by Kitty Kelley
Meanwhile, Columbia Records, which no longer could issue a new Sinatra record every month as it had in the past, instructed Mitch Miller to do everything possible to recoup their investment.
“I was flailing myself trying to get something that would work,” said Miller. “I had made all these great records with him—‘Nevertheless,’ ‘You’re the One,’ ‘Love Me,’ and ‘I’m a Fool to Want You’—but they just weren’t selling. We couldn’t give them away. So I racked my brain trying to come up with something commercial. Frank’s contract gave him full approval over all his songs, and he would not always record my suggestions. Once I met him at LaGuardia and brought him into the studio to hear two songs that I had arranged for him. I had his keys and had them arranged for him with chorus, orchestra, and French horns. It was the night before he was leaving for Spain to see Ava, and I wanted him to record both of them. Frank preferred recording at night because he said he was in better voice then, so I took him to the office with Hank Sanicola and Ben Barton, who were his music publishing partners. I played the songs for him. ‘Frank, I think you could do great with these,’ I told him. He listened and then looked at Sanicola and Barton, who gave him this sort of blank stare. ‘I won’t do any of this crap,’ he said, and walked out. I scrambled around to salvage the date because the musicians and the chorus had to be paid. So I called Guy Mitchell, and he recorded both sides, which became instant hits: ‘The Roving Kind’ and ‘My Heart Cries for You.’ ”
Another time, Mitch Miller suggested that Frank record a novelty song entitled “Mama Will Bark” with Dagmar, the one-name singer. This time, Frank agreed.
“He had been appearing at the Paramount with Dagmar getting great laughs from the audience with her dumb-blonde routine. Jackie Gleason was the opening act. Around that time, someone came to me with a song about a girl and a guy necking in the next room; the guy wanted something more but the girl resisted, saying, ‘Mama will bark.’ I thought it was a novelty that would either be an overnight smash or do nothing at all. I called Frank and said it might be worth a crack, so we got Dagmar and the two of them made the record. Frank wasn’t embarrassed at the time, and if he had been, all he had to say was, ‘I don’t want this to come out,’ and it would never have come out. But he never voiced any objections. Four years later, he came after me claiming I had ruined his career with that song.”
For months, Henry Jaffe begged Bob Hope to feature Frank on his television show. Finally, Hope gave him a guest shot, for which Frank was very grateful. Then Jaffe got Frank a “network video package,” which included a three-year contract with CBS for a one-hour weekly television variety show (The Frank Sinatra Show) and a radio show (Meet Frank Sinatra) that guaranteed Frank $250,000 a year. But the sponsors canceled after thirteen weeks.
“After Frank’s first television show [October 7, 1950] bombed, I was called in to produce,” said Irving Mansfield, “and I lived in hell for the next eight weeks. He was impossible to work with—absolutely impossible. A real spoiled brat. He was with Ava then, and the two of them were living in Manie Sacks’s suite at the Hampshire House, and every day her life was a hell on earth because he was always accusing her of running out in the afternoon to sleep with Artie Shaw. Frank was insanely jealous of Shaw. Whenever he couldn’t get her on the phone, he’d start screaming on the set that she was having an affair with Artie. ‘I know she’s with that goddamn Artie Shaw,’ he’d yell. ‘I know she’s with that bastard. I’ll kill her. I’ll kill her. I’ll kill her.’ He was crazy on the subject.
“He was constantly surrounded by his entourage—Ben Barton, Hank Sanicola, some gorilla named Al Silvani, and a bunch of other hangers-on—and they shook and shivered every time he yelled. They talked in hushed tones and stood around him like goons protecting a gangster. I couldn’t get near him. Dumb, isn’t it, that the producer had to deal with the star through his flunkies and the three writers on the show, but that’s the way it was. I went into the deal for a dollar a week so that I would have the right to quit on one week’s notice. I knew it would be tough, but I never thought it was going to be as bad as it was … God!
“Frank was always late, sometimes two and three hours late; he hated to rehearse and refused to discuss the weekly format. Usually, he ignored the guest shots entirely. Once, he wanted to book Jackie Gleason, who was very hot at the time, but Frank would not rehearse. Even though he and Jackie were pals, Jackie refused to go on the air without a rehearsal, and we ended up having to pay him $7,500 plus expenses for being the guest star who did not do Frank’s show. Another time I came to work and was told by the goons that Brian Aherne was the guest star for the following week. ‘Frank wants to class up the show,’ they said. What could I do? Aherne was a B actor with a mustache and no flair for television. He was a disaster, and Frank was furious afterwards. ‘Why’d you put that bum on my show?’ he screamed. ‘It wasn’t my idea,’ I said. ‘It was yours.’ He refused to talk to me again for days.
“Frank was always washing his hands, constantly washing, washing, washing, as if he was trying to wash his life away or something. When he wasn’t washing his hands, he was changing his shorts. He would drop his pants to the floor, take off his drawers, and kick them up in the air with his foot. Some flunkie would chase those dirty shorts around the room while Frank put on a clean pair. He must’ve changed his shorts every twenty minutes. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.”
Despite weekly shake-ups in the writing, planning, and production departments, Frank’s show continued to receive poor reviews. In frustration, he blamed everyone around him. He lashed out at Mansfield and cursed the stagehands for being too slow. He castigated the critics who held up The Dave Garroway Show as the model he should emulate. He was especially bitter toward those who said guest stars like Perry Como stole the show from him. Mostly he blamed CBS for the technical mishaps and bad planning.
“Why can’t the network smooth out the bugs on a show after it’s been on the air five weeks?” he asked Jack O’Brian of the New York Journal-American. “I’m not a genius—I’m a performer. I can’t think up the scripts. I certainly wish I could. I can’t direct the camera work even if I wanted to. I’m onstage. They’re not even pointing the thing at me!”
Frank banished Irving Mansfield from his sight but not before the producer invoked a clause in his contract and quit. The following Saturday, Frank showed up three hours late for rehearsal, but Mansfield no longer cared. This was his last Sinatra show, so he waited patiently for Frank to get started.
“During the rehearsal, I pressed the talk-back and said, ‘Frank, I think we better go over that bit again. The dynabeams were off, the curtain was too slow, the—’
“ ‘I can’t see in there. Who said that?’ Frank asked.
“Irving Mansfield.”
“ ‘Come on out here,’ he yelled.”
Mansfield walked out of the control booth, and Frank turned on him. “Listen, pal, I don’t have time today to do it again, and I don’t care what you like or don’t like. You don’t like me, either, do you?”
Mansfield felt the tension among the entourage standing in the wings. No one said a word. He looked the irate star squarely in the eye. “Frank, as an artist, you are incomparable. Nobody can touch you. But where you’re a failure is as a human being.”
“You’re fired, pal,” said Frank. “FIRED! Do you hear me?”
“Sorry, Frank. I already quit this morning,” said Mansfield.
The show stumbled along for a few more months and could not hold its own against Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca’s Your Show of Shows. Eventually, Frank lost his sponsors and his show.
Unable to find work in movies or television, he turned to his friends in the Mafia for nightclub bookings. Paul “Skinny” D’Amato booked him into his 500 Club in Atlantic City; Moe Dalitz let him sing at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, Willie Moretti gave him several engagements at Ben Marden’s Riviera in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and Joe Fischetti kept him working in Chicago.<
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Since their trip to Cuba together in 1947 to see Lucky Luciano, Frank and Joe Fischetti had become close friends. Frank introduced Al Capone’s good-looking cousin to Ava’s best friend and roommate, Peggy Maley, and the foursome spent many evenings together. Frank did many favors for the Fischetti brothers, who used his friendship to their best advantage. Government documents show that they once asked Frank to fly with them in a private plane from Las Vegas to Palm Springs to impress a starstruck automobile tycoon from Detroit whom they were romancing for an agency franchise. Frank made the trip, and soon after, the Fischettis opened crime syndicate car agencies in several large cities. The Fischettis also persuaded Frank to make a commercial “as a favor without charge,” according to FBI files, for their friend, Peter Epsteen, who ran a Pontiac agency in Skokie, Illinois.
“Frank was begging for spots to sing at at the time,” said Vincent “Vinnie” Teresa, a member of the Boston Mafia family. “The Palladinos [Joe Beans and Rocco] let him do his stuff at the Copa in Boston, and they paid him a good buck for it. He did all right, not sensational, but all right. Then he went to Joe Beans and asked if he could borrow some money. He told Joe that he could deduct what he borrowed the next time he came in to play the club. He said he’d be back to play the club. Joe was glad to help out. Sinatra paid Joe back what he owed him, but he never came back to play the club like he promised, because he and Joe had a falling out.”
Another gangster who helped Frank during this time was Mickey Cohen, the West Coast Mafia boss with whom Frank and Hank Sanicola were financial partners in Jimmy Tarantino’s gossip magazine, Hollywood Night Life. Tarantino, who later went to prison for extortion, used this entertainment weekly as a shakedown vehicle to terrorize Hollywood with its vicious “advertise or be exposed” techniques. Frank had invested fifteen thousand dollars in the magazine, which ensured him good publicity in it.
“I love Frank,” said Cohen, “and I have a very great respect for him, and even when he was at his worst, I was his best friend. When Frank was going pretty bad, when he was getting kind of discouraged, I had this testimonial dinner for him at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I brought in his father and mother, and they put their arms around me and kissed me the same as they did Frank.
“His voice was even faltering a bit at the time. In fact, he sang a song that night, goddamn, that was really heartbreaking for me, because he really didn’t sing like his old songs. It was a long song and he just wasn’t himself—he wasn’t the real Frank Sinatra.
“You know, I’ve been through much in my day. Many of my guys, people that I loved, were hit and buried and all that. It’s very hard for me to cry, but really I felt sad that night for Frank. I was close to tears myself because his voice was really bad. And I think everybody in the audience could sense it.
“My guys had a private table alone for our own people. In fact, there was about fourteen of my own guys that fitted in with that type of doing—that could dress well enough and could carry themselves well. You know, there were some people that I had to keep out of certain places. They just were too crude, you know what I mean?
“A lot of people that were invited to that Sinatra testimonial, that should have attended but didn’t, would bust their nuts in this day to attend a Sinatra testimonial. A lot of them would now kiss Frank’s ass after he made the comeback, but they didn’t show up when he really needed them. I don’t know the names of a lot of them bastards in that ilk of life, but I remember the people that I had running the affair at the time telling me, ‘Jesus, this and that dirty son of a bitch should have been here.’ But I don’t think anybody pulled any wool over Frank’s eyes.…
“The testimonial instilled a little encouragement in him. At least it showed him that everybody wasn’t down on him, I mean, everybody didn’t think that he was all finished, and I really felt that he just had to find himself again. But his voice came back better than ever.”
Americans focused on the Mafia and organized crime for the first time in December 1950 when Estes Kefauver, the Democratic senator from Tennessee, chaired hearings of the Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce, popularly known as the Kefauver committee. For weeks, people sat riveted before television sets as the committee conducted its hearings on ninety-two days in various cities. Viewers saw gangsters like Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, Mickey Cohen, and Willie Moretti dressed in shiny double-breasted suits take the Fifth Amendment—“I decline to answer the question on the grounds that it might tend to incriminate me.”
To a man, they denied membership in the Mafia. Some claimed never to have heard of it, and others thought maybe they had read about it once or twice in the newspapers. Senator Kefauver tried to enlighten them and his thirty million viewers.
“The Mafia is a shadowy international organization that lurks behind much of America’s organized criminal activity,” he said. “It is an organization about which none of its members, on fear of death, will talk. In fact, some of the witnesses called before us, who we had good reason to believe could tell us about the Mafia, sought to dismiss it as a sort of fairy tale or legend that children hear in Sicily, where the Mafia originated. The Mafia, however, is no fairy tale. It is ominously real, and it has scarred the face of America with almost every conceivable type of criminal violence, including murder, traffic in narcotics, smuggling, extortion, white slavery, kidnapping, and labor racketeering.”
During the committee’s investigation, Senator Kefauver handed Joseph L. Nellis, one of the committee lawyers, a package containing eight eight-by-ten glossy photographs and told him to arrange a meeting with Frank Sinatra. “I almost fell off my chair,” recalled the lawyer. “I opened the envelope and saw a picture of Sinatra with his arm around Lucky Luciano on the balcony of the Hotel Nacional in Havana; another picture showed Sinatra and Luciano sitting at a nightclub in the Nacional with lots of bottles, having a hell of a time with some good-looking girls. One picture showed Frank getting off a plane carrying a suitcase, and then there were a couple pictures of him with the Fischetti brothers, Lucky Luciano, and Nate Gross, a Chicago reporter who knew all the mobsters. Kefauver wanted to know more about Sinatra’s relationship with Luciano, who was running an international narcotics cartel in exile. So I called Frank’s attorney and arranged a meeting.”
Sol Gelb, the New York lawyer Frank retained for this meeting, knew that a public appearance by Sinatra in the company of Albert “The Executioner” Anastasia and the henchmen of Murder, Inc., would finish him in show business. Even the news that the Kefauver committee was interested in Sinatra’s Mafia relationships might be fatal to his faltering career, so Gelb agreed to produce his client only under the most clandestine circumstances. He insisted that Nellis conduct the interview at four A.M. on March 1, 1951, in a law office on one of the top floors of Rockefeller Center so that the press would never find out.
“It was an ungodly hour, but I was there with a court reporter when Frank arrived with his attorney,” said Nellis. “He was very nervous. I remember, he kept shooting his cuffs, straightening his tie, and he smoked constantly. He knew that I was going to ask him about Willie Moretti and Lucky Luciano, but he didn’t know about all the photographs that I had. He also didn’t know that I had a report about a rape he had allegedly been involved in and the blackmail that had reportedly been paid to keep that story from ever being published.”
Nellis began by asking Frank about his friendship with Joe Fischetti and his trip to Cuba in 1947 to see Lucky Luciano, whom the Kefauver committee had publicly pronounced as reprehensible. “There are some men who by their conduct in their life become a stench in the nostrils of decent American citizens, and in my judgment, Lucky Luciano stands at the head of the list,” Senator Charles W. Tobey, a member of the committee, had said. Staff investigators had been informed by the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics that Frank Sinatra was suspected of delivering money to Luciano, so Nellis asked him about the luggage he carried on the plane and what it contained. Frank said that he was
carrying an attaché case filled with his razor and crayons. Nellis tried again.
Q: There has been stated certain information to the effect that you took a sum of money well in excess of $100,000 into Cuba.
A: That is not true.
Q: Did you give any money to Lucky Luciano?
A: No, sir.
Q: Did you ever learn what business they were in?
A: No, actually not.
Nellis broached the subject of the rape by bringing up the name of Jimmy Tarantino: “We have information to the effect that you paid Tarantino quite a large sum of money to keep him from writing a quite uncomplimentary story about you.”
A: Well, you know how it is in Hollywood. That dame, Florabel Muir, she runs a gossip column, had written some pretty bad stuff about me and some women in Las Vegas. Jimmy called up and said he had an eyewitness account of a party that was supposed to have been held down in Vegas in which some broads had been raped or something like that. I told Jimmy if he printed anything like that, he would be in for a lot of trouble.
Q: Did he ask you for money?
A: Well, I asked Hank Sanicola, my manager, to talk to him and that’s the last I heard of it until Muir printed a story about it in the Los Angeles Herald.
Q: Did Hank tell you he paid Tarantino?
A: Well, I understand Tarantino was indicted and I don’t know the rest of the story, but the Hollywood (Night Life) quit publishing this crap afterwards.
Nellis then named a list of Frank’s Mafia friends and acquaintances—Frank Costello, Joe Adonis, Abner “Longy” Zwillman, Meyer Lansky, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel—and asked how well he knew each of them.
A: No business. Just “hello” and “good-bye.”
Q: Well, what about the Jersey guys you met when you first got started?
A: Let me tell you something, those guys were okay. They never bothered me or anyone else as far as I know. Now, you’re not going to put me on television and ruin me just because I know a lot of people, are you?