Frank: The Voice (29 page)

Two days after Sinatra’s arrival in Pasadena, a radio listener in San Jose wrote a letter to the FBI:

Crazy as it was, the letter was notable for one reason: it was the beginning of what would become a 1,275-page FBI dossier on Sinatra.

He rented a bungalow at the Garden of Allah, where the parties never stopped. Five years earlier, Sheilah Graham had moved Scott Fitzgerald out of the complex so he could get some work done. Sinatra, who had come to Hollywood not only to start a movie career but also to have some serious fun, had picked his new residence deliberately. He took some vocal coaching from his new neighbor Kay Thompson. And he commuted to Culver City to make
Higher and Higher
.

The picture was a trifle, the kind of silly B fluff the studios cranked out by the ton in the 1930s and 1940s. The upstairs-downstairs comedy, such as it is, is set in motion when the wealthy Drake family loses its money and Mr. Drake conspires with the servants to marry the scullery maid off to the rich boy next door … Who, in an unconsciously inspired bit of casting, is played by none other than the Hoboken Kid, as himself. His first line, ever, in the movies, to the maid who opens the Drakes’ door: “Good morning. My name is Frank Sinatra.” (The maid faints.)

The big surprise about Sinatra in
Higher and Higher
is not how well he can hold a big screen, but how beautiful he is. Not handsome—any Joe Blow can be handsome. The twenty-seven-year-old Frank Sinatra, shot in rich black and white by cinematographer Robert De Grasse, is resplendent. Lovingly lit, photographed in slightly soft focus (and largely from the camera’s left, his right, to avoid the bad profile), he glows through his every scene, all cheekbones and wide, wide eyes. He’s like Bambi with sex appeal.

As for his acting—it scarcely matters: you simply can’t take your eyes off the guy. A great deal has to do with the undismissable fact that this is
Frank Sinatra
. Had he been killed in a plane crash in 1947, or had his career come to an end (as it almost did) in 1950 or thereabouts, maybe Sinatra wouldn’t have glowed quite so luminously.

But Frank endured. He became, for better and worse, a kind of god, and it’s particularly interesting to observe him in the celluloid guise of a bashful young swain. The role, of course, was just a slight variation of the role he played when he sang. Watching
Higher and Higher
(in which Sinatra also gets to perform five numbers
⁷
), you can understand why the girls went bonkers: the guy was gorgeous and magnetic and achingly vulnerable. Quite simply, he was phenomenal—way too much so for little RKO Radio Pictures, a fact of which Frank Sinatra, doubtless, was sharply aware. Surely he had his people working frenziedly on contingency plans to extricate him from the studio even as he wrapped his first film with them. After all, contracts, seven-year and otherwise, were only pieces of paper.

Another contract, one that grew progressively more irksome as Sinatra’s earnings skyrocketed, was the onerous severance agreement he had signed with Tommy Dorsey. Having initially boasted he would simply stiff the steely-eyed bandleader, Frank now decided to toss Tommy a bone: reportedly, about $1,000 in commissions. Predictably, this was not an amount that made Dorsey happy—and he grew increasingly unhappy hearing Sinatra brag to the press how much he was raking in.

In response, Sinatra, under the brilliant aegis of Evans, was turning the dispute into a cause célèbre, having his radio writers inject comic jabs at the bandleader into his sketches (at the sound of a few out-of-tune bars of “I’m Getting Sentimental over You”: “
It’s Dorsey, coming to collect his commission!”) and paying bobby-soxers to carry picket signs (“Dorsey Unfair to Our Boy Frankie!”) outside Tommy’s show in Philadelphia, while eager newspaper photographers immortalized the event.

Battered in the public arena, Dorsey would have been down for the count—except for the fact that Tommy Dorsey took no shit from anyone. There was also the fact that Dorsey was represented by that rising giant, the Music Corporation of America (MCA), which was desperate
to also represent Frank Sinatra. Despite the imaginative formulations of both Mario Puzo and Sinatra, the whole affair was resolved in the most Byzantine (and peaceful) way possible.

The Godfather
, of course, was the vehicle that elevated the whole contretemps to the realm of myth. In the novel, Puzo relates how the fictional bandleader Les Halley pressures the fictional singer Johnny Fontane into an impossibly severe personal-services contract. When Fontane approaches his godfather, Don Corleone, and asks him to intervene on his behalf, the don goes to Halley and offers him $20,000 to release Fontane from the contract. Halley refuses to play ball. Even after Don Corleone ominously drops his offer to $10,000, the bandleader won’t budge.

Still wincing from his portrayal as the sniveling Fontane, but loftily refusing to acknowledge it, Sinatra took the high road when Sidney Zion asked him in 1986 about the Dorsey contract. “
The man who straightened it out was named Saul Jaffe,” Sinatra told Zion. “He’s a lawyer who now is retired. Mr. Jaffe was the secretary of the American Federation of Radio Artists, and Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra would play from hotel [ball]rooms around the country on radio programs.
I told [Jaffe] the whole story, and he went to Mr. Dorsey and he said to him, ‘I represent Frank Sinatra in this case that you and he are involved in.’ He said, ‘I think we can come to a settlement quite simply.’ Tom said, ‘No no, I want one-third of his salary for the rest of his life.’ So Jaffe said to him, ‘Do you enjoy playing music in hotel [ball]rooms and having the nation hear you on the radio?’ [Dorsey] said, ‘Sure I do.’ [Jaffe] said, ‘Not anymore, you won’t.’ ”

Whether other, darker forces were brought to bear—and if they were, whether Sinatra knew anything about it—are questions that will forever remain unresolved. The answers are tied up in Frank’s relationship to the Mob, and mobsters, in 1943 and for the rest of his life: a teasing, conflicted, flirtatious dance on both sides.

Jerry Lewis had another version of the Dorsey-Sinatra brouhaha. He asserted that, based on the Mafia’s early adoration for Sinatra, a summit consisting of Frank Costello, Albert Anastasia, Willie Moretti, and the Murder Inc. hit man Frankie Carbo got together and went to Dorsey to make him that offer he couldn’t refuse. “
Frank told me years later—laughing—how that talk went,” Lewis remembered. “Carbo said, ‘Mr. Dorsey, could you play your trombone if it had a dent in it? Could you play it if you didn’t have the slide?’ It was all just like that, and Dorsey got the idea.”

One kernel of truth in this account would seem to be the participation of Sinatra’s Hasbrouck Heights neighbor Willie Moretti, a.k.a. Willie Moore, the boss of North Jersey. Moretti was short, plump, bald, wisecracking, gregarious—and, as his job demanded, dangerous. He had his fingers in many pies, paid close attention to such profit centers as the Meadowbrook in Cedar Grove, the Riviera in Fort Lee, and the Rustic Cabin, and apparently took quite a shine to Sinatra. Still, whether that makes Moretti (who was about as different from the noble Don Corleone as it was possible to be) Sinatra’s godfather, and whether Moretti interceded personally with Dorsey (who was, after all, a North Jersey resident himself), is another question.

Peter J. Levinson, in his Dorsey biography, tells us that the “
Bergen
Record
entertainment editor and syndicated writer Dan Lewis, [who] knew Moretti personally … once asked [the gangster] if there was any truth to these reports. Moretti smiled and, in a rare departure from
omertà
, answered, ‘Well, Dan, let’s just say we took very good care of Sinatra.’ ”

In fact, Moretti had a reputation for making frequent departures from
omertà
. He was an infamous blowhard whose garrulity—perhaps abetted by an advanced case of syphilis—would eventually lead to his elimination.

To complicate matters further, Dorsey’s daughter, Levinson writes, “
vividly remembers her father telling her about getting a threatening telephone call at dinnertime early in the Sinatra-Dorsey contretemps. The anonymous caller implied ominous consequences if Dorsey didn’t ‘cooperate’ by letting Sinatra out of his contract. He was reminding Dorsey that he had two children, and that he wouldn’t want anything to happen to them. That’s when Dorsey responded by putting up barbed wire atop the wall surrounding [his house], installed sweeping searchlights that bathed the property on a nightly basis, and constructed an elaborate electric fence at the entrance to the property.”

There is yet another story, told by an old Hoboken pal of Sinatra’s, one Joey D’Orazio, that possesses a seriocomic ring of truth. D’Orazio asserted that Hank Sanicola sent two rough customers, “
not real underworld characters but just some frightening fellows that he and Sinatra both knew,” to threaten Dorsey if he didn’t release the singer from the contract. Sanicola claimed that in order to protect Sinatra should things go wrong, he never told him about the two thugs.

But, according to D’Orazio, when the two threatened to break Dorsey’s arms if he didn’t sign legal papers to let the singer go, the bandleader “laughed in their faces … [saying] ‘Oh, yeah, look how scared I am. Tell Frank … I said, “Go to hell for sending his goons to beat me up.” ’ ”

Dorsey then told the men, “I’ll sign the goddamn papers, that’s how sick I am of Frank Sinatra, the no good bum. The hell with him.”

“
It wasn’t much of an intimidation,” D’Orazio said. “In fact, one of the guys was so excited about meeting Tommy Dorsey, he had to be talked out of going back and asking the guy for his autograph after they left his office.”