicly floated the notion of returning to Your Hit Parade, at almost three times the salary. Variety reported Sinatra’s monetary musings, and Old Gold got upset, informing him that he still had a year to go on his three-year contract and that it would be very expensive to get out of it. Frank struck back as he often would in years to come, by announcing that he was sick and was taking three weeks off to rest up in Florida.

  When it turned out that he had gone to Havana, his sponsor was unhappy, as were others. Afterward, while Frank hunkered down, throwing himself into family life and doing a little recording (“Stella by Starlight,” “Mam’selle,” “Almost Like Being in Love”), the newspapers raged, and Louis B. Mayer fumed. He never fumed long. Very quickly Frank was called to the principal’s office to endure the tough squint from Ida, the panicky wait in the tiny antechamber, the long trudge to the big desk with the grim-faced little man behind it.

  Mayer informed Frank that after his next movie, The Kissing Bandit (Frank had read the script, and looked forward to making it much as he would look forward to taking poison), in view of his recent deportment (Mayer cleared his throat), the studio would be loaning him out to his old employer, RKO, for a new picture called The Miracle of the Bells.

  He would play a priest.

  This last was pointed. Mayer studied him coldly through the rimless spectacles that rode his hawk nose. Frank’s image must be rehabilitated.

  In the middle of March, It Happened in Brooklyn premiered. It was a smaller movie than Anchors Aweigh, in black and white instead of Technicolor; this time Sinatra got to wear an Army uniform rather than a sailor suit. Kathryn Grayson was back as his love interest, trilling prettily and ringing new changes on haughty vulnerability. (And bringing as little chemistry to her side of the love equation as Frank did to his: if Grayson was ever on the fabled dressing-room checklist, she remained unchecked.) The great Durante was cute as the dickens in the thankless role of a sexless school janitor. Lawford, on the other hand, was a kind of black hole on-screen, too handsome for his own good, and much too pleased about it. The picture simply grinds to a halt every time he shows up. But Sinatra—for all his bad behavior on and off the set, for all the feuds with the Schnozzola—was every bit as good as Durante, once again getting great mileage out of playing another Clarence Doolittle character, a Bashful Frankie. Something about the black-and-white cinematography brought out the amazingly sculpturesque quality of his still-rawboned features and killer lower lip—a face that the sculptor Jo Davidson had compared to Lincoln’s.

  And when Frank sang … He had a self-conscious but bewitching way of stretching that lower lip over to the right at key moments (for emphasis? to sneak a breath? or just to look cute?), a habit he would retain to the end of his career. And the movie gave him great material to work with. After the success of Anchors Aweigh, MGM had welcomed Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne to the ranks of officially certified screen songwriters, and once again the team did itself proud. Their tunes fit Sinatra like a Savile Row suit. When he sang (to Durante!) a great number like “Time After Time,” he not only sounded magnificent, but looked utterly at home. This was an exceedingly rare trick, requiring absolute confidence, consummate stage presence, and close work with gifted composers: only Crosby, singing the works of Burke and Van Heusen, could also bring it off on-screen.

  The critics were impressed—with the notable exception of Lee Mortimer, who couldn’t keep his mind off current events. “This excellent and well-produced picture … bogs down under the miscast Frank (Lucky) Sinatra, smirking and trying to play a leading man,” he wrote.

  It was wrong, and it was hitting below the belt. While Frank certainly deserved censure for the Havana escapade,4 Mortimer (no doubt, in great part, to please his masters at Hearst) seemed to be on a special campaign to bring down the star who had rejected him. As an arts critic who had arrogated the right of sociopolitical commentary (he would be one of the first but far from the last), the Daily Mirror columnist was hammering at the wall between Sinatra’s career and his private misbehavior. It was a wall George Evans had worked long and hard to build, and one that was now—thanks both to Frank’s efforts and to his energetic detractors—crumbling into dust.

  Much as the Manson murders in the summer of 1969 killed the Age of Aquarius, the Black Dahlia murder in January 1947 symbolized the end of Hollywood’s sunny image and the beginning of a much darker new era. It wasn’t so much the crime itself—a fresh-faced young woman named Elizabeth Short had been stabbed to death and left nude and grotesquely mutilated in a downtown vacant lot—as what it said about Los Angeles: a city rife with decadence, moral ambiguity, drug use, racial tension, and police corruption, all playing out against a backdrop of national political paranoia. The vision of Hollywood as a place of wartime optimism—the world of Anchors Aweigh—had curdled; film noir flourished. And Frank Sinatra, now a certifiably dubious figure on the American landscape, seemed to be acting out a scene from one of these ominous movies when he and a male companion pulled the wrong way in to an exit driveway of Ciro’s on Sunset Boulevard shortly after 11:00 p.m. on April 8.

  Sinatra could have been trying to avoid the press by not giving his car to the nightclub’s valet; on the other hand, his arrival, in retrospect, looks purposefully secretive.

  Lee Mortimer was just finishing a late dinner with an Asian-American band singer named Kay Kino when Sinatra walked in. In the syndicated New York Post column he wrote a couple of days later, Earl Wilson, ever eager to excuse Frank for almost everything (in gratitude, Sinatra had given the columnist one of those gold cigarette cases, engraved: OIL, YOUSE A POIL), offered a somewhat incoherent account of the evening’s events, citing Mortimer’s choice of dinner companion itself as dubious. Mortimer, Wilson wrote, was “known in the cafés for liking all champagne (except domestic) and Chinese girls, the latter so much that he sometimes brought in practically their whole families. His preference for Chinese girls brought publicity which he never mentioned suing anybody about.”

  Frank had other grievances on his mind. After he and his companion—who was almost certainly Sam Weiss, a song plugger and old New York pal—had been inside the club for about fifteen minutes, Mortimer and Kino left. While Mortimer was standing on the steps outside the entrance to Ciro’s, Sinatra suddenly emerged and blindsided him, hitting him behind the ear with his right fist and knocking him to the ground.

  At this point, as is usually the case with stories of fistfights, the tale grows murky. Mortimer seems to have gotten up and asked Sinatra why he had hit him, upon which a large man with black hair and a blue pin-striped suit (probably Weiss) pushed the columnist—who was about the singer’s height and weight, though ten years older—down again. Then Sinatra began to pound the columnist and scream at him (calling him, by one account, a “shit heel” and “a perverted bastard” and, by a
nother, a “degenerate” and a “fucking homosexual”) while either the original large man alone, or he and two others, held him. “I’ll kill you the next time I see you!” Sinatra screamed in Mortimer’s face. “I’ll kill you!” A King Features photographer tried to intervene. And then the beating was over.

  Frank, the only one who had done any punching, had not inflicted much damage. Mortimer stood up, went to the West Hollywood sheriff’s substation to lodge a complaint against Sinatra, then stopped at a hospital to have his sore jaw seen to. After phoning his lawyer, he started calling the press. Sinatra, for his part, went back into Ciro’s and ordered a double brandy.

  As the phone wires began to buzz, the Los Angeles Herald-Express columnist Harrison Carroll hurried over and found Frank still at the bar, in an explanatory mood. Equipped with a reporter’s notebook and a sympathetic, if tin, ear, Carroll quoted Sinatra on the Mortimer dustup:

  For two years he has been needling me. He has referred to my bobby-soxer fans as morons. I don’t care if they do try to tear your clothes off. They are not morons. They are only kids fourteen and fifteen years old. I think I have had more experience with their tactics than any other star in the country, but I have never beefed. Honestly, I intended to say hello to Mortimer. But when I glanced in his direction, he gave me a look. I can’t describe it. It was one of those contemptuous who-do-you-amount-to looks. I followed him outside and I saw red. I hit him. I’m all mixed up. I’m sorry that it happened, but I was raised in a tough neighborhood, where you had to fight at the drop of a hat and I couldn’t help myself.

  Frank may indeed have locked eyes with Mortimer inside Ciro’s. His first sight of the columnist—whose cold eyes, puffy cheeks, and pouting lower lip gave him the look of a school-yard tattletale—would not have been a pleasant experience. Yet Sinatra could be a fearsome sight himself, and both men had certainly been building up a head of steam. (“Every time Frank read one of Mortimer’s columns,” Jack Keller later recalled, “he went into a towering rage and threatened that the next time he saw this guy he was going to wallop him.”) What happened outside the club is Rashomon, although a reminiscence tape-recorded by Keller many years later gives a fascinating picture of spin control, 1947 style. The publicist recalled that Sinatra knocked on his door in the wee hours, saying, “Jeez, I think we’re in trouble.”

  “You bet your ass we’re in trouble and we better get out of here before the reporters start showing up,” Keller said.

  They drove over to Bobby Burns’s house to hash the situation over. After much pacing, Keller came up with a solution:

  There’s only one thing to do. It’s the only way to get out of this thing. Otherwise, you’re going to have every newspaper in America against you, because regardless of what they think of this guy Mortimer, they resent any one of their number being manhandled by an actor. So Frank, you’ve got to pick up the phone and call all the papers and say, “This is Frank Sinatra” and listen to their questions. Then you’ve got to tell each one of them that when you walked out of Ciro’s, Mortimer and this Chinese dame were standing there and you heard him say to her, “There’s that little dago bastard now!”

  This is a slur on your nationality, and no one in their right mind would expect you to take this in good grace. Knowing your temper, the press will go along with you and be more or less on your side. It’s the only thing you can do to come out of this looking good.

  Frank tried. He called all the reporters he knew and told them the fish tale. But when the papers ran it the next morning, Lee Mortimer went into a towering rage of his own, lodging a complaint of battery against Sinatra to the district attorney and announcing he would sue the singer for $25,000 in damages. On Wednesday afternoon, April 9, while Frank was in the CBS Vine Street studio rehearsing “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’ ” for the Old Gold broadcast, a deputy sheriff and two investigators from the district attorney’s office marched in and told him he was under arrest.

  He phoned his lawyer, then went along quietly to the Beverly Hills Justice Court. The press was already there. The Los Angeles Times’s account was jocular, treating the affair as the non-earthshaking event it clearly was:

  SINATRA ARRESTED AND FREED ON BAIL IN ROW WITH WRITER

  Columnist Charges Singer Bopped Him; Date of Trial Set

  … Frankie was wearing a gray sports suit, regular necktie instead of his usual droopy bow tie, and a smile when he walked briskly into court.

  “I plead not guilty,” he announced in a firm voice, “and wish a jury trial—sometime late next month.”

  Judge Woodward set the trial for 10 a.m., May 28.

  Then, there was the matter of bail—it was set at $500 on the warrant.

  Frankie had $400 on him. His attorney, Albert Pearlson, had $300. But, the money would be tied up until the trial. They didn’t want to part with it. So, there was a 30-minute wait until a bail bondsman showed up to post the bail.

  Frankie’s smile turned a bit sheepish during the bail episode and then it got practically sickly when a deputy sheriff gently informed him that his permit to carry a gun had been suspended …

  Semiofficial weights for the “battle” were listed yesterday as: Sinatra, 130; Mortimer, 135.

  Late that night, Frank flew to New York. He was going to receive yet another award for his good works—the Thomas Jefferson Award of the Council Against Intolerance in America. It also didn’t seem like a bad moment to get out of town. He boarded a triple-tailed TWA Constellation—the state of commercial-aviation art in 1947—and caught a little sleep in first class before facing the public the next morning. Continuing its tongue-in-cheek coverage, the L.A. Times wrote:

  Frankie … was met by 500 screaming bobby-soxers and newspapermen who immediately changed his title from “The Voice” to “The Punch” … On his arrival in New York … “The Punch” told his version of the historic Hollywood “battle” to a roomful of newspapermen at La Guardia Field.

  One reporter wrote:

  “ ‘It was a right-hand punch,’ Frankie said. He said it quietly, modestly, in the way of a man awed by his own strength.”

  The crooner repeated for New York newsmen his assertion that he overheard Mortimer refer to him as “Dago ——— ——— ———.”

  “We all have human weaknesses,” he was quoted as saying in New York, “and there is just so much a man can take.”

  In Hollywood Albert Pearlson, Sinatra’s attorney, said he is checking the law which makes calling a person a profane name in public a misdemeanor.

  “If my interpretation of the law is correct, I’m going to the District Attorney’s office and demand a complaint against this fellow,” Pearlson declared.

  The counteroffensive was in full swing: always blame the victim. That evening, Frank ran into Mr. and Mrs. Earl Wilson at the Copacabana. “Frank came in and greeted both of us warmly,” the compliant columnist recalled.

  He wasn’t objecting to my piece [“Frankie, you shouldn’t-a,” Wilson had gently written], but still said he’d done it because Mortimer had called him a name.

  “Did you have to hit him?” I asked Frank.

  “He was coming toward me. I thought he was going to hit me.”

  “He said you belted him from behind.”

  “I hit him on the chin! To hit him on the chin and hit him from behind, you got to be an acrobat.” Frank’s eyes lit up with excitement. “When he said what he did, I said to myself, ‘Here goes,’ and I let him have a good right hook. I felt very good about it afterwards. Somebody pinned my arms behind me—there was an awful tussle all at once, people coming out of walls.”

  What did he resent most in Mortimer’s writings? That about his fans being moronic was one of the things—he’d always been loyal to them as they had been to him … And, curiously, he hated references to his being an overnight success.

  “Don’t make me laugh! All the cream cheese-and-nut sandwiches I ate when I was living on about thirty cents a day, working on those sustaining programs. Na
ncy was working in a department store and used to slip me a couple of bucks …

  “The coldest nights I walked three miles because I didn’t have bus fare. I wasn’t getting anywhere, I was giving up, but after I got married, I got lucky.”

  Frank managed to mix lies and braggadocio and self-pity into one unattractive glop. Maybe he was starting to believe his own version of the Mortimer punch-up.

  But the public wasn’t. His second Columbia album, Songs by Sinatra, released not long after the Ciro’s incident, wasn’t selling so well. Granted, Songs didn’t have the same novelty and artistic integrity as The Voice, but the avalanche of negative press that spring didn’t help. The L.A. Times, which persistently treated the affair lightly, was the exception that proved the rule. The five hundred Hearst papers were, as Time noted, “[giving] the story headlines and space almost fit for an attempted political assassination. Mortimer suddenly attained the stature of Dreyfus.”

  And Hearst, as we have seen, mattered enormously to Louis B. Mayer. When Frank returned to the Coast, he was called, yet again, onto the studio chief’s carpet. Mayer ordered Sinatra to apologize publicly to Mortimer and pay him a settlement of $9,000. On June 4, in Beverly Hills District Court, Frank read a statement saying that the whole incident had sprung from a misunderstanding, that Mortimer had never made any remark about him, and that he keenly regretted his actions. Mortimer read a statement saying that he had received satisfaction for his injuries, and was satisfied, also, at Sinatra’s acknowledgment and apology. The columnist withdrew his charges and, Sinatra having paid $50 in court costs—and some $15,000 to his lawyers, plus the $9,000 to Lee Mortimer—the case was dismissed.

  But within a week Old Gold had dropped Frank from his radio show and hired Buddy Clark as his replacement.