Frank

by James Kaplan

  I insist the “Communist Party” is more of a plot than a party, and I say that for too long the Communist propaganda machine, directed by many Broadway and Hollywood publicists, writers and “wise-crack” specialists, has bullied government officials so that they fear to disclose evidence of this plot.

  The message, to any right-thinking reader, was clear: subversive elements were trying to undermine America, and Frank Sinatra—with his Mafia connections, his draft-dodging and sex-offending past (not to mention his oily hair and Italian surname)—was their standard-bearer.

  Pegler was clearly building a case, but for what? Frank had acted badly: this was not in dispute. He had acted very badly. In the matter of his Havana adventure, depending on the contents of that heavy valise, he may even have broken the law. Had he dodged the draft? Probably. So had John Wayne. Had he been convicted on those two 1938 sex arrests? He had not. But rhetorically speaking, Pegler (he portentously called the complainant a “girl”) felt the arrests were worth mentioning again. As was the fact that somebody had been lying about Frank’s age.

  The rock-jawed columnist (a photo of his unimpeachably Waspy countenance ran with every installment) was throwing everything he had at Sinatra, building up to a bombshell of some kind.

  The propaganda campaign, Pegler said, consisted

  of many writers, including night club, radio, and movie columnists of New York and Hollywood, who have minimized incidents of Sinatra’s career which other persons might have viewed with severity. Dozens of these “interpreters” and propagandists purport to be authorities on the personal histories of all such “celebrities.” Many of them draw outlandish salaries as “reporters.” But not one of them has ever reported this episode [the 1938 arrests], the most dramatic in Sinatra’s life.

  So he was not only a crook, a bully, and a draft dodger; he was a pervert. And his apologists, Pegler said, were legion. Of all the supposed dozens, the columnist singled out two egregious offenders, the Daily News’s Ed Sullivan and the New Yorker’s E. J. Kahn Jr. Sullivan, still a year away from his television career, had, for whatever reason, early on adopted a Sinatra-right-or-wrong stance in his columns. The News columnist, Pegler thundered, had “impugned the professional integrity of legitimate journalists who had faithfully covered the ‘Sinatra story’ in the Havana and Hollywood [Mortimer] episodes. [Sullivan had insisted Mortimer’s] motive was to punish Sinatra because he gave of his spare time and energy ‘to persuade kids to be nice to minority groups.’ ”

  Fair enough. Sullivan was more or less in the bag. (Maybe, as with Wilson, a gold cigarette case had sealed the deal.) But Kahn was scarcely another Broadway hack. On balance, the worst that can be said about his three-part New Yorker profile (subsequently expanded into the slight but charming book The Voice) is that it was written in the amused, breezy tone so common to that magazine in those days, the verbal equivalent of Eustace Tilley deigning to glance through his lorgnette at a butterfly. “Sinatra has several other friends who, while not precisely desperadoes, are fairly rough-and-tumble individuals,” reads a typical sentence in Kahn’s piece. The passage immediately following soft-pedals Sinatra’s acquaintance with Joe Fischetti and his meeting with Lucky Luciano.

  For whatever reasons—surely artistic rather than political—Kahn minimizes Sinatra’s bad behavior. But the writer’s worst offense, according to Westbrook Pegler, was this: “Kahn writes also that some of Sinatra’s public earnestly believe that his birthday is second in importance to only that of Jesus Christ.”

  Pegler, who would become an increasingly rabid anti-Semite (he liked to refer to Eastern European Jews as “geese”), didn’t have to state the obvious: Kahn was a Jew. And worse still, a Jew bowing down to an Antichrist. This is no exaggeration. In his column of September 26, Pegler wrote, “There is a weird light playing around Sinatra. Hitler affected many Germans much the same way and madness has been rife in the world.”

  This was not just some California kook writing the FBI about the nefarious possibilities of swooning bobby-soxers. This was a Pulitzer-winning columnist, with the broadest possible platform, the five hundred newspapers of the Hearst Syndicate, comparing a popular entertainer to the worst mass murderer in history.

  And Pegler wasn’t done yet.

  On December 8, he went for the knockout punch, beginning with the magic triangulation: “From time to time, these dispatches have disclosed and commented on a strange liaison between our journalism and the underworld and Communist fronts of the amusement industry.”

  Communism never came up again in that column—in those days you only had to say it once. After dropping the word, Pegler segued right back into the familiar theme of Frank’s nasty associations. First he took on the Varsity member Jimmy Tarantino, who had moved to California and started a scandal sheet called Hollywood Nite Life, a precursor of Confidential. Tarantino was a skanky character, one of the many who would stick a little too closely to Sinatra throughout the years.2 In this case the glue was Hank Sanicola, Tarantino’s partner on Hollywood Nite Life. (Mickey Cohen, quite the man about Tinseltown, might also have been involved.) Frank should have given Jimmy Tarantino—and a lot of other people throughout the years—a wide berth, but if a man was loyal and amusing, Frank never bothered to do a background check. He liked to laugh, and fun came first. If the price was the vitriol of Westbrook Pegler and Lee Mortimer, so be it. Yet there was another price to pay.

  At the end of the column, Pegler returned to the reliable theme of sex: specifically, Sinatra’s role as seducer of the nation’s youth. But in a curious (and more than slightly kinky) twist, the columnist now blamed the seducees:

  There has been strident controversy as to Sinatra’s real opinion of the nasty little chits who used to loiter late into the night around night clubs, theaters, and other inappropriate haunts for children, where Sinatra was earning his living or taking his ease with the Fischetti freres of the Chicago underworld and Lucky Luciano, the exiled Sicilian prostitutioneer. Mortimer called them little morons. This was outlandish flattery in the reckless tabloid manner, and Sinatra caught him when his head was turned and slugged him …

  In a study of this matter at the time I wrote that Mr. Evans, the manager and press-agent, had expressed the same opinion of these sinister little tramps … It was … Mr. Evans, Sinatra’s own manager and propagandist, the man who fomented the excitement over this exaggerated roadhouse moaner, who spoke to me of Frankie Boy’s following as sexually excited jailbait, a million of them, squealing like animals.

  Pegler is finally showing his true colors. The real surprise is George Evans’s disaffection. No matter what he actually said to Westbrook Pegler—and the lack of a direct quotation is suspicious—the fact that he spoke to him at all (and in all likelihood really did say something derogatory about Sinatra’s fan base) hints at trouble in Frank’s professional life. At the end of the column Pegler, in high poetic mode, wrote, “Sinatra laid an egg at the Capitol theater and the amorous cult had vanished away like the insect clouds that madly swarm and dissolve.” There was certainly no love lost between Westbrook Pegler and Frank Sinatra, but where the Capitol Theater gig was concerned, the columnist was, for once, telling the straight story.

  Sinatra’s stand at the Capitol, the site of his famous opening with the Hoboken Four, was meant to be a triumphant return. “FRANK SINATRA/M-G-M’s Singing Star/IN PERSON,” a poster trumpeted. But the tanking of It Happened in Brooklyn, along with the star’s current publicity, hinted that triumph might not be in the cards. (And then, for anyone who cared to pay attention, there was the title of the movie that accompanied the Capitol show: Her Husband’s Affairs, with Lucille Ball and Franchot Tone.) By the end of the second week of the three-week engagement, it was clear that something was very wrong. Lee Mortimer reported, gleefully but with the numbers to back him up: “The crooner, expected to pile up new highs, almost hits a new low. His second week … was a sickly $71,000, half of the advance estimate.” And in a subsequent column: “Bro
adway whispers this will be Sinatra’s last appearance here, and that didn’t kill my appetite for the family turkey dinner.”

  It was no fluke: the wheel really had turned. The relentless bad publicity couldn’t have helped; still, the cold fact was that Frank’s core audience, those nasty little chits, that sexually excited jailbait, were growing up and moving on. Throughout the year, despite Sinatra’s unprecedented number of studio sessions, his record sales had slipped badly: his discs spent just twenty-six weeks on the Billboard charts in 1947, as compared with ninety-seven the year before. He was putting more in and getting less out. On Your Hit Parade, he was almost always singing other people’s songs: one of the first, in September, had been that old chestnut, “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now,” a big hit for Perry Como—who, by the way, now stood one notch above Frank on Billboard’s annual performance chart.

  Sinatra had been singing professionally for a dozen years; he had had an amazing run. Maybe his time was passing. He might have been The Voice, but there were other voices the public found pleasing. That nice Perry Como had a very pleasant tone (and a nice face too), and you didn’t see him running around with gangsters or slugging people.

  All but buried at the bottom of the poster for the Capitol Theater engagement, far beneath “SINATRA” and in significantly smaller type than the billings for Lorraine Rognan (Petite Comedienne) and Skitch Henderson (his Piano and his ORCH.), was the name of Frank’s opening act: “WILL MASTIN TRIO with Sammy Davies Jr.”

  Misprint aside, the billing was deceptive: Sammy Davis Jr. was the one whose name should have been first, in big capital letters. He had been the star of the act since age three, in 1928, when his father, Sammy Davis Sr., and vaudeville partner Will Mastin first put the little boy on the stage. From childhood, Sammy had been a miraculous performer, a show-business prodigy who could instantly pick up complicated dance routines, sing like a natural, and learn to play any instrument that was put into his hands. About to turn twenty-two, having reached his adult height of just five feet three, he was a tiny whirlwind of singing and dancing genius: he not only had a beautifully rich baritone but could do tap routines of blinding speed and precision. He could play piano, saxophone, and drums. He did eerily accurate impersonations of Cary Grant, Boris Karloff, Edward G. Robinson—and of his idol Frank Sinatra.

  He was also a desperately lonely young man. His parents had split when his father took him on the road; performing had been his whole life. Little Sammy spent his childhood running from truant officers, missing his mother, living for the charmed moments each day when he could win the love of an audience. The hours between those moments were long and empty. In his spare time he imagined the fame that would bring him true love at last. Fame, he knew, was everything.

  Davis had been obsessed with Sinatra from the moment he first heard about him. That voice made his hair stand on end—as did the idolatry. As Sammy toured the unapologetically racist country, scrounging a living in flea-bitten vaudeville theaters, carrying the act named after the bitter and domineering old man who also loved him like an uncle, he thought constantly of Frank—bought his records and fan magazines, kept a scrapbook of articles about him, imitated his dress and mannerisms. And—since he was not just an entertainer but also a stargazing fan who haunted stage doors wherever he played, trying to get a glimpse of, and maybe an autograph from, stars like Milton Berle, Danny Thomas, Bob Hope—Sammy dreamed of the day he would meet his idol in person.

  It came, unexpectedly, at Detroit’s Michigan Theater in 1941, when the Mastin Trio filled in for Tommy Dorsey’s warm-up act Tip, Tap, & Toe. There was a friendly backstage handshake between Sinatra and the awestruck sixteen-year-old, and then the road took them their separate ways. Over the next couple of years, as Frank’s star rose and the Mastin Trio kept scrounging, Sammy dreamed of the reunion that would validate his existence. His chance came in the fall of 1945, in Los Angeles. Though he’d been discharged from the Army in June, he got out his uniform, had it pressed, and put it on so he could get a serviceman’s ticket to Sinatra’s radio show at CBS. Afterward, he recalled in his autobiography.

  I hurried around the corner to the stage door. There must have been five hundred kids ahead of me, waiting for a look at him. When he appeared, the crowd surged forward like one massive body ready to go right through the side of the building if necessary. Girls were screaming, fainting, pushing, waving pencils and papers in the air. A girl next to me shouted, “I’d faint if I had room to fall down.” She got her laugh and the crowd kept moving. I stood on tiptoe trying to see him. God, he looked like a star. He wasn’t much older than a lot of us but he was so calm, like we were all silly kids and he was a man, sure of himself, completely in control. He acted as if he didn’t know there were hundreds of papers being waved at him. He concentrated on one at a time, signing it, smiling, and going to the next. He got to me and took my paper. He used a solid gold pen to sign his name. I thanked him and he looked at me. “Don’t I know you?”

  The story rings true, solid-gold pen and all. Sinatra did have an amazing memory for names and faces, and Sammy Davis didn’t look like anybody else. Frank invited him to come to his dressing room after the next week’s show. Sammy remembered that once there, all he could do was stare at his idol and think, “ ‘I can speak to Frank Sinatra and he’ll answer me.’ But I couldn’t think of anything clever enough to say so I just watched him, smiling and laughing at his every word.”

  It was a perfect relationship for both men.

  By the time Frank got to the Capitol in November 1947, he had established a tradition. “Frank Sinatra,” Will Mastin explained to the two Sammys after the fateful telegram came, “always has a colored act on the bill with him.”

  Even if George Evans had nothing but public relations in mind when he pushed his star client to accept all those tolerance awards, that didn’t make Sinatra a phony liberal. And his sentiments about working with black entertainers ran deep: artistically speaking, he knew where his bread was buttered. He simply understood too much about the roots of American popular music to imagine that he didn’t owe an important debt to the geniuses of Fifty-second Street, Billie Holiday first among them.

  But aside from that, Frank genuinely liked black people. And, understanding this, most black people—who, by the fact of their existence in America, possessed an intricate radar for racism—liked him back.3 He clearly understood what it was like to be discriminated against. He had great style. And that voice of his told the truth, no matter what color your ears were.

  So he hired colored acts. Sinatra, in addition to being color-blind, was generous—and, once he had decided to help someone, tenacious. MGM could squawk all it wanted about taking on those unknowns Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne, but if they didn’t, they didn’t get Sinatra. The Capitol Theater could remind Frank until they were blue in the face that if he wanted a colored act, he could easily get the more famous Moke and Poke, or the Berry Brothers, or the Nicholas Brothers, who were even in a movie, for God’s sake. Frank shook his head obstinately. “There’s a kid who comes to my radio show when he’s in town, he works with his family, his name is Sam something. Use him.”

  “All right, Frank, if you want ’em you got ’em. How much do you want to give them?”

  “Make it $1,250.”

  “We can get the Nicholas Brothers for that kind of money and … they’re hot.”

  “$1,250. That’s it. I don’t want the Nicholas Brothers. I want Sam and his family.”

  And once the Will Mastin Trio (which up to this point had been making $350 in a good week) was onstage at the Capitol, Frank would stroll out and throw his arm around Sammy’s shoulder—in an era when such a gesture from a white man to a black man was a very rare sight indeed—and personally introduce him to the crowd.

  Even if the crowd, especially by the second week, was no longer quite the size the crowds had been so very recently.

  During all this disappointment, Frank kept recording as though his life depend
ed on it—which, in a very real way, it did. In October alone, he cut an amazing twenty sides at Liederkranz Hall, more than he had done in all of 1943. Committing to shellac such great standards as “All of Me,” “Laura,” “The Song Is You,” and “What’ll I Do?” was a kind of atonement for all the mediocre material he was being forced to sing on Your Hit Parade. On Friday, October 31—having spent the previous afternoon grinning through a cold rain as Hoboken celebrated Frank Sinatra Day—he recorded three beautiful songs, “Mean to Me,” “Spring Is Here,” and “Fools Rush In,” and he sang them beautifully.

  The only problem was, the public wasn’t buying.

  Dolly had stood close by Frank’s side as the mayor of Hoboken presented him with a giant wooden key to the city. Wearing a big feathered hat and the mink stole Frank had bought her, she threw her head back as the photographers snapped away, a rapturous smile creasing her chubby cheeks. Rain or no rain, her moment in the sun had come at last. Frank Sinatra Day, Dolly Sinatra Day—same thing. At his son’s other shoulder stood Marty, looking grim in his old-fashioned fire captain’s uniform with its two rows of brass buttons. Firemen marched in parades; they didn’t lead them.

  Just out of range of the photographers stood Nancy, smiling despite the proximity of her mother-in-law. George Evans was holding an umbrella over her. She wore a wool coat, the Tiffany pearl earrings Frank had bought her, and, out of sight but cool against her breastbone, the triple strand of pearls. She was also carrying a very tangible token of her husband’s recommitment to their marriage: she was pregnant again.