Frank: The Voice (39 page)

Sinatra gave the song his tenderest reading, pitching it shamelessly both to the audience that hated him most, the millions of men who were still far from home, and to the audience that adored him: the women who kept the home fires burning. Nancy, of course, heard it, too.

But she wouldn’t get to see him: the moment he finished the session, he turned on a dime and headed right back east. There was a Western Union telegram, dated March 8, 1945, from Manie:

But the next day, by return wire, Frank jokingly affirmed Winchell’s position, telling Manie to look out for a punch in the nose when he got back to town. He, too, signed with love and kisses.

Frank’s recording was going beautifully, the recording business, less so. Columbia was crimping him on studio charges, charging him for copying, arrangements, Axel’s conducting fees. Crimping him, Sinatra!

Still, there is no evidence that he gave Sacks anything but a hug when they met in New York: Sinatra never was one for personal confrontation. Besides, even where Manie was concerned, Frank had someplace else to be—a radio show, a dinner at Toots’s, a speaking engagement at the World Youth rally at Carnegie Hall. He was a blur of motion. Making the spots. Staying out late. Talking.

Strangely enough, one of the glamour girls Sinatra had claimed he could live without—in Phil Silvers’s lyric at least—had started spending time at 1051 Valley Spring Lane, mostly when the man of the house wasn’t there. Lana Turner had struck up a conversation with Nancy at the New Year’s Eve party, and the odd couple had hit it off: the petite blonde from Idaho with the checkered past and the even more petite brunette from Jersey City with the practical turn of mind and an artist’s hand in the kitchen. They had laughed together that night, at Lana’s lightly scathing comment about the anatomical shortcomings of one of the handsomest men there. The remark let Nancy breathe easier about her own shortcomings, her new hometown’s unrelenting tyranny of beauty.

Lana, of course, was almost impossibly beautiful, but something in her brown eyes spoke of pain and a restless sadness. Hollywood was nothing but a boiler factory as far as she was concerned, her privileged place in it notwithstanding. The men were all fairies or hounds, sometimes both. (Not Frank, of course. Nancy had a real man—maybe ’cause he didn’t look like all those cookie-cutter hunks.) And the women were all out to slit each other’s throats.

That was why Lana liked Nancy: she was someone she could really talk to. She played with a strand of Nancy’s hair. And Lana loved the way she looked, too.

Nancy smiled, accepting the compliment. Finally she felt a little less lonely. And she was delighted to tell her family and her friends back in Jersey: At last she had a real friend in Hollywood, and they wouldn’t believe who it was.
Lana Turner!

Inconceivably—he had been president since Frank was seventeen—FDR died in April. Frank, in New York, went to light a candle at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, then drove up to Hyde Park for a memorial service. He felt deeply sad, as though he had lost a beloved uncle; he felt sorrow with the rest of the country. You couldn’t avoid it; it was in the air like the weather. But somehow the sadness didn’t get Frank where he lived. He was young, in the vibrant prime of life; Roosevelt had been an old, sick man.

Still, Frank had shaken his hand, looked in his eyes … Death was such a strange thing: it gave him the creeps. Best not to think about it.

Less than a month later, with the nation still in mourning, the war in Europe was over, and grief turned to joy. It would still be months before the hundreds of thousands of troops came home, and George Evans and Jack Keller agreed that the time had come at last for Sinatra to go over and entertain them. It would quell the jingoistic newspapermen—not to mention the gossip columnists.

Frank’s daughter Nancy has written that her father was unable to travel overseas before the end of the war because the FBI, suspicious of his left-wing activities, prevented him from getting a visa. In fact, J. Edgar Hoover didn’t get really interested in Sinatra until after the war, and when he did, it wasn’t just because of the singer’s liberal sympathies.

The truth is that Sinatra hadn’t gone abroad during the war because he’d been scared.

As he had every right to be. He read the papers. He had seen
Stars and Stripes
, even after Evans and Keller tried to keep it away from him. He had seen the tomatoes speckling his picture on the Paramount marquee, had heard the catcalls in the street, had felt it when he did
USO shows Stateside: not all of the servicemen hated him (he could win them over when he was in a room or a theater with them)—but an awful lot did. He was the ultimate cuckolder: He might not have actually screwed their women (still, who knew? rumor had it the guy really got around), but he was in their heads. Their wives and girlfriends wanted him, and that was bad enough.

For the troops overseas, it was much worse. Missing home and missing nooky most of all, they were convinced their women were stepping out on them—and in many instances, of course, they were right. Sinatra the draft dodger was the lightning rod for their insecurity. When Evans and Keller floated the idea of a post V-E Day Sinatra tour, the Hollywood Victory Committee, the group of Screen Actors Guild worthies who ran the Canteen, weighed right in. “
There might be some unpleasantness,” they said. Frank had heard rumors that the troops would throw eggs at him, maybe worse … These guys had
guns
, for God’s sake.

Evans and Keller had a brilliant idea.

They’d seen Phil Silvers doing shtick with Sinatra at the Hollywood Canteen: making fun of Frank’s skinniness, pinching his cheeks and pulling his ears, teaching him to sing. This last bit was particularly funny—the droopy-eyed comedian would go on and on about how Sinatra’s tones weren’t round enough, would play with his mouth to get his lips to form just the right shape … and no matter what Sinatra did, it was wrong. Silvers, who had come up through baggy-pants vaudeville, was brilliant, and the bit was hilarious.

Evans called Phil and asked him to oversee Sinatra’s USO tour, introduce him at every stop. Do the same stuff he did with him at the Canteen. Make plenty of fun of him. Push him around a little. Silvers would be doing everything those GIs really wanted to do to him, and he’d be getting them on Frank’s side in the process.

It worked like a charm. In June, Sinatra and Silvers flew to Casablanca on an Army C-47, along with the pianist Saul Chaplin, the actress and singer Fay McKenzie, and the dancer Betty Yeaton. At
every dusty camp they played, Silvers slapped Sinatra’s cheeks, and the soldiers roared. He ordered him offstage—“
Go away, boy, you bother me. The Blood Bank’s down the street”—and they guffawed. By the time the comedian was done with Frank, the GIs were begging to hear him sing. Not an egg was thrown. “
The singer kidded himself throughout the program and had the audience on his side all the way,” the
New York Times
reported. The troupe played bases in North Africa, then flew to Rome, where the singer had an audience with Pope Pius XII, who didn’t know who Sinatra was (“
Are you a tenor, my son? Which operas do you sing?”), though he had heard of Crosby. They played Rome and Caserta and Foggia and Venice. And then they flew home. They had done seventeen shows in ten days, entertained ninety-seven thousand servicemen and servicewomen.

The minute Sinatra stepped off the plane at La Guardia, he stuck his foot in his mouth. The USO and Army Special Services were incompetent, he told the crowd of reporters. “
Shoemakers in uniform run the entertainment division,” he said. “Most of them had no experience in show business. They didn’t know what time it was.”

What was his problem? Maybe the lighting cues had been off, or a few microphones hadn’t worked. Maybe the dressing rooms had been insufficient; maybe he was still grouchy about the pope. (Or just the dirt. It couldn’t have been easy for a true obsessive-compulsive, a man who was in the habit of showering and changing his underwear several times a day, to deal with military amenities in dirt-poor North Africa and Italy.)

He later defended himself by saying that GIs had asked him to complain about how poorly organized and presented most of the shows were. There was plenty to gripe about in a theater of war, even after the big show was over. But Sinatra, who could turn irritable if the wind shifted, was the wrong person to do the griping. His momentarily silenced critics got right back into gear. “
Mice make women faint too,” sneered the
Stars and Stripes
. “He is doing an injustice to a group of people who are for the most part talented, hardworking, and sincere.
There have been, of course, the usual prima donnas who have flown over, had their pictures taken with GIs, and got the hell home.” And dependable Lee Mortimer jumped on the bandwagon, calling Sinatra’s post V-E Day mini-tour a “
joy ride,” comparing him unfavorably to “aging, ailing men like Joe E. Brown and Al Jolson [who] subjected themselves to enemy action, jungle disease, and the dangers of traveling through hostile skies from the beginning of the war.”

George Evans took it all with apparent calm. Even though his heedless client had innumerable ways of ratcheting up the publicist’s blood pressure, even though Sinatra often seemed to work overtime at being his own worst enemy, the Sinatra machine looked unstoppable.

In mid-July,
Anchors Aweigh
came out, and it was a huge hit, with the critics and at the box office. Even the
Times
’s reliably crusty Bosley Crowther waxed grudgingly enthusiastic (after first giving well-deserved raves to Gene Kelly, “
the Apollonian marvel of the piece”): “But bashful Frankie is a large-sized contributor to the general fun and youthful charm of the show.”

The show made big money, and Louis B. Mayer’s thin smile grew broader. He had been right about that boy.

Meanwhile, Evans and Keller plunged ahead with a new campaign. If the public was going to hear a lot of nonsense about the starlets Frankie was stepping out with in Hollywood and the ungracious remarks he persisted in making about worthy organizations like Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and the U.S. Army, the public was also going to see another side of him: Frank Sinatra was going to be a humanitarian.

It wasn’t phony. He was a humanitarian at heart. (Or at least in one of the many chambers of his heart.) He hated intolerance—first, of course, because it had smacked him personally in the face many times, but also because it attacked people he genuinely loved. Hadn’t Mrs. Golden clasped him to her substantial breast and cooed to him in Yiddish? Didn’t he love Manie like a brother? A couple of years earlier, when intimations of the Holocaust first started to emerge, Frank had
had dozens of medals made up with the cross of Saint Christopher on one side and the Star of David on the other (a daring gesture in those days). He had given them out left and right.

And where Negroes were concerned, anyone who was half a musician couldn’t even begin to be prejudiced. Sinatra had encountered far too many black geniuses to feel anything but pity and contempt for the thickheaded smugness of racist America. He had kissed Billie Holiday the way she ought to be kissed one night outside a Los Angeles club; he had dreamed of doing much more. He would always have a thing for black women, though, in truth, this, like everything else about him, was complicated: by his misogyny, his own feelings of inferiority.

His feelings of compassion were purely emotional. But when he talked about them with George Evans, the publicist realized Frank was being honest. And those feelings were golden. Evans repped some of the greatest entertainers in the business, yet none had Sinatra’s capacity to become a great
American
. Evans talked about it with Keller, and they agreed on a strategy: they would flood out the bad with the good. They sent their boy out to thirty speaking engagements in 1945, many of them at high schools in the throes of racial tension. In the fall, Frank went to Benjamin Franklin H.S. in Italian East Harlem, where there had been fistfights among the integrated student body. The future jazz giant Sonny Rollins, then a sophomore, recalled many years later, “
Sinatra came down there and sang in our auditorium … after that things got better, and the rioting stopped.”