Frank

by James Kaplan

  Accompanying this particular testimony were tears edging down her cheeks. She dabbed them with a dainty handkerchief.

  Summing up, she said her husband’s conduct “made me terribly nervous and upset and humiliated me.”

  Mrs. Sinatra’s sister, Miss Julie Barbato, was her corroborating witness.

  She testified that she knew from her own knowledge that Sinatra embarrassed his wife by staying away from home and by rudely refusing to assist in the entertainment of guests.

  Frank didn’t contest the action.

  As Nancy left the courthouse, the photographers called out to her, asking for a smile. “I don’t feel much like smiling,” she told them.

  She had won, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. “I would see her faint into her plate at dinner from the stress,” Nancy junior wrote.

  Sometimes it was heart palpitations, sometimes a cold, sometimes fatigue. Until then, she had never been sick. I used to think it was the food. Maybe she wasn’t eating right. She was in pain. And though I wasn’t aware of it, her pain was exacerbated by the scandal. She was deeply in love and terribly hurt. I would hear her crying quietly at night while I was going to sleep. She would never show it in front of us, never, but my room was next to hers and I would tiptoe out and I’d listen at her door and she’d be crying. Sometimes I would go in to her and just put my arms around her. And sometimes I would just go away, thinking, “Mind your own business. Daddy’s just on the road again,” and cry myself to sleep.

  The picture of Frank painted in court by Nancy and her sister is not a pretty one, and while it was certainly tinged by rancor—no doubt many of the guests he snubbed were Barbatos—it feels all too true. Sinatra certainly used Twin Palms as a bachelor pad, and would continue to do so for as long as he owned the place. And though his remoteness was exacerbated by his obsession with Ava, it was also deeply ingrained in his character. He was, and always would be, the loneliest son of a bitch he knew.

  It therefore made perfect sense, in Frank’s world, that the Varsity was still up and running: Sanicola, Ben Barton, Toots Shor, Jackie Gleason, Al Silvani, Tami Mauriello, Manie Sacks, and whoever else might be lighting his cigarettes and laughing at his jokes. Ava hated the whole thing, hated the sycophancy and the boys’-club exclusivity, but there was little she could do about it. Frank—much like Picasso, with the group of hangers-on he called his tertulia—was a king who required a court.

  And he needed all the support he could get on October 7, at 9:00 p.m., when The Frank Sinatra Show made its debut on CBS television, opposite the smash hit Your Show of Shows on NBC. Continuing Bob Hope’s swimming-pool metaphor, the New York Times’s Jack Gould wrote, “Frank Sinatra walked off the television high dive on Saturday night, but unfortunately fell into the shallow end of the pool.” Gould went on to call the show “a drab mixture of radio, routine vaudeville and pallid pantomime.” John Crosby, of the Herald Tribune, called Sinatra “a surprisingly good actor but a rather bad emcee.” And Variety cited “bad pacing, bad scripting, bad tempo, poor camera work and an overall jerky presentation.”

  And the $41,500 the episode cost was money straight out the window for CBS, which hadn’t been able to attract a sponsor.

  Clearly the occasion called for a big celebration.

  Toots Shor’s (of course) was the venue, and Sinatra’s new publicist, Nat Shapiro, invited 150 of the singer’s closest friends. Three hundred showed up, along with a writer and a photographer from Look magazine, which ran a feature on the bash.

  But no amount of publicity could slap much life into The Frank Sinatra Show. The broadcast would limp along for the rest of the season at forty grand per episode (though in November, Bulova signed on to sponsor the first half hour), as the critics continued to snipe and the viewing public mostly tuned to Sid Caesar. Things might have been different if Sinatra had devoted himself to the program, but he appeared to have other fish to fry. “Frank was always late, sometimes two and three hours late,” recalled Irving Mansfield, whom the network brought in to produce after the first show bombed.

  He hated to rehearse and refused to discuss the weekly format. Usually, he ignored the guest shots entirely. Once he wanted to book Jackie Gleason, who was very hot at the time, but Frank would not rehearse. Even though he and Jackie were pals, Jackie refused to go on the air without a rehearsal, and we ended up having to pay him $7,500 [almost $70,000 today] plus expenses for being the guest star who did not do Frank’s show. Another time I came to work and was told by [Sinatra’s entourage] that Brian Aherne was the guest star for the following week. “Frank wants to class up the show,” they said. What could I do? Aherne was a B actor with a mustache and no flair for television. He was a disaster, and Frank was furious afterwards. “Why’d you put that bum on my show?” he screamed. “It wasn’t my idea,” I said. “It was yours.” He refused to talk to me again for days.

  As was so often the case, Frank was furious because he felt out of control. His movie career was DOA; his concert and nightclub bookings were flatlining. The one place where he felt most dominant, the recording studio, was increasingly dominated by another. His response was not only disengagement and petty tyranny but also a spike in his obsessive-compulsive symptoms. “Frank was always washing his hands, constantly washing, washing, washing, as if he was trying to wash his life away or something,” Mansfield said. “When he wasn’t washing his hands, he was changing his shorts. He would drop his pants to the floor, take off his drawers, and kick them up in the air with his foot. Some flunky would chase those dirty shorts around the room while Frank put on a clean pair. He must’ve changed his shorts every twenty minutes. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.”

  He felt unclean. Unworthy.

  He also grew obsessed with the idea that Ava was cheating on him. Three thousand miles away, who knew what she might be up to? The main suspect was Artie Shaw. According to Mansfield, “Frank was insanely jealous of Shaw. Whenever he couldn’t get her on the phone he’d start screaming on the set that she was having an affair with Artie. ‘I know she’s with that goddamn Artie Shaw,’ he’d yell. ‘I know she’s with that bastard. I’ll kill her. I’ll kill her. I’ll kill her.’ ”

  He was in a dangerous state of mind: the world seemed to conspire against his every move. The condition is all the worse for its circularity. Jackie Gleason, riding high, understood that rehearsal brought polish, which brought success, which brought more confidence. Sinatra, feeling like a failure, was ensuring nothing but more failure for himself.

  The new radio show, on Sunday afternoons, was a blip. Some programming genius at CBS had come up with a weird formula for Meet Frank Sinatra: Frank wouldn’t just sing, he would engage in repartee with his studio audience and guests. The talk felt scripted, forced. The singing was another matter: he was backed by a five-piece rhythm combo, a format that always made him feel comfortable and spontaneous. The only problem was, nobody was listening.

  That same month, Columbia released Sing and Dance with Frank Sinatra, his first album specifically conceived as a ten-inch LP—and, as it turned out, his last for the label. The record consisted entirely of George Siravo–arranged, up-tempo numbers, seven of them from the overdubbed April sessions, and even if there was a slight disconnect between Frank and the Frank-less musicians, the album was—and still is—joyous, swinging Sinatra.

  But Sing and Dance failed to even graze the Billboard charts.

  He flew to Los Angeles for Christmas, to bring his kids presents and remind them who he was, but mainly to see Ava. It had been over three months, yet the reunion was ambivalent. She was thrilled at her gift: he’d bought her a puppy, a Pembroke Welsh corgi; they named it Rags. And she was thrilled with Show Boat, which was close to wrapping at Metro, the studio that had fired him. Frank’s smile slowly chilled. He had scant patience for listening to Ava enthuse about her director, George Sidney—who had directed Frank in Anchors Aweigh—and her co-star Kathryn Grayson, who had co-starred with Frank not once but three times.
Not to mention the wonderful Howard Keel.

  Was she banging him?

  She was never one to flinch, not even for a second. How about Marilyn Maxwell—was he still screwing her?

  His voice rose. What about Artie Shaw?

  She gave as good as she got. What about his wife? Was he ever going to leave her, or was that going to go on forever?

  The puppy cowered. Then came more screaming, and breaking dishes, and slamming doors—followed, of course, by the absolutely stupendous making up. After which she nestled sweetly in his arms, and they swore never to fight again.

  Then he was back off to New York again.

  September 1950: Nancy, beautiful in distress, wins her separate-maintenance suit in Santa Monica Superior Court. She dabbed away “a tear or so,” the Los Angeles Times reported, as Judge Orlando H. Rhodes awarded her “the Holmby Hills home, its furnishings and effects, a 1950 Cadillac, 34 shares of stock in the Sinatra Music Corp. and one-third of Sinatra’s annual gross earnings on the first $150,000 and 10% of the next $150,000.” (photo credit 26.2)

  27

  Frank and Ava with Dolly and Marty at the premiere of Meet Danny Wilson, November 1951. Dolly, who constantly clashed with Nancy, was crazy about Ava. (photo credit 27.1)

  One night in January, as Frank walked into the Columbia recording studios, he passed a group of teenage girls, who noticed him at once. They giggled. As he smiled expectantly, they called out in unison: “We like Eddie Fisher!”

  Frank shrugged, chastened. “I do, too,” was all he could come up with.

  Edwin Jack Fisher was a nice Jewish boy from Philadelphia with a handsome face, a thick head of dark hair, a soaringly confident tenor voice, and no sense of musical tempo whatsoever. “You had to tell him when to start,” said the record producer Alan Livingston. “It was amazing.” Fisher had started singing on the radio in high school, had been discovered by Eddie Cantor, and had signed with RCA Victor in 1949, at twenty-one. And in June 1950, an appearance on Milton Berle’s Texaco Star Theater, the biggest show on television, had turned Eddie into a national sensation.

  Fisher was the first popular singing idol created by the new medium, which was growing by the month beyond anyone’s ability to calculate. The new stars of TV—Berle, Sid Caesar, Jackie Gleason, Martin and Lewis—were riding the crest of a tremendous wave, and by 1950 Eddie Fisher was riding along too. Days after the Texaco appearance, his agent booked him into Ben Miller’s Riviera, an elegant nightspot atop the Palisades in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and over the span of a two-week gig Fisher came into his own not just as a pop phenomenon but as an important American entertainer—the clubs were still a key cultural component in those days. It was a feat akin to the one Sinatra had pulled off at the Astor roof ten years earlier. Earl Wilson wrote, “Singer Eddie Fisher … is merely wonderful. There’s no reason he shouldn’t become a big star.” And in the Daily Mirror, Frank’s old nemesis Lee Mortimer raved, “The cash customers cheer and beg for more, indicating the lad is the song find of the year.” Variety, Time, and the New York Times printed similar plaudits.

  “I became the hottest act in show business,” Fisher recalled many years later. He was twenty-two.

  Within weeks I was performing before sold-out audiences at the best clubs in the country … Every variety show on television wanted me as a guest … By the end of the year I had been named America’s Most Promising New Male Vocalist in Billboard’s annual disc-jockey poll, as well as Discovery of the Year and Male Singer of the Year.

  All the major motion-picture studios begged me to take a screen test. I began receiving thousands of pieces of fan mail every day, and fan clubs were organized around the country.

  Then, in February 1951, Fisher played the Paramount:

  Few entertainers have ever experienced the kind of adulation I received when I opened at the Paramount. There is no way to describe accurately the feeling of being at the center of that kind of frenzy … I was the new Sinatra, the Jewish Sinatra.

  Eddie Fisher was writing his memoirs at the end of the 1990s, at a moment when the world had all but forgotten him. There is a poignant odor of insistence about his recollections: Remember me. I used to be huge.

  Yet in February 1951, Frank Sinatra had no way of knowing that Eddie Fisher would be forgotten and he himself would be immortal.

  One night Frank was walking through Times Square when he saw the giant crowds of girls beneath the Paramount marquee. The sight was like a vision at once of his past and his death. He hurried back to Manie Sacks’s suite at the Hampshire House, went into the kitchen, closed the door, laid his head on the stove, and turned on the gas. Manie happened to return not long afterward, smelled the odor, and went into the kitchen, where he found Frank lying on the floor, sobbing, a failure even at suicide.

  In December 1950, the Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver, a Democrat possessed of a crusading temperament and presidential aspirations, convened the Special Committee on Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce. In reality, the committee’s investigations had less to do with commerce than with an organization of which few Americans were aware in that more innocent time: the Mafia. The country got a crash course. The hearings ran for ninety-two days in fourteen cities, including New York, Chicago, Detroit, and New Orleans, with a cast of witnesses who became instantly infamous: the likes of Giuseppe Doto (Joe Adonis), Albert Anastasia, Frank Costello, Jake Guzik, Virginia Hill, Willie Moretti, and Longy Zwillman. The committee’s sessions were televised, quickly becoming America’s most popular show. Appliance stores tuned the TV sets in their display windows to the Kefauver hearings as an inducement to buy. The nation was mesmerized by the raspy-voiced testimony of the Copacabana owner, Costello, who had refused to allow his face to be shown on camera. Instead, viewers saw a dramatic close-up of the gangster’s well-manicured hands, which he wrung constantly as he spoke.

  At a committee meeting during the investigation, Kefauver handed one of his lawyers, Joseph Nellis, an envelope containing eight eight-by-ten glossy photographs. The pictures were all of Frank Sinatra. “I almost fell off my chair,” Nellis recalled many years later. “I opened the envelope and saw a picture of Sinatra with his arm around Lucky Luciano on the balcony of the Hotel Nacional in Havana; another picture showed Sinatra and Luciano sitting at a nightclub in the Nacional with lots of bottles having a hell of a time with some good-looking girls. One picture showed Frank getting off a plane carrying a suitcase, and then there were a couple pictures of him with the Fischetti brothers, Lucky Luciano … Kefauver wanted to know more about Sinatra’s relationship with Luciano, who was running an international narcotics cartel in exile. So I called Frank’s attorney and arranged a meeting.”

  Nellis didn’t just want to talk to Frank’s attorney—he wanted Frank to testify, on camera. This, of course, would have been the final nail in Sinatra’s coffin: a TV show to end all TV shows, a big broadcast that would have blown the singer’s career right out of the water. Kefauver and Nellis were entirely serious about this: the senator had ordered his lawyer to bulldoze Sinatra with the full power of the U.S. Senate. What Nellis hadn’t reckoned on was his adversary.

  Frank (or in all likelihood, Henry Jaffe) had chosen his attorney well. Sol Gelb was a former assistant to New York’s governor, Thomas Dewey, and the Manhattan district attorney Frank Hogan, now in private practice. Ironically—or appropriately, depending on your point of view—he had worked for Dewey when the crime-busting governor convicted Lucky Luciano of running a prostitution ring. He had also helped Hogan bring Lepke Buchalter of Murder Inc. to justice. Gelb was a tough lawyer who knew organized crime inside and out, and he had no fear of Kefauver. He argued strenuously to Nellis that if Sinatra had to testify alongside the likes of Costello, Moretti, and Adonis, the singer’s public image and career would be permanently ruined. Nellis argued back no less strenuously, citing the incriminating photographs. Finally, the two lawyers reached a compromise.

  Frank would testify in absolute secrecy. Gelb chose a l
aw office on an upper floor of Rockefeller Center, at four o’clock in the morning on March 1, 1951.

  At 4:00 a.m. on the dot—no being two hours late for this one—Sinatra and Gelb stepped off the elevator to find Nellis and a court reporter, stenotype machine in hand, already waiting. Frank’s famous bluster was nowhere in sight: the Kefauver Committee, with its implicit threat of fatal publicity, had thrown the fear of God into him. He looked “like a lost kitten, drawn, frightened to death,” Nellis recalled. “He kept shooting his cuffs, straightening his tie, and he smoked constantly.” His right hand shook so badly each time he tried to light a fresh cigarette that he had to hold it with his left.

  “He knew that I was going to ask him about Willie Moretti and Lucky Luciano,” Nellis said, “but he didn’t know about all the photographs that I had. He also didn’t know that I had a report about a rape he had allegedly been involved in and the blackmail that had reportedly been paid to keep that story from ever being published.”

  The rape story was the first of many such Sinatra rumors that would pop up, like malodorous bubbles in a swamp, over the years. The venue was usually Las Vegas or Palm Springs. Usually prostitutes were involved; so, usually, was Jimmy Van Heusen. For all his vaunted courtliness where ladies were concerned, Van Heusen—a self-confessed sex addict—was obsessed with prostitutes, and allegedly had some outré tastes. Sinatra allegedly shared some of these tastes. “Van Heusen was a wild man, they said—a crazy man as far as women were concerned,” said Gloria Delson Franks, Sammy Cahn’s first wife. “Sometimes not in a nice way, too; he abused a lot of women, apparently. Pushing them around. Whatever. I think there was a time when Nancy felt he was a bad influence on Frank. Not that Frank was a choir boy before.”