His Way

by Kitty Kelley

  Frank had seethed over Mortimer’s assaults in the past and more than once had threatened to get even. He told Joe Candullo, a friend who was a musician, to give the columnist a message: “If you don’t quit knockin’ me and my fans, I’m gonna knock your brains out.”

  “Every time Frank read one of Mortimer’s columns, he went into a towering rage,” said Jack Keller, “and threatened that the next time he saw this guy he was going to wallop him.”

  On April 8, 1947, Frank and Jack Keller were in Palm Springs relaxing with friends. Jack returned to Los Angeles in the afternoon and asked Frank to come with him, but Sinatra said he wanted to stay for the afternoon sun.

  That night, Frank went to Ciro’s, a Hollywood nightclub, and sat with several friends, including Sam Weiss, a two hundred-pound music publisher, and his date, Luanne Hogan, a nightclub singer.

  Around midnight, Frank saw Lee Mortimer leave with singer Kay Kino. With Sam Weiss behind him and three other men at his side, Frank jumped up and followed the couple to the front door. While Frank’s men moved forward to hold Mortimer, who weighed barely one hundred twenty pounds, Frank lunged at the columnist. He called him a “fucking homosexual”—a “degenerate”—and slugged him behind the left ear. Mortimer fell, and Sinatra’s friends pinned him to the ground while Frank continued slugging at him and screamed in his face, “I’ll kill you the next time I see you. I’ll kill you.”

  Nat Dallinger, a photographer for King Features Syndicate, who had been standing at the bar, saw the fight and ran to the columnist’s rescue. “I rushed out and saw Mortimer go down and several men grab hold of him. I tried to pull them off, and somebody said, ‘Are you going to get tough too?’ I said, ‘No, but four men against one are too many.’ ”

  Frank and his friends finally backed off while Dallinger called the press and took the columnist to West Hollywood Emergency Hospital.

  Before leaving, Frank told a reporter: “For two years he has been needling me. He has referred to my bobby-soxer fans as morons. I don’t care if they do try to tear your clothes off. They are not morons. They are only kids, fourteen and fifteen years old. I think I have had more experience with their tactics than any other star in the country, but I have never beefed. Honestly, I intended to say hello to Mortimer. But when I glanced in his direction, he gave me a look. I can’t describe it. It was one of those contemptuous who-do-you-amount-to looks. I followed him outside and I saw red. I hit him. I’m all mixed up. I’m sorry that it happened, but I was raised in a tough neighborhood, where you had to fight at the drop of a hat, and I couldn’t help myself.”

  At two A.M., Jack Keller’s phone rang. It was an Associated Press reporter asking where Frank was.

  “He’s in Palm Springs,” replied Keller, who had left him there hours before.

  “No, you’re wrong,” said the reporter. “He’s in town, and he just hit a guy on Sunset Boulevard who’s still rolling down the street.”

  “I just left him in Palm Springs,” insisted Keller.

  “Well, I know it was him,” said the reporter. “He just hit a guy by the name of Lee Mortimer.”

  Before Keller died in 1975, he left tape-recorded reminiscences in which he told his version about what happened that night.

  “After the AP guy called, the UP called and so did the downtown papers. Finally I just turned the phone off. Just about that time, a timid little knock comes on my door, and who’s standing there but Frank.

  “ ‘Jeez, I think we’re in trouble,’ he said.

  “ ‘You bet your ass we’re in trouble and we better get out of here before the reporters start showing up,’ I said.”

  Both of them jumped into Frank’s car and headed for Bobby Burns’s house to decide what to do. At three A.M., Keller came up with the solution.

  “There’s only one thing to do,” he said. “It’s the only way to get out of this thing. Otherwise, you’re going to have every newspaper in America against you, because regardless of what they think of this guy Mortimer, they resent anyone of their number being manhandled by an actor. So, Frank, you’ve got to pick up the phone and call all the papers and say, ‘This is Frank Sinatra’ and listen to their questions. Then you’ve got to tell each one of them that when you walked out of Ciro’s, Mortimer and this Chinese dame were standing there and you heard him say to her, ‘There’s that little dago bastard now!’

  “This is a slur on your nationality, and no one in their right mind would expect you to take this in good grace. Knowing your temper, the press will go along with you and be more or less on your side. It’s the only thing you can do to come out of this looking good.”

  Frank seized on the suggestion and started making calls, the first of them to Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper.

  “Hedda, this is Frank Sinatra,” he said. “I hate to wake you up. But I’ve been in a little fracas, and I wanted you to know the truth of what happened. Lee Mortimer has been poking at me in print for two and a half years. I saw him tonight at Ciro’s, and he called me a name reflecting both on my race and my ancestry. I had no way of hitting back at him except with my fist. So this time I let him have it.”

  The next day the papers reported that Frank had floored Mortimer with one punch because he had called him a dago. Outraged by the reports, Mortimer denied the charge. “I was standing on the steps outside the restaurant when I was hit without warning,” he said. He promptly swore out a warrant for Frank’s arrest, charging him with assault and battery. Conviction carried a maximum fine of one thousand dollars or six months in jail, or both. He also sued Frank for twenty-five thousand dollars in damages.

  Arrested the next day during a radio rehearsal, Frank sailed into the courtroom smiling and proclaiming his innocence. “I plead not guilty and wish a jury trial sometime late next month,” he said. The sheriff revoked his gun permit, and the judge set bail at five hundred dollars.

  The next day Mortimer reported that he had received two anonymous phone calls threatening him unless he dropped his charges.

  “The first voice was guttural,” he said. “After asking my name, the voice said, ‘Get out of town. Get out of town immediately, and don’t prosecute Sinatra.’ The next call, the voice was lighter and smoother. I was told to get out of town right away and the person added, ‘If you don’t, we’re going to take you over and take care of you.’ ”

  The Hearst organization moved into action behind its columnist and gave the story headlines for five days in a row. Time magazine said that the space devoted to the episode was “almost fit for an attempted political assassination.”

  MGM attorneys investigated the case and found that there was no basis to Frank’s assertions that Mortimer had called him “a dago,” or “a dirty dago” or “a dago son of a bitch,” as he had alleged on various occasions. Furthermore, MGM boss Louis B. Mayer was not about to tangle with the powerful Hearst organization, whose newspaper chain reached one out of every four readers in America. He demanded that the matter be settled at once. He told Frank to pay Lee Mortimer nine thousand dollars in damages, apologize publicly, and admit the truth. Jack Keller fought the decision.

  “The MGM attorneys insisted that Hearst had gotten to the courts and that Frank was going to have to do thirty days in jail,” he said. “I pleaded with him not to settle. I told him to do the time in jail because he’d get so much more publicity, but MGM prevailed on him and he paid the nine thousand.”

  Frank retained Pacht, Ross, Warner, and Bernhard, the law firm that represented Bugsy Siegel. Isaac Pacht and Siegel’s lawyer, N. Joseph Ross, drafted a statement: “Frank stated that the whole episode arose when acquaintances stopped at his table and claimed to have overheard Mortimer make a remark which aroused Frank’s anger and resentment. On further inquiry, Sinatra ascertained that Mortimer had made no remark and had not even known Sinatra was in the café and therefore that no provocation really existed for the subsequent occurrence.”

  A few nights later, Frank attended a party at Charles Feldman’
s house, where William Randolph Hearst, Jr., was a guest. “Young Bill,” as the newspaper heir was known, looked askance as Frank walked into the room with his bodyguards. An argument ensued, and Frank left the party. Years later Hearst said, “I resented Sinatra surrounding himself with hood types rather than becoming a gentleman.”

  After the Mortimer fight, Frank received only negative press coverage from the Hearst papers. Since no star—not even Frank Sinatra—could survive a broadside from this behemoth chain and syndicate, George Evans flew to Hollywood to work on Louella Parsons, the Hearst columnist with forty million readers. He begged her to have lunch with Frank, but she refused. George kept calling. After five more invitations, she finally relented on condition that George pick her up at home and deliver her to the Beverly Hills Club, where Frank was to be sitting in a booth awaiting her arrival. Frank did as he was told and was there smiling as she walked in. He groveled.

  “I know I did many things I shouldn’t have, things I’m now sorry for,” he said. He offered to escort the columnist to the Walter Winchell Tribute Dinner at the Mocambo a few weeks later.

  Through the good offices of Marion Davies, Hearst’s mistress for thirty years, Frank got an appointment with the press lord, who was eighty-four years old and in failing health. John Hearst, Jr., was visiting his grandfather in Marion Davies’s pink stucco house at 1007 North Beverly Drive on the day that Frank arrived for his audience with William Randolph Hearst.

  “He drove up by himself—no limousines, no bodyguards, no hangers-on. He was very contrite,” recalled John Hearst.

  Miss Davies smoothed the way for Frank. Like him, she had always admired Eleanor Roosevelt, hated Westbrook Pegler, and didn’t have much use for Lee Mortimer. She had wanted to intercede for Frank, and so she had suggested that he come for tea with Hearst, knowing that he would be a charming visitor for the old man, who was too ill to see many people. Frank stayed at the Davies mansion for an hour; he got his pardon.

  With the Hearst malediction lifted, Frank returned to work at MGM, where few people looked him in the eye. His studio bosses were chagrined by the reviews of his priestly role in The Miracle of the Bells. Although it was an RKO picture, MGM could not afford to see one of its highest paid properties devalued.

  “Frank Sinatra, looking rather flea-bitten as the priest, acts properly humble or perhaps ashamed,” said Time.

  Frank took the bad reviews out on RKO and struck back when the studio required him to appear at the film’s premiere in San Francisco.

  “Frank did not want to go, but the producer, Jesse Lasky, pleaded with him to do it as a personal favor, so he agreed, but not with good grace,” recalled Jack Keller. “Jimmy Van Heusen, Bobby Burns, and I went with him. We checked into the biggest suite in the Fairmont Hotel, with rooms covering half a floor. As we walked into Frank’s suite, he went right to the phone and called room service. ‘Send up eighty-eight Manhattans,’ he said.

  “Pretty soon all these carts came jangling up the hallway with waiters ready to serve the eighty-eight Manhattans. ‘Where do you want them, sir?’ Frank points to the entry hall. ‘Just put them over there in the corner.’

  “Well, Jesus, after three days the goddamn Manhattans were still sitting in the entry hall untouched.”

  At four A.M., Frank, who had insomnia, ordered a piano sent to his suite, which required waking the manager of the piano store and paying a truck driver triple wages to deliver it. The next night, Frank took a party of twenty people to four nightclubs and then back to his suite until seven A.M.

  “Then Frank comes to me around nine A.M. and says, ‘Let’s go shopping.’ I asked what we were going to buy and he said, ‘What the hell’s the difference? We’ll think of something.’ So we went to the best men’s store in San Francisco. Frank asked me my size, walked over to the counter, and picked out eight cashmere sweaters in different colors. ‘Just keep those,’ he said. Then he went to the tie counter, where the best ties were selling for fifteen dollars a shot; he picked out two dozen for me. Then socks and shirts, totaling twelve hundred dollars’ worth of clothes. He did the same for Van Heusen and Burns. He told the store to send them to the Fairmont and put them on his bill.

  “The premiere went off beautifully, and Frank charmed everyone. The next morning, he wanted to fly directly to Palm Springs with Van Heusen while Bobby and I returned to Los Angeles, but the fog was so thick, you couldn’t see out the windows. Frank was furious. How dare they do this to him! He had me call the airport but, of course, no planes were flying. He was irate. Then he turned to Van Heusen, who is a licensed pilot, and said, ‘Charter a goddamn plane.’

  “Van Heusen looked at him. ‘Are you crazy? If the commercials aren’t flying, who the hell is going to rent me a plane?’

  “ ‘Don’t argue with me,’ yelled Frank. ‘Get me a plane and let’s get the hell out of here.’

  “Van Heusen sat down and called every charter service. They all laughed at him. After an hour he said, ‘Frank, there’s no way out of here.’

  “ ‘Don’t tell me there’s no way out of here,’ roared Frank. ‘We’ll drive to Palm Springs.’

  “We thought he was kidding, but he called Mario, the San Francisco chauffeur who drove him around whenever he was in town, and told him to get his ass over to the hotel. He then called the Blue Fox restaurant. ‘Get your ass down to your goddamn kitchen,’ he told the owner, ‘and fix me up a great big picnic hamper with cold fried chicken, wine, cherry tomatoes—the works—and have it ready in an hour.’

  “We tried to talk him out of it, but you could never talk Frank out of anything. He and Van Heusen left, and Burns and I waved them off as they headed for Palm Springs. We flew out in two hours, when the fog had lifted, and were in Los Angeles by three o’clock that afternoon. We didn’t hear from Frank for almost a week. They had gotten hit by a blizzard and had to seek refuge in a farmhouse for three days. Every single thing on that trip was charged to RKO, and the limousine bill alone was something like eleven hundred and fifty dollars!”

  Frank’s next film for MGM was The Kissing Bandit with Kathryn Grayson, who strenuously objected to their love scenes. “I couldn’t stand kissing him because he was so skinny, so scrawny,” she said.

  The critics also objected.

  “Except for appearing gawky, which seems not very hard for him to do, and singing the Nacio Herb Brown songs rather nicely, he contributes little,” said Bosley Crowther of The New York Times.

  “While his songs aren’t bad, his acting is,” said Justin Gilbert in the Los Angeles Mirror.

  To recoup their investment, MGM executives decided to put Frank back into sailor-suit musicals with Gene Kelly. This time, though, they gave top billing to Kelly, and kept their fingers crossed that they could repeat the success of Anchors Aweigh with Take Me Out to the Ball Game and On the Town.

  “I made both of those films with Frank and Gene,” said Betty Garrett, “and they were great to work with. We had weeks of grinding rehearsals before we ever started shooting, and we became very close. There was a lot of horsing around, especially with the dancers, patting each other on the behind, pinching, hugging, and all that. Frank worked hard on all the dances; he had a natural grace and moved easily. Gene never had him do anything terribly complicated, and in their numbers together, he geared them to what Frank could do. Frank was quick, but he hated to rehearse, particularly the book part, saying that if he did a scene more than once, he’d get stale.

  “At other times, he could be perfectly awful, kidding around and wasting time. Frank did that a lot in On the Town when Gene and Stanley Donen were directing. In those days, any kind of disapproval from his coworkers or friends really upset him. He was very touchy about any sort of social ostracism. We knew this, so when he was late to one of our recording sessions and held up everybody for hours, including the orchestra, we decided as a joke to give him the silent treatment and not speak. I can’t tell you how upset Frank got with us for doing that. He went crazy.


  “Another time, he held Gene up and pushed his patience to the limit. Gene got mad at him and Frank suddenly got very remorseful and did a complete turnaround. While we went to lunch, he stayed there with Gene setting up for the next shot, which is normally the job of the stand-in. He adored Gene, and just didn’t want to get on his bad side.”

  Frank, who was thirty-four years old when he made those two films, was sensitive about having the MGM makeup men fit him with hairpieces to cover his receding hairline and incipient baldness; he worried about covering the facial scars from his mastoid operations, and he fretted about having to have his large ears taped back. One day, he walked into Betty Garrett’s dressing room, where she had a picture of her husband, Larry Parks, taped to the mirror. Frank looked at himself and then stared at the photograph.

  “I hate your husband,” he said. “He has what I call a noble head. I’ve got a head like a walnut.”

  “He just didn’t seem comfortable with his looks,” said Betty. “I remember the first day of shooting On the Town. I came up behind him and patted him on the fanny to wish him luck. We’d been doing that for six weeks in rehearsals, but this time he turned on me and snarled, ‘Don’t you ever do that again.’ I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him until Gene told me that when they put the sailor pants on him, he didn’t have any behind. In fact, he was actually concave. They had to call wardrobe and make symmetricals for him, which are like padded cheeks for the fanny. He was humiliated that he had to be built up like that, and didn’t want any of us to find out.

  “He was a sweet guy, though, and very good to me when we were doing Take Me Out to the Ball Game. I remember that we were doing a two-shot of a little scene together and they shot the master shot, then they shot over my shoulder to get a close-up of Frank and started to move the camera away. He yelled, ‘Hey, wait a minute. How about a close-up of my girl here?’ They gave me that close-up because of Frank.