by James Kaplan
In early May, while the Hearst papers were inveighing against Frank and MGM lawyers were parsing the Ciro’s case to see if their star had a leg to stand on, Mortimer requested an audience with none other than J. Edgar Hoover. He had information on Sinatra, he said, and he needed some questions answered. Tit for tat.
The bureau bit. On May 12, Hoover’s aide Louis B. Nichols—the same man who had gone to Detroit the previous year to observe the bobby-soxer mob greeting the singer at the airport—wrote a lengthy memo to Clyde A. Tolson, Hoover’s right-hand man, detailing talking points for Mortimer’s meeting with the director the next day:
1. Mr. Mortimer said he had a picture of Sinatra getting off a plane in Havana with a tough-looking man whom he has been unable to identify. He believes he is a gangster from Chicago. [This picture, no doubt, was the still frame from the newsreel showing Frank with Rocco and Joe Fischetti.]
Observation: It is suggested that this picture be exhibited to Agents who have worked on the reactivation of the Capone gang in Chicago, as well as to Agents in the Newark Office who have been working on criminal work, in view of the known contacts that Sinatra has had with New York hoodlums. It is entirely possible that in this way the unidentified picture might be identified. If we identified the individual we could secure a picture of the person identified and furnish that to Mortimer and then in turn let him go out and verify the identification in such a way as to remove the Bureau from any responsibility of furnishing information.
2. Mortimer stated that Sinatra was backed when he first started by a gangster in New York named Willie Moretti, now known as Willie Moore.
Observation: It is well known that Willie Moretti of Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, controls gambling in Bergen County, New Jersey, and is a close friend of Frank Costello. According to Captain Matthew J. Donohue of the Bergen County Police, Moretti had a financial interest in Sinatra. In this connection, Sinatra resides in Hasbrouck Heights.
Observation: the actual place of Sinatra’s current residence was far from the only key fact the FBI would get wrong in its lengthy dossier on the singer, a document that inspires scant confidence in the intelligence-gathering abilities and motives of the bureau. The memo went on to mention other juicy details that Mortimer wanted to discuss with the director, including Frank’s relationships with Bugsy Siegel, the Los Angeles gangster Mickey Cohen, and the Fischettis; his “arrest on a sex offense”; and his draft record.
At the last minute, though, the bureau pulled a bait and switch on Mortimer. When the columnist walked into his May 13 meeting, he found not Hoover but Tolson waiting for him. Mortimer swallowed his disappointment and went on with the meeting, which turned out to be of not much consequence:
I talked this afternoon [Tolson wrote in a memo to Hoover] to Mr. Lee Mortimer, of the New York Daily Mirror, who wanted to ask some questions concerning Frank Sinatra. I told Mr. Mortimer that, of course, he realized that we could not give him any official information or be identified in this matter in any manner, which he thoroughly understands.
He left a photograph taken of Frank Sinatra in Cuba and asked whether we could identify one individual shown in the picture. Copies of this photograph are being made and an effort will be made to determine whether any of our Agents are acquainted with the person in question.
Secondly, he was interested in the association between Sinatra and Willie Moretti of Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey. I told Mr. Mortimer in this connection that his best bet would be to make appropriate contacts with the Bergen County Police and possibly with a Captain Donohue.
Also, Mr. Mortimer was interested in Sinatra’s arrest on a sex offense.
It’s an unseemly image: the oily snitch (and secret Jew) meeting with the FBI director’s boyfriend to discuss the Italian-American star’s sex life. But then that was America in the late 1940s—ethnics were never to be entirely trusted; Communists and other subversive types were under every rock. And even though nothing of substance would come of all the bureau’s scratching after Sinatra, for the moment both the FBI and Lee Mortimer could content themselves that they had met.
So what can be made of Frank’s picaresque misadventures: the gun, the gangsters, the beating of the little columnist? There’s something telling about his quiet, then not so quiet, swagger after the Ciro’s incident: “It was a right-hand punch …” “I let him have a good right hook. I felt very good about it afterwards …” “There is just so much a man can take …” In a way, he was casting himself as a hero in a corrupt world, a little guy up against overwhelming forces, like the Hearst Syndicate.
Even when those forces were benign, they were white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Certainly one unconscious purpose for Frank’s Havana trip was to reclaim the power of his Italianness. On the other hand, even he wouldn’t have painted his trip to Havana as heroic. Rebellious and defiant, yes; but not heroic. One common theme uniting all his exploits that bad year was manliness. There was something boyish and wistful about his need to carry that gun, to be accepted by those mostly Italian men of honor, even to claim bragging rights for taking care of Lee Mortimer. Macrophallus and all, Frank was a little guy (not a single record exists of his ever having prevailed in a real fight), and secretly he knew he was an artist, with an exquisite sensibility. How could such a person be a man among men? Even grunting, illiterate Marty—boilermaker, athlete, fireman—was that.
As Sinatra’s fame grew and his hangers-on kowtowed and cowered, he came to believe in his own toughness. Yet there was always something artificial about it. He needed the bodyguards, needed not to risk his all-important life fighting somebody else’s battles overseas. He had to protect his image; even more, he needed the hard shell that guarded the exquisite flower within.
Sammy Cahn, the least sexually adventurous member of the Varsity, had happily fallen into the tender trap in 1945, tying the knot with the young and beautiful Gloria Delson, a Goldwyn Girl (and a Jewess). Sixty years later, Gloria Delson Franks, long since divorced from Cahn, recalled an early weekend she and Sammy spent in the Springs with the Sinatras, at the Lone Palm. “Frank taught me to swim,” she said. “He’s the one who got me over my fear of water. I said, ‘I don’t like putting my face in the water, Frank; it scares me.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry. You’ll learn how to do it and you won’t be afraid. I’m telling you.’
“He’d sit with me in the pool and hold me up, and he’d say, ‘Okay, put your face in.’ Like I was a baby. He treated me so gently, and he was so patient with me.”
On Friday night, June 20, Benny Siegel ate a late dinner with friends at an Ocean Park seafood restaurant called Jack’s. On the way out, he took a toothpick and a free copy of the next morning’s Los Angeles Times stamped, “Good Night. Sleep Well. With the Compliments of Jack’s.” The party drove back to Beverly Hills, where Siegel let himself into the big Tudor at 810 North Linden Drive he was renting for Virginia Hill. (Hill herself was in Paris, perhaps on her way to or from Benny’s Swiss bank—or perhaps keeping away from Beverly Hills.)
It was a warm night, the windows were open, and the ethereal fragrance of night-blooming jasmine suffused the living room, where Siegel sat at one end of a flowered chintz couch, his Times on his lap. He wore a beautifully tailored gray silk suit and handmade English shoes polished to a high sheen. At the other end of the couch sat his pal and business partner, a handsome, prematurely white-haired man who called himself Allen Smiley. The two men talked about the Flamingo, which had just turned the corner into profitability.
In the bushes outside the front window a man in dark clothing squatted with a .30-caliber carbine, listening to the ratchet of the katydids and the singsong of Benny and Smiley’s conversation. When he was sure Benny was speaking, the man rose and rested the carbine’s muzzle in the V of a trellis and took careful aim at Siegel’s head. He squeezed the trigger. There was a blast, a flash, and Benny’s head exploded. His right eye was blown across the room onto the Spanish tiles of the dining-room floor. Smiley dove to the carpet. T
he man in the bushes fired eight more shots—all redundant—then dropped the rifle and fled into the soft night.
Pure hate. Lee Mortimer looks on as a Beverly Hills judge sets bail for Frank. April 1947. (photo credit 20.2)
Sinatra heard the news late the next morning as he suited up for a Saturday-afternoon Swooners softball game. The call came from Hank Sanicola, who had heard from a friend of a friend of Mickey Cohen’s. Frank was shocked but not surprised. He felt sad at the death of his beautiful and magnetic friend, and at its violence, but knew he must suppress the feeling. He would soon hear that the hit had been engineered by Frankie Carbo—the same Frankie Carbo who was rumored to have helped persuade Tommy Dorsey to release Sinatra from his contract, and ironically, the same Frankie Carbo who had been implicated along with Siegel in the 1939 murder of Harry Greenberg. But it barely mattered who had done the planning, or who had pulled the trigger: Frank knew the order had come straight from the summit in Havana, and the manager of the project had been Charlie Fischetti.
21
He didn’t want to put on a sailor suit anymore; MGM obliged. Frank wore fake sideburns and a properly embarrassed expression in The Kissing Bandit, 1948. (photo credit 21.1)
There is a weird light playing around Sinatra. Hitler affected many Germans much the same way and madness has been rife in the world.
—Westbrook Pegler, in his syndicated Hearst column of September 26, 1947
As U.S. relations with the Soviet Union deteriorated, paranoia over Communism mounted, particularly in Hollywood. The climate of fear surrounding the 1946 congressional elections had put a Republican majority in both houses for the first time since 1932, including a freshman senator from Wisconsin named Joseph McCarthy. The new majority swung into action in 1947, moving the House Un-American Activities Committee to step up its inquisitions and pressuring Harry Truman into signing Executive Order 9835, the so-called Loyalty Order, which gave the FBI broad latitude to investigate citizens and suspected Communist-front organizations.
It was in this climate, in June, that Americans began spotting flying saucers: over Mount Rainier in Washington State; over Idaho, surrounding a United Airlines DC-3; over Roswell, New Mexico. And then all over the place. Every week, Norman Rockwell–covered Saturday Evening Posts were plunking into American mailboxes; every night, citizens were checking under the bed.
In its own intense way, Hollywood reflected the national anxiety. On the face of it, nothing had changed: swimming pools glittered in the sun; heavy black cars glided beneath the palm trees; carpenters banged on sets. But there was big trouble in the easily spooked company town—J. Parnell Thomas, the chairman of HUAC, was in Hollywood to brief studio executives on what the committee believed was Communist infiltration of movie content by the Screen Writers Guild.
At the same time, Frank Sinatra was reporting to Culver City every weekday morning to play Ricardo, the kissing bandit.
In his previous pictures, Frank had just had to put on a costume and a little Max Factor; his latest role required a more complex transformation. Every morning, the hair department glued a luxuriant toupee, complete with sideburns, over his already thinning locks; the makeup people spackled his mastoid and acne scars so that his left profile would photograph acceptably under the bright lights required for Technicolor. After the failure of the black-and-white It Happened in Brooklyn, MGM was reinvesting in the expensive film process, hoping The Kissing Bandit would duplicate the magic of Anchors Aweigh.
Once again, Sinatra’s pal and fellow Hollywood leftist Isobel Lennart wrote the script;1 once again, the haughty-faced coloratura Kathryn Grayson co-starred—and, once again, she and Frank enjoyed minimal affinity. “I couldn’t stand kissing him,” Grayson later confessed. “He was so skinny, so scrawny.”
But chemistry was just one of the picture’s problems. The story was a mixture common enough for the era: broad comedy, romance, and music. To write the songs, Metro (having jettisoned Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne, perhaps as the whipping boys for It Happened in Brooklyn) hired the dependable if less interesting Nacio Herb Brown, writer of “Singin’ in the Rain” and Bing’s classic groaner “Temptation.” In this instance, though, Brown’s tunes were strictly so-so; the romance wasn’t quite believable; and the comedy was tragically bad.
You can practically see the wheels turning in the story department at MGM: The war’s over; it’s time to get Frank out of uniform. How about some laughs? How about a satire on Zorro? Sinatra plays Ricardo, a college boy who returns from Boston to Old California and takes over his father’s spot as the titular bandit. The laughs are supposed to come from Ricardo’s timidity—once again Frank is playing awkward and shy—and his physical clumsiness. (He falls off his horse a lot.) There’s campy fun in the film, and the Technicolor is gorgeous, but from the first scene the star’s discomfort is palpable. His ears and his Hoboken accent both stick out a mile. (In subsequent pictures, Frank’s ears would be taped back; the movies would learn to live with the accent.) He tries hard to look adorable: he does that lower-lip twitch. But something has misfired badly. Sinatra is clearly not liking himself in this part, which makes it hard to like him.
He can hardly be blamed for his uneasiness. Each morning, while the hair and makeup people labored over him, studio lawyers were trying to figure out how to make the Lee Mortimer affair go away. Between anticipating the verdict of the Beverly Hills District Court and having to stay out of trouble, Frank was not in buoyant spirits that spring and summer.
Still, he always managed to find outlets. If he couldn’t keep Lana Turner (he finally dropped her over the phone, sending her into a rage: she was the one who did the dropping), he was going to throw himself into his marriage. This meant keeping his hijinks low profile, but most important it meant making a grand gesture. In May, wearing a yachting cap and licking an ice-cream cone, he walked into the Palm Springs office of a young architect named E. Stewart Williams and said, as Williams later recalled, “I wanna house.”
And not just any house. Frank wanted a Georgian mansion, he told Williams, and he wanted it pronto: by Christmas. Christmas was very important. Nancy was going to get a present she wouldn’t forget.
Six days after Benny Siegel was gunned down, on June 26, Frank was in the studio recording Christmas songs. In 1947 he recorded as he never had before: a total of seventy sides in all. Let Old Gold drop him; let Lee Mortimer sue him; let the Hearst papers rake him over the coals: he would show them all.
There was reality—complicated, thorny, less hospitable every minute—and there was Frank in a yachting cap with an ice-cream cone. He strutted; he kept up appearances; he would keep believing in himself till there was no other alternative. His agents had gone out and done battle for him and got him a new radio show, really a return to an old one: Your Hit Parade, still sponsored by Lucky Strike. The good news was that for the first time since the show’s inception in 1935, a single star would be at its center, singing the tunes and doing many of the commercials himself.
The bad news was that—gradually, then all at once—it wasn’t really Frank’s show. He wouldn’t get to sing his own songs, unless his songs happened to be on the hit parade, an occurrence that seemed less likely with every passing week. Even as Hearst kept snapping at his heels, the public’s musical tastes were changing. Suddenly Sinatra’s record sales were dropping; his concert and nightclub bookings had declined. His yearly income had dropped below $1 million for the first time since 1942. Nobody was feeling very sorry for him.
On the first broadcast of his second Your Hit Parade run, on Saturday, September 6, Frank introduced Axel Stordahl, who had replaced Mark Warnow as bandleader, and, as co-star for the show’s first two months, Doris Day. From Sinatra’s first song, it was clear that something was deeply wrong.
The song was called “Feudin’ and Fightin’,” a novelty number about life down in the holler, Hatfield-and-McCoy style. It was the kind of faux-folksy trifle Bing Crosby could bring off without breaking a sweat, but with F
rank singing it, it felt as phony as a three-dollar bill. His heart wasn’t in it. (And he certainly hadn’t read these lyrics like a poem before singing them.) But it was on the hit parade, which meant the American public wanted to hear it. And more and more, Sinatra and the American public appeared to be going their separate ways.
The ground was sliding beneath Frank’s feet. His singing was the one part of his life where he couldn’t dissemble. His belief in a song was part of what made him great; when he lost conviction, his vocal quality became two-dimensional. Metronome, which only two years earlier had crowned Frank Act of the Year, and with whose All-Stars he’d recently recorded the sublime “Sweet Lorraine,” was withering about the new edition of Your Hit Parade:
The show is alternately dull, pompous and raucous. Frank sings without relaxation and often at tempos that don’t suit him or the song. Axel plays murderous, rag-timey junk, that he, with his impeccable taste, must abhor. And poor Doris Day, making her first real start in commercial radio, is saddled with arrangements which sound as if they were written long before anybody ever thought of having a stylist like her on the show … Frank sounds worse on these Saturday nightmares than he ever has since he first became famous.
There may have been schadenfreude in this; even those who had been his biggest boosters probably weren’t averse to the pleasures of piling on. But to listen to the show proves Metronome right. Westbrook Pegler was another matter. The columnist, who had been otherwise engaged for a couple of years, now went at Sinatra with a fresh vengeance. Throughout September he hammered on Frank, trotting out all the sins for which the Hearst papers had lavishly been taking him to task, and now—his one new note—slamming Sinatra’s defenders. “A campaign of propaganda has been running in some areas of our press, including magazines, and on the radio to rehabilitate the reputation of Frank Sinatra,” his column of September 10 began, ominously. In this loaded time, such phraseology was guaranteed to raise a Red flag. In some papers this column ran side by side with one by Victor Riesel, which began: