His Way

by Kitty Kelley

  MGM production memos show that even when the fog lifted, Frank did not work very much on either coast:

  7/7:

  Company had early call, stood by until 1:00 P.M., then called Sinatra to be ready at 3:15 P.M., sent car for him but could not locate him. Sinatra never came. Waited until 5:50 P.M. at doubletime on crew.

  7/17:

  Sinatra arrived from New York but reported he was ill and didn’t work.

  9/4:

  Sinatra telephoned in to say he was ill but we were later informed that he had left for New York without permission.

  9/10:

  Bobby Bums phoned 9/10 and said Sinatra arrived from New York that morning, but was tired and would not report, that he would broadcast on Wednesday and report on Thursday.

  9/12:

  Called Sinatra for rehearsal but didn’t report. He had an appointment to rehearse with Jack Donohue at 10:30 A.M. but didn’t come in. Publicity Department also had made appointment with him to shoot magazine cover still. He finally arrived on lot at 2:20 P.M., shot the poster still, and then went to Stage 10 and ran through number once with Mr. Donohue. Sinatra said it was a “cinch,” said he had an appointment and had to leave, which he did, without further rehearsing, at 2:45 P.M.

  9/23:

  Sinatra only worked part of day. He worked from 11:22 A.M. to 12:05, when dismissed for lunch. He was called back to rehearse at 1:05, but he did not report.

  10/7:

  He did not report. He was called to rehearse but because Durante was not available, Sinatra said he would not come in as he didn’t see any point in rehearsing by himself. Mr. Donohue felt that he could have used Sinatra’s services to good advantage, but Sinatra said he would not be in.

  10/12:

  Sinatra refused calls to come in and rehearse even though Mr. Durante was available.

  11/7:

  Left at 2:30 to appear on Burns & Allen broadcast.

  In September, when Frank called in sick and left for New York without permission, he was flying to a friend in need. Phil Silvers was scheduled to open at the Copacabana on September 5 with Rags Ragland, who had died suddenly two weeks before. Besides being dearest friends, Phil and Rags were comedy partners from burlesque days, and Phil did not think he could do his act without him.

  “He informed the Copa that because of Rags’s death he could not carry out the contract,” said Jo-Carroll Silvers, “but the Copa insisted he be there. He called Frank to help him out, but Frank said he was in the middle of a movie and couldn’t leave MGM. Phil was heartsick and also scared to death. He’d never played the Copa before, and he felt that if he bombed there, his career would be over. He was panicked and so he called Frank again and begged him, but Frank said he just couldn’t get away.

  “On opening night, Phil was sitting in his dressing room after a bad dinner show when Frank stuck his head through the door and said, ‘Here’s your stooge.’ ”

  With renewed confidence, Silvers strutted back onstage for the late show, with Frank sitting at a ringside table. “Turn on the lights,” he said. “If there’s anybody here who’s famous, I’ll introduce them.” He looked directly at Sinatra. “Okay, turn down the lights,” he said.

  A few minutes later, he touched his tie, which was the prearranged signal for Frank to walk onstage and play the stooge. They repeated their highly successful USO routine in which Silvers slapped Frank, tweaked his nose, and pulled his ears while giving him singing lessons. The crowd gave Frank a standing ovation as he took his seat at ringside. Afterward, Phil called him back and they took their bows together. Then Phil stepped forward. “May I take a bow for Rags?” he asked.

  The next day Variety headlined its story: “Sinatra’s Stoogery for Phil Silvers NY Nitery Preem an Inspired Event.”

  It said: “That appreciative gesture by Sinatra understandably sets him in a niche all his own in the big, sentimental heart of show business.”

  With such positive publicity, MGM could hardly make an issue, but within weeks Frank had challenged them again by demanding that shooting be completed by a certain date so that he could do the Burns and Allen radio show. The director refused to accommodate him, and so Frank again left the lot without permission.

  An MGM conference was called with studio head Louis B. Mayer presiding. Mr. Mayer ordered that Frank be officially notified by telegram of his improper conduct.

  “Mr. Mayer stated that he wanted to go on record as to our attitude with respect to Sinatra’s conduct,” stated an MGM legal memo. “After some discussion it was decided that we would end the wire by notifying him that we do not condone or acquiesce in his course of conduct.”

  The next day, the telegram was sent, saying, in part: “No consent was given by us to such a radio appearance and your participation in such broadcast was in violation of your obligation and agreement under your contract with us.… These incidents are the culmination of a long series of violations of your contractual obligations to us.”

  Days later, an MGM executive gave Louella Parsons the story, which the Hollywood columnist printed in full, saying that Frank was being extremely difficult on the lot. She reprimanded him for his obstreperous behavior and predicted that if he did not improve, his days with MGM would be numbered.

  Frank exploded when he saw her column. Without consulting Jack Keller, Frank sent a blistering wire in response:

  SUGGEST YOU READ THIS TELEGRAM WITH YOUR ARTICLE IN YOUR OTHER HAND. I’LL BEGIN BY SAYING THAT IF YOU CARE TO MAKE A BET I’LL BE GLAD TO TAKE YOUR MONEY THAT M-G-M AND FRANK SINATRA DO NOT PART COMPANY, PERMANENTLY OR OTHERWISE.

  SECONDLY, FRANKIE HAS NOT BEEN A VERY DIFFICULT BOY ON THE LOT. FRANKIE HAS ONLY BEEN HEARD FROM WHEN IT CONCERNS THE IMPROVEMENT OF THE PICTURE WHICH YOU WILL FIND HAPPENS IN MOST PICTURES WHERE YOU USE HUMAN BEINGS. … AS AN ADDED THOUGHT, I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN ONE OF THE MOST STALWART DEFENDERS OF THE PHRASE ‘NOBODY IS INDISPENSABLE,’ SO APPARENTLY YOUR LINE ABOUT MY BEING IRREPLACEABLE WAS ALL WET.

  LAST, BUT NOT LEAST, IN THE FUTURE I’LL APPRECIATE YOUR NOT WASTING YOUR BREATH ON ANY LECTURES BECAUSE WHEN I FEEL I NEED ONE I’LL SEEK ADVICE FROM SOMEONE WHO EITHER WRITES OR TELLS THE TRUTH. YOU HAVE MY PERMISSION TO PRINT THIS IF YOU SO DESIRE AND CLEAR UP A GREAT INJUSTICE!

  FRANK SINATRA

  Hollywood columnist Erskine Johnson criticized Frank for the churlish display of temperament and the next day he, too, received a Sinatra telegram:

  JUST CONTINUE TO PRINT LIES ABOUT ME, AND MY TEMPER—NOT MY TEMPERAMENT—WILL SEE THAT YOU GET A BELT IN YOUR VICIOUS AND STUPID MOUTH.

  Johnson offered to do battle either in a stadium or in his office. “Don’t bother to open the door, Frankie,” he responded. “Just come through the crack.”

  Lee Mortimer gleefully saluted both writers. “May I welcome two distinguished members to the charmed ‘Wise to the Verce’ Circle. They are Louella Parsons, movieland’s greatest columnist, who has been receiving nasty letters and wires from Toots Shor’s favorite crooner, and Erskine Johnson, another Hollywood scribe, whom Frank promises to poke on the nose when he sees him.”

  Frank complained bitterly about the unfairness of the press. That year, 1946, the Hollywood Women’s Press Club voted him the undisputed winner of their “Least Cooperative Actor” award.

  On October 5, 1946, a sobbing Nancy Sinatra called George Evans to say that Frank had walked out of their Toluca Lake home and was looking for an apartment.

  “He wants his freedom without a divorce,” she cried, telling Evans about the fight that had split them apart. Nancy had expressed resentment over the $22,000 house that Frank had bought for his parents in Hoboken and he had yelled at her because her five married sisters and their children were always underfoot. George listened sympathetically and decided to sit on the story for forty-eight hours while he tried to persuade Frank to go back home. He warned him of the repercussions, and explained that his fans would not tolerate a separation, but Frank refused to budge.

  That night he went to a pa
rty given by Sonja Henie, where he danced all night with Lana Turner. The next day, Evans was forced to announce the separation, which he had been trying for years to prevent. “It’s just a family squabble,” he said. “The case of a Hollywood career, plus a man-and-wife fight. There’s no talk of divorce. I think they’ll make up in a few days. Frankie has a few days off, so he’s gone to a desert resort for a little privacy. This is the first public battle they’ve ever had, and I don’t think it’s serious. He will be back in three days to work on his current movie.”

  But Frankie spent those three days in Palm Springs, where he was seen dancing with Ava Gardner and dining with Lana Turner at the Chi Chi Club. The Hollywood press assumed that Lana, known as the Sweater Girl, was responsible for the break-up. “The items, even the innuendos, had some basis in fact,” wrote Louella Parsons. “Frank was on a tear and he was tearing about publicly.” Lana called Louella and tried to deny everything. “I am not in love with Frank and he is not in love with me. I have never broken up a home. I just can’t take these accusations.”

  George dispatched Manie Sacks to California to see if he could bring about a reconciliation. Both men were concerned about the effect of the emotional tension on Frank. “It absolutely destroyed him,” Evans said later. “You could always tell when he was troubled. He came down with a bad throat. Germs were never the cause unless there are guilt germs.”

  Two weeks later, Phil Silvers opened at Slapsie Maxie’s in Hollywood, and had Frank join him onstage. As Frank was singing “Going Home,” he saw Nancy sitting in the audience. Twice his voice quavered, and once he choked, but he made it to the end. Grim-faced and oblivious to the applause, he returned to his seat. Before he could sit down, Phil swooped over and steered him to Jule Styne’s table, where Nancy was waiting with her eyes full of tears. Frank asked how the children were and put his arms around her as the audience cheered. They danced once, and left to spend the night at Frank’s bachelor apartment before returning home the next day.

  In expiation, Frank later bought Nancy a full-length ermine coat and an ermine muff. He promised her a house in Palm Springs that they would build together. He took her with him on his trip to New York in November, bought her a three-strand pearl necklace for Christmas, and held a press conference saying that they were definitely reconciled and looking forward to a long vacation together. That vacation was postponed for three months while Frank did retakes at MGM and badgered the studio for time off.

  In January 1947, he received a call from Joe Fischetti, whom he had seen a few months earlier at the Chez Paree in Chicago. The two men, whose friendship dated back to 1938, reacted to each other like Sicilian brothers. Frank possessed glamour, and Joe, a cousin of Al “Scarface” Capone, came from the kind of family whose sense of honor Frank respected. The Fischettis were “made” men, amici nostri, who had taken the blood oath of Mafia brotherhood, and sworn to uphold omertà, the dark code of silence. They were soldati in the ancient and exclusive society of Cosa Nostra. Frank never used the word Mafia, a tenth-century Arabic term meaning “sanctuary.” Instead, he simply referred to “the Boys” or “the syndicate.”

  Joe Fischetti had stayed with Frank at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City in June 1946, under the assumed name of Joseph Fisher. The alias was necessary because the Fischetti name was known to the press and police. Charles “Trigger Happy” Fischetti was the mob’s political fixer in Chicago, and his brother, Rocco, ran the syndicate’s gambling concessions there. Joe was the youngest and best-looking of the Fischettis but, according to FBI files, “the least intelligent and least aggressive.” He was not the underworld power that his brothers were, but he enjoyed the same associations.

  The Fischetti brothers, along with Mafia bosses from across the country, were going to gather in Havana, Cuba, in February to pay respects to their exiled leader, Charlie “Lucky” Luciano. In his January phone call, Joe invited Frank to stay with them in Miami for a few days and then fly to Havana to meet “the man.”

  Luciano, a ruthless killer and master racketeer, had unified the Italian Mafia factions after Prohibition in the 1930s and had joined with the most powerful elements in Jewish and Irish crime circles to create the basis for the syndicate, with its division of families. He had been convicted in 1936 for running New York’s largest prostitution ring, and sent to prison for ten years.

  A few days before leaving Los Angeles, on January 31, 1947, Frank requested a gun permit and was fingerprinted. He said he wanted the right to be armed because he sometimes carried large sums of money. In exchange for a few days alone with “the boys” in Cuba, he promised to meet Nancy in Mexico City on Valentine’s Day. After a stop in New York, he flew to Miami Beach, where he stayed with the Fischettis in Charlie’s mansion on Allison Island. The night before leaving for Cuba, Frank and Joe visited the Colonial Inn in Hallendale, a luxurious gambling casino owned by New Jersey mobster Joe Adonis and Meyer Lansky, where Frank put on a free show for everyone. On February 11, they flew to Havana, where the Fischetti brothers and Frank were photographed walking down the steps of a Pan American clipper. Both Frank and Rocco were carrying attaché cases, which federal investigators suspected held two million dollars in cash for Luciano.

  They checked into the Hotel Nacional, where thirty-six suites had been readied for the conclave, and within four days Frank met the major chieftains of America’s underworld. He partied with Lucky Luciano, gambled in the casino with him, went to the races with him, and ate dinner with him. He even posed for a few photographs with him. He also enjoyed the company of Albert “The Executioner” Anastasia, Carlo Gambino, Willie Moretti, Vito Genovese, Frank Costello, Augie Pisano, Joe “The Fat Man” Magliocco, Joe Bonanno, Tommy “Three-Fingers Brown” Lucchese, Joe Profaci, Joe Adonis, Tony Accardo, Carlo Marcello, “Dandy Phil” Kastel, Santo Trafficante, and Meyer Lansky, all major mobsters.

  Also present was Joseph “Doc” Stacher, who controlled the jukeboxes in Newark and operated slot machines for Lansky. Years later, in exile, Stacher recalled the underworld conference in Cuba in 1947: “The Italians among us were very proud of Frank. They always told me they had spent a lot of money helping him in his career, ever since he was with Tommy Dorsey’s band. Lucky Luciano was very fond of Sinatra’s singing. Frankie flew into Havana with the Fischettis, with whom he was very friendly, but, of course, our meeting had nothing to do with listening to him croon. The meeting took place in the Hotel Nacional and lasted all week. Everybody brought envelopes of cash for Lucky, and as an exile he was glad to take them. But more important, they came to pay allegiance to him.”

  A few days after Frank had flown to Mexico City to meet his wife, newspaper columnist Robert Ruark, who was in Havana, discovered the presence of Luciano and denounced Frank for consorting with a deported drug peddler, procurer, and thug. Ruark wrote:

  If Mr. Sinatra wants to mob up with the likes of Lucky Luciano, the chastened panderer and permanent deportee from the United States, that seems to be a matter for Mr. Sinatra to thrash out with the millions of kids who live by his every bleat.… This curious desire to cavort among the scum is possibly permissible among citizens who are not peddling sermons to the nation’s youth and may even be allowed to a mealy-mouthed celebrity if he is smart enough to confine his social tolerance to a hotel room. But Mr. Sinatra, the self-confessed savior of the country’s small fry, by virtue of his lectures on clean living and love-thy-neighbor, his movie shorts on tolerance, and his frequent dabblings into the do-good department of politics, seems to be setting a most peculiar example for his hordes of pimply, shrieking slaves, who are alleged to regard him with the same awe as a practicing Mohammedan for the Prophet.

  The effect of the column was astonishing. The United States immediately cut off all shipments of narcotic drugs to Cuba, and Harry J. Ansiinger, Federal Narcotics Commissioner, said the ban would continue as long as the vice czar remained on the island. The next day, Cuban police arrested Luciano and threw him into a prison camp before sending him
back to Italy. The episode became national news, and Frank was depicted as a friend of mobsters.

  “Any report that I fraternized with goons and racketeers is a vicious lie,” he said. “I was brought up to shake a man’s hand when I am introduced to him without first investigating his past.”

  But Sinatra and Hank Sanicola later visited Luciano in Naples, where Frank gave the Mafia boss a solid gold cigarette case inscribed “To my dear pal, Charlie, from his friend Frank Sinatra.”

  Sinatra’s response did not satisfy anyone, least of all Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer executives, who dispatched a representative to talk to Robert Ruark to “see if we can’t straighten this whole thing out.” In an effort to contain the damage, Frank’s agents also sent a man to see the Scripps-Howard columnist to find out how many more columns he was going to do on Sinatra.

  George Evans tried to salvage what he could of Frank’s besmirched image by announcing that in his next film, The Miracle of the Bells, the singer was going to be cast as a Catholic priest and that he would donate his $100,000 wages to the church.

  Ruark wrote another column, saying that he was not mollified.

  I was told a week earlier that some such effort would be made to remove the muck that Sinatra’s association with hoodlums had left on his sinewy frame. As I say, it is elegant press relations—the best, because Sinatra, the mock clergyman, hurriedly wipes out the picture of Sinatra, the thug’s chum.

  Lee Mortimer, the entertainment editor of the New York Daily Mirror, berated Frank for befriending “cheap hoodlums,” adding that his fans were morons to worship a man who wanted to socialize with gangsters.

  A few weeks later, It Happened in Brooklyn was released to generally good reviews for Frank, except from Lee Mortimer.

  “This excellent and well-produced picture … bogs down under the miscast Frank (Lucky) Sinatra, smirking and trying to play a leading man,” wrote the columnist.