His Way

by Kitty Kelley

  Pegler retaliated by writing about Frank’s arrest, six years before, on a morals charge. “It was in Bergen County that Sinatra was arrested in 1938 on a charge of seduction and causing the pregnancy of an unmarried young woman.”

  George Evans called him immediately, saying that the complainant had seduced Frank and was arrested for annoying him. He added that the incident happened years ago, when Frank was young and poor and unknown, pointed out that the charges had been dropped, and he appealed to Pegler to do the same.

  The columnist responded by printing Evans’s comment and adding a few of his own. “No indictment was found, and Sinatra was discharged. The incident would indicate a certain precocity, however, for it will be observed that the facts of the case never were tried and that this experience of the youth so soon to become the idol of American girlhood was by no means common to decent young American males, however poor.”

  George Evans was nearly apoplectic. He made Frank promise to do nothing further to antagonize Pegler, and Frank grudgingly gave him his word of honor that he would not incite the columnist to resume his attack. It was a promise he kept for almost two years.

  9

  With a draft classification of 4-F, Frank did not have to worry about military service until 1945, when he was suddenly called up for a reexamination. “I’m awfully upset right now,” he told reporters. “I’m going to visit my New Jersey draft board to find out my Selective Service status.”

  After three days of medical exams Frank was declared 2-AF, meaning that his punctured eardrum disqualified him from serving and that he was “necessary for the national health, safety, and interest,” which would exempt him even from a war job. This new classification had been created when Congress passed a “work-or-fight” bill.

  Then a newspaper headline asked, “Is Crooning Essential?” which stirred a national debate over Frank’s draft status. An investigation was ordered by the New Jersey Selective Service Board, which announced that it was referring the matter to the appeals board in Washington “under a recent ruling governing the reexamination of outstanding athletes and stage and screen stars.” This triggered bitter letters to the editor throughout the country.

  “Can you tell me why athletes and stage and screen stars are so important that there must be some special dispensation concerning their war status?” the mother of an American soldier asked the New York Sun. “When the sons of ordinary citizens like myself go before a draft board, they go or not depending on the word of the local examiners, and that’s that.”

  One of the most damning letters came from the men of Ward 47-4, Hospital Plant 4118 in England, who had read that the girls back home were jumping into snowbanks and threatening to take their lives if Frankie were drafted.

  “There are millions of GIs in the Army, so I don’t see why there’s so many tears for one man,” wrote Pvt. Jerry M. Porcilli. “I am beginning to doubt if the girls back home are still civilized. My buddies agree with me that something should be done. Would you print this letter to show how the boys in the European Theater of Operations feel about the matter?”

  On March 5, 1945, the New Jersey draft board declared there had been a “mix-up” and that Frank’s 4-F classification was to be continued. Not everyone was satisfied. George E. Sokolsky wrote in the New York Sun: “The 4-F explanation is emotionally unsatisfactory. A few devils might be psychoneurotics, but surely that generalization does not explain all the exemptions, deferments, and 4-Fs that one notes on stage, screen, and radio. Nor do pierced eardrums. If it is policy to retain a number of actors at home to entertain the public on the theory that it is sound to spread good cheer, then that should be stated and explained. But how would that include Frank Sinatra, regarding whose induction there was so much publicity and then a silence? It gives the impression that his opportunity to continue his private business pursuits while other men of his age are forced to give up their careers and fight, even to death, for their country is a result of his political activities. Certainly, no man would want to be put in that position and no man would want to take advantage of it.”

  George Evans could not ignore this kind of public sentiment. He announced that Frank planned an immediate national tour of Army and Navy hospitals and that he would go overseas to entertain the troops in June.

  “When Frank’s manager asked me to put together a show to tour Europe with Frank for six weeks, I was torn apart,” Phil Silvers recalled. “I was still on my honeymoon with Jo-Carroll. Yet Frank was a pal—if he needed me, I had to help. Jo-Carroll lost out to the tour. Frank left the details of the show in my hands because of my stage and USO experience.”

  Jo-Carroll Silvers, a former Miss America from Tyler, Texas, was most understanding about that USO tour. “All the stars had been going overseas except for Frank, who was getting a lot of bad publicity because of it. He knew that he finally had to go, but he was scared,” she said. “He had heard the rumors from the Victory Committee that the guys were really going to let him have it. There were reports that they were going to throw eggs at him and make fun of him for not being in the service. For months, the servicemen had been up in arms about Sinatra and all his swooners. They resented their girlfriends’ and wives’ making fools out of themselves over him. It was insulting to their manhood that this skinny little ‘shmo’ was a sex symbol to women on the home front. Now they were going to get even.”

  Silvers’s unit included Saul Chaplin as accompanist, Betty Yeaton, an acrobatic dancer, and Fay Mackenzie, an actress with a fine singing voice. In May 1945, Frank met the group in New York after making news by bumping an Iwo Jima veteran to get a seat on the plane from Los Angeles. He was further criticized for making his first USO tour a few days after victory in Europe had been declared and the Germans had unconditionally surrendered their entire military force to General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

  When the group landed in Rome, Frank refused to stay in the three-floor walk-up hotel where they had been booked. “We’ll stay at the Excelsior,” he announced. It was the best hotel in town and booked to capacity, Silvers recalled, but Sinatra somehow managed to get everyone in. Next, he decided that he wanted an audience with Pope Pius XII.

  “Come on, Frank,” said Phil Silvers. “What’ve you been smoking?”

  Frank called Myron Taylor, President Roosevelt’s envoy to the Vatican, and the appointment was made. Frank told Silvers that he planned to tell the pope of a few things happening in the United States that he might not be aware of. “Like that bigot Father Coughlin in Detroit. This priest is doing a lot of damage to the Church.”

  When the Sinatra group was ushered into a private room of the Vatican, Frank knelt to kiss the ring of St. Peter. The pope then asked him if he was a tenor.

  “No, Your Holiness, I’m a baritone.”

  “Ah, and what operas do you sing?”

  “I—ah—don’t sing opera, Your Holiness.”

  “And where did you study?”

  “I—ah—never studied.”

  Frank received his blessing from the pope without enlightening him about the fallibility of the Catholic Church in Detroit. His Holiness next turned to Phil, who was carrying rosary beads he had bought to have blessed for Bing Crosby. The pope seemed much more familiar with this singer than he had been with Frank and even gave Silvers an extra string of blessed beads for Mrs. Crosby.

  Afterward, Frank punched Phil’s arm hard and said, “You creepy bum! I take you in to see the pope—and you’re plugging Crosby.”

  Phil Silvers had deliberated about how to introduce Sinatra to the troops.

  “I knew Frank had to be presented in a very special way. I couldn’t give him the usual build-up—‘And here he is, the idol of America’s youth!’—because those youths in uniform might have thrown C-ration cans.

  “I suggested to Frank that he be presented as the underdog of the show. I would open with a few well-aimed Army jokes—food, the draft, civilian clothes. Then Frank wanders on, casually. Jokes about Frank: ‘I know ther
e’s a food shortage, but this is ridiculous. He weighed twelve pounds when he was born, and he’s been losing weight ever since.’ Frank asks if he can sing. We go into my singing-lesson bit. I shape his tones, slap his cheeks, browbeat him, convince him he can’t sing at all. Then my clarinet bit, for which Frank goes into the audience and heckles me. By this time I figured the men would be demanding, ‘Let Sinatra sing!’ The soldiers had been underdogs so long, I was sure they would love this underdog.”

  The routine worked. Frank made his first appearance before the troops and let Phil pull his ears, squeeze his cheeks, and slap him across the stage. The soldiers cheered loudly and then begged Frank to sing “Nancy with the Laughing Face,” a song that Phil had written with Jimmy Van Heusen in honor of Little Nancy Sinatra’s fourth birthday.

  “He had those boys in the palm of his skinny hand,” said Phil Silvers.

  The New York Times agreed, saying, “The singer kidded himself throughout the program and had the audience on his side all the way.”

  After touring the Mediterranean theater, the group re turned to the United States on July 6, 1945. Reporters were waiting at LaGuardia Airport in New York City, and Frank did not disappoint them. Minutes after alighting from the plane, he assailed the USO and the Army’s Special Services for their handling of troop entertainment overseas.

  “Shoemakers in uniform run the entertainment division,” he said. “Most of them had no experience in show business. They didn’t know what time it was. They might just as well be out selling vacuum cleaners.”

  With those words he demolished the good public image that he had established over the past few weeks. The backlash was immediate. The Army newspaper, Stars and Stripes, leaped to the defense of its men.

  “Mice make women faint, too,” said the newspaper. “He is doing an injustice to a group of people who are for the most part talented, hardworking, and sincere. There have been, of course, the usual prima donnas who have flown over, had their pictures taken with GIs, and got the hell home.”

  Defenders of the USO noted that Frank had made one of the shortest tours ever made by a big-name performer and asked why he had not been abroad before. Marlene Dietrich, who had spent months entertaining the troops, said, “You could hardly expect the European Theater to be like the Paramount.”

  Hearst columnist Lee Mortimer excoriated Frank and praised Stars and Stripes for answering “Sinatra’s shrill solo by defending the brave, intelligent, and hardworking people who provided entertainment for troops under fire, while the crooner found safety and $30,000 a week behind a mike.”

  Mortimer disparaged “the 4-F from Hasbrouck Heights” for waiting until the hostilities were over in the Mediterranean “to take his seven weeks’ joy ride, while fragile dolls like Carole Landis and aging, ailing men like Joe E. Brown and Al Jolson subjected themselves to enemy action, jungle disease, and the dangers of traveling through hostile skies from the beginning of the war.”

  Frank plaintively tried to defend himself. “I talked to thousands of guys over there.… They asked me to beef about the shows.”

  Once again, George Evans snapped into action, and soon the bad publicity was diluted by good reviews for Frank’s campaign against racial injustice, the tolerance crusade that Evans had promoted after the singer had skipped the inter-faith rally in Boston. Since then, Frank had made a speaking tour of American youth centers. He had lectured high school editors and student council presidents in Philadelphia. He had talked in schools, auditoriums, and churches. He had written an article on juvenile delinquency and he had been applauded by the people he most admired, people who were educated and politically committed.

  As an Italian-American, Frank had always resented being cast outside of the mainstream. He saw how his paisans, with their flailing gestures and exaggerated accents, were ridiculed as “eyetalians” and portrayed as illiterates and boors. He hated the discrimination.

  “I’ll never forget how it hurt when the kids called me a ‘dago’ when I was a boy,” he said. “It’s a scar that lasted a long time and which I have never quite forgotten. It isn’t the kids’ fault—it’s their parents’. They would never learn to make racial and religious discriminations if they didn’t hear that junk at home.”

  Evans encouraged in Frank a commitment to racial tolerance that was basic and emotional. “I’m not the kind of guy who does a lot of brain work about why or how I happened to get into something,” said Frank. “I get an idea—maybe I get sore about something. And when I get sore enough, I do something about it.”

  As a liberal Democrat, Evans talked politics with Frank and introduced the singer to his politically active friends like the sculptor Jo Davidson. Soon Frank was quoting socialist philosophy to reporters. “Poverty. That’s the biggest thorn,” he said. “It comes down to what Henry Wallace said, to what he meant when he said every kid in the world should have his quart of milk a day.”

  He vowed to take his campaign for racial justice to the students of America, but with only an eighth-grade education he sometimes had trouble expressing himself. Growing up within the narrow confines of Hoboken, New Jersey, where there was no emphasis on learning, had limited him intellectually. Now, for the first time in his life, he began reading.

  “I started with the most prolific [sic] books—I mean the kind that are easily understandable to a person like me, with a newly found job in my mind and in my heart,” he said. He read The History of Bigotry in the United States by Gustavus Myers—“a great book,” he said. He also read The American Dilemma by Gunnar Myrdal, a study of blacks in the United States, and Freedom Road by Howard Fast, which describes the struggles of a group of blacks after the Civil War to take their place in a society promising equal opportunity. These books made a powerful impression on Frank, who embraced their teachings on the evils of racial prejudice and promised to dedicate himself to righting social wrongs. “I’m in it for life,” he said. “After all, I’m only coming out for the basic American ideal, and who can object to that?”

  Jack Keller said, “George Evans and I encouraged this newly developed social conscience, for we could see that along this road, except in the Deep South, it would certainly set Frank aside as ‘a citizen of the community’ as well as being a star. We convinced him to make a Film entitled The House I Live In, which caused a lot of people to sit up and take notice. He even received a special Academy Award for it.”

  The ten-minute short, written by Albert Maitz, directed by Mervyn LeRoy, and produced by RKO, was made on a nonprofit basis, all proceeds going to organizations dealing with the problems of juvenile delinquency. In the movie, Frank teaches a lesson of religious and racial tolerance to a gang of kids.

  The critics applauded. “The House I Live In is a short subject to make everyone concerned feel proud,” said Variety.

  “The picture’s message is tolerance. Its medium is song. And its protagonist is Frank Sinatra—the bow-tied, fan-eared, scrawny-necked idol of the bobby-soxers, who has, amazingly, grown within a few short years from a lovelorn microphone-hugging crooner to become one of filmdom’s leading and most vocal battlers for a democratic way of life,” said Cue.

  “This well-meaning project … part of a larger Sinatra crusade … was staged with free help from topflight Hollywood talent. They got the idea for the picture when they learned that Sinatra had been making spontaneous visits to high schools, where he preached little sermons on tolerance. The short’s message should be clear enough to anyone,” said Time.

  The success of the film led Frank to Gary, Indiana, on November 1, 1945, to try to settle a strike by the white students of Froebel High School against the “pro-Negro” policies of their new principal, who had allowed the school’s two hundred seventy black students to share classrooms with whites, to join the school orchestra, and to swim in the school pool one day a week. As a result, some one thousand white students had walked out, screaming and yelling and throwing bricks through the school windows. They refused to return as long as they
had to share their facilities with the black students, and their parents supported them, fearing competition for their steel mill jobs from Gary’s growing black population. After a four-day strike, the principal was as worried as the mayor. It was at this impasse that Frank was invited to address the students in hopes that he might be able to bring them together.

  George Evans and Jack Keller briefed Sinatra on what to say and accompanied him to Indiana. They were met by the mayor and escorted to the school auditorium, where more than five thousand pupils and their parents had gathered at eight o’clock in the morning.

  “George and I were standing in the wings, and although we had told Frank what to say, we were skeptical and pretty damned frightened as to what might happen,” recalled Jack Keller. “Frank walked out onstage and stood dead center while all these rough, tough steel workers and their kids started catcalling and whistling and stamping their feet. Frank folded his arms, looked right down at them, and stared for a full two minutes, until there was a dead silence in the room. Evans and I were nervous wrecks wondering what in hell he was going to do.

  “Without smiling, Frank kept staring at the audience. Finally he unfolded his arms and moved to the microphone. ‘I can lick any son of a bitch in this joint,’ he said. Pandemonium broke loose as the kids cheered him. They thought he was right down their street, and from then on, it was terrific.”

  Frank spoke earnestly. “I implore you to return to school. This is a bad deal, kids. It’s not good for you and it’s not good for the city of Gary, which has done so much to help with the war for freedom the world over.

  “Believe me, I know something about the business of racial intolerance. At eleven I was called a ‘dirty guinea’ back home in New Jersey,” he said.

  “No, no, no,” shrieked hundreds of girls in the audience. “No, Frankie, no.”

  “We’ve all done it,” he said. “We’ve all used the words nigger or kike or mick or polack or dago. Cut it out, kids. Go back to school. You’ve got to go back because you don’t want to be ashamed of your student body, your city, your country.”