His Way

by Kitty Kelley

  On one of his trips to New York, Sinatra was sitting in Toots Shor’s restaurant when Shor received a phone call from Democratic Committee Chairman Robert Hannegan inviting him and his wife to the White House for tea with President Roosevelt. There were to be only twenty people present, including Ed Pauley, treasurer of the Democratic National Committee, Senator Harley M. Kilgore of West Virginia, and former governors Keen Johnson of Kentucky and Frank Murphy of Michigan. Shor’s wife was sick and could not attend, so he asked if he might bring Frank and, in addition, comedian Rags Ragland. Hannegan called the President’s assistant, Marvin Mclntyre, for permission. He got it. Stage and screen stars were always welcome in Franklin Roosevelt’s White House, and Frank Sinatra was wanted especially because Bing Crosby had announced his support of Roosevelt’s Republican opponent the week before. So the three men flew to Washington on September 28, 1944. Frank said that he wanted to talk to the President about the political campaign “because I’d like to do all I can.”

  Roosevelt had never endeared himself to Italian-Americans, especially after he said to the Attorney General: “I don’t care so much about the Italians. They are a lot of opera singers, but the Germans are different. They may be dangerous.” When Roosevelt ordered the internment of five thousand Italian-Americans, including opera singer Ezio Pinza, who was held at Ellis Island, Dolly Sinatra never forgave him. Berating Frank for not coming home to help her with a political campaign in Hoboken, she excoriated him with, “But you campaigned for that Roosevelt!”

  Upon meeting the singer, President Roosevelt asked him to name the number one song on the hit parade. “Amapola,” Frank said. The President looked puzzled. “He thought I was talking Italian,” said Sinatra years later.

  As Frank floated out of the White House, reporters asked him if he had sung for the President.

  “No,” he said. “I wish that I could have.”

  “What happened?”

  “It was very nice,” said Frank. “I told the President how well he looked. He kidded me about making the girls faint and asked me how I do it. I said I wished to hell I knew.”

  “Did he want any pointers?”

  “No, he does very well himself.”

  “Naw, that’s not what happened at all,” interrupted Rags Ragland. “Frank was speechless when the President said how wonderful it was that he had brought back the art of fainting after it had been dead fifty years. Frank swooned himself. We had to pick him off the floor.”

  Frank told the reporters that he had voted for Roosevelt before and intended to do so again in November.

  “Do you favor a fourth term?”

  “Well,” he said, “you might say I’m in favor of it.”

  The next day the President was criticized for inviting to the White House a 4-F singer who, unlike other stars, had yet to leave the country to make one USO tour.

  “When our men are dying on foreign battlefields and fighting to maintain the foothold they have won in Germany, such a party is going from the tragic to the ridiculous,” said the Republican senator from Indiana.

  “That crooner!” said the Republican senator from Nebraska. “Mr. Roosevelt could spend his time better conferring with members of Congress who will have to pass upon his foreign policy. I have no objection to Sinatra, but the business of the American people comes first.”

  Frank’s fan clubs were delighted with FDR for inviting their hero to the White House and one, Sinatra Slick Chicks of Chicago, offered the President a membership, which he accepted. This enraged Hearst columnists Westbrook Pegler, who denounced Sinatra as the “New Dealing Crooner,” and Lee Mortimer, who said Frank didn’t know anything about politics.

  Frank didn’t care. He donated five thousand dollars to the FDR election campaign, made a series of radio recordings for the Democratic National Committee, and spoke at Carnegie Hall.

  “I’d just like to tell you what a great guy Roosevelt is,” he said. “I was a little stunned when I stood alongside him. I thought, here’s the greatest guy alive today and here’s a little guy from Hoboken shaking his hand. He knows about everything—even my racket.”

  Many years later, Frank recalled his speech at a political rally at Madison Square Garden. “I said I was for Roosevelt because he was good for me. He was good for me and for my kids and my country, so he must be good for all the other ordinary guys and their kids. When I was through, I felt like a football player coming off the field—weak and dizzy and excited and everybody coming over to shake hands or pat me on the back. I’m not ashamed to say it—I felt proud.”

  He appealed to his fans, saying that they as the youth of America were entitled to the peace of tomorrow. “This peace will depend on your parents’ votes on November seventh,” he said, sending legions of screeching girls home to beg their parents to vote for Roosevelt.

  On the morning of Columbus Day—October 12, 1944—thirty thousand frenzied bobby-soxers jammed Times Square, blocking traffic, stampeding bystanders, and crashing into store windows to get to the Paramount to see Frank, who was opening a three-week engagement of five shows a day. His last performance at the Paramount had been in May 1943, and his fans seemed to have proliferated like spores in those seventeen months.

  “This is the worst mob scene in New York since nylons went on sale,” said the police chief, surveying the human wall engulfing his patrolmen outside the theater.

  The city went on emergency alert. Two hundred detectives, seventy patrolmen, fifty traffic cops, four hundred twenty-one police reserves, twelve mounted police, twenty radio cars, two emergency trucks, and twenty policewomen were dispatched to subdue the rioters.

  The first thirty-six hundred girls admitted to the theater refused to give up their seats after the first show. Their pockets bulged with bananas and sandwiches as they settled in for the entire day. “Our folks would rather have us following Sinatra than chasing sailors and soldiers,” said one seventeen-year-old fan. “And, besides, I always call mine twice a day to let them know I’m still here.”

  The minute Frank stuck his head through the stage curtain the girls stamped their feet and shouted and moaned in ecstasy. He blew them a kiss, and the uproar was so piercing and prolonged that he couldn’t start singing. After five minutes of their nonstop screaming, he begged them to be quiet. “Please, please, please,” he said. “Do you want me to leave the stage?”

  “No, no, no!” they cried.

  “Then let’s see if we can’t be quiet enough to hear a complete arrangement,” Frank said.

  Most of the teenage boys in the audience laughed at the swooners and enjoyed their hysterics, but one finally got fed up with all the adulation showered on the twenty-nine-year-old singer. Just as Frank reached the final bars of “I Don’t Know Why I Love You Like I Do,” Alexander J. Dorogokupetz took aim from the third row center and threw a raw egg that splattered in Frank’s face. It slopped down the singer’s chest onto his light gray jacket. Frank tried to keep singing, but Alexander fired again with another egg, which landed in his eye, and a third that grazed his bow tie. Before Dorogokupetz could fling his fourth missile, irate Sinatratics pounced on him, threatening to scratch his eyes out and pull his arms out of their sockets. One smashed him over the head with her umbrella. As the band played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Frank ran offstage.

  A dozen uniformed police rushed to the battered culprit’s rescue. They dragged him to the manager’s office, where he was asked why he did it.

  “I don’t know why I did it,” he said. “It just seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  Frank did not press charges, so four policemen escorted Dorogokupetz to the safety of the subway and sent him home to the Bronx.

  The next day’s papers carried headlines about the incident. “Sinatra Hit by Eggs; The Voice Scrambles Song,” said one. “Hen Fruit Hits Heartthrob,” said another. A group of sailors who read the stories of Dorogokupetz’s egging began throwing ripe tomatoes at Frank’s photographs on the theater marquee, leaving angry r
ed splotches all over the boyish smile, the bow tie, and the curly forelock hanging down the forehead.

  None of this diminished the bobby-soxers’ idolatry. Their rush to touch Frank after every show necessitated posting security guards outside his dressing room.

  “That dressing room was always jammed,” recalled Mary Lou Watts, “especially when Frank’s mother was there. She was a great big bossy lady and towered over her husband, who was about the size of a mushroom. He was as little as Frank, but that mother of his was huge and very domineering. Scare you to death.”

  On her regular pilgrimages to the Paramount, Dolly told reporters that Frankie was a fine boy. “He may be famous now, but he’ll always be a baby to me,” she said. “And I always told him to be nice to people as he goes up the ladder, because they’re the same people he’ll pass coming down. So far he has followed my instructions.”

  Most of Frank’s friends from Hoboken waited in line to see him, including Tony Mac, who couldn’t get backstage after the show. “When Frank came to the Union Club with Jimmy Durante I asked him why I wasn’t allowed in to see him and he said, ‘The signal was to say you was my cousin.’ ”

  Marion Brush Schreiber was ushered in right away without knowing the password. She had kept her friendship with Frank from their days together on Garden Street, and he was very pleased to see her again. “He introduced me to the Ink Spots,” she said. “He was a great host; afterwards, he walked me to the elevator and kissed me good-bye.”

  Another backstage visitor was Fred “Tamby” Tamburro, who had moved back to Hoboken after turning down the job as Frank’s valet the year before. Now he needed five thousand dollars to buy a tavern. His arrangements for financing had fallen through at the last minute, so he went to see Frank at the Paramount. Knowing that his former singing partner was making more than a million dollars a year, Tamby felt confident that Sinatra would lend him the money, but Frank turned him down cold.

  Minutes later, while Tamby was still in Frank’s dressing room, Buddy Rich, who was out of the service, stopped by and mentioned that he wanted to start his own band. Frank gave him forty thousand dollars on the spot. After Rich left, Tamby grabbed Sinatra and threw him up against the wall as he used to do when The Hoboken Four were touring for Major Bowes.

  “He called the cops on me, but then changed his mind and told them to let me go,” said Tamby. “He knew how it would look if his old partner was arrested for beating on him.

  “A lot of people in Hoboken hate him ’cause he made it big. With me—I praise him to the sky as an entertainer. I told him to his face: ‘Frank, as an entertainer, you’re the tops. As a man—you stink.’ ”

  Frank continually posed challenges to the ingenuity of his press agents. George Evans accompanied him on a train from New York City to Boston, where Frank was to address an interfaith tolerance rally of sixteen thousand teenagers in the Boston Garden. Evans, who was a committed liberal, was all for building on the image of Frank’s wholehearted support for President Roosevelt.

  But Frank had agreed to address the rally before he realized that it was the same night that Tami Mauriello was fighting in Madison Square Garden. By the time the train reached New Haven, Connecticut, he was getting restless. He told Evans he was going to the club car for a drink. An hour later, Evans went looking for him and discovered that Sinatra had got off the train at New Haven. When Evans told the thousands of youngsters in Boston Garden that Frank was unable to appear “because of a sudden illness,” the distraught press agent knew it was best to leave town immediately. Had he remained in Boston overnight, Evans probably would have been lynched, for the morning papers carried pictures of Frank screaming his head off at Madison Square Garden for his favorite prizefighter.

  Incensed, the rally’s Boston promoters, who had been forced to refund a full house and to pay the musicians, threatened to sue Frank for breaking his contract. They also threatened to take the issue to the musicians union and demand that the union take action against Sinatra.

  To deflect the growing controversy, Evans announced that Frank would make a series of addresses to high schools in several large cities early the next year. He urged the students, most of whom were devoted fans, to remain in school and to continue their education. “Mr. Sinatra will go to Washington this week to discuss the tour with education officials,” he said. Although no one in Washington knew anything about Sinatra’s pending visit, the announcement elevated him in the eyes of the public as someone who would use his influence and power to fight juvenile delinquency.

  While George Evans handled things on the East Coast, his partner, Jack Keller, had his hands full in California, where the singer had stamped his feet in January and demanded that his part of the Hit Parade be moved from the CBS studio, with three hundred fifty seats, to the Vine Street Playhouse, with fourteen hundred seats. The move would amplify the volume of screams and sighs considerably.

  Frank had hurled this demand at CBS less than an hour before broadcast time. In vain, officials had tried to explain to him that such a move would require several hours to reassemble all the special equipment. Frank said to move it anyway or he would not make the broadcast.

  At this point, the American Federation of Radio Artists entered the dispute. “Either you go on tonight or you’re through as far as AFRA’s jurisdiction is concerned,” he was told. Frank backed down.

  To Jack Keller’s dismay, the incident had made front-page news the next day. Variety quoted an AFRA spokesman as saying, “The kid’s beginning to believe his own publicity, and that’s fatal.”

  On his next trip to the West Coast, Frank alienated Hollywood with an ugly outburst during the filming of Anchors Aweigh. It was a characteristic explosion that would never have become a big story if a reporter had not been there to quote it.

  “Pictures stink and most of the people in them do too,” Sinatra said. “Hollywood won’t believe I’m through, but they’ll find out I mean it. It’s a good thing not many of these jerks came up as rapidly as I did. If they had, you couldn’t get near them without running interference through three secretaries.”

  Jack Keller exploded when he read that story. “Are you crazy? Are you nuts or something?”

  At first, Frank denied saying anything, but Keller recognized the ring of truth in the quotes. He called everyone who had been on the set with Frank the preceding afternoon, and finally Frank admitted that he’d been hot and tired and might have said “something” to the United Press reporter who had been there interviewing Jose Iturbi. One of Frank’s aides, Al Levy, said, “It was the hottest day of the year. Naturally he was tired, but that crack was never intended for that fat fellow with the glasses [the UP reporter].”

  Keller called the reporter and apologized, asking if he’d be willing to carry a statement by Sinatra as a follow-up to his original story. The reporter agreed and Frank’s statement, as written by Jack Keller, appeared as follows:

  It’s easy for a guy to get hot under the collar, literally and figuratively, when he’s dressed in a hot suit of Navy blues and the temperature is a hundred and four degrees and he’s getting over a cold to boot.

  I think I might have spoken too broadly about quitting pictures and about my feeling toward Hollywood.

  I’m under a seven-year contract to RKO, which still has six years to run, and I have one more commitment at Metro following Anchors Aweigh, and believe me, I intend to live up to my contractual obligations.

  Understandably, Jack Keller was delighted when Frank returned to the East Coast and the capable hands of George Evans. Unfortunately, Evans was not with his client the night Sinatra attacked one of the most powerful newspaper columnists in the country.

  It happened late that election night of 1944. Frank was staying at the Waldorf-Astoria, where he was to begin his second singing engagement at the Wedgwood Room the next day. He had been told that Westbrook Pegler, the staunchly Republican columnist, was also staying at the hotel, and Frank decided to taunt Pegler with President R
oosevelt’s stunning victory over New York Governor Thomas Dewey. As Sinatra told writer Dan Fowler: “We’d had a few drinks, and when it looked for sure like Roosevelt was in for his fourth term, somebody mentioned that Pegler was in the same hotel. We got to kidding about how he was probably taking Roosevelt’s victory, and I said, ‘Let’s go down and see if he’s as tough as he writes.’ So we went down and knocked on his door. When nobody answered, we went away. Nobody broke in and busted up his furniture like it’s been said.”

  A Pegler aide remembered the incident differently. “Peg was inside,” he said, “and kept needling Sinatra through the door with things like, ‘Are you that little Italian boy from Hoboken who sings on the radio?’ Sinatra became so frustrated that he went back to his rooms and busted up his own furniture, throwing a chair out the window.”

  The columnist amplified his aide’s version. “In the company of Orson Welles and others, Sinatra toured the circuit of expensive New York saloons known as the milk route and spent some time at the political headquarters of Sidney Hill-man, which were the Communist headquarters too. He got shrieking drunk and kicked up such a row in the Waldorf that a house policeman was sent up to subdue him, and did.”

  The vendetta between the columnist and the crooner continued. A few nights later, Westbrook Pegler appeared in the Wedgwood Room for the late show. Frank saw him and told the management to get him out or he would not perform. Hank Sanicola pleaded with him to go easy. “Pegler is too powerful to mess around with,” he said. Frank would not listen. Knowing he could not force the manager to evict him, Frank took advantage of the rule that once the show had started, no one could be seated. He sent one of his aides to fake a long distance phone call for the columnist, and two minutes before the show was to start, Pegler was paged. Seconds after he left the room to take the phone call, Frank stepped up to the microphone and started singing, apparently unmindful of the old Sicilian saying: “Keep your friends close to you; keep your enemies even closer.”