Frank: The Voice (40 page)

He had less luck in early November in Gary, Indiana, where a thousand white students at Froebel High had walked out of school, smashing windows with bricks, after a new principal declared the school’s 270 black students free to take classes, play in the orchestra, and share the swimming pool with everyone else. Sinatra, with Evans and Keller along for support, walked straight into a powder keg: a tough steel town where the white students’ fathers feared that blacks had come to take away their jobs. The kids were their parents’ outriders in hate; the whole city was united in toxic fury.

But of the five thousand Garyites who came to hear Sinatra sing—and speak afterward—at the city’s Memorial Auditorium, four thousand were women and girls. (He wore a bright blue bow tie—it went so well with his eyes—and a chrysanthemum presented to him by one of the students.) And while the overwhelmingly female audience assured he would get a sympathetic hearing, the event made no guarantee of strides toward racial tolerance in Gary, Indiana. Years afterward, Jack Keller offered a stirring version of the scene:

According to Keller, Sinatra continued:

A contemporary newspaper account, under the headline
GARY HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS COOL ON SINATRA’S APPEAL, gave a more tempered view of the occasion. “The audience came to hear Sinatra sing and stayed to listen to what he had to say about the high school strike,” reported Illinois’s
Edwardsville Intelligencer
. “But at the soda fountain where some of the bobby sockers gathered after the meeting there was doubt that Sinatra’s appeal had worked. The strike leaders had not attended the meeting, and few of the striking students who were there stayed even throughout the program.”

This is somewhat at odds with the picture of the tough little singer facing down a roomful of hostile steelworkers. Maybe (it’s a great story) Frank did offer to lick any son of a bitch in the joint; maybe the quote was a product of Keller’s fertile imagination.
²
Nevertheless, Sinatra (perhaps emboldened by the warmer than expected response of the GIs in North Africa and Italy) must be given points for going to Gary at all. And in the weeks that followed—even though the Froebel strike continued after he left—he racked up even more points, collecting an honorary scroll from the Bureau of Intercultural Education in New York (Eleanor Roosevelt, with whom Frank would form a warm bond, was the keynote speaker); the Philadelphia Golden Slipper Square Club’s annual unity award; the Newspaper Guild’s Page One Award; a citation for “
outstanding efforts and contribution to the cause of religious tolerance and unity among Americans” from the National Conference of Christians and Jews; et cetera, et cetera.

Evans and Keller were thrilled. All those awards washed out a lot of nasty gossip, given the public’s short attention span. For the time being, anyway.

But it wasn’t just the high-school visits that lent Sinatra new moral substance. Over the summer, at the suggestion of former MGM
production chief Mervyn LeRoy (“
You could reach a thousand times more people if you’d tell your story on the screen”), he’d made a fifteen-minute movie short called
The House I Live In
. Sinatra plays himself in the RKO featurette, appearing first in a recording studio, singing “If You Are But a Dream,” and looking magnificent—slim, suntanned, and sleek (even shot from his bad side, though probably through gauze, by Robert De Grasse, who’d made him look so resplendent in
Higher and Higher
and
Step Lively
). His face, at this point in its development, is a long triangle beneath those sculpted cheekbones. He mugs shamelessly for the camera, acting the song, feeling the song,
being
the song—in short, dreaming. His eyebrows rise expressively, that beautiful mouth trembles passionately. Then he switches gears.

When he steps outside for a smoke, he encounters a gang of boys who have cornered another kid with dark hair and Semitic features.

“
What’s he got? Smallpox or somethin’?” Sinatra asks.

“We don’t like his religion!” one of the gang responds.

“His
religion
?”

“Look, mister,” another boy pipes up. “He’s a dirty—”

“Now, hold on!” Sinatra interjects. He softens. “Look, fellas,” he says. “Religion makes no difference. Except maybe to a Nazi, or somebody that’s stupid. Why, people all over the world worship God in many different ways. God created everybody.”

As he explains it to them, he’s acting as passionately as he acted while he sang in the recording studio, only now it’s in a slightly different key—now, rather than being romantic, Frank is being kind and thoughtful and gentle but strong: ultimately persuasive. You’d never guess in a million years that this is a man with a temper so violent and unpredictable that his best friends, including Sammy Cahn and Phil Silvers, are terrified of him. The man in
The House I Live In
is Sinatra’s best self, twenty-nine years old and beautiful and solid and thoughtful. This self existed, not just on celluloid. Seeing him reasoning with the tough kids and persuading them, you just
want
to give this guy a prize of some sort.

Then, before long, he’s breaking into song again, to the kids this time. It’s the title number, a paean to tolerance. What was America to him?

And it was dynamite. Looking at the film (and listening to the song) three generations later, you can’t help thinking: Okay, this is corny in a lot of ways, but what’s wrong with it? How far have we really come since then? It’s that well done.

Mervyn LeRoy directed the short. The Hollywood leftist Albert Maltz wrote the script, and the New York leftist Abel Meeropol, under his pen name Lewis Allan, wrote the title song’s lyrics. The little film had great impact. It got people talking about tolerance; the liberal press ate it up. Practically overnight, as Tom and Phil Kuntz write in
The Sinatra Files
, an analysis of the singer’s huge FBI dossier, Sinatra became “
a darling of the American left.” LeRoy, the producer Frank Ross, Maltz, Meeropol, and Sinatra were all nominated for honorary Oscars, and they took them home in early 1946.

But the right-wing press, as powerful just after World War II as it is today, smelled a rat. Weren’t Maltz and Meeropol, no matter what name he was hiding under, both not only leftists but also card-carrying Commies? (They were. And defiantly so: Maltz would become one of the Hollywood Ten; Meeropol, who’d also written Billie Holiday’s great 1939 antilynching song, “Strange Fruit”—a number so hot Columbia Records wouldn’t release it—would eventually adopt Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s two orphaned sons.) The tolerance Sinatra was preaching looked, to Hearst’s Westbrook Pegler and the America First Party’s Gerald L. K. Smith and the Knights of Columbus’s Gerval T. Murphy, among others, like a newfangled cover for old-fashioned socialism. (In fact, much of the conservative criticism leveled at
The House I Live In
was a newfangled cover for old-fashioned anti-Semitism: virtually
everybody involved in the short, not to mention almost everyone running Hollywood, was Jewish.)

It was directly in the wake of
The House I Live In
that FBI interest in Sinatra perked up again. On December 12, 1945, the special agent in charge of Philadelphia sent J. Edgar Hoover a memo advising the director that a confidential informant had identified “
FRANK SINATRA, well known radio and movie star,” as a member of the Communist Party. The informant, the memo continued,

The war was over, but the country was shell-shocked. The atrocities in Europe and the Pacific were emerging in their full horror. The U.S.A. focused on new enemies. In 1945, the House Un-American Activities Committee, having heretofore convened on an ad hoc basis, became a standing committee. And in January 1946, Gerald L. K. Smith—white supremacist, Jew hater, Holocaust denier—testified before HUAC that Frank Sinatra was acting “as a front” for Communist
organizations. He spoke of “Hollywood’s left-wing cabal” and called Sinatra “Mrs. Roosevelt in pants.” It all would have almost been comical if much of America, at the moment, hadn’t been taking Smith and the like so seriously. And Joseph McCarthy, campaigning for the Senate, was waiting in the wings.

At first Sinatra brushed off the right-wing rhetoricians like so many pesky flies. “You know,” he told Walter Lowenfels, in the above-mentioned
Worker
interview, “they called [seventeen-year-old] Shirley Temple a Communist. Me and Shirley both, I guess.” Yet soon he was tempering his cockiness. “
I don’t like Communists,” he told another reporter, “and I have nothing to do with any organization except the Knights of Columbus.”

But there was another organization—to the extent that it actually was organized—that remained a constant in Frank’s life. His connection to gangsters should be neither overemphasized nor underplayed. As many entertainers who came up in the great era of nightclubs (the 1930s through the early 1960s) have pointed out, it was impossible to play the clubs and not come into contact with the Mob. The Boys backed the clubs, often secretly owning them and hiring front men to present a legitimate face to the public. They operated the clubs as glamorous profit centers for many of the businesses in which they took a direct interest: entertainment and liquor and cigarettes and gambling and prostitution. Every enterprise touched on a dozen others. Organized crime during Frank Sinatra’s early career, and prior to the U.S. government’s tardy but assiduous attempts to break it up, was a vast, darkly shimmering American under-culture—an alternative economy so huge that the über-criminal Meyer Lansky was able to boast, famously, “
We’re bigger than General Motors.” The problem with the remark being the small but crucial word “we.” What was called organized crime was actually something far more complex—and less organized.

Unlike General Motors, organized crime was not publicly held;
it did not elect a board of directors or issue stockholders’ reports. Unlike privately held businesses, it wasn’t formally incorporated. It was ten thousand businesses, an enormous shape-shifting cluster of enterprises under the control of whoever happened to be in control until someone more powerful came along and took over, displacing or (often) eliminating the previous owner: an infinite chain of big fish eating smaller fish. It could be argued that while legitimate business operates under the nominal oversight of the law, it is actually subject to the survival of the fittest; illegitimate business merely eliminates the oversight. Yet organized crime, lacking any checks and balances or a structural superego, functions under brute power. This may seem glamorous to outsiders who have to live by (or at least contend with) society’s rules. It seemed alluring to Frank, who in becoming a man sought stronger role models than his weak father. But to the men who live it, it is simply the Life. They swim like sharks: sometimes in pods or schools, sometimes alone, now and then turning to attack each other out of sheer bloodthirstiness.