by Kitty Kelley
The bobby-soxers squealed with delight when they learned that their idol had been spared. The Varsity was relieved, and “the monster” noncommittal. The only statement came from Mama Sinatra, who was so taken with her fabricated image as a Red Cross nurse in World War I that she played it to the hilt. “Oh, dear,” she said. “Frankie wanted to get in so badly because we wanted to have our pictures taken together in uniform.”
7
For all the women in Frank Sinatra’s life—the starlets and singers, waitresses and call girls—he much preferred the company of men, especially fighters and those who were attracted to boxing. Every Friday night in the early 1940s, he and The Varsity headed for the old Madison Square Garden on Fiftieth Street and Eighth Avenue to see the fights. No woman ever interrupted this weekly ritual. Going to the fights represented more than the spectacle of raw violence. There was also the camaraderie of like-minded men who enjoyed the sport and its elemental violence.
Some men took women—flashy women glamorous enough to instill envy and awe in other men—but, for the most part, this was a male arena where men watched other men in satin trunks pummel each other.
Before the action started, the air was visceral. The Garden was gamy and rife with gambling. Bets were made by smalltime hustlers and high-stake gamblers, bookies and fight promoters. In one part of the Garden, several rows of men sat under a blue cloud of cigar haze. They wore fedoras and iridescent suits that shimmered under the glaring lights. Some of them sported tuxedos, as if they were dressed for the most important party of their lives. Others who sat ringside wore camel’s-hair coats and diamond-encrusted gold pinkie rings that complemented their solid gold bridgework.
Frank liked to sit there with the subculture celebrities—the restaurateurs and nightclub owners like Toots Shor, and crime syndicate bosses like Frank Costello. This is where Frank Sinatra paid his weekly respects to Willie Moretti (aka Willie Moore), the underworld boss of New Jersey, who was his neighbor in Hasbrouck Heights. Moretti was a short, garrulous man whose public recognition of Frank paved Sinatra’s way with other mobsters.
“I never missed a Friday night,” said Frank. “And the great fights I saw there and the great times I had I wouldn’t trade for anything. Going to the Friday night fights was an event, a great event.”
His passion for boxing had started in childhood with his admiration for his father, who fought thirty pro fights, and his three boxer uncles. Too small to carry on the family tradition, Frank, who weighed 127 pounds and whose hands swelled every time he landed a punch, became an avid fan. He enjoyed the heavyweight boxers’ display of strength and toughness. He felt comfortable with these men and said he liked to associate with them because they were great company and had a sense of humor. “I remember teasing Marciano and Dempsey for that high-pitched voice each had,” he said years later. “I’d say to them, ‘You guys must have been hit in the crotch too many times,’ and they’d laugh.”
In 1943, Frank paid ten thousand dollars to buy an interest in heavyweight fighter Tami Mauriello. He attended all Mauriello’s fights and accompanied him to the Gotham Health Club every chance he got. When Tami was drafted, he gave Frank his gold identification bracelet, which the singer wore as proudly as a high school girl wears her boyfriend’s class ring.
With the induction of Tami and boxing writer Jimmy Tarantino, The Varsity was depleted by two, but there were always eager replacements and stand-ins more than willing to do Frank’s bidding. Many of these men were uneducated Italians from the streets who shared an ethnic bond. The closest among them were the Sicilians, who accepted the ill-tempered yelling and tolerated the haranguing to be with a star who could introduce them to a glittering world of nightclubs and celebrities and potentially more money than they could ever make as blue-collar workers.
“We had some great times in those days,” said Nick Sevano. “Frank was always going, going, going, and we were always with him, going to the theater, to the fights, to see Zero Mostel or Billie Holiday, eating with George Raft and Betty Grable, going to the Stork Club, Lindy’s and the Copa, flying to California, going to the Hollywood Palladium, meeting Spencer Tracy and Cary Grant. Those were the good times, the fun times, when Frank could make us forget what a pain in the ass he was.”
The stage door at the Paramount was stacked six deep with petitioners begging for a coveted spot on The Varsity. It was there that Ben Barton had appeared one night and ended up starting the music company with Frank and Hank Sanicola.
Ben was more than a business partner. He became close with the Sinatras, stayed with them in Hasbrouck Heights, took care of Frank’s parents, sent flowers to Dolly for Frank on Mother’s Day, and, most of all, was Nancy’s confidant, listening to her complaints about Frank’s other women. He advised her to turn her eyes away and shut her ears. Long after their divorce he said: “If she’d done what I told her, she’d still be married to him. …”
Song pluggers pleaded with Frank for attention. Even Fred (“Tamby”) Tamburro, Frank’s bullying nemesis from the days of The Hoboken Four, came knocking.
“Frank, look,” said Tamby. “You gotta do me a favor. A big favor. I just got married. Give me a job with you.”
Sinatra knew he had forty-three sport jackets that he liked to have hanging a certain way, shirts that had to be carefully laundered—without starch—and exactly folded, and twenty-one pairs of shoes he insisted on lining up in a long, even row on the floor. He offered to take Tamby on as his valet.
“Me, shining your shoes and getting your shirts? Me?” Tamby refused to lower himself to the level of a manservant. Instead, he asked to use Sinatra’s name for a year and bill himself as the man who originally sang with The Voice, but Frank refused.
“I can’t understand why this man never helped me,” said Tamby many years later. “I’m not the best singer in the world, but I’m not the worst either. I asked him to let me use his name for a year—to travel up and down the country and bill myself as Sinatra’s original partner—but he said, ‘No dice. No way.’ ”
Everyone in the entourage was covetous of his own position, and everyone was excited about going to Hollywood, where Frank was to star in Higher and Higher for RKO with Michèle Morgan and Jack Haley.
“This was Frank’s first big film in which he was going to be the star, and all of us were pretty revved up about going with him,” said Nick Sevano. “Except for Nancy. She was staying home because she was pregnant and had to take care of Little Nancy. She was fit to be tied about it and took it out on all of us. She was so upset because she was not included that she started raising hell with Frank. She was especially mad that I was going.”
Friction between Big Nancy and Nick had been growing for months because Frank spent more time with his friend than with his wife. Nick lived with them in New Jersey. He was with Frank nightly, frequently staying with him in a suite at the Astor Hotel when it was too late to drive home.
“I was with him all the time in those days, and Nancy resented it,” Nick said. “She was insecure and very jealous of anyone who was close to Frank. She hated Hank Sanicola, too, but Hank didn’t come home at night with Frank and live with them in the house the way I did.
“Nancy would call Frank, and I’d hear him say, ‘All right, Nancy, I’m coming home for dinner,’ and then he’d never make it. Hours later, on the way home, he’d stew about it. He broke many, many promises in those days. Nancy would call Dolly, and Dolly would call Frank and say, ‘You promised her, Frank. You promised Nancy that you would be there.’ It was terrible, but Frank didn’t have time to spend with a family. He was too distracted with getting ahead, with his responsibilities to his career, his work, his radio programs, his rehearsals, his appearances. He was running so hard in those days. Nancy didn’t understand his ambitions.
“Then she’d blame me for carousing with Frank. She accused me of getting all the broads for him because I was a bachelor, but I can assure you that I never had to get any women for Frank in those days.”
One day not long before Frank and his crew were to leave for the West Coast, Frank told Nick to run some errands, and make a few purchases. Nick was embarrassed to say that he’d run out of his expense money, and he could no longer bear going to Nancy because she questioned every purchase and every expense, wanting to know why it was bought, where, for how much, and for whom. So he crept into the master bedroom and took a ten-dollar bill from the top of the dresser. She saw him and later told Frank that Nick was stealing. She would not let up on the subject and finally forced her husband’s hand.
A few nights later Frank and Nick left the Paramount and headed for Forty-ninth Street, where Frank kept his car parked for the ride back to New Jersey. On the way to the garage, Frank didn’t say much, but when they reached the car, he didn’t tell Nick to get in as he usually did. Instead, Frank lowered his head and said, “Why don’t you stay at the hotel tonight, and I’ll be in touch.”
Nick realized there was severe conflict at home, so he agreed to stay in their suite at the Astor Hotel. “I sort of sensed that something was wrong, but I thought that he’d forget about it. I didn’t take it too seriously until Hank called me the next day to say that Frank wanted me fired. I couldn’t believe it. After more than four years of living and working together, he couldn’t look me in the eye and tell me himself. If he’d just said he was under a lot of pressure at home, I would’ve understood, but he couldn’t even do that. He couldn’t communicate. I knew how much he hated confrontations but—I was dumbstruck by the whole thing, and in addition to being hurt, I was scared. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I couldn’t go back to Hoboken, not after everything I’d seen and done with Frank. I was desperate, just desperate.”
People were shocked when they heard the news. Nick had been with Frank since 1939. He had designed Frank’s clothes when Frank first went on his own, had handled all Frank’s phone calls, letters, and public relations during the Dorsey days, always staying in the background. He ran all Frank’s errands, shielded him from Nancy, and placated Dolly. He bought all the presents that Frank wanted to give and shouldered him in and out of cabs so that he would not be trampled by his young fans. He seemed to have dedicated himself to Frank.
He had even acted as his romantic emissary, flying to Saranac, New York, to visit Alora Gooding when she was hospitalized with tuberculosis. Frank had sent him because he couldn’t go himself, and he didn’t want Alora to be alone. Nick had gone and been snowed in.
One of Frank’s entourage remembered the night Frank threw up all over Nick outside of Patsy D’Amore’s Villa Capri in Los Angeles, and Nick carried him back to the Sunset Towers and put him to bed. He also recalled how much Nick hated hookers and how Frank used to send them around to his room as a joke. Nick had been Frank’s Friar Tuck, his Sancho Panza.
Even Dolly Sinatra was stunned. She called Nick the minute she found out. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s that bitch wife of his that’s to blame. That bastard will call you. I’ll get him on the phone to you. He’ll know that you were the best friend he ever had. Don’t worry.” Two weeks later, she phoned Nick again: “Did that no good son of a bitch call you yet?”
“Frank never called, but those phone calls from Dolly gave me the confidence to keep going,” said Nick. “Then Tommy Dorsey phoned and asked me to come with him.”
Having sacrificed his best friend to his wife, Frank hired his Hoboken cousin, also named Frank Sinatra, but called Junior, to be his valet. Then he left for the coast with Axel Stordahl, Hank Sanicola, and George Evans to film Higher and Higher.
When he arrived in California, a screaming, clawing, hair-pulling crowd of five thousand teenagers mobbed the Pasadena station to meet his train on August 12, 1943. The minute the little girls spotted Frank and his red-and-white polka dot bow tie, they surged forward screaming and scratching and biting one another to get closer to him. Holding them back, police rushed Frank to safety in a nearby garage, where newsmen questioned him about his impending performance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, which was already a matter of controversy.
George Evans had convinced Stadium Concerts, Inc., the booking agency for most of the country’s symphony orchestras, that they needed the crowd-drawing talents of his client to plump up their sagging box offices and pay off their deficits. Desperate to make money, they agreed, and booked Frank with the Cleveland Orchestra, the National Symphony in Washington, D.C., and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra at Lewisohn Stadium. Now he was scheduled to appear with the Los Angeles Symphony, and Hollywood’s classical music lovers were outraged that a Tin Pan Alley crooner would be allowed in the Hollywood Bowl. They campaigned militantly against the Sinatra appearance.
“These classic longhairs really get me,” Frank said. “It’s no gag that I have a passion for classical music. I own albums and I attend concerts whenever I can. That’s why I am willing to help out when philharmonic societies approach me. It’s pretty disheartening and disappointing to me that people like those opposing my appearance at the Hollywood Bowl think in those channels. I’m only doing it to help finance a field of music that I really love.”
Years later, Frank Sinatra talked more of his love of classical music. He said that his own style, though originally in the Bing Crosby tradition, had developed into the belcanto Italian school of singing. And he said further that his first musical inspiration was from Jascha Heifetz’s violin concerts. He said he liked the “fantastic things Heifetz did with the notes—holding them, gently sliding them, sustaining them. It was a whole new concept of phrasing to me, and terribly exciting.”
More than eighteen thousand people turned out to sit under a harvest moon in the Hollywood Bowl, the largest crowd of the season. Most of them were under the age of sixteen, and could barely sit still as Vladimir Bakaleinikoff conducted the orchestra in a string of Russian classics. Finally, at ten P.M., Frank walked onstage with Morris Stoloff of RKO, who would conduct for him while Bakaleinikoff stepped aside. Aware of the ill feelings surrounding this part of the program, Stoloff turned to the orchestra and said, “You men know your kind of music and play it as though you loved it. Now, tonight I want you to play the kind of music Mr. Sinatra sings and loves with the same feeling.”
Frank stepped up to the microphone as the girls began howling and screaming ecstatically. He smiled at their welcome but refused to sing until they were quiet. He began with “Dancing in the Dark,” and several dozen photographers rushed the stage in a salvo of exploding flashbulbs. Next he sang “You’ll Never Know,” “Ol’ Man River,” and “The Song Is You.” By the time he introduced “Night and Day,” saying, “This is my favorite song of all time,” the audience was wailing and gasping. “Girls, girls, please,” he said, trying to quiet them. After nine sleepy ballads, he returned to the stage for encore after encore. Then he said to the audience, “I understand there has been a controversy out here over whether I should appear at the Bowl at all. Those few people who thought I shouldn’t lost out in a very big way.”
Rows and rows of girls screamed, “Oh, Frankie, we love you so,” while a disgruntled army sergeant muttered, “After this, I hope they won’t forget to flush the bowl.”
Days later, the sergeant’s comment appeared in Time magazine and roused George Evans to volunteer Frank for yet another war bond rally—to stave off the continued criticism about his draft-exempt status. With more than eleven million Americans in the service by this time, Evans was most sensitive about Frank’s not being in uniform and made constant references to Frank’s three-year-old daughter at home and the baby on the way.
In October 1943, Frank auctioned off his clothes over WABC radio in New York City, raising more than twelve thousand dollars in war bond purchases by shedding everything from his shirt to his shoelaces. Days after he disrobed, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution dropping draft deferments for pre-Pearl Harbor fathers.
Frank’s success at home outraged soliders overseas. “I think Frank Sinatra was the most hated
man of World War II, much more than Hitler,” said writer William Manchester, who served in the Marines and was wounded on Okinawa. “Because we in the Pacific had seen no women at all for two years, and there were photographs of Sinatra being surrounded by all of these enthusiastic girls.”
While Evans worried about his client’s contribution to the war effort, Frank worried about his opening at the Wedgwood Room of the Waldorf-Astoria. In 1943, the Waldorf was one of the most famous hotels in the world. The lofty towers of the Art Deco palace on Fiftieth Street and Park Avenue admitted only high society, and the boy from Hoboken was apprehensive about the reception he might receive from the haughty sophisticates who were accustomed to liveried doormen, chauffeured limousines, and debutante balls. He was especially afraid of society chronicler Elsa Maxwell, the columnist, who had already charged him with “musical illiteracy” and derided his fans as “emotionally unstable females who paraded naked and unashamed for the drooling, crooning, goonish syllables of a man who looked like a second-string basketball player.” She then recommended the girls be given “Sinatraceptives.”
On opening night, Frank paced up and down in his dressing room, chain-smoking.
“Frank goes in to take a shower and falls,” said Manie Sacks. “His ankle swells up. He says, ‘I can’t go on.’ George Evans … and I knew it was fright—that he was looking for an out. We called a doctor, and he bandaged up the ankle.
“George and I decided to applaud like mad, so Frank would at least hear a lot of noise from the first row. I was more frightened than Frank was. George didn’t even sit down. He stood in the door and shivered.
“Frank sang for an hour and a half, until the captain came over and told Evans to ask Frank to stop so he could serve drinks.”