Frank: The Voice (53 page)
Authors: James Kaplan
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #General, #United States, #Biography, #Composers & Musicians, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #Singers, #Singers - United States, #Sinatra; Frank
In early May, while the Hearst papers were inveighing against Frank and MGM lawyers were parsing the Ciro’s case to see if their star had a leg to stand on, Mortimer requested an audience with none other than J. Edgar Hoover. He had information on Sinatra, he said, and he needed some questions answered. Tit for tat.
The bureau bit. On May 12, Hoover’s aide Louis B. Nichols—the same man who had gone to Detroit the previous year to observe the bobby-soxer mob greeting the singer at the airport—wrote a lengthy
memo to Clyde A. Tolson, Hoover’s right-hand man, detailing talking points for Mortimer’s meeting with the director the next day:
1. Mr. Mortimer said he had a picture of Sinatra getting off a plane in Havana with a tough-looking man whom he has been unable to identify. He believes he is a gangster from Chicago. [This picture, no doubt, was the still frame from the newsreel showing Frank with Rocco and Joe Fischetti.]
Observation: It is suggested that this picture be exhibited to Agents who have worked on the reactivation of the Capone gang in Chicago, as well as to Agents in the Newark Office who have been working on criminal work, in view of the known contacts that Sinatra has had with New York hoodlums. It is entirely possible that in this way the unidentified picture might be identified. If we identified the individual we could secure a picture of the person identified and furnish that to Mortimer and then in turn let him go out and verify the identification in such a way as to remove the Bureau from any responsibility of furnishing information.
2. Mortimer stated that Sinatra was backed when he first started by a gangster in New York named Willie Moretti, now known as Willie Moore.
Observation: It is well known that Willie Moretti of Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, controls gambling in Bergen County, New Jersey, and is a close friend of Frank Costello. According to Captain Matthew J. Donohue of the Bergen County Police, Moretti had a financial interest in Sinatra. In this connection, Sinatra resides in Hasbrouck Heights.
Observation: the actual place of Sinatra’s current residence was far from the only key fact the FBI would get wrong in its lengthy dossier on the singer, a document that inspires scant confidence in the intelligence-gathering abilities and motives of the bureau. The memo
went on to mention other juicy details that Mortimer wanted to discuss with the director, including Frank’s relationships with Bugsy Siegel, the Los Angeles gangster Mickey Cohen, and the Fischettis; his “
arrest on a sex offense”; and his draft record.
At the last minute, though, the bureau pulled a bait and switch on Mortimer. When the columnist walked into his May 13 meeting, he found not Hoover but Tolson waiting for him. Mortimer swallowed his disappointment and went on with the meeting, which turned out to be of not much consequence:
I talked this afternoon [Tolson wrote in a memo to Hoover] to Mr. Lee Mortimer, of the New York Daily Mirror, who wanted to ask some questions concerning Frank Sinatra. I told Mr. Mortimer that, of course, he realized that we could not give him any official information or be identified in this matter in any manner, which he thoroughly understands.
He left a photograph taken of Frank Sinatra in Cuba and asked whether we could identify one individual shown in the picture. Copies of this photograph are being made and an effort will be made to determine whether any of our Agents are acquainted with the person in question.
Secondly, he was interested in the association between Sinatra and Willie Moretti of Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey. I told Mr. Mortimer in this connection that his best bet would be to make appropriate contacts with the Bergen County Police and possibly with a Captain Donohue.
Also, Mr. Mortimer was interested in Sinatra’s arrest on a sex offense.
It’s an unseemly image: the oily snitch (and secret Jew) meeting with the FBI director’s boyfriend to discuss the Italian-American star’s sex life. But then that was America in the late 1940s—ethnics were never to be entirely trusted; Communists and other subversive types were
under every rock. And even though nothing of substance would come of all the bureau’s scratching after Sinatra, for the moment both the FBI and Lee Mortimer could content themselves that they had met.
So what can be made of Frank’s picaresque misadventures: the gun, the gangsters, the beating of the little columnist? There’s something telling about his quiet, then not so quiet, swagger after the Ciro’s incident: “
It was a right-hand punch …” “I let him have a good right hook. I felt very good about it afterwards …” “There is just so much a man can take …” In a way, he was casting himself as a hero in a corrupt world, a little guy up against overwhelming forces, like the Hearst Syndicate.
Even when those forces were benign, they were white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Certainly one unconscious purpose for Frank’s Havana trip was to reclaim the power of his Italianness. On the other hand, even he wouldn’t have painted his trip to Havana as heroic. Rebellious and defiant, yes; but not heroic. One common theme uniting all his exploits that bad year was manliness. There was something boyish and wistful about his need to carry that gun, to be accepted by those mostly Italian men of honor, even to claim bragging rights for taking care of Lee Mortimer. Macrophallus and all, Frank was a little guy (not a single record exists of his ever having prevailed in a real fight), and secretly he knew he was an artist, with an exquisite sensibility. How could such a person be a man among men? Even grunting, illiterate Marty—boilermaker, athlete, fireman—was that.
As Sinatra’s fame grew and his hangers-on kowtowed and cowered, he came to believe in his own toughness. Yet there was always something artificial about it. He needed the bodyguards, needed not to risk his all-important life fighting somebody else’s battles overseas. He had to protect his image; even more, he needed the hard shell that guarded the exquisite flower within.
Sammy Cahn, the least sexually adventurous member of the Varsity, had happily fallen into the tender trap in 1945, tying the knot with the young and beautiful Gloria Delson, a Goldwyn Girl (and a Jewess). Sixty years later, Gloria Delson Franks, long since divorced from Cahn, recalled an early weekend she and Sammy spent in the Springs with the Sinatras, at the Lone Palm. “
Frank taught me to swim,” she said. “He’s the one who got me over my fear of water. I said, ‘I don’t like putting my face in the water, Frank; it scares me.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry. You’ll learn how to do it and you won’t be afraid. I’m telling you.’
“He’d sit with me in the pool and hold me up, and he’d say, ‘Okay, put your face in.’ Like I was a baby. He treated me so gently, and he was so patient with me.”
On Friday night, June 20, Benny Siegel ate a late dinner with friends at an Ocean Park seafood restaurant called Jack’s. On the way out, he took a toothpick and a free copy of the next morning’s
Los Angeles Times
stamped, “Good Night. Sleep Well. With the Compliments of Jack’s.” The party drove back to Beverly Hills, where Siegel let himself into the big Tudor at 810 North Linden Drive he was renting for Virginia Hill. (Hill herself was in Paris, perhaps on her way to or from Benny’s Swiss bank—or perhaps keeping away from Beverly Hills.)
It was a warm night, the windows were open, and the ethereal fragrance of night-blooming jasmine suffused the living room, where Siegel sat at one end of a flowered chintz couch, his
Times
on his lap. He wore a beautifully tailored gray silk suit and handmade English shoes polished to a high sheen. At the other end of the couch sat his pal and business partner, a handsome, prematurely white-haired man who called himself Allen Smiley. The two men talked about the Flamingo, which had just turned the corner into profitability.
In the bushes outside the front window a man in dark clothing squatted with a .30-caliber carbine, listening to the ratchet of the katydids and the singsong of Benny and Smiley’s conversation. When he
was sure Benny was speaking, the man rose and rested the carbine’s muzzle in the V of a trellis and took careful aim at Siegel’s head. He squeezed the trigger. There was a blast, a flash, and Benny’s head exploded. His right eye was blown across the room onto the Spanish tiles of the dining-room floor. Smiley dove to the carpet. The man in the bushes fired eight more shots—all redundant—then dropped the rifle and fled into the soft night.
Pure hate. Lee Mortimer looks on as a Beverly Hills judge sets bail for Frank. April 1947.
(photo credit 20.2)
Sinatra heard the news late the next morning as he suited up for a Saturday-afternoon Swooners softball game. The call came from Hank Sanicola, who had heard from a friend of a friend of Mickey Cohen’s. Frank was shocked but not surprised. He felt sad at the death of his beautiful and magnetic friend, and at its violence, but knew he must
suppress the feeling. He would soon hear that the hit had been engineered by Frankie Carbo—the same Frankie Carbo who was rumored to have helped persuade Tommy Dorsey to release Sinatra from his contract, and ironically, the same Frankie Carbo who had been implicated along with Siegel in the 1939 murder of Harry Greenberg. But it barely mattered who had done the planning, or who had pulled the trigger: Frank knew the order had come straight from the summit in Havana, and the manager of the project had been Charlie Fischetti.
