Frank: The Voice (54 page)

He didn’t want to put on a sailor suit anymore; MGM obliged. Frank wore fake sideburns and a properly embarrassed expression in
The Kissing Bandit
, 1948.
(photo credit 21.1)

A
s U.S. relations with the Soviet Union deteriorated, paranoia over Communism mounted, particularly in Hollywood. The climate of fear surrounding the 1946 congressional elections had put a Republican majority in both houses for the first time since 1932, including a freshman senator from Wisconsin named Joseph McCarthy. The new
majority swung into action in 1947, moving the House Un-American Activities Committee to step up its inquisitions and pressuring Harry Truman into signing Executive Order 9835, the so-called Loyalty Order, which gave the FBI broad latitude to investigate citizens and suspected Communist-front organizations.

It was in this climate, in June, that Americans began spotting flying saucers: over Mount Rainier in Washington State; over Idaho, surrounding a United Airlines DC-3; over Roswell, New Mexico. And then all over the place. Every week, Norman Rockwell–covered
Saturday Evening Post
s were plunking into American mailboxes; every night, citizens were checking under the bed.

In its own intense way, Hollywood reflected the national anxiety. On the face of it, nothing had changed: swimming pools glittered in the sun; heavy black cars glided beneath the palm trees; carpenters banged on sets. But there was big trouble in the easily spooked company town—J. Parnell Thomas, the chairman of HUAC, was in Hollywood to brief studio executives on what the committee believed was Communist infiltration of movie content by the Screen Writers Guild.

At the same time, Frank Sinatra was reporting to Culver City every weekday morning to play Ricardo, the kissing bandit.

In his previous pictures, Frank had just had to put on a costume and a little Max Factor; his latest role required a more complex transformation. Every morning, the hair department glued a luxuriant toupee, complete with sideburns, over his already thinning locks; the makeup people spackled his mastoid and acne scars so that his left profile would photograph acceptably under the bright lights required for Technicolor. After the failure of the black-and-white
It Happened in Brooklyn
, MGM was reinvesting in the expensive film process, hoping
The Kissing Bandit
would duplicate the magic of
Anchors Aweigh
.

Once again, Sinatra’s pal and fellow Hollywood leftist Isobel Lennart wrote the script;
¹
once again, the haughty-faced coloratura Kathryn Grayson co-starred—and, once again, she and Frank enjoyed minimal
affinity. “
I couldn’t stand kissing him,” Grayson later confessed. “He was so skinny, so scrawny.”

But chemistry was just one of the picture’s problems. The story was a mixture common enough for the era: broad comedy, romance, and music. To write the songs, Metro (having jettisoned Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne, perhaps as the whipping boys for
It Happened in Brooklyn
) hired the dependable if less interesting Nacio Herb Brown, writer of “Singin’ in the Rain” and Bing’s classic groaner “Temptation.” In this instance, though, Brown’s tunes were strictly so-so; the romance wasn’t quite believable; and the comedy was tragically bad.

You can practically see the wheels turning in the story department at MGM: The war’s over; it’s time to get Frank out of uniform. How about some laughs? How about a satire on Zorro? Sinatra plays Ricardo, a college boy who returns from Boston to Old California and takes over his father’s spot as the titular bandit. The laughs are supposed to come from Ricardo’s timidity—once again Frank is playing awkward and shy—and his physical clumsiness. (He falls off his horse a lot.) There’s campy fun in the film, and the Technicolor is gorgeous, but from the first scene the star’s discomfort is palpable. His ears and his Hoboken accent both stick out a mile. (In subsequent pictures, Frank’s ears would be taped back; the movies would learn to live with the accent.) He tries hard to look adorable: he does that lower-lip twitch. But something has misfired badly. Sinatra is clearly not liking himself in this part, which makes it hard to like him.

He can hardly be blamed for his uneasiness. Each morning, while the hair and makeup people labored over him, studio lawyers were trying to figure out how to make the Lee Mortimer affair go away. Between anticipating the verdict of the Beverly Hills District Court and having to stay out of trouble, Frank was not in buoyant spirits that spring and summer.

Still, he always managed to find outlets. If he couldn’t keep Lana Turner (he finally dropped her over the phone, sending her into a rage:
she
was the one who did the dropping), he was going to throw himself
into his marriage. This meant keeping his hijinks low profile, but most important it meant making a grand gesture. In May, wearing a yachting cap and licking an ice-cream cone, he walked into the Palm Springs office of a young architect named E. Stewart Williams and said, as Williams later recalled, “
I wanna house.”

And not just any house. Frank wanted a Georgian mansion, he told Williams, and he wanted it pronto: by Christmas. Christmas was very important. Nancy was going to get a present she wouldn’t forget.

Six days after Benny Siegel was gunned down, on June 26, Frank was in the studio recording Christmas songs. In 1947 he recorded as he never had before: a total of seventy sides in all. Let Old Gold drop him; let Lee Mortimer sue him; let the Hearst papers rake him over the coals: he would show them all.

There was reality—complicated, thorny, less hospitable every minute—and there was Frank in a yachting cap with an ice-cream cone. He strutted; he kept up appearances; he would keep believing in himself till there was no other alternative. His agents had gone out and done battle for him and got him a new radio show, really a return to an old one:
Your Hit Parade
, still sponsored by Lucky Strike. The good news was that for the first time since the show’s inception in 1935, a single star would be at its center, singing the tunes and doing many of the commercials himself.

The bad news was that—gradually, then all at once—it wasn’t really Frank’s show. He wouldn’t get to sing his own songs, unless his songs happened to be on the hit parade, an occurrence that seemed less likely with every passing week. Even as Hearst kept snapping at his heels, the public’s musical tastes were changing. Suddenly Sinatra’s record sales were dropping; his concert and nightclub bookings had declined. His yearly income had dropped below $1 million for the first time since 1942. Nobody was feeling very sorry for him.

On the first broadcast of his second
Your Hit Parade
run, on Saturday,
September 6, Frank introduced Axel Stordahl, who had replaced Mark Warnow as bandleader, and, as co-star for the show’s first two months, Doris Day. From Sinatra’s first song, it was clear that something was deeply wrong.

The song was called “Feudin’ and Fightin’,” a novelty number about life down in the holler, Hatfield-and-McCoy style. It was the kind of faux-folksy trifle Bing Crosby could bring off without breaking a sweat, but with Frank singing it, it felt as phony as a three-dollar bill. His heart wasn’t in it. (And he certainly hadn’t read these lyrics like a poem before singing them.) But it was on the hit parade, which meant the American public wanted to hear it. And more and more, Sinatra and the American public appeared to be going their separate ways.

The ground was sliding beneath Frank’s feet. His singing was the one part of his life where he couldn’t dissemble. His belief in a song was part of what made him great; when he lost conviction, his vocal quality became two-dimensional.
Metronome
, which only two years earlier had crowned Frank Act of the Year, and with whose All-Stars he’d recently recorded the sublime “Sweet Lorraine,” was withering about the new edition of
Your Hit Parade:

There may have been schadenfreude in this; even those who had been his biggest boosters probably weren’t averse to the pleasures of piling on. But to listen to the show proves
Metronome
right. Westbrook
Pegler was another matter. The columnist, who had been otherwise engaged for a couple of years, now went at Sinatra with a fresh vengeance. Throughout September he hammered on Frank, trotting out all the sins for which the Hearst papers had lavishly been taking him to task, and now—his one new note—slamming Sinatra’s defenders. “
A campaign of propaganda has been running in some areas of our press, including magazines, and on the radio to rehabilitate the reputation of Frank Sinatra,” his column of September 10 began, ominously. In this loaded time, such phraseology was guaranteed to raise a Red flag. In some papers this column ran side by side with one by Victor Riesel, which began:

The message, to any right-thinking reader, was clear: subversive elements were trying to undermine America, and Frank Sinatra—with his Mafia connections, his draft-dodging and sex-offending past (not to mention his oily hair and Italian surname)—was their standard-bearer.