Frank: The Voice (46 page)

As you might imagine, there is no dearth of speculation on the subject. Some sources mention darkly that the Sinatras had neighbors
named Fischetti back in the cold-water-flat days, and that Frank was friends with one of the Fischetti children. In fact, census records tell us that there were Fischettis on Monroe Street in the 1920s, two large families of them, and that the heads of both households were in what was then called the junk business—waste management.

But a lot of Italian immigrants were in the junk business in the 1920s, and certainly not all of them were criminals. Moreover, Fischetti was a reasonably common surname (as, for that matter, was Sinatra). Maybe the Hoboken Fischettis were related to the Chicago Fischettis; maybe not.

Here’s a wild hypothesis: What if Charlie Fischetti, having recently been introduced by his old pal Willie Moretti to Willie’s pal Sinatra, was simply bringing Frank Sinatra over that night to impress his mom?

On the other hand, there is reason to believe that Prince Charlie had a small request to make of Sinatra that evening. And in truth, from here on, the Fischettis would begin to stick to Sinatra in increasingly disconcerting ways. In August 1946, according to the FBI, which was keeping a close eye on the brothers,
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Charlie and Joe contacted Sinatra to ask him to get them hotel reservations in New York—probably at the Waldorf—so they could attend the Army–Notre Dame game at Yankee Stadium, a much-anticipated matchup between two football titans. (No doubt Charlie and Joe had a financial interest in the game; no doubt they were unpleasantly surprised by the final score: 0–0.) Sinatra got them deluxe suites. In gratitude, the boys sent him two dozen custom-made shirts.

The incident sounds innocuous, but it would have been remarkable if some of the table talk between Frank and Charlie that summer and fall hadn’t concerned Benny Siegel. If, as seems likely, Sinatra had confessed his admiration for the Bug, Fischetti probably would have demurred.

That was a horse Frank might not want to bet on. Benny had been a naughty boy.

The specific complaint concerned funds forwarded to Siegel by
Meyer Lansky for the specific purpose of building the Flamingo Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. The word filtering back to the Mob was that of every dollar Benny had received—and the sum now ran well into the millions—he was forwarding (via a courier, his girlfriend Virginia Hill) a significant portion to his private bank account in Switzerland. In casino terminology, this is known as the skim. In reality, Bugsy Siegel was nothing like the semi-saintly visionary Warren Beatty played in the movies: in reality, Siegel’s gruesome slaughter of his fellow gangster Louis Amberg was just another day’s work, and the dream of a great Hollywood-style hotel-casino in the desert was not even his. The true visionary was Billy Wilkerson, founder of the
Hollywood Reporter
, Ciro’s, and Trocadero—not to mention the discoverer of Lana Turner. Soon after Wilkerson began erecting the Flamingo, he had made the mistake of running low on funds. Back east, Lansky, who missed nothing, saw an opportunity to muscle in. He called his old Lower East Side landsman Benny Siegel and asked if Benny might be interested in a major stake in a casino. It took some convincing—Benny was happy living the high life in Hollywood. Now he was not only racking
up enormous cost overruns with outlandish construction add-ons but also blatantly stealing from the heads of the Mob. He had come by his nickname rightly.

The Varsity—or a portion thereof. Frank rides on Toots Shor’s back while Rags Ragland looks on adoringly. Jule Styne is directly to Shor’s left. September 1944.
(photo credit 18.2)

Hearing the inside story for the first time, Sinatra whistled softly and looked at the bankerly Fischetti with fresh admiration. Where the Boys were concerned, Frank was always admiring: he just couldn’t help himself.

Serious trouble. Frank dances with Lana Turner, with his very visible wedding ring giving the world quite a mixed message. June 1946.
(photo credit 19.1)

I
n the meantime, there was Lana. As much as Frank had loved Marilyn, it seemed to him in the late summer of 1946 that he was twice as crazy about Lana Turner. Later he would tell Hedda Hopper, “
I haven’t much to say in my defense except that I was in a terrible state of mental confusion.” A nightclub photograph from the period confirms this. The picture shows Sinatra and Turner dancing close, Lana in a polka-dot blouse, her lush blond hair pulled up into elaborate
whirls and topped with a kind of snood. She’s smiling happily. Frank, in a gray suit with white pocket square, looks ecstatic. There are thousands of pictures of Sinatra smiling, but extremely few in which he’s grinning with such complete lack of restraint. Eyes slit with pleasure, he looks like an eleven-year-old at his birthday party. His left hand is clasped tightly with Lana’s right, and there on the fourth finger, for the photographer and all the rest of the world (including Nancy) to see, is his wedding band.

What was he thinking? Clearly, he wasn’t thinking. He’d come back to L.A. in the middle of July and flown straight into Lana’s arms. “
Sinatra arrived from New York but reported he was ill and didn’t work,” the production memo of July 17 reported. On the other hand, perhaps he really was exhausted. Besides singing concerts, intermittently shooting a movie, making speeches, attending prizefights and ball games, rubbing elbows with mafiosi, and screwing around, Frank was recording at a blistering rate: five sessions and eighteen songs since February. After July he would pick up the pace. He was still in wonderful voice when he recorded “Begin the Beguine” and “How Deep Is the Ocean?” but, interestingly, the two versions he recorded of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s great “Soliloquy” from
Carousel
, while pleasantly sung, don’t really do justice to the material.

Maybe he just hadn’t enough sense yet of what it meant to be a father.
When I think of all the family affairs and events I would miss over the years because I was on the road …

Even when he was at home, he was on the road.

On August 20, Rags Ragland died. The cause was acute kidney failure, after, according to Earl Wilson, “
an over-festive vacation in Mexico.” Given the state of medicine in those days, who knows? In any case, the death was tragically premature: the hulking comic was three days shy of his forty-first birthday. His sudden demise came as a massive shock to Frank, who stood vigil at Ragland’s hospital bedside along
with Rags’s old Minsky’s Burlesque partner Phil Silvers. It was the first time Frank had witnessed the death of a close friend and near contemporary.

Among the deceased’s possessions was a gold Cartier cigarette case, engraved TO RAGS FROM RICHES.

Sinatra sang at the funeral with tears in his eyes, as much for himself as for his friend: the absolute injustice and indignity of it all made him furious. With few exceptions after that, Frank resolutely avoided hospitals and funerals. Not only were illness and death unpleasant to witness, but they might also be contagious.
¹

Two days later, Frank was back in the CBS studio, recording four numbers, including “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” His rendition is game enough, but overall—quite understandably—shockingly dispirited: it sounds as though Stordahl’s sprightly thirty-five-piece orchestra, plus the male chorus, is carrying all 127 pounds of the singer.

That was Thursday. On Monday morning, Frank was on the set at Culver City, but he was just phoning it in. It wasn’t just the thought of Rags. Phil Silvers was calling every few hours, sounding desperate. Several weeks before, the comic had snagged a plum booking: the Copacabana, his first time. The problem was that the Copa had signed Silvers and Rags Ragland as a team.

Silvers telephoned Jules Podell the day after Rags’s death to explain that he couldn’t possibly make the booking, and—not entirely to the comic’s surprise—Podell informed him, in terms both blunt and obscene, that Silvers would go on solo or he could forget about the Copacabana forever.

Playing the Copa was a career maker; banishment could have the opposite effect. But Silvers wasn’t a solo. He was a top banana, and a top banana needed a stooge. Could Frank help him out? Phil
didn’t have to mention the beautiful music the two of them had made together playing exactly those roles on last year’s USO tour—the tour that, thanks largely to Phil, had rescued Frank’s reputation among thousands of GIs. On the other hand, you couldn’t call in favors with Sinatra. When the comic pleaded, again and again, for the singer to step into the breach, Frank was glum. He hated being put on the spot; he hated not being able to be magnanimous. “I’d come in, but I can’t leave the picture,” he said.

It wasn’t as if he hadn’t left it plenty of times already, but that was just the problem. It was one thing to displease Dickie Whorf and Jimmy Durante and Kathryn Grayson; it was something else to displease L. B. Mayer. Now that Sinatra was back on the Coast, the Chief had called him in to his office, to discuss many things, including Frank’s absences.

Going to Mayer’s office was like being summoned by the principal, and then some. It could mean a lecture on any subject at all. First Frank had to face the boss’s assistant Ida Koverman, a former secretary to Herbert Hoover and a formidable presence in her own right. Ida would welcome Sinatra briskly, send him into an antechamber, and close the door behind him. There was a moment of claustrophobic panic—then Ida pushed a button that opened the door to Mayer’s office, revealing a long, long room, the little mogul behind his huge desk at the other end. The desk was on a platform, so that the Chief loomed above all visitors: from his side of the desk, Frank could see LB’s feet, not quite reaching the ground.

His tone with Frank this time was warm and fatherly. But the message was clear: behave.
We are a family. Families pull together
.

Then Labor Day weekend came. The cast and crew were given both Monday and Tuesday off for the holiday. Frank paced, then decided.