Frank: The Voice (51 page)

It could be a slightly more ribald version of
Some Like It Hot
, set in the Batista Havana of
The Godfather: Part II
. The problem was that it was real life, and Frank’s hero worship of tough guys had gotten him in way over his head. Danger made these men magnetic, and our fascination with gangsters suggests that few of us could have been in their presence without being, on some level, thrilled. But to the American public of 1947, the men were not faces and eyes and rough handshakes but names, names to be censured. And ethnic names at that. The court of public opinion would quickly take note of Sinatra’s new friends, and would react violently.

Ruark wrote of Frank’s wild going-away party on Valentine’s Day (the day he was supposed to meet Nancy in Acapulco):

In an era when Americans got their news almost exclusively from newspapers, when every major city had at least two dailies and sometimes three or four, Ruark’s columns, and the avalanche of follow-up coverage they triggered, had huge impact. And long legs. “
It was a pretty story while it lasted, and it lasted quite a while,” Ruark wrote, in his best Hemingway-ese, in 1962. It was also George Evans’s worst nightmare: his star client, on ethnic thin ice under the best of circumstances, had done himself no favors by mingling his name with the kinds of names many Americans reflexively associated with the darker side of Italian identity. Sinatra’s first response to the attacks was weak, almost stunned—not to mention self-contradictory: “
I was brought up to shake a man’s hand when I am introduced to him without first investigating his past. Any report that I fraternized with goons or racketeers is a vicious lie.”

Not long after the trip, Frank told Hedda Hopper what he insisted was “
the complete story”:

The tone of persecution would crop up more frequently over the next few years as Sinatra became ever more embattled; but it’s hard to argue that Frank hadn’t brought the controversy on himself. Hedonism was one thing; lawlessness was something else. Amiability could rapidly become complicity. Very soon after that week in February, attention focused on the picture of the heavy suitcase in Sinatra’s hand. A story circulated that Frank had been acting as a courier for the Fischettis, carrying Luciano a large sum in business proceeds that had mounted up while Lucky was unavoidably out of the country. The story festered and swelled. Sinatra himself claimed, a bit absurdly, that the bag had contained painting and sketching supplies and his jewelry. (Spare pinkie rings?) In 1951 in the New York
Daily Mirror
, Lee Mortimer formally accused the singer of carrying $2 million in small bills to Cuba.

It was a compelling tale. Who wouldn’t like to open up a suitcase and find that kind of money? But the idea of fitting $2 million in small bills into hand luggage was patently ridiculous, and Sinatra quickly set about bashing the straw man:

But what if the bills were fifties? Or hundreds? By similar logic, since after all a $100 bill weighs the same as a single, a hundred thousand in Benjamins would weigh that same three pounds. Two million dollars in hundreds would therefore weigh sixty pounds. Which admittedly would make for one very heavy suitcase—one you’d have to lean against your hip while carrying it—but not one (even for skinny Frankie) that would require the assistance of baggage handlers.
³

There were other consequences. Frank’s behavior at the end of 1946 and the beginning of 1947 had the effect of a giant electrical surge creating power outages in its wake. On February 14, the day an orgy unfortunately detained him in Havana, he sent a plaintive cable to Nancy, who was already cooling her heels in Acapulco:

When he finally arrived in Mexico for their romantic interlude, he made a shattering discovery: his wife, as good as her word, had aborted their third child. “
She found a doctor in Los Angeles through a friend and had the procedure while my father was in Cuba,” Tina Sinatra writes. “The doctor’s prep was evident, ‘and [Nancy told her daughter] he knew immediately what I’d done.’ ”

The horror—all too uncomfortably reminiscent of the scene in
Godfather II
when Kay tells Michael Corleone that she has not suffered a miscarriage but aborted their child (“An abortion, Michael. Just like our marriage is an abortion”)—rings down the decades. Nancy Sinatra had exerted the only real power she had over her relentlessly wayward husband, and her single act of revenge had terrific impact.

Tina Sinatra tells us, strangely, that her father’s reaction was to
order his wife, “
Don’t you
ever
do that again.” As though she had committed a nuisance. As though he had the upper hand. It seems more likely, given Frank’s seismic temper and Nancy’s by now steely resolve, that the result of his discovery was something more than a curt directive: that the two had a messy and furious scene soaked with tears.

Then, Tina writes, sunlight came after the storm:

It’s a romantic picture, but the real story is far more complicated: 1947 would be a long, hard year.

It seemed not to matter to him that his radio show,
Old Gold Presents Songs by Sinatra
, was a superb vehicle for his talents: Frank had made up his mind that the indignity of earning a mere $2,800 a week (for a half hour’s work) was too much for him. In January he had publicly floated the notion of returning to
Your Hit Parade
, at almost three times the salary.
Variety
reported Sinatra’s monetary musings, and Old Gold got upset, informing him that he still had a year to go on his three-year contract and that it would be very expensive to get out of it. Frank struck back as he often would in years to come, by announcing that he was sick and was taking three weeks off to rest up in Florida.

When it turned out that he had gone to Havana, his sponsor was unhappy, as were others. Afterward, while Frank hunkered down, throwing himself into family life and doing a little recording (“Stella by Starlight,” “Mam’selle,” “Almost Like Being in Love”), the newspapers raged, and Louis B. Mayer fumed. He never fumed long. Very quickly Frank was called to the principal’s office to endure the tough squint
from Ida, the panicky wait in the tiny antechamber, the long trudge to the big desk with the grim-faced little man behind it.

Mayer informed Frank that after his next movie,
The Kissing Bandit
(Frank had read the script, and looked forward to making it much as he would look forward to taking poison), in view of his recent deportment (Mayer cleared his throat), the studio would be loaning him out to his old employer, RKO, for a new picture called
The Miracle of the Bells
.

He would play a priest.

This last was pointed. Mayer studied him coldly through the rimless spectacles that rode his hawk nose. Frank’s image must be rehabilitated.

In the middle of March,
It Happened in Brooklyn
premiered. It was a smaller movie than
Anchors Aweigh
, in black and white instead of Technicolor; this time Sinatra got to wear an Army uniform rather than a sailor suit. Kathryn Grayson was back as his love interest, trilling prettily and ringing new changes on haughty vulnerability. (And bringing as little chemistry to her side of the love equation as Frank did to his: if Grayson was ever on the fabled dressing-room checklist, she remained unchecked.) The great Durante was cute as the dickens in the thankless role of a sexless school janitor. Lawford, on the other hand, was a kind of black hole on-screen, too handsome for his own good, and much too pleased about it. The picture simply grinds to a halt every time he shows up. But Sinatra—for all his bad behavior on and off the set, for all the feuds with the Schnozzola—was every bit as good as Durante, once again getting great mileage out of playing another Clarence Doolittle character, a Bashful Frankie. Something about the black-and-white cinematography brought out the amazingly sculpturesque quality of his still-rawboned features and killer lower lip—a face that the sculptor Jo Davidson had compared to Lincoln’s.

And when Frank sang … He had a self-conscious but bewitching way of stretching that lower lip over to the right at key moments (for emphasis? to sneak a breath? or just to look cute?), a habit he would retain to the end of his career. And the movie gave him great material
to work with. After the success of
Anchors Aweigh
, MGM had welcomed Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne to the ranks of officially certified screen songwriters, and once again the team did itself proud. Their tunes fit Sinatra like a Savile Row suit. When he sang (to Durante!) a great number like “Time After Time,” he not only sounded magnificent, but looked utterly at home. This was an exceedingly rare trick, requiring absolute confidence, consummate stage presence, and close work with gifted composers: only Crosby, singing the works of Burke and Van Heusen, could also bring it off on-screen.

The critics were impressed—with the notable exception of Lee Mortimer, who couldn’t keep his mind off current events. “
This excellent and well-produced picture … bogs down under the miscast Frank (Lucky) Sinatra, smirking and trying to play a leading man,” he wrote.

It was wrong, and it was hitting below the belt. While Frank certainly deserved censure for the Havana escapade,
⁴
Mortimer (no doubt, in great part, to please his masters at Hearst) seemed to be on a special campaign to bring down the star who had rejected him. As an arts critic who had arrogated the right of sociopolitical commentary (he would be one of the first but far from the last), the
Daily Mirror
columnist was hammering at the wall between Sinatra’s career and his private misbehavior. It was a wall George Evans had worked long and hard to build, and one that was now—thanks both to Frank’s efforts and to his energetic detractors—crumbling into dust.