Frank: The Voice (36 page)

He began to read newspapers—not just the news, but the editorials and reviews. He was hungry for knowledge and the tools to express it. (He even began doing crossword puzzles, was pleased to find he was good at them.) When Frank thought about what moved him, he kept coming back to the times he had been made to feel small for who he was.

Everywhere he went, he felt revolted by the casual way Negroes were belittled and excluded. It helped to be white, but as soon as people found out he was Italian, things changed. If you were Italian, in fact, by many people’s definition you weren’t quite white anyway. When you had a name that ended with a vowel, it was easy to feel you weren’t a full-fledged American.

Except that he knew he was. Just as he knew that Billie and Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson and Lester Young and all the other great musicians he met on Fifty-second Street and in Harlem were too.

Now Frank read to express these thoughts. He worked his way through thick books about prejudice: Gunnar Myrdal’s
American Dilemma
, Gustavus Myers’s
History of Bigotry in the United States
, Howard Fast’s novel about Reconstruction,
Freedom Road
. When Sanicola and Levy saw him sitting in his train or plane seat with his nose in a tome, they’d shrug. “Frank,” they’d say with a sigh, meaning that was just the way he was. He also washed his hands twenty-five times a day, for Christ’s sake.

But when George Evans saw what his client was reading, he knew he had a gold mine on his hands. It wasn’t just that Evans, a dyed-in-the-wool liberal himself, agreed with Sinatra; it was that a right-minded, crusading Sinatra would make people forget all about the Sinatra who had dodged the draft.

This time when he reached the city, Dolly demanded to see him the second he got off the train. Frankie winced ever so slightly as his mother reached up to pinch his thin cheek.

Jesus Christ! Didn’t they fucking feed him anything out there?

After he saw his parents, he made another call, one that Dolly wouldn’t be very happy with.

A good pal of Sinatra’s, the frog-voiced, backslapping Times Square saloon keeper Toots Shor, badly wanted to meet the president. This wasn’t just a wild dream—Shor was a world-class character, and his restaurant was a crossroads for manly men from many walks of life, the Democratic National Committee chairman, Robert Hannegan, among them. It was election season, the ailing FDR was running for a fourth term, and Hannegan knew that the weary Roosevelt was up for some diversion. He told Shor he was welcome to come to tea at the White House if he didn’t mind a bit of a crowd—twenty people or so.

Tea at the White House! “
Could I bring Sinatt?” Shor croaked, taking out his cigar and grinning. He pointed to the round table where Sinatra was holding court. “And could I bring Rags?”

Rags Ragland, a hulking former truck driver, boxer, and burlesque comic, was currently employed as a character actor in Hollywood. He had played a lovable cop in
Anchors Aweigh
and hit it off with Sinatra, who always liked having tough guys around. Now Rags was part of the entourage.

The motley little crew flew down from La Guardia the next day, and at 3:00 p.m. they were escorted into the White House’s Red Room, where FDR himself sat, laughing that famous laugh at something a pretty lady was saying to him. Despite his gallantry, he looked like
death warmed over. The war, the presidency itself, the polio—it all had desiccated him. The circles under his eyes were almost as dark as his suit. In fact he would live six months and two weeks from that day.

But Sinatra couldn’t help himself: he had goose bumps just at the sight of the great man. Then Hannegan was introducing him, and FDR was staring up at Sinatra with those black-bagged eyes, grinning with his crooked gray teeth, shaking his hand. The two most famous men in America regarded each other.

The president turned to his secretary, Marvin McIntyre. “
Mac, imagine this guy making them swoon. He would never have made them swoon in our day, right?”

Sinatra’s smile tightened just a fraction. Implicit in the pleasantry was an ethnic dismissal:
this skinny little guinea …
Roosevelt was a democrat as well as a Democrat, but he was also a patrician, with ingrained prejudices. And Sinatra, beneath all his bravado and arrogance, was still a little guinea. This was the old order of things: the Founding Fathers were square-jawed white men, with noble heads and noble accents. Frank decided to love his president anyway.

On the flight home that night, Sinatra delved deeper into his Gustavus Myers. The next day, on Evans’s recommendation, he made a substantial donation in his and Nancy’s name to the Democratic campaign fund. (This was a far rarer act in those pre-media-saturated days than now. Most entertainers then, fearful of the effects political alignment might have on their careers, stayed studiously neutral. And the size of Sinatra’s gift, $7,500—the equivalent of $90,000 today—was a surprise to Evans and especially to the purse-string-holding Nancy, who asked her husband on the telephone that night if he was out of his mind.)

With Evans’s and Keller’s encouragement, Sinatra accepted invitations to join the political action committee of the radical Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and the Independent Voters Committee of the Arts and Sciences for Roosevelt (Fredric March, Bette
Davis, and Eddie Cantor were all members, as were John Dewey, Van Wyck Brooks, and Albert Einstein). Frank made radio broadcasts for FDR and spoke at rallies at Carnegie Hall and Madison Square Garden. But his largest audience by far would be in Times Square.

When he opened at the Paramount it was as though a dam had burst. Sinatra had gone to California to become a movie star, but while he returned regularly, it was generally not to perform. The teenage girls who made up the first critical mass of his success knew that he had changed his base of operations, that he had gone Hollywood. They had waited faithfully by their radios, dreaming … But now he was back, and they came out in force, thousands upon thousands of them, lining up the night before to buy their tickets, packing Times Square, forcing the police department to send out reinforcements: detectives, traffic cops, and a dozen mounted men, 421 patrolmen and 20 patrolwomen in all.

Then came the first show, at ten o’clock in the morning on Wednesday, October 11, and Bob Weitman, the Paramount’s manager, ignoring the fire laws, let almost five thousand fans (almost all of them girls) into a theater designed to seat thirty-five hundred. They brought sandwiches, apples, bananas, Cokes; they settled in and made themselves comfortable.

And ten thousand still waited restlessly outside.

The movie was
Our Hearts Were Young and Gay—
a Cornelia Otis Skinner biopic, of all things—with Charles Ruggles and Beulah Bondi in the starring roles. It might as well have been a documentary about wheat farming. The warm-up acts were
Hit Parade
singer Eileen Barton (Ben Barton’s daughter), dancers Pops and Louie, impressionist Ollie O’Toole. They performed to the sound of coughs and rustling sandwich bags.

Then, with a soft hum and sleek hiss of silken pistons, up rose the great hydraulic platform bearing the forty-piece Raymond Paige Stage Door Canteen Radio Orchestra, and the screaming began.

Paige raised his baton, the orchestra struck up the first strains of “This Love of Mine,” and the screams got louder.

Suddenly that unmistakable head—the face still bore the traces of a California suntan—poked through the curtain, and the screams reached a deafening crescendo. The curtain parted; the slim figure in a dark suit and floppy bow tie emerged and strode to center stage. Ten thousand feet stamped the floor in unison. The screaming was white noise. The few boys in the audience (their ratio was one to ten) grimaced and held their hands to their ears.

George Evans stood in the wings, awestruck at what he and his client had wrought.

Frank grinned and blew the crowd a kiss. The pandemonium continued for minute after minute, undiminishing. He held up his hands, trying to say something.

Finally the screaming quieted ever so slightly. “Please, please, please,” Sinatra was saying. He glanced around the huge theater. In all the world, there were few gazes this intense.

“Oh, Frankiee!” one shrill voice among the many cried—and the tumult cranked up once more.

He raised his hands. And then, after a moment, just audibly: “Do you want me to leave the stage?”

“No, no, no!” they chanted. “No! No! No!”

“
Then let’s see—”

“No! No! No!”

“Let’s see if we can’t be quiet enough to hear a complete arrangement,” Frank said forcefully.

They quieted down just a little, and he began to sing.

After an exhausting forty-five minutes of battling them, he sang his closing number, “Put Your Dreams Away,” bowed, threw some more kisses, and walked off the stage. The great platform slowly descended into the pit as Paige and his orchestra continued to play.

Of the more than forty-five hundred in the theater, only a scattering stood up. In all, perhaps two hundred departed, a disproportionate
number of them boys. The girls who filed out (no doubt having bowed to intense parental pressure) trudged with eyes downcast, as if they’d been expelled from paradise. Back in the seats, those who had stayed unwrapped more food, chatted with friends, filed their nails.

Outside, the huge line inched forward two hundred places and stopped. The crowds, slowly growing aware of the monstrous injustice, pressed against the stanchions. The cops looked nervous.

The theater doors closed.

The girls behind the police lines pushed, shouted, wept in disbelief. Several fainted and had to be passed through the crowd to waiting ambulances. In the jammed side streets leading to Times Square, cabbies got out of their stopped vehicles and scratched their heads.

There were six shows that day, and something like two full audiences got to see the show. But twenty, then twenty-five, then thirty thousand waited outside—screaming, shoving, crying hysterically, pissing their pants. During one of the shows, a cordon of cops suddenly burst from the theater, flanking a skinny, grinning eighteen-year-old boy in a double-breasted gray suit. His name was Alexander J. Dorogokupetz, and he had come to the Paramount to see what the big deal was about this little singer that the girl he was stuck on was stuck on. As the band had struck up “I Don’t Know Why (I Just Do),” a tender Fred Ahlert and Roy Turk ballad (Frank exquisitely aspirated the
h
’s in “why,” just as John Quinlan had taught him), Dorogokupetz had taken aim from third-row center and hurled an egg that hit the curtain and dropped on the stage. Sinatra barely saw it fly by. Then the second egg struck him smack in the face. The shell fragments stung like hell, the yolk and albumen dripped down his chin and onto his collar, but he managed to keep singing.

Then a third egg hit him smack in the eye. And a fourth landed on his bow tie. The music stopped. “I vowed to put an end to this monotony of two years of consecutive swooning,” Dorogokupetz said later, sounding for all the world like an apprehended assassin. “I took aim and threw … it hit him … his mouth was open … I felt good.”

SINATRA HIT BY EGGS, read a headline the next morning. THE VOICE SCRAMBLES SONG.

That afternoon, a gaggle of sailors on leave, inspired by the reports in the papers and more than a few Knickerbocker beers consumed in a Times Square bar, arrived in front of the Paramount with a bag of overripe tomatoes and began slinging them at the giant image of a standing Sinatra on the marquee. By the time they were through, the singer’s face was streaming with red juice.

Backstage, Dolly was fielding reporters’ questions. “
He may be famous now, but he’ll always be a baby to me,” she told them, waiting till everybody had stopped writing before she began talking again. “And I always told him to be nice to people as he goes up the ladder, because they’re the same people he’ll pass coming down. So far,” she said, looking around wryly, “he has followed my instructions.”

Forty years later, a Long Island society girl named Mary Lou Watts, a special friend of Sinatra’s since the Dorsey days, recalled the scene in his dressing room at the Paramount. “
[It] was always jammed,” she said, “especially when Frank’s mother was there. She was a great big bossy lady and towered over her husband, who was about the size of a mushroom. He was as little as Frank, but that mother of his was huge and very domineering. Scare you to death.”