Why Sinatra Matters (14 page)

Luciano claimed later, in a posthumous “autobiography,” that one of the purposes of the Havana assembly was to congratulate
young Frank Sinatra for his great accomplishments and to allow Sinatra to thank them for all their help. This seems preposterous;
why risk calling attention to their own clandestine congress by bringing a man so famous to a public place? It’s more likely
that young Fischetti was running his own game: trying to impress his elders by producing Frank Sinatra and to impress Sinatra
by displaying his own intimate connections to some legendary mobsters. Fischetti seems to have introduced Sinatra to all of
them. There was one report that Sinatra got up to sing in the nightclub of the Hotel Nacional. A few days later he left to
meet his wife on St. Valentine’s Day in Mexico City.

That should have been that; as Sinatra was learning, that is almost never that. Scripps Howard columnist Robert Ruark, who
was in Havana, learned about Luciano’s presence from Narcotics Bureau boss Harry J. Anslinger, a bumbling fanatic who was
engaged in a turf war with J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI. Anslinger (or one of his agents) underlined Sinatra’s part in the “convention.”
Ruark, a macho right-winger who despised Sinatra’s politics, opened up with all his rhetorical guns. He wrote a column that
said, in part:

“Mr. Sinatra, the self-confessed savior of the country’s small fry, by virtue of his lectures on clean living and love-thy-neighbor,
his movie shorts on tolerance, and his frequent dabblings into the do-good department of politics, seems to be setting a most
peculiar example for his hordes of pimply, shrieking slaves, who are alleged to regard him with the same awe as a practicing
Mohammedan for the Prophet.”

There was an immense scandal. Lucky Luciano! Frank Sinatra! The sin city of Havana! It was a splendid opportunity to attack
Sinatra’s politics as more than naive, as probably devious. All the old anti-Italian prejudices rose again, clothed, as always,
in virtue. Sinatra said, “I was brought up to shake a man’s hand when I am introduced to him without first investigating his
past.” But the damage was done. The Mob image would be part of the rest of his life. Thirty years later he admitted to me
about the Havana trip: “It was one of the dumbest things I ever did.” But he did not elaborate.

There would be other Mob stories over the years: his long friendship with Sam (Momo) Giancana of Chicago, his ease with West
Coast hoodlum Mickey Cohen, his connections with some members of the Patriarca family of Rhode Island. He certainly played
Las Vegas in the heyday of the hoodlums and helped make it one of the nation’s most lucrative adult playgrounds. He played
Mob joints in other parts of the country, sometimes without a fee. At every Sinatra concert I attended over the years, I would
see known wise guys, smoking cigars, their diamond pinkie rings glittering in the light. At concerts in New York they brought
their wives; in Vegas they brought their girlfriends. As late as 1976 Sinatra posed for a photograph in his dressing room
at the Westchester Premier Theater with Brooklyn Mob boss Carlo Gambino and a group of other hoodlums. It didn’t matter that
they wanted the photograph to impress their friends and children, it didn’t matter that they were among Sinatra’s most awestruck
fans; they had access.

It’s absurd to believe that the Mob had made Sinatra a star; if that was possible, they’d have made two hundred other stars,
and they made absolutely none. But Sinatra certainly knew Mob guys, was often amused by them, and knew that they could be
dangerous. When we were talking about doing his book in the mid-1970s, I told him I’d have to discuss three subjects with
him: his politics, his women, and the Mob. He shrugged and said that the first two were no problem. “But if I talk about those
other guys, someone might come knocking at my fucking door.” A few days later he called and said, “Hey, what the hell. All
the guys I knew are dead anyway.” On another occasion he elaborated about his friendships with hoodlums:

“Did I know those guys? Sure, I knew some of those guys. I spent a lot of time working in saloons. And saloons are not run
by the Christian Brothers. There were a lot of guys around, and they came out of Prohibition, and they ran pretty good saloons.
I was a kid. I worked in the places that were open. They paid you, and the checks didn’t bounce. I didn’t meet any Nobel Prize
winners in saloons. But if Francis of Assisi was a singer and worked in saloons, he would’ve met the same guys. That doesn’t
make him part of something. They said hello, you said hello. They came backstage. They thanked you. You offered them a drink.
That was it.” He paused. “And it doesn’t matter anymore, does it? Most of the guys I knew, or met, are dead.”

But in 1948–49, as he moved inexorably toward the Fall, the Mob was becoming a heavier piece of his baggage. There were more
severe, if less melodramatic, problems. His marriage was in constant turmoil; Nancy was holding on, hoping to wait him out
as he dallied elsewhere; Sinatra wanted his total freedom. The move to California had put a continent between him and his
parents, but the city of New York would serve Sinatra for another half-century as his personal version of the Old Country.
It would always be as full of magic as it had been when he stood alone on the piers of Hoboken. If he felt the urge, he wanted
the freedom to go back — alone. To move through the New York night. Without a wife. Without his children. The marriage was
Hoboken, and Hoboken was not magic.

Later, most people who were sympathetic to both parties said that Sinatra had grown and Nancy had not, that he was out in
the big world, adding sophistication and social ease to his style, while Nancy remained imprisoned by the parochial codes
of New Jersey. Sinatra once told a close friend about the night he realized the marriage was over. He had to go to a business
meeting in a Los Angeles restaurant. It was raining hard. When he reached the door, Nancy called after him, “Frank, don’t
forget your galoshes.”

That story might be apocryphal; it too neatly fits the story of Sinatra’s flight from the middle-class values of Hoboken.
But many of the others were not. There were constant arguments over money, houses, the children, relatives, other women. He
and Nancy separated at least once, in 1948, but reconciled after a few weeks. With very little discretion, Sinatra romanced
a variety of women, including Marilyn Maxwell and Lana Turner; and then in 1949 he met Ava Gardner.

III
. The tale of Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner has been told many times, most effectively and honestly by Ava herself in her
autobiography
(Ava)
. At one point, the whole world seemed to know the story of the romance, Sinatra’s divorce, the marriage to Ava, the mutual
jealousies, the drunken quarrels, the snarling fights with photographers and reporters. At one point, Sinatra even tried to
kill himself. In the sorry narrative that constitutes the Fall, he would lose his movie contract, his radio show, his recording
contract, and his agents. Desperate for money as the various contracts began running out, needing the validation of an audience,
he began taking as many live engagements as possible. And then he lost his voice. That was the most terrifying event of all.
It happened in the spring of 1950, near the end of an eight-week engagement at the Copacabana nightclub in New York, and he
described the night to Arlene Francis many years later:

“I was doing three shows a night, five radio shows a week, benefit performances, and recording at the same time. And then
I opened at the Capitol Theater toward the end of the engagement. I went out to do the third show [at the Copa] at about half
past two or quarter to three in the morning, and I went for a note, and nothing came out. Not a sound came out. And I merely
said to the audience, as best I could, ‘Good night.’”

Sinatra would get his voice back and continue to work; in that same year of 1950 he still had several years left on his Columbia
Records contract. But as a singer he was confused, often torn, capable of fine work on “Hello, Young Lovers,” “Birth of the
Blues,” and “Why Try to Change Me Now?” while recording such second-rate tunes as “Tennessee Newsboy” and the infamous “Mama
Will Bark,” a duet with a bosomy TV star named Dagmar. The hit-driven Mitch Miller, boss of Columbia Records, was often blamed
for the erratic quality of Sinatra’s work. But he insisted later that Sinatra could never be forced to make any record and
that he had agreed to even the Dagmar duet. Certainly, Sinatra was desperate for a hit. He hated the new music, songs like
Frankie Laine’s “Mule Train” or “Come On-a My House,” performed by Rosemary Clooney (a singer he otherwise admired); but while
his singles were selling 25,000 copies, others’ were soaring over a million, and Mitch Miller had produced them.

At the heart of Sinatra’s anxiety was his fading relationship with the audience. Men had never been a major part of that audience;
the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 reminded many of them that Sinatra had never taken part in World War II. Some
veterans of that war (including baseball great Ted Williams) were now being called back to active duty while Sinatra had never
served a day (neither had John Wayne, but right-wing actors were never criticized in the way that liberal actors were attacked).
The Cold War was now hot; communist troops were killing America’s young men in the Korean peninsula. The great hunt for domestic
subversives, for pinkos, com-symps, the enemy within, became even more intense. Joe McCarthy, the junior senator from Wisconsin,
emerged as the major voice sniffing into past associations with communists, suggesting evidence of wide conspiracies, and
he was not alone. From California the crusade was driven by an ambitious young politician named Richard Nixon. Liberalism
itself was soon reeling, with some Republicans describing the long reign of Roosevelt and his successor, Harry Truman, as
“twenty years of treason.” It did not help Sinatra’s reputation that he had supported Henry Wallace for president in 1948.

In 1950 another kind of inquiry into domestic enemies began. The Kefauver hearings into organized crime became a television
extravaganza, helping to establish the new medium. Elaborate organizational charts were presented, showing the way territory
was divvied up by the Mob. The word
Mafia
was shouted from headlines. Connections between Mob guys and big-city political machines were explored. Among many others,
the names of Longie Zwillman and Willie Moretti were tossed around, the refrain of “I refuse to answer on grounds that I will
tend to incriminate myself” was heard in the land, and there were more rehashed stories about the famous summit conference
in Havana. Mobology became a staple of the newspapers, and many reprinted the photograph of Sinatra and Joe Fischetti getting
off that plane. Some of the more creative journalists even claimed to know that each attaché case contained a million dollars,
in spite of that being a physical impossibility.

If Sinatra’s triumphs were, in part, a result of the times of World War II, his defeats would be part of the times of the
early 1950s. His politics were suddenly a bit musty to some, un-American to others; as the exodus of blacks from the South
got under way, the contempt for liberalism also acquired an element of racism. Sinatra’s urban, freewheeling style, with its
reminders of immigrant origins, was suspect in white Middle America and its expanding suburbs, where the demand for conformity
was growing more powerful. His connections to the Mob, real or illusory, outraged more and more city people as the heroin
plague spread and the crime rate soared. The bootlegger might have been a romantic figure; there was nothing romantic about
a dope peddler. In some ways, Sinatra was a public figure who fed two paranoid visions: the secret society of the Mob and
the agenda of the liberal left. On the crudest level, this did not help him sell records. It certainly did not help him sell
records to men. Older men sneered at Sinatra. Younger men were listening to Frankie Laine and Guy Mitchell.

Much more dangerous to Sinatra was his abandonment by female fans. This almost certainly was the result of his brutal public
humiliation of his wife. It was one thing to have discreet affairs, but flaunting Ava Gardner during a January 1950 gig at
the Shamrock Hotel in Houston,
while still married to Nancy
— that was cruel. His third child, daughter Tina, was only a year and a half old. The boy, Frank Jr., was five. But little
Nancy was eight. She was going to school. She could hear the taunts. Her mother, a beautiful, normal woman, was being tossed
aside for an actress who was once married to
Mickey Rooney!
This was outrageous. Or so believed many of the women who in 1944 and 1945 had bought millions of Sinatra’s records or had
waited in the rain to see him at the Paramount. So they left. Many never came back. They identified too strongly with Nancy
Barbato Sinatra, who soon settled into the role she would play for the rest of Sinatra’s life: the Woman Who Would Wait. Asked
once why she had never remarried, she answered, “After
Sinatra?”

The loss of that core audience was a source of pervasive, contaminating anguish for Sinatra. He was only ten years removed
from the Rustic Cabin; now his nights were haunted by the dread of losing everything, of a forced return to the maiming obscurity
of his youth. More than many other performers, he needed the audience. He needed to feel a connection with all those strangers,
needed them to ratify his existence and his value, needed to feed on their emotions, as they sometimes were nourished by his.
And now they were gone. Or so it seemed. And without the audience, he was just the boy who was applauded for knowing the words.
Or worse: an older man singing to an empty room.

It was the aftermath of the Fall that changed the audience and changed Sinatra. Right out there in public, Sinatra had been
flattened. And men often saw the world in sports terms. One thing they knew about prizefighters, for example, was that you
never knew what a fighter was made of until he had been knocked down. Second-raters stayed down and took the count. The great
ones always got up.