Why Sinatra Matters (13 page)

But when the veterans started coming home that fall, after the atom bombs ended the war with Japan, the smooth ride of Frank
Sinatra started getting bumpier. The return of actors like Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart reminded Americans that many show
business figures had gone off to war. The ballplayers came home too, including Pee Wee Reese and Pete Reiser from the Brooklyn
Dodgers, Hank Greenberg from the Detroit Tigers, Ted Williams from the Boston Red Sox, and, of course, the great DiMaggio.
All were among the 9 million Americans who had served their country. More than half a million had been Italian Americans,
thirteen of whom received the Congressional Medal of Honor while ten were awarded the Navy Cross. More than 300,000 Americans
didn’t come home at all, including 13,712 from the state of New Jersey. And in every state in the Union, those who had been
wounded and maimed tried to adjust to the changed country. Some have speculated about the effect military service might have
had on Sinatra’s personality and career; that leads nowhere. For reasons that were honorable, he didn’t go to his generation’s
war and had to settle for playing servicemen in eleven of his sixty movies. One thing is certain: for many of those who came
back from World War II, the music of Frank Sinatra was no consolation for their losses. Some had lost friends. Some had lost
wives and lovers. All had lost portions of their youth.

More important to the Sinatra career, the girls from the Paramount, and all their sisters around the country, started marrying
the men who came home. Bobby socks vanished from many closets. The girls who once wore them had no need anymore for imaginary
lovers; they had husbands. Nothing is more embarrassing to grownups than the passions of adolescence, and for many, Frank
Sinatra was
the
teenage passion. Children were soon being born in unprecedented numbers, all those kids who a generation later would be known
as the baby boomers. At the same time, the children of all those turn-of-the-century immigrants, now toughened by war, equipped
with the benefits of the GI Bill, began leaving city ghettos for the expanding new suburbs; some became the first people in
the histories of their families to go to universities.

Swing music was rapidly dying, for complicated reasons. Most important was a two-year strike by the American Federation of
Musicians, which, among other things, forced Sinatra to make his first sides for Columbia Records singing a cappella with
a choral group. The strike kept the big bands out of the studios, unable to reach the mass audience with new material. Goodman,
Dorsey, and others sounded stale; Glenn Miller was dead, having disappeared over the English Channel. The economics of the
bands also changed. Postwar inflation drove up the cost of transportation. Sidemen who gladly worked for $40 a week during
the Depression were now asking for $200, with soloists demanding more. Musically, the big band sound was exhausted. From Fifty-second
Street to Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem, the hippest fans were now listening to bebop, to Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie,
Fats Navarro, Max Roach, and others — all of them playing in small groups that were formed during the musicians’ strike. Jazz
had become a freer, more democratic form of chamber music, an ongoing jam session liberated from the dictates of rigid big
band arrangements. Younger fans, with only vague memories of the Depression, were listening to mush or to novelty tunes. For
many other people, the music of the swing bands reminded them of the war, a time they wanted to forget. It would be a long
time before nostalgia would work its magic, transforming that music into a symbol of a more innocent America.

Musically, Sinatra reacted to the postwar climate in several ways. Even before leaving for his USO tour, he had experimented
with other sounds, recording four sides with a black gospel-style group called the Charioteers and two others in a rumba rhythm
with the orchestra of Xavier Cugat. He conducted an instrumental album of Alec Wilder songs. He wrote the lyrics to an aching
ballad called “This Love of Mine.” But basically, he stayed with variations on his own traditional taste in ballads and jump
tunes, most of them arranged by Stordahl. Many were very well done, enriched by strings and woodwinds, but the mysterious
currents of public taste were shifting. The fans were groping for something new, sounds that would express the exuberance,
optimism, and, in certain ways, mindlessness of the years after the war. Some would find it in singers as varied as Billy
Eckstine, Frankie Laine, and Guy Mitchell. Perry Como had a string of hits. Doris Day became a star, along with Peggy Lee,
Vaughn Monroe, Vic Damone, and the Four Aces. Even Gene Autry had a hit in 1949 with “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.” There
were no signs of panic in Frank Sinatra, but he must have been uneasy.

He put much of his energy into the movies. In 1945 he won a special Academy Award for a ten-minute short called
The House I Live In
. He played himself, leaving a radio studio and running into some kids who are beating up another “because we don’t like his
religion.” Sinatra tries to straighten them out and sings the title song. At the time, Sinatra’s liberal politics were widely
known. Most performers of that era kept their politics to themselves; let Democrats in the audience believe they were Democrats,
Republicans think they were Republicans. But Sinatra was a new breed in Hollywood. He publicly supported Franklin D. Roosevelt
and visited him in the White House. This was more than familial loyalty to his mother, Dolly; Sinatra was one of the first
big stars to use his fame to promote his politics, and those politics were, by all accounts, deeply felt. He made an effort
to visit schools and talk to teenagers about bigotry, always citing the hurtful words that had been hurled at him as a boy
in Hoboken. He signed petitions. He sent money to candidates. The short, directed by Mervyn LeRoy from a script by Albert
Maltz (later to become one of the Hollywood Ten during the anticommunist crusade), impressed the critics.

“Mr. Sinatra takes his popularity seriously,” said the reviewer for
Cue
. “More, he attempts to do something constructive with it. Millions, young and old, who will not or cannot read between the
lines of their daily newspapers and are blind to the weed-like growth of bigotry and intolerance planted by hate-ridden fanatics,
will listen carefully to what Mr. Sinatra has to say in this short film.”

He followed the short with
Anchors Aweigh
(1945), a bright, good-natured musical about sailors on shore leave. Sinatra was superb. He worked with Gene Kelly — worked
very hard indeed, and his dance number with Kelly shows it; the routine is full of high spirits, self-kidding, and good dancing.
“I never worked so goddamned hard in my life,” he said later, laughing in a fond way. “Kelly was a brute.” But those were
the days of the major studios; at MGM, where Sinatra had a five-year contract, he often couldn’t choose his vehicles. The
films that followed were mediocre (
It Happened in Brooklyn,
RKO’s
The Miracle of the Bells
), and one,
The Kissing Bandit
(1948), was dreadful. Set in the nineteenth century, this semimusical stars Sinatra as a young Mexican fresh out of an Eastern
college who goes back to Old California to run the family rancho. He even sings one song while riding a white horse. Sinatra’s
love interest is Kathryn Grayson, and the movie also features J. Carrol Naish, the Irish actor from
Life with Luigi
, who plays Sinatra’s Mexican foreman, Chico. “I hated reading the script,” Sinatra later said, “hated doing it, and, most
of all, hated seeing it. So did everyone else.”

He wasn’t truly good again as a movie actor until 1949, when he teamed up once more with Kelly in an MGM musical called
Take Me Out to the Ball Game
, and quickly followed it with a movie masterpiece,
On the Town.
Another story of sailors on shore leave, this time in New York, the film was codirected by Kelly (who also stars) and Stanley
Donen. It was written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. Music for a ballet was composed by Leonard Bernstein. The reviews
were raves. Sinatra’s star should have been ascending.

Instead, he was heading for the Fall.

II
. The Fall was essential to the Sinatra myth. Most of it was a combination of bad timing, dreadful luck, and self-inflicted
wounds. It didn’t happen all at once; instead, the Fall started small and gathered strength, like a landslide.

First, Sinatra alienated the Hollywood press corps. He would have one too many drinks in some public place and curse them
all for whores and pimps. He started firing off thin-skinned telegrams to various columnists, including Louella Parsons, then
the most famous paid yenta in Hollywood. In 1946 the Hollywood Women’s Press Club gave Sinatra the “Least Cooperative Actor”
award. He was not contrite. Then, on April 8, 1947, in Ciro’s nightclub in Hollywood, Sinatra punched out Hearst columnist
Lee Mortimer, who had been needling him in print for many months. The cops were called. Charges were filed. Sinatra was arrested.
To be sure, it was not as if he had punched out Mother Cabrini. In almost four decades in the newspaper business, I have never
met anybody who liked or respected Lee Mortimer; he was a nasty, mean man, a poor reporter, a worse writer, and the king of
the “blind item.” But it was a critical mistake for Sinatra to belt him. Newspaper people who despised Mortimer suddenly started
getting much tougher about Frank Sinatra; as contemptible as Mortimer was, he was part of their guild, not Sinatra’s. The
singer had to pay Mortimer $9,000 to settle out of court. But there were more lasting consequences. The Hearst chain was then
a powerful national force and had already been sniping at Sinatra over his liberal politics. Now the attacks intensified.
He was Red-baited by the chain’s star columnists, Westbrook Pegler and George Sokolsky, and subjected to a campaign that dripped
with innuendo. Sinatra was presented as naive or gullible at best, an agent of the Red conspiracy at worst. Sinatra, of course,
wasn’t close to being a communist; he was, like millions of other Americans, a committed New Deal liberal. But the Hearstlings
didn’t care about the facts. They wanted to destroy Sinatra, and in the growing postwar anticommunist hysteria, they had many
allies. Hollywood was becoming a major target of the anticommunist crusaders; the cynical among them knew that hauling a Hollywood
figure before a committee would bring bigger headlines than would interrogating some high school math teacher who had been
a communist for three weeks in 1934. The true believers among the crusaders were convinced that Moscow was smuggling anti-American
propaganda into the most brainless Hollywood productions. Most of this was absurd. But studio bosses were never profiles in
courage, and because of their fear and trembling, the blacklist soon became a fact of Hollywood life. Sinatra was marginal
to that story but never completely immune. In the placid postwar years he was starting to look like a whole lot of trouble.

Early in 1947 Sinatra did another job on himself, providing a context for the Mortimer affair and building a crucial element
in his life that would stay around until he died. At some point in January he accepted an invitation to go to Havana from
Joe Fischetti, the youngest of the three Fischetti brothers, who were among the second-generation hoodlums then running the
Chicago rackets established during Prohibition by Al Capone. Sinatra had known the Fischetti brothers from before the war,
when he had played a joint they ran in Chicago. Sinatra said, Why not? In those days a trip to Havana was as routine as one
to Miami.

But there are several ways to interpret this journey. One is dark. According to this version, Frank Sinatra had been connected
to the Mob for at least five years. In particular, he was obligated to them for one big favor. Back in 1943, when he was at
the peak of the first stage of his fame, he was also being ruined financially by the terms of the release he had signed with
Tommy Dorsey. The bandleader insisted on taking almost 55 percent of Sinatra’s earnings; expenses and taxes consumed the rest.
Dorsey refused to negotiate; a deal was a deal, and fuck you, kid. So Sinatra reached out to the Mob. In some versions of
the tale, Dolly Sinatra went personally to see Longie Zwillman at his mansion in New Jersey; in others, Sinatra made the visit
himself. Zwillman was outraged at the injustice of it all and put Willie Moretti on the case. In the spirit of conciliation
and compromise, Moretti walked into Dorsey’s dressing room, shoved a pistol into the bandleader’s mouth, and told him to give
Frank Sinatra a release. Dorsey instantly agreed.

Most Sinatra biographers, including those who are not soft on Sinatra’s personal history, dismiss this story as pure invention.
The research indicates that Sinatra obtained his release after a year of tough bargaining by his powerful agents from the
Music Corporation of America (MCA) and some equally tough lawyers. Dorsey was persuaded that he could not afford the publicity
that would come his way if the contract became the center of a court case; Sinatra, after all, was among the most popular
entertainers in the United States. Dorsey settled for $60,000, and he and Sinatra went their separate, if unhappy ways. The
myth has a certain logic and great durability. I heard it as a teenager from the apprentice hoodlums I knew in Brooklyn; it
was repeated to me by cops and old reporters when I was a young newspaperman.

For whatever reason, in February 1947 Sinatra flew to Havana, promising to meet Nancy later in Mexico City. Alas, he was photographed
getting off a plane with Joe Fischetti. Both men were wearing sunglasses and carrying attaché cases; they definitely looked
like a pair of gangsters. They went to the Hotel Nacional, then the grandest hotel in the Cuban capital, and checked into
separate rooms. Sinatra immediately found himself at the largest Mob convention since the late 1920s. The most honored guest
was Charles (Lucky) Luciano himself.

It remains unclear whether Sinatra knew that Luciano would be in Havana; if he did, it should be no surprise that he would
want to meet him. Charlie Lucky was a legendary figure during Sinatra’s youth and was still one of the most famous gangsters
in the world. The romantic aura of the bootlegger was still attached to such men; they were not yet committed to the wholesale
peddling of heroin. Luciano was then living in exile in Naples as the result of a deal worked out during the war whereby the
imprisoned Mob boss agreed to do what he could to help the war effort. Or so we were told by purveyors of the myth. Luciano
bragged later that he had made this deal while serving a thirty-to-fifty-year sentence for white slavery in Dannemora prison.
(That sentence, by the way, was almost certainly the result of a frame-up.) Luciano claimed that he had helped secure the
New York waterfront against sabotage and then set up intelligence networks for the Allies before the invasion of Sicily. The
grateful Americans then cut his sentence, released him in 1946, and deported him to Naples. He couldn’t return to the United
States but was, of course, free to go to Cuba. The Mob bosses — including Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky, Carlos Marcello, Joe
Adonis, and dozens of others — had assembled to honor Charlie Lucky, pledge loyalty, deliver him some cash, discuss business
(including a plan to kill Bugsy Siegel, who was not in Havana but preparing to invent modern Las Vegas). They would also have
fun.