Frank_ The Voice Part 10

Sinatra had been a fervent Democrat since boyhood, when he'd helped ward boss Dolly stump for local Democratic candidates, and a Roosevelt lover since the early 1930s. The Democrats had established themselves at the beginning of the century as the defenders of America's minorities, and FDR, transformed by crippling polio from a shallow playboy to an avatar of n.o.blesse oblige, was every bit as charismatic as Frank himself.

The situation was not without its complexities. For one thing, Hearst and Louis B. Mayer were extremely close. For another: not long after the beginning of World War II, Roosevelt ordered the FBI's director, J. Edgar Hoover, to compile a list of possible threats to national security, and one of the bureau's first responses was to round up some fifteen hundred Italian aliens. Dolly put the blame for this unpleasant act squarely on FDR, and took her son to task for his ardent support of the president.

Some have contended that Sinatra's crusade against racial and religious intolerance was opportunistic, a convenient publicity stunt. Some charged that the ardently pro-Roosevelt George Evans encouraged Frank's enthusiasm for FDR. And while it's true that it didn't hurt his image to support the president, it's also true that one of the singer's proudest possessions was a large autographed photo of Franklin D., which he hung prominently in the foyers of his residences at least until his politics veered sharply right in the late 1960s.

In fact, Sinatra was a convenient lightning rod for all kinds of antipathies. It's hard to imagine in this age of diversity what a strong hold white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males once had over America. Ethnics were an essential ingredient in the Great Melting Pot: they could be acknowledged sentimentally and smiled at condescendingly, but essentially were not to be trusted. (Of all the slurs against FDR, one of the strangest was that he was secretly a Jew named Rosenfeld.) Frank Sinatra was definitely an ethnic; what's more, he was a small, rich, c.o.c.ky, s.e.xually potent ethnic. This didn't ingratiate him with much of the press. None of America's editorial writers were getting on John Wayne's case for not enlisting. But then Wayne wasn't Italian or liberal.

In May 1944, the Army newspaper Stars and Stripes Stars and Stripes, which had already waxed indignant about Sinatra's draft status, ran an article on the singer by one Sergeant Jack Foisie. It is a fascinating doc.u.ment, written in wisecracking forties slang, dripping with envy and contempt. Foisie strives for some sort of objectivity but at every turn battles, not very energetically, his own distaste for the singer: Dateline New York. There is no denying, gentlemen, this guy Frankie Sinatra has something we ain't got. Most everyone is trying to discover what that something is, and the few who claim to know can't find the words to express themselves. So until a better explanation comes along, the homefront is simply calling this 26-year-old [sic] Hoboken-born crooner a national phenomenon. However, if one must get a.n.a.lytical, Sinatra, otherwise known as the Voice, has certain definite things which we ain't. For instance, he pulls down about ten-hundred thousand bucks a year, says press agent George B. Evans, carefully adding that about $930,000 goes back to the government in taxes...Secondly, Evans estimates that The Voice has about 50 million bobby-sock followers and other less fanatical fans. The Sinatra fan mail averages 2,000 letters weekly, of which 40% are from other than young (14 to 18 years) girls. Of this 40%, a lot is from servicemen, but-Evans admits-very little is from servicemen overseas.His bobbysock brigades are the most fantastic people. At the very sight of 'The Voice' they break into screams...This screaming has become Sinatra's trademark. At first encouraged, if not suggested by Sinatra's press agents, the practice now is very much frowned upon. Before each Lucky Strike Hit Parade Lucky Strike Hit Parade radio performance, the 5-foot-10 1/2-inch [ radio performance, the 5-foot-10 1/2-inch [sic], 140-pound [sic] crooner pleads with his high school dumplings to please, oh please, just be nice girls, and applaud, but don't scream. He tells them that the War Department doesn't like them to have screams show up on his program recordings for overseas consumption. It is bad on the combat GI's morale, the WD figures...Now that I've seen Sinatra myself, I still can't imagine why he does what he does to people, especially girls. Yet 50 million Americans can't be wrong.People will argue day and night over whether he has a voice or not. The people who can hear him say he has, but the people who can't hear him, especially when he has to compete with the volume of Mark Warnow's band on the Lucky Strike Hit Parade Lucky Strike Hit Parade, say he hasn't.On August 4, 1943, he appeared with the [Philadelphia] Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra. The crowd, containing a larger percentage of bobbysocks than ever before seen in a concert hall, thought he was good, but the music critics almost universally did not. They were not so much annoyed by his voice as by his reference to the musicians of the Philharmonic as "the boys in the band."Sinatra is 4-F because of a punctured eardrum. As a civilian crooner, his friends point out, he is doing a lot more for the country by packing them in at bond rallies and the like than he could do in a uniform, an argument raised on behalf of many entertainers, and seemingly a satisfactory one to the Selective Service Boards.In answer to my question whether he was planning any overseas tours, Sinatra said: "I would like to if I can stand it physically..."Frankie is now in Hollywood, fulfilling his RKO contract. Even in the city of movie stars, the fans single him out for special attention. That he is married and has two babies doesn't seem to matter.

This last is especially pointed-the military reader would have known at once exactly which fans were singling Sinatra out, and just what kind of special attention they were giving him. All in all, it was an article expressly designed to make soldiers' blood boil, and it was symptomatic of a spreading feeling about the singer. Despite George Evans's heroic efforts, the public was starting to sniff out things it didn't like about Frank Sinatra. He was a hedonist, in a nation under wartime restrictions. He was a man apart, in a time when men were supposed to be supporting their buddies. He was having the time of his life, while his countrymen were fighting and dying overseas.

And thanks to MCA, he was no longer working for the piddling RKO but starting his new contract with MGM, one that, according to Evans, helped make him the highest-paid entertainer in the world. This may have been close to the truth. By Sinatra's own later estimation, he earned $840,000 in 1944, the equivalent of over $10 million today.

Still, it wasn't just the money. He was now officially with the studio that had "more stars than in the heavens."1 Back on the Coast in April from Frank junior's christening, he attended a party given by Mayer for the twenty-six-year-old Henry Ford II, freshly mustered out of the Navy and soon to take over the family business. (The record doesn't show whether young Ford agreed with his grandpa Henry's notorious anti-Semitic writings, but Mayer was never one to scruple where Americanism was concerned.) No doubt the event was a cras.h.i.+ng bore except for the presence of several of the studio's loveliest, their morals clauses all atwitter at the sight of Frankie, and one other interesting party: a very handsome, quite funny, ever so slightly world-weary twenty-year-old English contract player named Peter Sydney Ernest Aylen Lawford. Back on the Coast in April from Frank junior's christening, he attended a party given by Mayer for the twenty-six-year-old Henry Ford II, freshly mustered out of the Navy and soon to take over the family business. (The record doesn't show whether young Ford agreed with his grandpa Henry's notorious anti-Semitic writings, but Mayer was never one to scruple where Americanism was concerned.) No doubt the event was a cras.h.i.+ng bore except for the presence of several of the studio's loveliest, their morals clauses all atwitter at the sight of Frankie, and one other interesting party: a very handsome, quite funny, ever so slightly world-weary twenty-year-old English contract player named Peter Sydney Ernest Aylen Lawford.

Peter Lawford liked to give an impression of charming superficiality, but Sinatra was intuitive enough to see at once that like him, the young actor was a complex and layered personality and, also like him, carried scars both visible and unseen. For one thing, Lawford had a slightly deformed right arm, the result of a childhood collision with a gla.s.s door; ironically enough, the deformity was as much a source of his success as his good looks and suave manner, for it had kept him out of military service. Metro was currently keeping him very busy shooting war movies, in which he was a natural to play the sensitive young English pilot or Tommy Atkins, or even, in 1942's A Yank at Eton A Yank at Eton, a bullying young sn.o.b, opposite Ava Gardner's husband, Mickey Rooney. Mr. Mayer loved Lawford, though he was less fond of the young actor's eccentric stage mother, Lady May Bunny, who had a t.i.tle but not a farthing, and who had tried (and failed) to prevail on Mayer to pay her a salary as her son's a.s.sistant. Lady May, young Lawford would reveal at the drop of a hat, had dressed him in girl's clothing until age eleven.2 On the surface, Sinatra and Lawford couldn't have been more different, but they had a natural affinity. Both had overbearing mothers; both had minor physical deformities. Both were beguiling and s.e.xually voracious. Each had qualities the other envied.

Lawford-whose status consciousness as a Brit on the low end of the Hollywood pecking order was acute-was fully aware of Sinatra's status. And Sinatra seemed aware of everything everything. The singer's wide blue eyes surveyed the whole crowded room and took in everything at once-Greer Garson's lovely posterior (she was forty forty, for Christ's sake); the sonorous Louie B.'s awareness of same, even as he chatted up the moonfaced young Ford.

But the singer, for all his ability to snap his fingers and order up any woman in the room (the young Brit saw them gazing at him as if their knickers were already halfway down their thighs), saw that Lawford had something even Frank could never have-that six-foot height, those impossibly handsome good looks.

Frank regarded Lawford and shook his head. If he looked like that that, he'd be- Lawford's eyes crinkled. d.i.c.k Haymes?

The singer bent double at the waist, laughing hard. Then he straightened up and pointed at Lawford in a way that the young Englishman had always been taught was rude. Hey, Chauncey here was all right.

On the golf course I'm under par, Metro-Goldwyn have asked me to star.

They arrived on June 1 at the Union Pacific station in Pasadena, Nancy and four-year-old Little Nancy and the baby, along with Nancy's twenty-one-year-old sister, Constante-known as Tina-whom she'd brought along for company, and also to fill in on official Frank Sinatra letter-writing duty while Nancy tended to the kids. Mike and Jennie Barbato, as well as their four other daughters, along with husbands, would soon follow. A whole c.o.c.keyed caravan, and they had to be put up somewhere while the new house was being prepared. With a sigh, Frank checked out of his private bachelor pad at the Art Deco Sunset Tower (where John Wayne and Bugsy Siegel also had suites) and into the Castle Argyle, a nice residential hotel conveniently located a stone's throw from the CBS Studios.

Sinatra had bought the new house at 1051 Valley Spring Lane sight unseen: a big pale pink Mediterranean-style stucco pile on Toluca Lake in the San Fernando Valley, ten miles from Hollywood-a posh suburb, orange-blossom-sweet, in those pre-freeway days. Bob and Dolores Hope lived just down the street. Bing and his brood weren't far away.3 That spring, oddly enough, Sinatra's future arranger Gordon Jenkins had written an upbeat, gospel-flavored hit called "San Fernando Valley," which Sinatra sang on the Vimms show: That spring, oddly enough, Sinatra's future arranger Gordon Jenkins had written an upbeat, gospel-flavored hit called "San Fernando Valley," which Sinatra sang on the Vimms show: I'll forget my sins I'll be makin' new friends...

It was a lovely song, and one very much of its era: wholehearted, full of the American promise of rebirth through moving west. Crosby recorded it around the same time, and his version is a thing of beauty-the forty-year-old Old Groaner at the top of his game, playing with the number's spiritual flavor, then reaching down low to kick it home. Still, it's a middle-aged reading. Sinatra's version-lighter, more youthful, and genuinely optimistic-has that unique quality that Haymes and Eberly, for all their appealing masculinity, simply couldn't bring off: the quality of conversation. Frank had lasered in on the lyric and, as his old teacher Quinlan had taught him, understood its depths. As a result, the singer was able to tell the song as an irresistibly charming story.

It was an irresistible story to Frank himself. In his westward relocation, he was reinventing and expanding himself, moving onto a larger canvas. The new house was of a piece with the expansion. It was full of big rooms: an antidote to his claustrophobia. On the wall of his new den (his own den!) was a framed quotation from none other than Schopenhauer: "Music is the only form of Art which touches the Absolute."

The musician, however, did not himself wish to be touched: the house was surrounded by a high wall, to keep fans at bay. There were other lovely perks. Tied up at Sinatra's private dock was a new single-masted sailboat, a gift from Axel Stordahl. And whenever the phone's incessant ringing began to get to him, Frank could swim or sail out to a wooden raft and play poker with cronies. Hasbrouck Heights's Warm Valley, with its little rooms and lingering cooking smells and close-in neighbors, was a distant memory.

Frank and Nancy named the new place Warm Valley too, in hopes of importing some domestic good luck (not that that had been in high supply back in Hasbrouck Heights). But it might not have been a good omen that the house's previous owner was the bedroom-eyed actress Mary Astor, whose lurid private life had been a tabloid playground in the mid-and late 1930s.

Life remained complicated. Dolly was furious at being left in the dust of the Barbatos' ma.s.s westward exodus. Over each successive month in the last five years, less and less love had been lost between her and Nancy; now, to all appearances anyway, her snip of a daughter-in-law had triumphed. And gone Hollywood. The Sunday-afternoon long-distance phone calls between the dutiful son and the irrepressible Dolly grew increasingly tense. Her anti-Nancy vitriol cannot have failed to leach into her son's system. Even as he was making a game effort at reviving his domestic situation, Sinatra was increasingly skeptical about his marriage.

And rhapsodize as he might about reinventing himself, Frank knew the West was alien soil. "When I arrived at MGM, I was a n.o.body in movies," he later told his daughter Nancy. "What was I? Just a crooner. A guy who got up and hung on to a microphone in a bad tuxedo and brown shoes." Hollywood is traditionally inhospitable to presumptuous strangers, no matter how celebrated they may be elsewhere, until they have demonstrated both fealty and mastery.

Sinatra, of course, had demonstrated neither. He had done two features for RKO (only one of them released to date), and he had garnered some respectable reviews. He had wowed Old Man Mayer and entered the MGM stable. He hadn't really produced. He might be a national phenomenon, but he wasn't a Hollywood phenomenon. Then as now, Hollywood made its own rules.

And Sinatra broke them virtually from the get-go. He was due to start shooting his first MGM feature, a musical called Anchors Aweigh Anchors Aweigh, in mid-June, but before he even began work, he insisted that the studio hire his pals Styne and Cahn to write the songs. Producer Joe Pasternak shook his head. Mack Gordon and Harry Warren, they they were movie songwriters. Burke and Van Heusen, they were movie songwriters. But Gordon and Warren and Burke and Van Heusen were all profitably engaged elsewhere, and Styne and Cahn's big movie credit was were movie songwriters. Burke and Van Heusen, they were movie songwriters. But Gordon and Warren and Burke and Van Heusen were all profitably engaged elsewhere, and Styne and Cahn's big movie credit was Step Lively Step Lively, a little RKO picture that hadn't even been released, and MGM wasn't buying.

Sinatra, for whom business and friends.h.i.+p were inseparable, dug in his heels.

"It came to such an impa.s.se," Sammy Cahn wrote in his autobiography, "that Lew Wa.s.serman, head of MCA, came to me to plead, 'Unless Frank gives in, he'll lose the picture. Won't you talk with him?' I of course went to Frank and said, 'Frank, you've already done enough for me. Why don't you pa.s.s on this one? There'll be others.' He looked at me...and said: 'If you're not there Monday, I'm not there Monday.'

"I was there Monday. So was he."

Frank was there, but he wasn't happy. He was in over his head and he knew it. This wasn't RKO; he couldn't just float through a picture on charm and a few songs. He would get to sing in Anchors Aweigh Anchors Aweigh, but he was also going to have to do something he had never done before: dance. And not just dance, but dance alongside Gene Kelly.

Kelly was three years older than Sinatra, and the same height, but forty pounds heavier. The forty pounds was all muscle, and there began the differences between Frank Albert Sinatra of Hoboken and Eugene Curran Kelly of Pittsburgh, who was unlike anybody Sinatra had met in Hollywood. Handsome, tough, cheerful, and athletically brilliant, Gene Kelly was a walking paradox: a blue-collar jock who happened to be a superlative dancer, the opposite of the slim, ethereally elegant Fred Astaire. (Even years later, when Sinatra and Astaire might have become friends, Frank remained intimidated by the dancer's aura. "Frank thought Fred was the cla.s.s act of all time," said the director Bud Yorkin, who worked with both men at different times. "He said, 'I can't be Fred Astaire.'") Sinatra was intimidated by Kelly, too-not by his cla.s.siness, but by his sheer dancing ability. Very fortunately for him, though, Kelly shook the singer's hand, looked him in the eye, and decided to help him out.

Every meeting between two men, and especially between two men who might reasonably see themselves as compet.i.tors, is essentially an encounter between Robin Hood and Little John-a joust on a log over a stream, with one bound to wind up on his behind in the water. Kelly, who was both starring in Anchors Aweigh Anchors Aweigh and directing its dance sequences, maturely decided that if he held Frank Sinatra's hand rather than kicked his a.s.s, they would both come out the better for it. and directing its dance sequences, maturely decided that if he held Frank Sinatra's hand rather than kicked his a.s.s, they would both come out the better for it.

What conditioned Kelly's decision was not just professional wisdom but confidence. He wasn't worried about yielding his position to Sinatra. (For one thing, though he had enlisted in the Navy early in the war, the Navy decided Kelly could best serve by making propaganda films, and allowed him to act in Hollywood on the side.) Sinatra saw his self-a.s.surance, and respected it. And so it was settled in a split second: the two men decided to like each other.

The movie was directed by a boy wonder named George Sidney (who, four years earlier, had produced Ava Gardner's screen test-and would go on to direct Annie Get Your Gun, Show Boat, Bye Bye Birdie Annie Get Your Gun, Show Boat, Bye Bye Birdie, and Viva Las Vegas Viva Las Vegas). Anchors Aweigh Anchors Aweigh was a standard MGM musical of the 1940s, built around the idea of two sailors on leave in Los Angeles-kind of a run-through for the much more successful was a standard MGM musical of the 1940s, built around the idea of two sailors on leave in Los Angeles-kind of a run-through for the much more successful On the Town On the Town, four years later. A tongue-in-cheek Kelly played the wolf of the fleet, and Frank was the goofily shy former church choirmaster Clarence Doolittle.

The ace MGM scenarist Isobel Lennart wrote the inspired characterization, which might as well have been cooked up by George Evans. Sinatra got to wear a uniform that at once flattered his slim physique and countered the draft-dodger image. (So flattering was that sailor suit that Frank would find it difficult to get out of it for the rest of his brief career at MGM.) And he got to act like a complete dunce around women. He was sweet and convincingly gentle.

The picture had several dance sequences, most notably a groundbreaking scene in which Kelly tripped the light fantastic with the Hanna-Barbera-animated mouse Jerry, of Tom and Jerry Tom and Jerry fame. But making Jerry Mouse move gracefully merely involved hand painting thousands of cels. Making Frank Sinatra dance was something else again. fame. But making Jerry Mouse move gracefully merely involved hand painting thousands of cels. Making Frank Sinatra dance was something else again.

Kelly did his heroic best. As Sinatra told his daughter Nancy: I was born with a couple of left feet, and I didn't even know how to walk, let alone dance. It was Gene who saw me through. We became a team only because he had the patience of Job, and the fort.i.tude not to punch me in the mouth because I was so impatient. Moviemaking takes a lot of time, and I couldn't understand why. He managed to calm me when it was important to calm me, because we were doing something that we wanted to do. Apart from being a great artist, he's a born teacher, and he taught me how to move and how to dance. We worked hard and he was a taskmaster. Rehearsal for each routine took eight weeks every day. I couldn't dance exactly like he danced so he danced down to me. He taught me everything I know.

This is remarkably self-knowing. Frank was was pathologically impatient, a characteristic that power and fame aggravated. (It was on pathologically impatient, a characteristic that power and fame aggravated. (It was on Anchors Aweigh Anchors Aweigh that his hatred of doing anything more than once, especially where the movies were concerned, earned him the nickname "One-Take Charlie.") Underneath was always a panicky uncertainty. He could be sweet when he was unsure: when he stepped on the actress Pamela Britton's toes during a dance number, he "quickly apologized," he recalled. Whereupon Britton "smiled bravely and said, 'Oh, that's all right. You're very light on my feet.'" that his hatred of doing anything more than once, especially where the movies were concerned, earned him the nickname "One-Take Charlie.") Underneath was always a panicky uncertainty. He could be sweet when he was unsure: when he stepped on the actress Pamela Britton's toes during a dance number, he "quickly apologized," he recalled. Whereupon Britton "smiled bravely and said, 'Oh, that's all right. You're very light on my feet.'"

But more to the point was another confession: "Because I didn't think I was as talented as some of the people who worked [at MGM], I went through periods of depression and I'd get terribly embarra.s.sed." When Frank felt humiliated, his first reaction was to bark commands. If others were humiliated in the process, all the better.

His hot-blooded reactions endeared him to no one, even the Job-like Kelly. "We used to play mean, nasty tricks on Frank Sinatra, because he was always a pain in the neck," Kelly's a.s.sistant on the film, the dancer Stanley Donen, told his, Donen's, biographer. "He didn't want to work and was very quixotic and quick to anger, so we used to take great pleasure in teasing him."

Kelly and Donen came up with a great practical joke, revolving around the MGM commissary, where they broke for lunch every day with Sinatra: The MGM commissary had square tables with blue plastic tops, pushed against the walls, like in a cafeteria. Every table was square, all but one, and that belonged to Gerry Mayer [Louis B.'s brother, who ran the studio's physical operations].So one day, mean b.a.s.t.a.r.ds that we were, Gene and I said to Frank, "Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could have a round table? It's so much nicer that way, because then we could sit closer together." As soon as Frank heard us say that, he said, "You watch, I'll get us a round table."There was no way Frank was going to get us a round table. We knew that. Then, when he was told to forget it, he got into this huge argument. He steamed and he fumed and threw fits and said he was going to quit. All this for a round table.

Early in the shoot of Anchors Aweigh Anchors Aweigh, Sinatra, insecure about how he was coming across in the movie (and probably worried about all those single takes), asked to see rushes. Pasternak told him that this wasn't done. When actors saw themselves on-screen, the producer said, they always asked for retakes, which cost time and money. Sinatra exploded; Pasternak relented. "Listen," he said, "I'm not supposed to do this, but I'll make an exception and let you see them. Just you, though, and n.o.body else."

Sinatra arrived for the secret screening with an entourage. This time Pasternak was the one who got furious. "I said just for you," he told Frank. "Not for half a dozen."

Frank announced, once again, that he was walking off the picture. Pasternak told him to go right ahead. Sinatra walked-then, not wanting to test his expendability, came back the next day.

But the pattern had been set. One afternoon, a United Press reporter who was on the set to interview the pianist Jose Iturbi got more than he bargained for: a choice outburst from a frustrated Sinatra. "Pictures stink and most of the people in them do too," he told the writer. "Hollywood won't believe I'm through, but they'll find out I mean it."

He had already pushed the limits by insisting on Cahn and Styne and upsetting the producer with his special needs. This blasphemous tantrum was the kind of thing that could get an actor, even a high-paid one, run out of town. Sinatra's team quickly went into damage control. "It was the hottest day of the year," his manager Al Levy told the press. "Naturally he was tired, but that crack was never intended for that fat fellow with the gla.s.ses [the reporter]." And Jack Keller quickly placed a statement by Sinatra (written by Keller) in the papers: It's easy for a guy to get hot under the collar, literally and figuratively, when he's dressed in a hot suit of Navy blues and the temperature is a hundred and four degrees and he's getting over a cold to boot.I think I might have spoken too broadly about quitting pictures and about my feeling toward Hollywood.

To say the least. And while it could certainly get hot under the klieg lights of a soundstage, especially in those pre-air-conditioned days, the summer of 1944 was in fact a typically temperate one in Culver City. In fact, as the war raged across Europe and the Pacific, it was a lovely summer in Los Angeles-a city of low white and pastel buildings, smogless in those days, full of fragrant blossoms and, for every working actor and screenwriter, five unemployed ones. Frank knew this, even as the black headlines blared of invasions and battles. Hollywood had its charms, and Sinatra was not about to lose them. Despite the aggravation of working at MGM, there were too many compensations: One day when the gaffers had taken around an hour too long to light the set, Frank simply got up and walked off the soundstage, into the studio alley. Turning right, down another alley to another soundstage, he went through another heavy door, with its sign saying QUIET PLEASE, past gaping extras, and up to a pet.i.te blonde deliciously filling out a tight WAC uniform. Her back was to him, but when she saw the reaction of the a.s.sistant director she'd been speaking to, she turned: it was Lana. She was in the midst of shooting another service comedy, this one about the Women's Army Corps and t.i.tled Keep Your Powder Dry Keep Your Powder Dry. She was also in the midst of leaving her second husband for the second time (long story), and seeing Peter Lawford, Bob Stack, and the exotically handsome Turhan Bey. But her big grin at Sinatra said she wouldn't mind seeing a lot more of him, soon. And quite soon, she was, he was, they were.

Even as he exhausted himself rehearsing dance sequences (and stepping out with Lana), Sinatra continued to do his radio shows that summer: it was important to maintain his multimedia presence. It was also expensive. Lucky Strike allowed him to broadcast his Your Hit Parade Your Hit Parade segments from the West Coast on the condition that the singer pay out of pocket for studio rental, Stordahl's orchestra, and the AT&T phone feed to New York. The total was $4,800 per show, $2,000 more than his weekly salary. segments from the West Coast on the condition that the singer pay out of pocket for studio rental, Stordahl's orchestra, and the AT&T phone feed to New York. The total was $4,800 per show, $2,000 more than his weekly salary.

Even Sinatra couldn't be everywhere at once. In July, he had to cancel a scheduled return to the Riobamba in Manhattan; to replace him, MCA sent a kid whom the agency's man in Cleveland had spotted singing with the Sammy Watkins Orchestra. The tall, dark, athletically handsome twenty-seven-year-old, out of Steubenville, Ohio, had been christened Dino Crocetti, but naturally that wouldn't do for a stage name. Wrote the ever-perceptive Lee Mortimer in the Daily Mirror Daily Mirror, "In Sinatra's singing spot is a chap by the name of Dean Martin, who sounds like him, uses the same arrangements of the same songs and almost looks like him." In a later blurb, Mortimer added a fillip: "Sings and looks like Sinatra-only healthier."

Frank and Gene Kelly play a couple of sailors on sh.o.r.e leave in MGM's Anchors Aweigh Anchors Aweigh, 1945. (photo credit 14.2) (photo credit 14.2)

15.

Sinatramania. The Paramount, October 12, 1944. Frank's publicist, George Evans, hired an ambulance to park outside the theater and issued the ushers bottles of ammonia "in case a patron feels like swooning." (photo credit 15.1) (photo credit 15.1) In Hollywood, Sinatra was just one star in a galaxy (not to mention an official pain in the a.s.s); in New York he was king. And, after finis.h.i.+ng Anchors Aweigh Anchors Aweigh in September, he came east to reclaim his crown. He was about to begin a new stand at the Paramount, the first in over a year. On the long train ride east, while Sanicola and Al Levy and Stordahl and his bodyguard Al Silvani played gin rummy, drank, and stared out the window, Frank read. in September, he came east to reclaim his crown. He was about to begin a new stand at the Paramount, the first in over a year. On the long train ride east, while Sanicola and Al Levy and Stordahl and his bodyguard Al Silvani played gin rummy, drank, and stared out the window, Frank read.

It was a habit he had picked up on the Dorsey bus, during the long rides through the night from city to city. He'd begun with dime novels, but quickly grew bored with the cheesy writing and flimsy plots. He wanted more than diversion; he wanted to improve himself. Now and then on the road he had been introduced to witty people who wanted to do more than gossip-they wanted to talk about the Depression and the New Deal and the labor movement. And while Sinatra had strong, inchoate emotions about the things they were discussing, to his embarra.s.sment he lacked both the words and the hard knowledge to partic.i.p.ate fully.

He began to read newspapers-not just the news, but the editorials and reviews. He was hungry for knowledge and the tools to express it. (He even began doing crossword puzzles, was pleased to find he was good at them.) When Frank thought about what moved him, he kept coming back to the times he had been made to feel small for who he was.

Everywhere he went, he felt revolted by the casual way Negroes were belittled and excluded. It helped to be white, but as soon as people found out he was Italian, things changed. If you were Italian, in fact, by many people's definition you weren't quite white anyway. When you had a name that ended with a vowel, it was easy to feel you weren't a full-fledged American.

Except that he knew he was. Just as he knew that Billie and Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson and Lester Young and all the other great musicians he met on Fifty-second Street and in Harlem were too.

Now Frank read to express these thoughts. He worked his way through thick books about prejudice: Gunnar Myrdal's American Dilemma American Dilemma, Gustavus Myers's History of Bigotry in the United States History of Bigotry in the United States, Howard Fast's novel about Reconstruction, Freedom Road Freedom Road. When Sanicola and Levy saw him sitting in his train or plane seat with his nose in a tome, they'd shrug. "Frank," they'd say with a sigh, meaning that was just the way he was. He also washed his hands twenty-five times a day, for Christ's sake.

But when George Evans saw what his client was reading, he knew he had a gold mine on his hands. It wasn't just that Evans, a dyed-in-the-wool liberal himself, agreed with Sinatra; it was that a right-minded, crusading Sinatra would make people forget all about the Sinatra who had dodged the draft.

This time when he reached the city, Dolly demanded to see him the second he got off the train. Frankie winced ever so slightly as his mother reached up to pinch his thin cheek.

Jesus Christ! Didn't they f.u.c.king feed him anything out there?

After he saw his parents, he made another call, one that Dolly wouldn't be very happy with.

A good pal of Sinatra's, the frog-voiced, backslapping Times Square saloon keeper Toots Shor, badly wanted to meet the president. This wasn't just a wild dream-Shor was a world-cla.s.s character, and his restaurant was a crossroads for manly men from many walks of life, the Democratic National Committee chairman, Robert Hannegan, among them. It was election season, the ailing FDR was running for a fourth term, and Hannegan knew that the weary Roosevelt was up for some diversion. He told Shor he was welcome to come to tea at the White House if he didn't mind a bit of a crowd-twenty people or so.

Tea at the White House! "Could I bring Sinatt?" Shor croaked, taking out his cigar and grinning. He pointed to the round table where Sinatra was holding court. "And could I bring Rags?"

Rags Ragland, a hulking former truck driver, boxer, and burlesque comic, was currently employed as a character actor in Hollywood. He had played a lovable cop in Anchors Aweigh Anchors Aweigh and hit it off with Sinatra, who always liked having tough guys around. Now Rags was part of the entourage. and hit it off with Sinatra, who always liked having tough guys around. Now Rags was part of the entourage.

The motley little crew flew down from La Guardia the next day, and at 3:00 p.m. they were escorted into the White House's Red Room, where FDR himself sat, laughing that famous laugh at something a pretty lady was saying to him. Despite his gallantry, he looked like death warmed over. The war, the presidency itself, the polio-it all had desiccated him. The circles under his eyes were almost as dark as his suit. In fact he would live six months and two weeks from that day.

But Sinatra couldn't help himself: he had goose b.u.mps just at the sight of the great man. Then Hannegan was introducing him, and FDR was staring up at Sinatra with those black-bagged eyes, grinning with his crooked gray teeth, shaking his hand. The two most famous men in America regarded each other.

The president turned to his secretary, Marvin McIntyre. "Mac, imagine this guy making them swoon. He would never have made them swoon in our day, right?"

Sinatra's smile tightened just a fraction. Implicit in the pleasantry was an ethnic dismissal: this skinny little guinea... this skinny little guinea... Roosevelt was a democrat as well as a Democrat, but he was also a patrician, with ingrained prejudices. And Sinatra, beneath all his bravado and arrogance, was still a little guinea. This was the old order of things: the Founding Fathers were square-jawed white men, with n.o.ble heads and n.o.ble accents. Frank decided to love his president anyway. Roosevelt was a democrat as well as a Democrat, but he was also a patrician, with ingrained prejudices. And Sinatra, beneath all his bravado and arrogance, was still a little guinea. This was the old order of things: the Founding Fathers were square-jawed white men, with n.o.ble heads and n.o.ble accents. Frank decided to love his president anyway.

On the flight home that night, Sinatra delved deeper into his Gustavus Myers. The next day, on Evans's recommendation, he made a substantial donation in his and Nancy's name to the Democratic campaign fund. (This was a far rarer act in those pre-media-saturated days than now. Most entertainers then, fearful of the effects political alignment might have on their careers, stayed studiously neutral. And the size of Sinatra's gift, $7,500-the equivalent of $90,000 today-was a surprise to Evans and especially to the purse-string-holding Nancy, who asked her husband on the telephone that night if he was out of his mind.) With Evans's and Keller's encouragement, Sinatra accepted invitations to join the political action committee of the radical Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and the Independent Voters Committee of the Arts and Sciences for Roosevelt (Fredric March, Bette Davis, and Eddie Cantor were all members, as were John Dewey, Van Wyck Brooks, and Albert Einstein). Frank made radio broadcasts for FDR and spoke at rallies at Carnegie Hall and Madison Square Garden. But his largest audience by far would be in Times Square.

When he opened at the Paramount it was as though a dam had burst. Sinatra had gone to California to become a movie star, but while he returned regularly, it was generally not to perform. The teenage girls who made up the first critical ma.s.s of his success knew that he had changed his base of operations, that he had gone Hollywood. They had waited faithfully by their radios, dreaming...But now he was back, and they came out in force, thousands upon thousands of them, lining up the night before to buy their tickets, packing Times Square, forcing the police department to send out reinforcements: detectives, traffic cops, and a dozen mounted men, 421 patrolmen and 20 patrolwomen in all.

Then came the first show, at ten o'clock in the morning on Wednesday, October 11, and Bob Weitman, the Paramount's manager, ignoring the fire laws, let almost five thousand fans (almost all of them girls) into a theater designed to seat thirty-five hundred. They brought sandwiches, apples, bananas, c.o.kes; they settled in and made themselves comfortable.

And ten thousand still waited restlessly outside.

The movie was Our Hearts Were Young and Gay- Our Hearts Were Young and Gay-a Cornelia Otis Skinner biopic, of all things-with Charles Ruggles and Beulah Bondi in the starring roles. It might as well have been a doc.u.mentary about wheat farming. The warm-up acts were Hit Parade Hit Parade singer Eileen Barton (Ben Barton's daughter), dancers Pops and Louie, impressionist Ollie O'Toole. They performed to the sound of coughs and rustling sandwich bags. singer Eileen Barton (Ben Barton's daughter), dancers Pops and Louie, impressionist Ollie O'Toole. They performed to the sound of coughs and rustling sandwich bags.

Then, with a soft hum and sleek hiss of silken pistons, up rose the great hydraulic platform bearing the forty-piece Raymond Paige Stage Door Canteen Radio Orchestra, and the screaming began.

Paige raised his baton, the orchestra struck up the first strains of "This Love of Mine," and the screams got louder.

Suddenly that unmistakable head-the face still bore the traces of a California suntan-poked through the curtain, and the screams reached a deafening crescendo. The curtain parted; the slim figure in a dark suit and floppy bow tie emerged and strode to center stage. Ten thousand feet stamped the floor in unison. The screaming was white noise. The few boys in the audience (their ratio was one to ten) grimaced and held their hands to their ears.

George Evans stood in the wings, awestruck at what he and his client had wrought.

Frank grinned and blew the crowd a kiss. The pandemonium continued for minute after minute, undiminis.h.i.+ng. He held up his hands, trying to say something.

Finally the screaming quieted ever so slightly. "Please, please, please," Sinatra was saying. He glanced around the huge theater. In all the world, there were few gazes this intense.

"Oh, Frankiee!" one shrill voice among the many cried-and the tumult cranked up once more.

He raised his hands. And then, after a moment, just audibly: "Do you want me to leave the stage?"

"No, no, no!" they chanted. "No! No! No!"

"Then let's see-"

"No! No! No!"

"Let's see if we can't be quiet enough to hear a complete arrangement," Frank said forcefully.

They quieted down just a little, and he began to sing.

After an exhausting forty-five minutes of battling them, he sang his closing number, "Put Your Dreams Away," bowed, threw some more kisses, and walked off the stage. The great platform slowly descended into the pit as Paige and his orchestra continued to play.

Of the more than forty-five hundred in the theater, only a scattering stood up. In all, perhaps two hundred departed, a disproportionate number of them boys. The girls who filed out (no doubt having bowed to intense parental pressure) trudged with eyes downcast, as if they'd been expelled from paradise. Back in the seats, those who had stayed unwrapped more food, chatted with friends, filed their nails.

Outside, the huge line inched forward two hundred places and stopped. The crowds, slowly growing aware of the monstrous injustice, pressed against the stanchions. The cops looked nervous.

The theater doors closed.

The girls behind the police lines pushed, shouted, wept in disbelief. Several fainted and had to be pa.s.sed through the crowd to waiting ambulances. In the jammed side streets leading to Times Square, cabbies got out of their stopped vehicles and scratched their heads.

There were six shows that day, and something like two full audiences got to see the show. But twenty, then twenty-five, then thirty thousand waited outside-screaming, shoving, crying hysterically, p.i.s.sing their pants. During one of the shows, a cordon of cops suddenly burst from the theater, flanking a skinny, grinning eighteen-year-old boy in a double-breasted gray suit. His name was Alexander J. Dorogokupetz, and he had come to the Paramount to see what the big deal was about this little singer that the girl he was stuck on was stuck on. As the band had struck up "I Don't Know Why (I Just Do)," a tender Fred Ahlert and Roy Turk ballad (Frank exquisitely aspirated the h h's in "why," just as John Quinlan had taught him), Dorogokupetz had taken aim from third-row center and hurled an egg that hit the curtain and dropped on the stage. Sinatra barely saw it fly by. Then the second egg struck him smack in the face. The sh.e.l.l fragments stung like h.e.l.l, the yolk and alb.u.men dripped down his chin and onto his collar, but he managed to keep singing.

Then a third egg hit him smack in the eye. And a fourth landed on his bow tie. The music stopped. "I vowed to put an end to this monotony of two years of consecutive swooning," Dorogokupetz said later, sounding for all the world like an apprehended a.s.sa.s.sin. "I took aim and threw...it hit him...his mouth was open...I felt good."

SINATRA HIT BY EGGS, read a headline the next morning. THE VOICE SCRAMBLES SONG.