Frank: The Voice (33 page)

At the same time, George Evans was on his case: Frank was a family man, and a family man lived with his family. If his life was in California now, that’s where his family had to be.

So the hounds he’d been keeping a sweet three thousand miles away had caught up with him. As Frank looked around at the Sinatras and Garaventas and Barbatos (and little Chit-U, smiling at nobody) jammed into his living room for the christening party, he realized that Nancy and Evans were right. He was a family man. In the first flush of excitement at home ownership (it felt like a hundred years ago), he and Nancy had named the little Cape Cod at 220 Lawrence Avenue Warm Valley. (The sentimental Frank had even fashioned a plaque with the name on it, making the letters out of sticks he’d picked up in the park, gluing the sticks onto a varnished board. A fan stole the sign.) Now the house felt like a claustrophobe’s nightmare. He needed a big place to match his big new life, and he knew his family had to be there with him.

He took Nancy aside while her mother cooed over the baby. The look in his wife’s large expressive eyes was complex: full of love and distrust, anger and hope. He said he wanted them to live in a great big house in California. That was where the movies were, and that was where his family should be.

She stared at him. What about her family?

She could bring ’em out. Why not?

And what on earth was she going to do in California? She couldn’t even drive a car.

He’d buy her the biggest goddamn Cadillac she’d ever seen. And driving lessons to go with it. She’d be the queen of Hollywood.

She shook her head: he was full of shit. But she didn’t say no.

“Joe E. Lewis, the only comedian who doesn’t do an impression of Frank Sinatra [the handwritten invitation reads], invites you to be a guest at a farewell cocktail party for the Voice on the eve of his departure for Hollywood, Friday, May 12th, at 4 p.m. in the cocktail lounge at Monte Proser’s Copacabana, 10 East 60th Street.
⁴
Being quite a man with the ladies himself, Joe has induced the lovely Conover cover girls (and they really are beautiful) to take care of the charm department. They’ll all be here, and Sinatra has promised to swoon for the girls just to confuse everybody. Drop in—but not without the card!”

Those Conover girls—they really were beautiful …

January 11, 1944: Franklin Wayne Emanuel Sinatra is one day old. Margaret Hague Maternity Hospital, Jersey City. Photographers dressed as doctors capture the blessed event. Frank is in Hollywood, otherwise engaged.
(photo credit 13.2)

Rowdy sailors on shore leave throw tomatoes at Sinatra’s image on the Paramount marquee, October 15, 1944. “It is not too much to say,” historian William Manchester wrote, “that by the end of the war Sinatra had become the most hated man in the armed services.”
(photo credit 14.1)

H
e was at once the most loved and the most reviled man in the country: the line seemed to fall squarely between the sexes.
SINATRA 1-A WITH US GIRLS, RATED 4-F BY ARMY DOCTORS, ran a typical headline. And men ran the newspapers. In the spring of 1944, as the Fifth Army fought inland from Anzio to Rome, much of America’s
civilian and military press mounted an offensive against Sinatra. And a columnist named Westbrook Pegler, flush from a 1941 Pulitzer for his exposés of racketeering in Hollywood’s labor unions, and recently signed up by the FDR-hating Hearst Syndicate, began to make a special project of laying into the FDR-loving, “
bugle-deaf Frankie-boy Sinatra.”

Another newspaper writer named Lee Mortimer, the entertainment columnist for the Hearst-owned New York
Daily Mirror
, also got into the act. Mortimer, like his colleague Winchell a closeted Jew (né Mortimer Lieberman), was ambivalent about Sinatra at first—he’d apparently once tried, unsuccessfully, to sell Frank a song he’d written. His early columns about the singer accordingly seem strangely sycophantic. “
Even I grow humble before the compelling force [of Sinatra’s impact],” Mortimer wrote. “It is inexplicable, irrational but it has made him the most potent entertainer of the day … I’ll go further. I think Frank is a showman without peer, he has a unique and pleasing personality plus talent of the first luster.” Then this uncomfortable man found the stone in his shoe. “I love Sinatra but my stomach is revolted by squealing, shouting neurotic extremists who make a cult of the boy. As a friend [!], I call on the Hero of Hasbrouck to disown his fanatics. Neither they nor his projection onto the political scene can help his brilliant theatrical career.”

Where his fans were concerned, Frank, who knew where his bread was buttered, didn’t mind the idolatry a bit. He let everyone in show business know exactly what he thought of Lee Mortimer, and word got back fast. Spurned, the columnist used his platform to stick it to the singer at every opportunity. Sinatra, Mortimer wrote soon afterward, “found safety and $30,000 a week behind a mike” while Real Men were overseas fighting Krauts and Japs. And as for those fans, they were worse than neurotic extremists: they were nothing but “imbecilic, moronic, screaming-meemie autograph kids.”

The columns weren’t just personal. Much of Mortimer’s and Pegler’s invective was politically motivated: right-wing and intolerant
at its core. Even amid the patriotism of the war, America was a deeply divided country. Great numbers of people, many of them moneyed, detested Franklin Roosevelt for the equalizing policies of the New Deal. To many—William Randolph Hearst significantly included—FDR’s policies were leading the country straight toward Communism.

Sinatra had been a fervent Democrat since boyhood, when he’d helped ward boss Dolly stump for local Democratic candidates, and a Roosevelt lover since the early 1930s. The Democrats had established themselves at the beginning of the century as the defenders of America’s minorities, and FDR, transformed by crippling polio from a shallow playboy to an avatar of noblesse oblige, was every bit as charismatic as Frank himself.

The situation was not without its complexities. For one thing, Hearst and Louis B. Mayer were extremely close. For another: not long after the beginning of World War II, Roosevelt ordered the FBI’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, to compile a list of possible threats to national security, and one of the bureau’s first responses was to round up some fifteen hundred Italian aliens. Dolly put the blame for this unpleasant act squarely on FDR, and took her son to task for his ardent support of the president.

Some have contended that Sinatra’s crusade against racial and religious intolerance was opportunistic, a convenient publicity stunt. Some charged that the ardently pro-Roosevelt George Evans encouraged Frank’s enthusiasm for FDR. And while it’s true that it didn’t hurt his image to support the president, it’s also true that one of the singer’s proudest possessions was a large autographed photo of Franklin D., which he hung prominently in the foyers of his residences at least until his politics veered sharply right in the late 1960s.

In fact, Sinatra was a convenient lightning rod for all kinds of antipathies. It’s hard to imagine in this age of diversity what a strong hold white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males once had over America. Ethnics were an essential ingredient in the Great Melting Pot: they could be acknowledged sentimentally and smiled at condescendingly, but
essentially were not to be trusted. (Of all the slurs against FDR, one of the strangest was that he was secretly a Jew named Rosenfeld.)

Frank Sinatra was definitely an ethnic; what’s more, he was a small, rich, cocky, sexually potent ethnic. This didn’t ingratiate him with much of the press. None of America’s editorial writers were getting on John Wayne’s case for not enlisting. But then Wayne wasn’t Italian or liberal.

In May 1944, the Army newspaper
Stars and Stripes
, which had already waxed indignant about Sinatra’s draft status, ran an article on the singer by one Sergeant Jack Foisie. It is a fascinating document, written in wisecracking forties slang, dripping with envy and contempt. Foisie strives for some sort of objectivity but at every turn battles, not very energetically, his own distaste for the singer: