Frank: The Voice (73 page)

O
ne night in January, as Frank walked into the Columbia recording studios, he passed a group of teenage girls, who noticed him at once. They giggled. As he smiled expectantly, they called out in unison: “
We like Eddie Fisher!”

Frank shrugged, chastened. “I do, too,” was all he could come up with.

Edwin Jack Fisher was a nice Jewish boy from Philadelphia with
a handsome face, a thick head of dark hair, a soaringly confident tenor voice, and no sense of musical tempo whatsoever. “
You had to tell him when to start,” said the record producer Alan Livingston. “It was amazing.” Fisher had started singing on the radio in high school, had been discovered by Eddie Cantor, and had signed with RCA Victor in 1949, at twenty-one. And in June 1950, an appearance on Milton Berle’s
Texaco Star Theater
, the biggest show on television, had turned Eddie into a national sensation.

Fisher was the first popular singing idol created by the new medium, which was growing by the month beyond anyone’s ability to calculate. The new stars of TV—Berle, Sid Caesar, Jackie Gleason, Martin and Lewis—were riding the crest of a tremendous wave, and by 1950 Eddie Fisher was riding along too. Days after the
Texaco
appearance, his agent booked him into Ben Miller’s Riviera, an elegant nightspot atop the Palisades in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and over the span of a two-week gig Fisher came into his own not just as a pop phenomenon but as an important American entertainer—the clubs were still a key cultural component in those days. It was a feat akin to the one Sinatra had pulled off at the Astor roof ten years earlier. Earl Wilson wrote, “
Singer Eddie Fisher … is merely wonderful. There’s no reason he shouldn’t become a big star.” And in the
Daily Mirror
, Frank’s old nemesis Lee Mortimer raved, “
The cash customers cheer and beg for more, indicating the lad is the song find of the year.”
Variety, Time
, and the
New York Times
printed similar plaudits.

“I became the hottest act in show business,” Fisher recalled many years later. He was twenty-two.

Then, in February 1951, Fisher played the Paramount:

Eddie Fisher was writing his memoirs at the end of the 1990s, at a moment when the world had all but forgotten him. There is a poignant odor of insistence about his recollections:
Remember me. I used to be huge
.

Yet in February 1951, Frank Sinatra had no way of knowing that Eddie Fisher would be forgotten and he himself would be immortal.

One night Frank was walking through Times Square when he saw the giant crowds of girls beneath the Paramount marquee. The sight was like a vision at once of his past and his death. He hurried back to Manie Sacks’s suite at the Hampshire House, went into the kitchen, closed the door, laid his head on the stove, and turned on the gas. Manie happened to return not long afterward, smelled the odor, and went into the kitchen, where he found Frank lying on the floor, sobbing, a failure even at suicide.

In December 1950, the Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver, a Democrat possessed of a crusading temperament and presidential aspirations, convened the Special Committee on Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce. In reality, the committee’s investigations had less to do with commerce than with an organization of which few Americans were aware in that more innocent time: the Mafia. The country got a crash course. The hearings ran for ninety-two days in fourteen cities,
including New York, Chicago, Detroit, and New Orleans, with a cast of witnesses who became instantly infamous: the likes of Giuseppe Doto (Joe Adonis), Albert Anastasia, Frank Costello, Jake Guzik, Virginia Hill, Willie Moretti, and Longy Zwillman. The committee’s sessions were televised, quickly becoming America’s most popular show. Appliance stores tuned the TV sets in their display windows to the Kefauver hearings as an inducement to buy. The nation was mesmerized by the raspy-voiced testimony of the Copacabana owner, Costello, who had refused to allow his face to be shown on camera. Instead, viewers saw a dramatic close-up of the gangster’s well-manicured hands, which he wrung constantly as he spoke.

At a committee meeting during the investigation, Kefauver handed one of his lawyers, Joseph Nellis, an envelope containing eight eight-by-ten glossy photographs. The pictures were all of Frank Sinatra. “
I almost fell off my chair,” Nellis recalled many years later. “I opened the envelope and saw a picture of Sinatra with his arm around Lucky Luciano on the balcony of the Hotel Nacional in Havana; another picture showed Sinatra and Luciano sitting at a nightclub in the Nacional with lots of bottles having a hell of a time with some good-looking girls. One picture showed Frank getting off a plane carrying a suitcase, and then there were a couple pictures of him with the Fischetti brothers, Lucky Luciano … Kefauver wanted to know more about Sinatra’s relationship with Luciano, who was running an international narcotics cartel in exile. So I called Frank’s attorney and arranged a meeting.”

Nellis didn’t just want to talk to Frank’s attorney—he wanted Frank to testify, on camera. This, of course, would have been the final nail in Sinatra’s coffin: a TV show to end all TV shows, a big broadcast that would have blown the singer’s career right out of the water. Kefauver and Nellis were entirely serious about this: the senator had ordered his lawyer to bulldoze Sinatra with the full power of the U.S. Senate. What Nellis hadn’t reckoned on was his adversary.

Frank (or in all likelihood, Henry Jaffe) had chosen his attorney well. Sol Gelb was a former assistant to New York’s governor, Thomas
Dewey, and the Manhattan district attorney Frank Hogan, now in private practice. Ironically—or appropriately, depending on your point of view—he had worked for Dewey when the crime-busting governor convicted Lucky Luciano of running a prostitution ring. He had also helped Hogan bring Lepke Buchalter of Murder Inc. to justice. Gelb was a tough lawyer who knew organized crime inside and out, and he had no fear of Kefauver. He argued strenuously to Nellis that if Sinatra had to testify alongside the likes of Costello, Moretti, and Adonis, the singer’s public image and career would be permanently ruined. Nellis argued back no less strenuously, citing the incriminating photographs. Finally, the two lawyers reached a compromise.

Frank would testify in absolute secrecy. Gelb chose a law office on an upper floor of Rockefeller Center, at four o’clock in the morning on March 1, 1951.

At 4:00 a.m. on the dot—no being two hours late for this one—Sinatra and Gelb stepped off the elevator to find Nellis and a court reporter, stenotype machine in hand, already waiting. Frank’s famous bluster was nowhere in sight: the Kefauver Committee, with its implicit threat of fatal publicity, had thrown the fear of God into him. He looked “
like a lost kitten, drawn, frightened to death,” Nellis recalled. “He kept shooting his cuffs, straightening his tie, and he smoked constantly.” His right hand shook so badly each time he tried to light a fresh cigarette that he had to hold it with his left.

“He knew that I was going to ask him about Willie Moretti and Lucky Luciano,” Nellis said, “but he didn’t know about all the photographs that I had. He also didn’t know that I had a report about a rape he had allegedly been involved in and the blackmail that had reportedly been paid to keep that story from ever being published.”

The rape story was the first of many such Sinatra rumors that would pop up, like malodorous bubbles in a swamp, over the years. The venue was usually Las Vegas or Palm Springs. Usually prostitutes were involved; so, usually, was Jimmy Van Heusen. For all his vaunted courtliness where ladies were concerned, Van Heusen—a self-confessed sex
addict—was obsessed with prostitutes, and allegedly had some outré tastes. Sinatra allegedly shared some of these tastes. “
Van Heusen was a wild man, they said—a crazy man as far as women were concerned,” said Gloria Delson Franks, Sammy Cahn’s first wife. “Sometimes not in a nice way, too; he abused a lot of women, apparently. Pushing them around. Whatever. I think there was a time when Nancy felt he was a bad influence on Frank. Not that Frank was a choir boy before.”

And Sinatra’s association with Jimmy Tarantino was coming back to haunt him. Tarantino was the former Varsity member whom Frank had helped set up in business with a scandal sheet called
Hollywood Nite Life
. No good deed goes unpunished. Maybe Frank knew at the outset that Tarantino’s modus operandi was blackmail: that celebrities had to pay for good publicity in the rag or get the bad kind. Maybe the $15,000 he invested was really protection money; or perhaps he was just being kind to a compadre. In any case, the minute Tarantino got wind of squalid doings in Vegas involving Sinatra, he tried to shake Frank down. This was complicated, given that Tarantino had Hank Sanicola and Mickey Cohen as business partners, and maybe Willie Moretti, too. Furious, Frank told Sanicola to tell Bobby Burns to write Tarantino another sizable check, ostensibly as a business loan, and to deliver the following proviso: this was the end of the line for Tarantino as far as Sinatra was concerned. The whole thing stank, but it was the kind of nonsense that happened all the time on the fringes of show business.

Now here was this Washington lawyer with his eyeglasses and narrow stare, getting in Frank’s business.

“
We have information,” Nellis intoned, as the stenographer clicked away, “to the effect that you paid Tarantino quite a large sum of money to keep him from writing a quite uncomplimentary story about you.”

“Well, you know how it is in Hollywood,” Sinatra said—as if this prick had any idea. “Jimmy called up and said he had an eyewitness account of a party that was supposed to have been held down in Vegas in which some broads had been raped or something like that. I
told Jimmy if he printed anything like that, he would be in for a lot of trouble.”

“Did he ask you for money?” Nellis asked.

“Well, I asked Hank Sanicola, my manager, to talk to him and that’s the last I heard of it until [the columnist and crime reporter Florabel] Muir printed a story about it in the
Los Angeles Herald
.”

“Did Hank tell you he paid Tarantino?”

“Well,” Frank said, “I understand Tarantino was indicted and I don’t know the rest of the story, but the
Hollywood
[
Nite Life
] quit publishing this crap afterwards.”

Nellis produced the photographs of Sinatra with Luciano in Havana, and proceeded to ask a series of questions about Frank’s February 1947 trip to Cuba. First, though, he wanted to know how Frank had met the Fischetti brothers. Frank said he had first met Joe while performing in Chicago in 1946. “He had a little speedboat on the lake, and one afternoon he took me for a ride,” Sinatra recalled nostalgically. “Having dinner with him, going to the theater.” Joe introduced him to Charlie and Rocco in Chicago, Frank said, and now and then over the following year he encountered the three casually.

“Did you ever have any business with any of the Fischettis?” Nellis asked.

“Not an ounce,” Sinatra replied.

“Where were you staying at Miami when you met them?”

“I had a little cottage.”

“How did you happen to bump into the Fischettis?”

“I went to either the Beachcomber or one of the clubs downtown in the entertainment center, and I saw Joe, and then later that evening I met Rocco,” Frank said. “He came in with some friends, and I said hello and met his friends, and that was it.”

But that was not it: a series of what seemed to be escalating coincidences kept bringing Sinatra and the brothers together. The same night he encountered Rocco, as Frank recalled, “I said to Joe, it is too cold, I think I am going to get out of here and go where it is warm. I
said I think I will go down to Havana, said if I went down I would stay a couple of days because I promised my wife I would meet my wife in Mexico around February 14. It was St. Valentine’s Day; that comes back to my mind.”

As well it should.

Frank continued: “Then that is when [Joe] told me they had also contemplated going to Cuba. I think the next day he called me on the phone and wanted to know when I was going down to Cuba. Apparently, at that time I probably did say what morning I was going, either the following morning or the morning after he called me, and when I got out to the airport, they were checking the baggage through; that is when I saw them on the plane.”