Frank

by James Kaplan

  At the end of March, Sinatra set out on a cross-country concert tour. He would play San Francisco, Philadelphia, Detroit, New York, and Chicago through June, then return to the Coast and perform at the Hollywood Bowl in August. Location work on It Happened in Brooklyn would proceed while he was in New York. Marilyn had planned a trip to Manhattan for early June, to clear her head and buy some clothes: they could spend days together, discussing the future.

  Lana, as it turned out, was also going to be in New York, for the premiere of her big new picture, The Postman Always Rings Twice. In her career-defining role, she played a scheming adulteress to such sizzling perfection that MGM insisted her character dress all in white to mute the impression.

  The concert tour was a huge success. Sinatra was at the zenith of his popularity. Anchors Aweigh had made him a major movie star; The House I Live In had made him the national voice of tolerance. In between concerts, he commuted back to Los Angeles for the weekly broadcast of his new radio show, Old Gold Presents Songs by Sinatra. Era-appropriate cigarette hawking aside (“Yes, light an Old Gold for cigarette comfort and pleasure! The comfort of extra protection against cigarette dryness, the pleasure of luxurious extra flavor!”), the show was classy—and all-Sinatra—from start to finish. He opened each program with a soulful version of “Night and Day,” slightly slowed to make it more a concert piece than a dance number. The new tempo was a powerful statement, telling the world he’d now taken full ownership of the gorgeous song whose lyrics he’d fluffed before its composer just seven years earlier at the Rustic Cabin. Frank closed each broadcast with his lovely signature tune “Put Your Dreams Away.” “Sinatra,” Friedwald writes, “featured songs for the ages as often as he did the best new numbers and his own hits, and even devoted whole programs to the works of Jerome Kern, Johnny Mercer, Irving Berlin, and their peers.”

  The new album affirmed his dominance. The week he played the Golden Gate Theatre in San Francisco (along with the Pied Pipers, who had left Dorsey and become a hit act on their own) was the same week The Voice of Frank Sinatra began its ascent to number 1 on the Billboard charts. The crowds swelled. In Philadelphia, he played to a house of ten thousand at the Convention Hall (the acoustics were beside the point). And in Detroit, the mass-steria was such that even his new friends at the Federal Bureau of Investigation took notice. When Sinatra arrived in the Motor City on May 8, no less a personage than Louis B. Nichols, one of J. Edgar Hoover’s top aides, went to observe the goings-on. A few days later, the stunned G-man wrote a memo to the director:

  As a symptom of the state of mind of many young people I wish to call to your attention the following incident that occurred in Detroit on last Wednesday.

  Frank Sinatra arrived in Detroit around midnight and a group of bobby soxers were waiting for him at the airfield. He eluded them and they then congregated at the stage door of the Downtown Theater where he was scheduled to give his first performance around 10:00 a.m. on Thursday morning. The line started forming at around 2:00 a.m. The police started challenging girls who appeared to be under 16 and tried to send them home. However, I have been told, there was a long line of mere kids, many of whom carried their lunches, and they remained in line until the theater opened. Truant Officers started checking the lines early in the morning and were berated by the girls. There was widespread indignation on the part of numerous individuals that I came in contact with and a severe indictment [by] parents of the girls. One individual went so far as to state that Sinatra should be lynched.

  Hoover was impressed. “Sinatra is as much to blame as the moronic bobby-soxers,” he scrawled across the bottom of the memo.

  At the Chicago Theatre later that month, the singer was paid $41,000—the equivalent of almost $450,000 now—for his week’s work. And in New York, the Paramount wasn’t big enough for him anymore. This time Sinatra was booked at Madison Square Garden, which could hold close to twenty-five thousand. The sight lines were miserable, especially from the cheap seats, and since smoking was allowed, a thick blue haze tended to gather in the balconies. In between coughing fits, the patrons in the upper rows would have barely been able to make out the tiny figure on the stage. The sound system was awful. But it was Sinatra!

  He began location work for It Happened in Brooklyn, in Brooklyn. Dickie Whorf quickly discovered that it was one thing to direct a New Year’s Eve show at Frank’s house and quite another thing to direct him in a movie. Others were learning what Manie Sacks had learned, to his sorrow. Whorf, a darkly handsome, easygoing New Englander, was a man Frank liked, but the star tested the young director’s patience to the limit. As Sinatra had discovered on Anchors Aweigh, being on a movie set made him anxious and panicky. He would leave at the slightest excuse—or simply not show up. “I got a break when we were starting this new picture in New York,” he said later. “We were shooting on the Brooklyn Bridge. We’d get out there in the morning and there’d be fog, so I wouldn’t have to work all day.”

  There were many distractions, but chiefly there was Marilyn Maxwell. All his cronies knew about Marvelous—in fact, most of New York knew. Certainly the staff at the Waldorf-Astoria were aware. She and Frank spent a lot of time in his suite, and when they went out, they were seen dining and dancing at all the right places. Marilyn visited him frequently on the set in Brooklyn, sometimes spiriting him away.

  An MGM production memo for July 7:

  Company had early call, stood by until 1:00 P.M., then called Sinatra to be ready at 3:15 P.M., sent car for him but could not locate him. Sinatra never came. Waited until 5:50 P.M. at doubletime on crew.

  The crew rolled their eyes. His pals rolled their eyes. Sinatra was walking on air.

  Toots Shor finally put his foot down when Frank said he’d be bringing Marilyn to the title bout between Billy Conn and Joe Louis at Yankee Stadium. For one thing, the fights were by definition masculine territory. When and if a lady came along, it was a big deal. All that pale flesh and perfume tended to attract attention around the ring. Especially if the lady happened to be the knockout date of a famous man with a wife.

  Toots Shor was not amused at the prospect of seeing Marilyn Maxwell on Sinatra’s arm smack in the middle of Yankee Stadium—not least because he planned on bringing Mrs. Toots to the fight. The presence of Frank’s date would be insulting to the missus, to the institution of marriage itself. Not to mention the fact that the big rematch between Conn and Louis was to be televised, one of the first major sporting events ever to appear on the magic box. Thousands would be watching. But when Shor told Sinatra, in all gruff seriousness, that the only woman Sinatra could ever think about bringing was Mrs. Sinatra, the crumb bum looked at him and winked. Winked!

  Toots shouldn’t worry a bit—Marvelous would behave herself.

  It was an impossible situation. So Toots called Manie, and Manie, having more or less given up on talking Frank out of irrational behavior, called Evans. Evans took a big gulp from the bottle of Maalox he kept handy in a desk drawer.

  His client’s life was rapidly heading for trouble. During the last year Sinatra had been Mr. Humanitarian, grabbing awards, neatly sidestepping the gossip. But Sinatra was Sinatra. There was just too much blatant misbehavior. Evans could only outflank the gossips for so long. The publicist had done his best and then hoped for the best, always a bad strategy. With Sinatra, the worst could always be counted on. “Frank was born to be a star,” he once mused to a reporter. “But he was also born to be a controversial figure, and a star and controversial figure he will remain until the day he dies.”

  Evans knew about the production delays on It Happened in Brooklyn: the no-shows, the tantrums, the running battle with Jimmy Durante, the nicest man in the world. Sick of being stood up by Sinatra when the cameras were ready to roll, Durante had taken to disappearing himself. Whorf was looking gray faced. And Evans knew more than he wanted to know about Marilyn Maxwell.

  Drastic measures were called for. The publicist phoned Maxwell at her hotel and came straight to the
point. She had a morals clause in her MGM contract. Frank was a married man. Her own divorce was not yet final. Did he have to spell it all out for her?

  She began to weep. He was being terrible.

  Evans spoke gently but firmly. This was a terrible situation. A marriage was in jeopardy, and the emotional stability of two small children at stake. A little girl going into the first grade. A little boy waiting for his daddy to come home.

  She wailed over the phone.

  But she was the one who could make it all right. Marilyn could walk away and face the world with her head held high.

  Frank called her an hour later and got the full waterworks. When he was finally able to make sense of what she was saying, he understood that they were not going to be able to see each other anymore. He didn’t sound quite as devastated as she would have hoped. They’d figure it all out somehow. That was when she knew it was all over.

  He went to the fight anyway on Wednesday night, with Mr. and Mrs. Toots and Marlene Dietrich and Joe DiMaggio. An odd couple indeed: Dietrich was thirteen years older than the Clipper and not his type at all (who was?), but there they were together, taking the evening toward its inevitable conclusion. (Later he would report, unchivalrously, that she had bad breath.) DiMag got the expected reaction at Yankee Stadium, a hero in his first season back from the war, rusty after the break but a hero anyway. Sinatra didn’t mind a bit. (He was glad he hadn’t had to take a break—he might’ve gotten worse than rusty. He might’ve gotten dead.) Nor did Frank mind being the fifth wheel: he was in oddly cheery spirits that night. He and Marlene exchanged wry looks while Joe, breathing through his mouth the way he did, gazed at the other Joe, the Brown Bomber, beating up Conn in the blinding white arc lights.

  Later that night Frank called up Lana, who had stayed in town after the premiere of Postman. She was delighted to hear from him.

  There were still other distractions that summer. Sinatra’s quickly burgeoning FBI file reads: “The New York Office was advised by Frances Duffy, clerk of the Local Selective Service Board #180, New York City, that she resides at 424 Second Street, Brooklyn, New York, in a home owned by Mrs. Mary Fischetti. Miss Duffy stated that Sinatra, accompanied by Charles Fischetti, visited the home of [Fischetti’s] mother and spent the evening there in about June of 1946.”

  The whole scene is sweetly absurd: Miss Duffy, the timid clerk at the Local Selective Service Board, renter of a small apartment (cat, crucifixes, lace doilies) in the brownstone of kindly widow Fischetti on quiet, tree-lined Second Street in Park Slope, had clearly seen Charles Fischetti before, and was clearly of a suspicious turn of mind. Though the silver-haired gent liked to pose as an art collector and sometimes introduced himself as Dr. Fisher, he was in fact a gangster, also known as Trigger Happy or, among friends, Prince Charlie. He was the oldest and most distinguished-looking of the crooked Fischetti brothers (the others were Rocco, three years younger, and Joe, the baby of the family). First cousins to Al Capone, the Fischettis had worked as Scarface’s bodyguards during Prohibition and were now highly placed crooks in Chicago. They wintered in Miami, in a beautiful mansion in the exclusive enclave of Allison Island. There seemed no reason for Sinatra to have spent an evening with Charles Fischetti and Fischetti’s mother in June 1946, when he was in the midst of shooting a movie.

  As you might imagine, there is no dearth of speculation on the subject. Some sources mention darkly that the Sinatras had neighbors named Fischetti back in the cold-water-flat days, and that Frank was friends with one of the Fischetti children. In fact, census records tell us that there were Fischettis on Monroe Street in the 1920s, two large families of them, and that the heads of both households were in what was then called the junk business—waste management.

  But a lot of Italian immigrants were in the junk business in the 1920s, and certainly not all of them were criminals. Moreover, Fischetti was a reasonably common surname (as, for that matter, was Sinatra). Maybe the Hoboken Fischettis were related to the Chicago Fischettis; maybe not.

  Here’s a wild hypothesis: What if Charlie Fischetti, having recently been introduced by his old pal Willie Moretti to Willie’s pal Sinatra, was simply bringing Frank Sinatra over that night to impress his mom?

  On the other hand, there is reason to believe that Prince Charlie had a small request to make of Sinatra that evening. And in truth, from here on, the Fischettis would begin to stick to Sinatra in increasingly disconcerting ways. In August 1946, according to the FBI, which was keeping a close eye on the brothers,3 Charlie and Joe contacted Sinatra to ask him to get them hotel reservations in New York—probably at the Waldorf—so they could attend the Army–Notre Dame game at Yankee Stadium, a much-anticipated matchup between two football titans. (No doubt Charlie and Joe had a financial interest in the game; no doubt they were unpleasantly surprised by the final score: 0–0.) Sinatra got them deluxe suites. In gratitude, the boys sent him two dozen custom-made shirts.

  The incident sounds innocuous, but it would have been remarkable if some of the table talk between Frank and Charlie that summer and fall hadn’t concerned Benny Siegel. If, as seems likely, Sinatra had confessed his admiration for the Bug, Fischetti probably would have demurred.

  That was a horse Frank might not want to bet on. Benny had been a naughty boy.

  The specific complaint concerned funds forwarded to Siegel by Meyer Lansky for the specific purpose of building the Flamingo Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. The word filtering back to the Mob was that of every dollar Benny had received—and the sum now ran well into the millions—he was forwarding (via a courier, his girlfriend Virginia Hill) a significant portion to his private bank account in Switzerland. In casino terminology, this is known as the skim. In reality, Bugsy Siegel was nothing like the semi-saintly visionary Warren Beatty played in the movies: in reality, Siegel’s gruesome slaughter of his fellow gangster Louis Amberg was just another day’s work, and the dream of a great Hollywood-style hotel-casino in the desert was not even his. The true visionary was Billy Wilkerson, founder of the Hollywood Reporter, Ciro’s, and Trocadero—not to mention the discoverer of Lana Turner. Soon after Wilkerson began erecting the Flamingo, he had made the mistake of running low on funds. Back east, Lansky, who missed nothing, saw an opportunity to muscle in. He called his old Lower East Side landsman Benny Siegel and asked if Benny might be interested in a major stake in a casino. It took some convincing—Benny was happy living the high life in Hollywood. Now he was not only racking up enormous cost overruns with outlandish construction add-ons but also blatantly stealing from the heads of the Mob. He had come by his nickname rightly.

  The Varsity—or a portion thereof. Frank rides on Toots Shor’s back while Rags Ragland looks on adoringly. Jule Styne is directly to Shor’s left. September 1944. (photo credit 18.2)

  Hearing the inside story for the first time, Sinatra whistled softly and looked at the bankerly Fischetti with fresh admiration. Where the Boys were concerned, Frank was always admiring: he just couldn’t help himself.

  19

  Serious trouble. Frank dances with Lana Turner, with his very visible wedding ring giving the world quite a mixed message. June 1946. (photo credit 19.1)

  In the meantime, there was Lana. As much as Frank had loved Marilyn, it seemed to him in the late summer of 1946 that he was twice as crazy about Lana Turner. Later he would tell Hedda Hopper, “I haven’t much to say in my defense except that I was in a terrible state of mental confusion.” A nightclub photograph from the period confirms this. The picture shows Sinatra and Turner dancing close, Lana in a polka-dot blouse, her lush blond hair pulled up into elaborate whirls and topped with a kind of snood. She’s smiling happily. Frank, in a gray suit with white pocket square, looks ecstatic. There are thousands of pictures of Sinatra smiling, but extremely few in which he’s grinning with such complete lack of restraint. Eyes slit with pleasure, he looks like an eleven-year-old at his birthday party. His left hand is clasped tightly with Lana’s right, and there on the fourth finger, fo
r the photographer and all the rest of the world (including Nancy) to see, is his wedding band.

  What was he thinking? Clearly, he wasn’t thinking. He’d come back to L.A. in the middle of July and flown straight into Lana’s arms. “Sinatra arrived from New York but reported he was ill and didn’t work,” the production memo of July 17 reported. On the other hand, perhaps he really was exhausted. Besides singing concerts, intermittently shooting a movie, making speeches, attending prizefights and ball games, rubbing elbows with mafiosi, and screwing around, Frank was recording at a blistering rate: five sessions and eighteen songs since February. After July he would pick up the pace. He was still in wonderful voice when he recorded “Begin the Beguine” and “How Deep Is the Ocean?” but, interestingly, the two versions he recorded of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s great “Soliloquy” from Carousel, while pleasantly sung, don’t really do justice to the material.

  Maybe he just hadn’t enough sense yet of what it meant to be a father. When I think of all the family affairs and events I would miss over the years because I was on the road …

  Even when he was at home, he was on the road.

  On August 20, Rags Ragland died. The cause was acute kidney failure, after, according to Earl Wilson, “an over-festive vacation in Mexico.” Given the state of medicine in those days, who knows? In any case, the death was tragically premature: the hulking comic was three days shy of his forty-first birthday. His sudden demise came as a massive shock to Frank, who stood vigil at Ragland’s hospital bedside along with Rags’s old Minsky’s Burlesque partner Phil Silvers. It was the first time Frank had witnessed the death of a close friend and near contemporary.