Sinatra

by Anthony Summers

  The Sinatras moved out of their Jersey City apartment and into a Cape Cod–style house in nearby Hasbrouck Heights. They did not stay there long. Frank now had a long-term contract with MGM, and decided to move to California. By Christmas 1944 the family was installed in a large pink house in the San Fernando Valley, at a superb waterside location on Toluca Lake. The previous owner had been the actress Mary Astor. Next door was the elite Lakeside Country Club, which turned up its nose at Jews, blacks, and some entertainers—including the upstart from Hoboken. Two members, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, supported Frank’s application in vain.

  Snooty locals aside, Frank and Nancy had found an idyllic new home. They named it Warm Valley—the same name they had given the Hasbrouck Heights house—and Nancy transformed the dark interior with creams, pastels, and flowered chintz. A fountain splashed on the patio. Frank improved the dock, bought a boat for expeditions on the lake, and built a raft. With a high stucco wall to one side, the water behind it, and a butler to keep out unwanted visitors, it was a perfect retreat for a star. Nancy called it the House That Music Built.

  Almost all their friends were young and having fun. Nancy cooked spaghetti dinners for Mario Lanza, then still a fledgling tenor. Talented friends were recruited for home entertainment—Jule Styne on the piano, Sammy Cahn supplying patter and lyrics; Phil Silvers, Rags Ragland, and Danny Thomas producing the laughs; Frank in blackface singing “Mammy.”

  Sinatra formed a softball team that starred Styne and Cahn, Anthony Quinn, other actors and writers, and Hank Sanicola and Al Silvani. They called the team the Swooners.

  During the day, the men played cards on the raft. At night there were endless games of gin rummy. “It was mostly the guys, except for Ethel Styne,” recalled Cahn’s first wife, Gloria, who met her husband at Warm Valley. “They played six or eight a side, for enormous stakes. Nancy and I were like the two maids or waitresses, feeding everybody, refilling the drinks, cleaning ashtrays.”

  To outsiders, the Sinatras appeared to be happy. George Evans, anxious to avoid the slightest whiff of scandal, made sure of that by orchestrating a succession of schmaltzy stories; the loving parents and their four-year-old daughter, Nancy, were even featured in a cartoon strip. This seeming bliss had been enhanced, just before the move to California, by the birth of a son, Franklin Wayne Emmanuel—Franklin for President Roosevelt and Emmanuel for Manie Sacks, the godfather. He came to be known as Frank Jr. This second child, Frank hoped, would cement the marriage. Instead, he said, “Little by little we drifted apart.”

  In New Jersey, when the tidal wave of publicity started, Nancy had tried to deal with the fan mail and handle the money herself. Frank’s new staff took over those tasks, but she soon found that her house had become a goldfish bowl. Bobbysoxers had laid siege to it, scrawled messages of undying love for Frank in lipstick on doors and windowsills. Girls clambered on each other’s shoulders to peer in bedroom windows, stole Frank’s boxers off the clothesline. There were rumors of threats to kidnap the children.

  In the pretentious world of California, Nancy was out of her depth. “People tried to get her not to dress like the little wife from New Jersey,” recalled Gloria Cahn. “She got beautiful clothes made for her by Jean-Louis. But she was very much a homebody, a typical Italian who grew up to take care of her man and her family. She was very much ‘real people.’ I used to see her go by driving the huge wagon Frank had bought her, a Chrysler I think. It was a funny sight because she was such a tiny woman—I think she had to pack the seats with pillows so she could reach the pedals. . . . She was trying very hard to be what Frank needed as the star he had become, but . . .”

  Virtually all of Nancy’s family, her mother and father and her five sisters and their families, followed the Sinatras to California. One sister moved in with them. Frank complained to friends of coming home to find his home overrun with Barbato in-laws and their children.

  “I was on edge and constantly irritable,” Frank remembered. “Nancy and I found ourselves getting into terrible arguments.” Frank often went out to parties on his own and now, at almost thirty, began to tipple more. He took a special liking to Jack Daniel’s bourbon. “I began to drink it in the forties one night when I couldn’t get to sleep,” he was to say. “It’s been the oil to my engine ever since.”

  The marriage to Nancy would produce a third child, but there was no passion left in it. Scuttlebutt about his dalliances with other women now increased. While working on Anchors Aweigh, it was said, Frank had a list in his dressing room of women at MGM he coveted. Makeup artist Gordon Bau said he saw the list pinned up on the inside of the door. Numerous names had been checked off by the time shooting ended.

  The deterioration of the marriage was only one of a series of difficulties now looming, problems both of his own making and visited on him by enemies. To start with, he was having a difficult war.

  9

  Rejected for Service

  When the Yanks go marchin’ in.

  I wanna be there boy . . .

  WHEN HE OPENED AT THE PARAMOUNT again in October 1944, Frank chose to sing these lines from an unabashedly militaristic World War II song. It was not what his fans were used to, but they squealed anyway. In the barracks and mess halls, and on airfields and ships across the world, the men and women of American and Allied armed forces had been hearing the song for more than a year. The catalogue of V-Discs, records made exclusively for the military, includes more than ninety Sinatra songs.

  Soldiers and airmen in the battles of Anzio and Monte Cassino had listened wistfully to “When Your Lover Has Gone” and “Falling in Love with Love.” Troops braving German fire in Normandy had heard Frank sing “All the Things You Are” and “The Way You Look Tonight.” Soldiers who crossed into Germany were familiar with his “Long Ago and Far Away” and “None but the Lonely Heart.” His nickname, The Voice, was painted on the noses of American bombers. A newly released prisoner-of-war in Hong Kong, Alexander Shivarg, had a perplexing exchange with the first British servicemen he encountered after emerging from behind the wire. “I asked ‘What’s been happening?’ And they said, ‘Frankie Sinatra, that’s what.’

  “ ‘Sinatra’ sounded a bit oriental, and I thought it must be some damn Pacific atoll I’d missed the name of, like Iwo Jima. But they laughed and said, ‘No, he’s a wop. He’s skinny and unattractive, but he’s got this wonderful voice that nobody can resist. He’s an American singer, a kid just like us, and he makes girls’ petticoats flutter and they wet their knickers when he sings. And sometimes he doesn’t even have to sing. . . .’ I couldn’t believe it. I was shattered . . . all these people could talk about was Frank Sinatra. . . . Can you beat that damned Sinatra? More important to those kids than the war.”

  Even the enemy knew about him. The Japanese-American woman most identified with the Tokyo Rose propaganda broadcasts, Iga Toguri, had an interest in swing music from her student days in California. She made dark hints as to what that rascally Sinatra might be doing with the GIs’ women while their men fought their way across the Pacific.

  Frank’s songs did smooth the way in American bedrooms. “Some women,” Pete Hamill has written, “used that music, with its expression of sheer need, to seduce the available men. . . . He was singing to those women, of whatever age . . . for whom Saturday night truly was the loneliest night of the week.” “I’ll Be Seeing You” soothed husbands and wives, lovers and sweethearts, yearning to return to the old familiar places, to precious remembered embraces. Frank, former Down Beat editor Gene Lees wrote, “said for the boys what they wanted to say. He said for the girls what they wanted to hear.”

  Frank was in Hollywood, partying at Lana Turner’s house, on the day that brought America into the war. The guests only learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor eight hours afterward, when a new arrival told them to turn on the radio. “As we listened,” Turner recalled, “I looked around at the stunned young men in my living room, and thought how drastically our lives were going to chang
e.”

  Professionally Frank energetically supported the war effort at home. The V-Disc program aside, he appeared on Command Performance, a radio show beamed to servicemen abroad. He sang at rally after rally, electrified a crowd in Central Park with his version of “God Bless America.” He sang for military groups, including a curiously muted audience of WAVES, the women’s naval auxiliary, who had been ordered not to behave like bobbysoxers. He asked fans to donate clothing for refugees. He raised money in a war loan drive by auctioning off his own clothes— a tie for $275, a shirt for $500, a pair of shorts for $1,000, a gold watch for $10,000.

  Many musicians exchanged their civvies for uniforms. From the Dorsey band alone there were Joe Bushkin, Buddy Rich, trumpeter Ziggy Elman, arrangers Sy Oliver and Paul Weston, and manager Bobby Burns. Bandleaders Artie Shaw and Eddy Duchin enlisted in the navy. Glenn Miller insisted on joining up although he was too old to be drafted. Bands he organized for the Army Air Forces included musicians from his old band and those of James, Dorsey, Goodman, and Shaw. Miller died, six months after D-Day, while flying from England to France aboard a military aircraft.

  Rudy Vallee was in the coast guard and Frankie Laine worked in an airplane factory. Jack Leonard, Frank’s predecessor with Dorsey, was drafted into the army and awarded a Bronze Star for entertaining battle-weary troops. Mickey Rooney had a heart murmur, but got himself accepted by the army and went abroad as an entertainer. Gene Kelly enlisted in the navy and, though he asked for combat duty, was assigned to make propaganda movies. Others saw action. Clark Gable flew missions as a major in the air force, as did Jimmy Stewart, who was much decorated. The singer Jimmy Roselli served in combat in France. Frank, however, remained in the United States until the conflict ended, singing his way to fame and fortune. He would demonstrate his patriotism by flying the Stars and Stripes on a fifty-foot-high flagpole outside his home, and often played the soldier in movies. Yet he never donned a uniform during World II, stirring a controversy that was never satisfactorily resolved.

  He had been one of 16 million young American men obliged to register for military service in late 1940, fulfilling what President Roosevelt called “the first duty of free citizenship.” As “Frank Albert Sinatra,” Serial No. 2615, he was granted a deferment on the grounds that he was married with a child. The deferment may have been accorded automatically, or in response to a request by him. It was subject to later review.

  This was not an easy time for Italian-Americans. Though thousands were drafted and served with honor, their loyalty was suspect. Just as Japanese-Americans were interned, so too were some Italian-Americans who did not have American citizenship. They were released only in 1942, after government officials decided they posed no security risk. They were, Roosevelt quipped, only “a bunch of opera singers.”

  In the summer of 1943, in the full flush of his success, Frank applied to join the coast guard. There is no record of what became of the application. In the fall, though, with deferment for married fathers about to be abolished, he was reclassified 1-A—available for service. George Evans ensured that this fact received publicity. Frank passed a preliminary physical and, in December, was examined again. (The army medics noted his height as five feet seven and a half inches, about three inches shorter than he usually claimed.) He emerged from the induction center to announce that he had been rejected on medical grounds. The doctors, he said, had found a “hole in my ear I didn’t know about” and “a few things I’d better take care of right away.” He had been declared 4-F—“rejected for service for physical, mental or moral reasons.” As fans rejoiced, rumors spread.

  “Sinatra has no more ear trouble than General MacArthur,” jeered a former Hoboken schoolmate. “How do you get a punctured eardrum?” a nightclub comic asked derisively. The young Pete Hamill heard his father dismiss Frank as a “draft dodger.” At Camp Haan in California to entertain soldiers, Frank encountered Bobby Burns, now in uniform. “There’s a lot of griping over your 4-F status,” Burns told him. “The troops figure you’re home living it up with the babes while they’re away.”

  In October 1944, days after Frank was welcomed back to the Paramount by the bobbysoxers, someone in the third row hit him in the eye with an egg. Sailors threw rotten tomatoes at his picture on the marquee outside. During a showing of his movie Higher and Higher, marines got to their feet and booed. “It is not too much to say,” wrote William Manchester, who served in the marines, “that by the end of the war Sinatra had become the most hated man in the armed services.”

  Frank’s local draft board made things worse when it came up with a new and arcane classification. For a while in 1944 he became 2-A(F), defined as “qualified for limited military service” but deferred “in support of national health, safety or interest.” One reporter’s question, “Is crooning essential?,” summed up the reaction. Then, in early 1945, Frank was summoned back to New Jersey for another medical examination.

  The fans knew in advance that he was coming. Hundreds of them surged forward, tearing his clothes, as he arrived at the 113th Infantry Armory to see the doctors. Then, after Frank had been sent to Fort Jay for yet another examination, his file went to Washington “for review by high military officers under a ruling governing the re-examination of outstanding athletes and stage and screen stars.” They decided once and for all that the “Frail Finch,” as a New Jersey newspaper called him, would not be going to war. He was, once again, 4-F.

  That was the end of the official process, but not of the suspicion and harsh criticism. “Can you tell me,” a serviceman’s mother asked in a letter to a newspaper within days, “why athletes or stage and screen stars are so important that there must be some special dispensation?” Conservative columnists had a field day. “The 4-F explanation is emotionally unsatisfactory,” wrote George Sokolsky, deploring Frank’s “opportunity to pursue his private business pursuits while other men of his age are forced to give up their careers and fight, even to death, for their country.” Lee Mortimer, in the New York Sunday Mirror, derided Frank as a crooner who “found safety and $30,000 a week behind a mike” while others risked their lives. Hearst’s Westbrook Pegler would still be sniping at “bugle-deaf Frankie Boy” years later.

  Frank had told the New York Times before his first rejection that he would be “glad to serve,” that he hoped to do “radio work or gunnery,” perhaps in the marines. He expressed frustration at being excluded. According to Milton Berle’s wife, Ruth, he had been “desperate” to serve.

  The powerful Hedda Hopper, a columnist friendly to him, argued in his defense that he had supported the cause whenever possible, “singing night and day to win over those GI characters.” She praised Frank, too, for having made a “war front tour.” He had indeed made a seven-week tour singing for the troops in the Azores, North Africa, and Italy. Numerous entertainers had made similar trips early on, when there was significant risk. More than thirty “soldiers in greasepaint” had been killed during the war. Al Jolson and Joe E. Brown, both past fifty, had performed at forward bases on what was known as the Foxhole Circuit. Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Merle Oberon, and Marlene Dietrich put themselves in harm’s way before the German surrender in the spring of 1945. Yet only in June that year, after the guns had fallen silent, did Sinatra sing for the troops in Europe.

  Frank’s defenders have claimed he had wanted to do so all along but, as his daughter Nancy has put it, “the FBI denied him a visa because of the alleged Communist charges in the Hearst newspapers.” The record, and the FBI file, tell a different story. Efforts to smear Frank for his political affiliations came only late in the war and he would be prevented from entertaining troops in Korea only ten years later.

  Frank was not the only entertainer to stay out of the conflict. John Wayne went to extraordinary lengths to get out of war service. “He had his studio contrive ever-new exemptions for him,” wrote Garry Wills. Dean Martin had “the first real fright of his life” when he received his draft notice, according to one of his recent biog
raphers. He did not want to serve, and was rescued by a double hernia. Jerry Lewis had hoped to get into the fight, but was exempted because of a heart murmur and, like Frank, a punctured eardrum. The New York Times referred laconically to the exemption Frank got as “another punctured eardrum case.”

  Weeks after the ear ailment was reportedly discovered, an anonymous letter was sent to a newspaper claiming that a Sinatra aide had paid doctors a huge bribe to ensure he got 4-F status. Ordered to investigate, FBI agents interviewed Captain Joseph Weintrob, the young army doctor who recommended the exemption. He denied that anyone had tried to influence him, and the FBI found no evidence to support the allegation. Weintrob said he had observed a perforation of the left eardrum consistent with previous disease, as well as scars consistent with mastoid surgery. X-rays, he and another doctor said, supported the finding. Yet draft board physician Dr. Alexander Povalski, examining Frank two months before Weintrob, had found no evidence of ear damage.

  In three draft questionnaires, Frank had responded “no” to questions as to whether he had any physical defects. In Weintrob’s formal report to his superiors, however, he said Frank drew attention to the ear. He volunteered that he had had “at least three mastoid operations in his youth,” had since had repeated episodes of “running ear”—the most recent just months earlier—and “frequently suffered from ‘head noises’ on the left side.”

  Finally, Frank offered the military doctors information about himself that remained unknown until after his death. “During the psychiatric interview,” Captain Weintrob noted in his report: