by Kitty Kelley
The chairman, Harry Reid, asked Frank a few more perfunctory questions and then turned the hearing into a testimonial by reciting a poem he said he had received that morning:
Frank Sinatra is the subject, a gaming license he requests;
His life you’ll review, his morals give tests.
I hope you’ll consider all the good Frank has done,
In sharing and giving, many hearts he has won.
They claim he slipped once, he’s paid for it dearly.
Must we condemn him more by bringing it up yearly?
It’s your duty as commissioners to question and ask,
And to investigate the subject to get all the facts.
He’s proved to Nevada his word he has kept.
Let’s grant him a license with all due respect.
He’s trustworthy, honest, a man of great pride.
As believers, as gamblers, let’s let the bets ride.
This man you are reviewing, please keep him in mind.
He’s given to the crippled, poor, and the blind.
He’s known to have a heart of pure gold,
Never asking for thanks, nor wants his greatness told.
He’s been brought to his knees, he’s gave [sic] a clean fight.
To error [sic] is human, but Frank’s proved he’s right.
The chairman then extolled Frank for his generosity: “You have built orphanages, you have built orthopedic hospitals, you have built mental facilities for retarded people, you have built blind centers, you have helped build universities. … I believe that we only have one alternative in this thing. The only thing that we can do, contrary to what anybody thinks, and the fact that they’re never going to stop writing about your association with Sam Giancana, they’re never going to stop writing about the fact that … you gave Lucky Luciano a cigarette lighter [sic]; they’re never going to stop talking about Fratianno … I don’t know now what the commission is going to do, but I would certainly hope that one of the commissioners would make a motion to grant you a license, taking away the six-month limitation, and just give you the license.”
The commissioners rushed to vindicate Frank.
“I am satisfied with Mr. Sinatra’s responses,” said one, “and I am satisfied with the investigation that was performed by our staff on the Gal-Neva incident. With regard to the other incident or incidents that allegedly happened, whether they did or not remains to be seen. …”
“I think we have heard testimony today and our investigation indicates that Mr. Sinatra was not on the premises at the time Mr. Giancana was at the Cal-Neva. Possibly that’s right,” said another.
“I am not suggesting that [Frank Sinatra] is a saint by any means,” said a third, “but I am suggesting in the areas that we have investigated, we have not found any substantive reason that he should not be granted a gaming license. One other thing the people of our state need to know is that in the gaming business we aren’t necessarily going to have a group of choir boys. There are going to be people that have had some types of associations.”
Yet the Nevada statutes are very clear as to what type of person is eligible for a gaming license:
A person of good character, honesty and integrity, a person whose prior activities, criminal record, if any, reputation, habits, and associations do not pose a threat to the public interest of this state or to the effective regulation and control of gaming or create or enhance the dangers of unsuitable, unfair, or illegal practices, methods and activities in the conduct of gaming, or the carrying on of the business of financial arrangements incidental thereto.
By a four-to-one vote, the board removed the six-month limitation on Frank’s license, and sent him out of City Hall with its seal of approval.
“We got that junk behind us,” Frank said wearily. “We cleared the air.”
* Sinatra listed the following privately held companies:
Somerset Distributors, Inc. — $1,123,130.26
Artanis Productions, Inc. — $10,000.00
Bristol Productions, Inc. — $12,000.00
Sergeant Music Go. — $1.00
Saloon Songs, Inc. — $1.00
Frank & Nancy Music — $14,000.00
Danny Stradella, Inc. — $6,000.00
Affiliated Capital Corp. — $30,000.00
Total — $1,195,132.26
† In 1971, Frank sold his twelve-seat Grumman Gulfstream jet for three million dollars to Allen Dorfman’s Chicago insurance company, a firm that the Chicago Crime Commission had listed as having syndicate connections. Dorfman, a good friend of Sinatra, had leased the luxurious jet, which bore the markings of 711-S (seven and eleven are a crapshooter’s winning rolls; the “S” was for Sinatra), to the Teamsters Union Central States, Southeast, and Southwest Pension Fund for thirty thousand dollars a month. Dorfman paid Sinatra three million dollars for a used plane when a new one would have cost about the same amount.
34
By 1980, Frank Sinatra’s movie career was over. He had made his first television film in 1977, Contract on Cherry Street, because it was his mother’s favorite story about the mob, but the reviews had been disappointing. The Los Angeles Times called it “dreadful … tawdry, slow, and tacky.”
The following year, he had played a tired detective in the movie of The First Deadly Sin after Marlon Brando rejected the role. The reviews were devastating. He had wanted to play the alcoholic lawyer in The Verdict, but the role went to Paul Newman. In 1983, he played only a cameo in Cannonball Run II with Sammy Davis, Jr., Dean Martin, and Shirley MacLaine, which the critics kindly ignored.
As much as Frank still wanted a good movie role, he refused to play any part that made him look old. Consequently, he turned down the role of the aging Kennedy patriarch in Winter Kills, by one of his favorite writers, Richard Condon.
“I went out to see Frank with the screenplay to ask him if he’d like to play Pa,” said the novelist. “He read it seriously, but when I got back home, I had a letter from him saying that the part is just too old for me.’ He didn’t want to appear on the screen as a venerable elder.”
Frank tried television again in 1981 with “Sinatra—The Man and His Music,” but the special fared so poorly in the Neilsens (forty-eighth out of sixty-five) that NBC refused to renew his option.
Yet, his voice, now darker, tougher, and loamier, swept him into his most successful period, bringing him greater financial rewards than he had ever known. In 1980, he released Trilogy, his first album in five years. The three-disc package with 500 musicians comprised his past, his present, and his future. In the album he sang hauntingly of making peace with his roots, of returning to Hoboken before his music ended.
The album sold for $20.95, turned “gold” (sold 500,000 units) within weeks, and was followed by She Shot Me Down in 1981, an album consisting of nothing but songs of lost love. In 1982, RCA Records released the complete Tommy Dorsey-Frank Sinatra sessions in three double-album sets. In 1983, Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs released a sixteen-album package from his Capitol years (1953–1962) entitled Sinatra, which sold for $350 and became a collector’s item. In 1984, at the age of sixty-eight, he recorded another album, L.A. Is My Lady, with Quincy Jones. Reviews were mixed, sales modest. He followed with The Best of Everything.
Among serious collectors, the most prized Sinatra recordings are the private vinyls, the unreleased masters, and the recording session outtakes that have been pirated over the years, creating a lively underground market. The noncommercial material is fiercely guarded by collectors, including Frank himself, but occasionally some of it is broadcast by radio disc jockeys, much to Sinatra’s dismay. New York radio host Jonathan Schwartz, a devoted Sinatra fan, frequently played material from his private collection, which included an outtake of Frank trying to sing “Lush Life,” a difficult song that he never could master. After several starts and stops, Frank stormed out of the recording studio and slammed the door, all of which was captured on the pirated tape. For years, Frank had been seething about Schwartz’s playing
such noncommercial material, but when the disc jockey broke the release date for Trilogy and then criticized it as “narcissistic … subservient” and “a shocking embarrassment in poor taste,” Sinatra called the owner of WNEW, saying: “Get him off!” The next day, Schwartz was put on an extended leave of absence.
New York Daily News columnist Liz Smith printed what happened in her syndicated column, saying: “I don’t care how fabulous the singer is … What kind of world is it when critics are not safe to criticize freely? And since when did criticism ever hurt Frank Sinatra one jot or tittle?”
The next day she received one of Frank’s virulent telegrams: YOUR INFORMATION IN REGARD TO JONATHAN SCHWARTZ AND MYSELF STINKS. I NEVER AT ANY TIME ASKED ANY EXECUTIVE OF WNEW TO “GET RID OF HIM.” WE DID NOTIFY SAID RADIO STATION THAT IF SCHWARTZ DID NOT STOP PIRATING AND PLAYING UNRELEASED RECORDS AND OUTTAKES, WHICH IS ILLEGAL, WE WOULD BRING A LAWSUIT AGAINST JONATHAN AND SAID RADIO STATION. IT IS ASTONISHING TO ME HOW YOU AND MOST OF YOUR COLLEAGUES CAN GET SO SCREWED UP WITH YOUR INFORMATION. He Went on to Say: MY WORK IN EVERY FIELD HAS BEEN CRITICIZED, GOOD AND BAD, FOR YEARS AND NONE OF IT EVER MEANT CRAP TO ME BECAUSE THE PEOPLE WHO CRITICIZE ME DO NOT HAVE THE CALIBRE OF MY MUSICIANSHIP OR MY PERFORMING KNOW-HOW. He signed the telegram: SINATRA, SINATRA, SINATRA.
Schwartz got his job back six weeks later, but Liz Smith had made a powerful enemy. She took Rona Barrett’s place in Frank’s monologues, and he viciously described her from concert stages across the country as being “so ugly she has to lie on the analyst’s couch face down.”
When he was singing, Frank continued to captivate audiences with his immutable magic. His baritone sometimes cracked, but the gliding intonations still aroused the same raptures of delight as they had at the Paramount Theater. Older and more affluent now, his loyal middle-aged fans paid dearly to watch him recapture a piece of their youth. In his sixties he had become a legend, an institution, a wonder to behold onstage.
He was paid two million dollars for four concerts in Argentina, and two million dollars for nine concerts in Sun City (South Africa). For every show he did at Resorts International in Atlantic City he was paid fifty thousand dollars. Then in 1982 he signed a three-year contract with the Golden Nugget casino for sixteen million dollars. In addition, he made $1,300,000 for the Showtime television rights to his “Concert for the Americas” in the Dominican Republic and $1,600,000 for his 1982 concert series at Carnegie Hall. He also made $250,000 for one evening of song at the ChicagoFest in 1982; two years later, he returned to Chicago and made $450,000 in six days at the Arie Crown.
“With that kind of income, Frank needs a lot of deductions, and he figures it’s better to give to charity and get the good publicity, plus the tax write-offs, than to let the IRS have it,” said a friend. “So a couple of times a year, Sonny [Nathan Golden, Frank’s accountant] figures out how much he’s got to unload, and Frank starts doing his charity bit with the donations and everything.”
Frank’s trip to Sun City in Bophuthatswana, South Africa, in 1981 tarred him with the racist apartheid policies of South Africa and subjected him to criticism from around the world.
“He is trying to pretend that he’s going into a separate state, which it is not,” said an official of the National Congress of South Africa (ANC). “We don’t recognize Bophuthatswana as a separate state from South Africa, and our policy is the same as if he agreed to perform in South Africa. He is saying that the black people of South Africa should be living in thirteen percent of the land.”
The Reverend Jesse Jackson also criticized Frank for accepting the Sun City engagement. “Sinatra gained respect when he came with us to Alabama in the sixties by identifying with the right cause, and he simply shouldn’t be trading his birthright for a mess of money now,” he said.
Frank’s publicist, Lee Solters, tried to defend the trip by saying that Frank’s contract forbade any type of segregation. “We think that the establishment of Bophuthatswana as an independent country is the right step for their future development … [but] … I couldn’t give a shit about the African organizations’ opinions.” Mickey Rudin, who had traveled ahead to make sure that segregation was not practiced in Sun City, said that he found “more interracial harmony than can even be found in some of our American cities.”
Reassured by his publicist and his lawyer, Frank accepted the engagement despite appeals by the United Nations, the African states, and some black people of South Africa to boycott the apartheid country. “I play to all,” he said. “Any color, any creed, drunk or sober.”
But those who remembered the young liberal singer from Tommy Dorsey’s band were disheartened. They recalled the Frank Sinatra who flew into Gary, Indiana, in 1945 to preach racial tolerance to students who were objecting to Froebel High School’s “pro-Negro” policies. They remembered how Frank, always an advocate of civil rights, had helped give Sammy Davis, Jr., his start in show business and how he had paid tribute to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1961 by performing at a benefit in Carnegie Hall to raise money for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The Frank Sinatra who condemned bigotry in The House I Live In in 1945 seemed light years away from the sixty-five-year-old singer who was now profiting from apartheid by appearing in the “homeland,” founded in 1977 as a puppet of the racist South African government and not granted diplomatic recognition by any other country on earth.
On the trip, Frank was made an honorary tribal chief and presented the Order of the Leopard by the president of Bophuthatswana, who proclaimed him “the king of the entertainment world.” He sang in the $33 million Sun City Hotel and Country Club and collected $2,000,000 from a country whose annual per capita income averages five hundred dollars.
In anti-apartheid eyes, the worst thing Frank did by this performance was to legitimize Sun City for other entertainers like Linda Ronstadt, Dolly Parton, Liza Minnelli, Paul Anka, Ray Charles, and Olivia Newton-John. But within two years, leading artists and athletes in the United States launched a campaign to refuse to perform in South Africa. The group, led by Harry Belafonte and Arthur Ashe, included stars like Paul Newman, Jane Fonda, Tony Bennett, Bill Cosby, Muhammad Ali, and Wilt Chamberlain.
“Word needs to get out loud and clear that Bophuthatswana is only a phony homeland,” said Arthur Ashe. “Nobody should be fooled. If an actor or actress goes there, then they are going to South Africa and they are giving approval to a racist regime.”
Singling out Frank for criticism, the United Nations Special Committee Against Apartheid released a register of 211 entertainers who performed in South Africa, saying that while some of the “collaborators” had perhaps visited the country because of ignorance of the situation, or the lure of exorbitant fees, others showed deliberate insensitivity or hostility to the legitimate aspirations of oppressed people. “Special mention must be made in this connection of Frank Sinatra, who performed in Sun City in … 1981 … and again went to South Africa in 1983 despite many appeals and protests by anti-apartheid groups. …” The U.N.’s celebrity register was compiled to facilitate boycott actions by governments, organizations, and individuals of those who supported Pretoria’s dehumanizing policies.
“Their subsequent demonstrations, meetings, and resolutions to broaden the movement could be called ‘Frank’s contributions,’ ” said The Village Voice.
Nothing exemplified Sinatra’s personal evolution more than this trip to South Africa. During the early years, when he was represented by George Evans, who had him making speeches about racial equality, such a trip would have been unthinkable, even for two million dollars. As a passionate liberal, Sinatra had spoken out fervently on the issue of race relations:
“We’ve got a hell of a long way to go in this racial situation. As long as most white men think of a Negro as a Negro first and a man second, we’re in trouble. I don’t know why we can’t grow up. It took us long enough to get past the stage where we were calling all Italians ‘wops’ and ‘dagos,’ but if we don’t drop this �
�nigger’ thing, we just won’t be around much longer. Hell, actors have got to take a stand politically, even if we’re afraid we’ll get hurt at the box office.” He said that in 1947.
In 1970, after aligning himself with Republicans like Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and Spiro Agnew, Frank lost the impetus to speak out on issues like race relations. As part of the establishment now, he had become politically complacent and conservative. The only issue that continued to excite him was his hatred of the press, which found expression in all his performances.
Acknowledging applause at the Los Angeles Universal Amphitheater, he said, “I haven’t heard that much clapping since NBC kicked Rona Barrett off the lot.” While entertaining NBC affiliates at the Century Plaza Hotel in 1982, he described CBS-TV newsman Dan Rather as a “ycccch.” In Atlantic City, he disparaged Barbara Walters of ABC-TV as “Baba Wawa, a real bow-wow … a pain in the ass who has a lisp and should take diction lessons.”
The next day, Liz Smith called him a pain in the ass for his gratuitous attack, and echoing the growing sentiments of his audiences, asked: “Why doesn’t this great big bully just shut up and sing.… Here is one of the finest talents of our time, a real legend both from his long career and his many good works for friends and for charity. Why does he have to keep ruining it all the time by stooping onstage to the petty throwing of cow chips?”
The next night, Frank spewed his anger toward the columnist from the stage of Atlantic City’s Resorts International.
“Gossip columnists are probably the lowest form of journalists,” he said, “The latest one is old Liz in New York. She’s now got a big thing going on because I said something about Barbara Wawa. Who in hell doesn’t say something about Barbara Wawa? It’s getting so that Ms. Smith is now being called in the trade the extra-strength Tylenol of the journalists. She’s a dumpy, fat, ugly broad.… She really got teed off at the fact that I said Barbara Wawa was a pain in the ass. And she is. She’s dangerous too. She’s very dangerous.