Frank: The Voice (50 page)

Louella Parsons and Frank sign autographs for servicemen at the Hollywood Canteen, August 1943.
(photo credit 20.1)

W
ell, Frankie and I have buried the hatchet deep,” Louella Parsons wrote in her column of January 27, 1947. “He promised me he would not carry a gun, feed me poison, or otherwise harm a hair of my defenseless head if I would have luncheon with him. So I went. Frankie Sinatra, that is, and he will leave for Miami in two weeks. He then will go on to Cuba and possibly to South America, and won’t return until MGM is ready to start
The Kissing Bandit
, his next picture.”

Whether the part about carrying a gun was eerily prescient or
merely a case of Louella’s making it her business to know absolutely everything, three days later the
Los Angeles Times
photographed Frank being fingerprinted by Deputy Sheriff Robert Rogers as he applied for a permit to carry a pistol.

The gun may have been a Walther, as has sometimes been reported, or it may have been a Beretta. Sinatra later told Hedda Hopper he “
wanted Nancy to have some protection in case of an emergency. So I bought a little gun for the house.” (With what he was up to lately, Nancy would have been the last person in whose hands he’d want a gun.) Or maybe, as he told another reporter, he needed the sidearm “
to protect personal funds.”

Whose personal funds is another question. It seems unlikely Frank meant his own. He had already begun the habit of having someone in his retinue carry his wad of crisp new twenties and hundreds, but even if he kept the money in his own pocket, a couple of thousand bucks was scarcely worth protecting with a gun. Whatever he meant to use the weapon for, it was a symbol, and not a good one, of what Frank Sinatra was in the process of becoming.

Maybe Frank was frazzled and needed a vacation; maybe he was a man on a mission, however misbegotten. Maybe both were true. Or perhaps he simply needed to get out of town.

For Nancy had found out about his meetings with Lana in New York. News travels fast in Hollywood. If Lana Turner was under the illusion once more that Frank Sinatra was going to leave his wife for her, the story would travel even faster.

Nancy had other news for Frank: she was pregnant. Was Lana Turner going to give him babies? The bitch had one already, a three-year-old bastard daughter, by the nobody she’d married twice. Did Frank really want to be that child’s stepfather? Did he really want to be Lana Turner’s third husband (and fourth marriage)? Hollywood would laugh at him.

Nancy told Frank she was going to have an abortion.

He stared at her. In the mid-1940s, a time of enforced conventionality, it was unspeakable. For a Catholic couple, it was unthinkable. And for this Catholic couple—Nancy knew it; Frank knew it—it was the stain that Dolly Sinatra had brought to their marriage.

The challenge was clear: if he left on this trip, whatever it was, anything could happen. She might do this unimaginable thing. He didn’t believe it, even as part of him feared it. He repeated to her that he had obligations in New York and Miami—a radio show, a benefit concert—and that he was going to take a few days off in Florida and then Havana. Boys only.

He told her it was all over with Lana. He had been a fool, a great fool. It was his nature. He knew Nancy understood: she was the only one in the world who really knew him. There was a loneliness deep in his soul, and he was susceptible. Lana Turner was scheming, inconstant (Frank knew about Tyrone Power), vain, and shallow. He realized she didn’t love him, and—bending the truth—he certainly didn’t love her.

He was exhausted, frayed out. He had been making bad decisions left and right, mistreating those who loved him best. He would make it up to her.

He had an inspiration: they would have a second honeymoon. In Mexico—Acapulco. Valentine’s Day. Two weeks.

The car horn was blowing in the driveway. His suitcases sat in the hall. Frank tried to kiss her, but she evaded his lips. And then he was gone.

He relaxed at the Fischetti mansion on Allison Island in Miami—cool tile floors, quiet servants, views of palm trees and the sparkling bay: a very nice place to be in February. The beautiful weather, luxurious surroundings, and pleasant company put Frank in such an expansive mood that on the night of the tenth he gave a free concert at the Colonial Inn, a gambling casino in Hallandale owned by Meyer Lansky
and Joe Adonis.
¹
The next morning at Miami International Airport, he climbed the steps to board a shiny-skinned TWA DC-3 to Havana.

A still frame from a newsreel taken when the plane landed in Cuba shows Sinatra, having just disembarked, in the midst of a small group of fellow passengers, all male. The faces all wear that distracted, just-got-off-the-plane look. Frank, seemingly unaware of being photographed (or simply inured to it at this point), is gazing off to the side, squinting in the tropical sun. He wears a snappy tweed sports jacket, a patterned necktie, a crisp white shirt. In his right hand is a large, squarish valise. From his posture—leaning to his left to support the valise’s weight against his hip—the bag appears to be quite heavy. Behind him and over his right shoulder is a gray-templed man later identified as Rocco Fischetti. In the left foreground of the frame stands a dark-haired man in a gray suit, cigarette in his mouth, cuffs shot, his pinkie-ringed hand partially shielding his hunched head. The man looks patently like a gangster—more specifically, like the template for a 1940s gangster lovingly re-created in Francis Ford Coppola’s movie of
The Godfather
. There is good reason for this—Joe Fischetti was a gangster. His big brother Prince Charlie, the man who had in all likelihood invited Sinatra on this trip in June at Mary Fischetti’s Brooklyn house, luckily (or craftily) avoided the camera.

A vast amount of attention has been devoted to Frank Sinatra’s four-day trip to Havana in February 1947, at the time in newspapers and magazines and over the years in the immense body of Sinatra literature. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the sojourn achieved mythic status—which is not to say that much of what has been written about it isn’t true. Even giving Frank the maximum benefit of the doubt, it would seem that he made some very bad decisions at a very sensitive time in his personal life and his career. This was his walk on the wild side with the Mob, with the men he had come to admire for all kinds of reasons, both inexcusable and understandable.

His Cuba trip wouldn’t have become legendary had it not coincided with the Havana conference, but the coincidence was no accident.
The many attendees had known for months that Frank would be coming; they had been looking forward to it. (One account has it that a Sinatra concert in Havana was, from the beginning, a cover story for the whole gathering.) Not only was the singer the biggest star in America; he was also an Italian-American. And no doubt due in part to efficient public-relations work by Sinatra’s early supporter the affable and popular Willie Moretti, Frank was widely known to be friendly where the Boys were concerned, neither a pushover nor a pain in the ass.
²

Most important, though, he was respectful.

But did respect translate to compliance—or, more pointedly, complicity? Was Sinatra’s mere association with these men a form of guilt in itself? (Many have charged that it was.) Or did his sins run deeper?

It almost didn’t matter. In the court of public opinion, Frank’s goose was cooked—a predicament he owed, indirectly, to Ernest Hemingway.

In early 1947, a thirty-one-year-old Scripps-Howard columnist named Robert Ruark traveled to Cuba to visit the writer’s haunts (Hemingway owned a villa a few miles outside of Havana) and, if possible, to meet the great man himself. While in the capital, young Ruark, who had quickly built a large readership with a lightly hard-boiled, humorous writing style that owed much to his literary idol, stumbled upon not Hemingway but the scoop of a lifetime. Fifteen years later, Ruark reminisced, in a column about the recently deceased Lucky Luciano:

The young Ruark knew a great story when he saw one, and the moment he finished his legwork, he immediately began cranking out columns from Havana: three in the last week of February alone. They were titled, none too subtly, “
Shame, Sinatra!” “ ‘Lovable’ Luciano,” and “The Luciano Myth.” In the first, dated February 20, he wrote:

Staying close to the action in a seventh-floor suite at the Nacional (the floor below Luciano’s rooms), Frank rubbed a lot of elbows that week. The conference was a veritable summit of crime, with all the Jewish and Italian bosses from major and secondary American cities present. Naturally, New York and New Jersey were most heavily represented: besides Lansky and Luciano, there were Frank Costello, Vito Genovese, Joe Bonanno, Longy Zwillman, Joe Adonis, and Willie Moretti. The Fischettis and Tony Accardo represented Chicago; Moe Dalitz, Detroit; and Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcello, Tampa and New Orleans. There were closed-door conclaves on internal politics and the divisive question of narcotics trafficking: even the Jews were excluded from meetings that strictly concerned Cosa Nostra matters, and Sinatra would probably not have been privy to any business discussions. He was there to provide a cover story and, in keeping with his lifelong relationship to men like these, to admire and be admired. He was, as Luciano later said, “
a good kid and we was all proud of him.”

Frank did what he was there to do, giving the attendees their promised concert in the hotel’s banquet room. There is no record of the song list. Still, wouldn’t it have been lovely to pan the house with an imaginary movie camera and watch those faces—fascinating faces, on the evidence of mug shots, but not inclined to be sensitive or reflective—while the Voice vocalized? There were probably more than a few moist eyes. “
Luciano was very fond of Sinatra’s singing,” an associate later recalled.

Frank performed, he glad-handed, and he was rewarded, not just with fellowship, but with fun. Pre-Castro Havana was a twenty-four-hour fiesta of unapologetic pleasures. There was even allegedly an orgy in his suite—twelve naked women, a number of gangsters, plenty of alcohol. Improbably, a group of Cuban Girl Scouts, led by a nun, arrived in the midst of the festivities to present Sinatra with an official token of their esteem. He is said to have hustled the celebrants into another room and received the Scouts in a silk dressing gown and ascot.