Instead, he was heading for the Fall.
II. The Fall was essential to the Sinatra myth. Most of it was a combination of bad timing, dreadful luck, and self-inflicted wounds. It didn’t happen all at once; instead, the Fall started small and gathered strength, like a landslide.
First, Sinatra alienated the Hollywood press corps. He would have one too many drinks in some public place and curse them all for whores and pimps. He started firing off thin-skinned telegrams to various columnists, including Louella Parsons, then the most famous paid yenta in Hollywood. In 1946 the Hollywood Women’s Press Club gave Sinatra the “Least Cooperative Actor” award. He was not contrite. Then, on April 8, 1947, in Ciro’s nightclub in Hollywood, Sinatra punched out Hearst columnist Lee Mortimer, who had been needling him in print for many months. The cops were called. Charges were filed. Sinatra was arrested. To be sure, it was not as if he had punched out Mother Cabrini. In almost four decades in the newspaper business, I have never met anybody who liked or respected Lee Mortimer; he was a nasty, mean man, a poor reporter, a worse writer, and the king of the “blind item.” But it was a critical mistake for Sinatra to belt him. Newspaper people who despised Mortimer suddenly started getting much tougher about Frank Sinatra; as contemptible as Mortimer was, he was part of their guild, not Sinatra’s. The singer had to pay Mortimer $9,000 to settle out of court. But there were more lasting consequences. The Hearst chain was then a powerful national force and had already been sniping at Sinatra over his liberal politics. Now the attacks intensified. He was Red-baited by the chain’s star columnists, Westbrook Pegler and George Sokolsky, and subjected to a campaign that dripped with innuendo. Sinatra was presented as naive or gullible at best, an agent of the Red conspiracy at worst. Sinatra, of course, wasn’t close to being a communist; he was, like millions of other Americans, a committed New Deal liberal. But the Hearstlings didn’t care about the facts. They wanted to destroy Sinatra, and in the growing postwar anticommunist hysteria, they had many allies. Hollywood was becoming a major target of the anticommunist crusaders; the cynical among them knew that hauling a Hollywood figure before a committee would bring bigger headlines than would interrogating some high school math teacher who had been a communist for three weeks in 1934. The true believers among the crusaders were convinced that Moscow was smuggling anti-American propaganda into the most brainless Hollywood productions. Most of this was absurd. But studio bosses were never profiles in courage, and because of their fear and trembling, the blacklist soon became a fact of Hollywood life. Sinatra was marginal to that story but never completely immune. In the placid postwar years he was starting to look like a whole lot of trouble.
Early in 1947 Sinatra did another job on himself, providing a context for the Mortimer affair and building a crucial element in his life that would stay around until he died. At some point in January he accepted an invitation to go to Havana from Joe Fischetti, the youngest of the three Fischetti brothers, who were among the second-generation hoodlums then running the Chicago rackets established during Prohibition by Al Capone. Sinatra had known the Fischetti brothers from before the war, when he had played a joint they ran in Chicago. Sinatra said, Why not? In those days a trip to Havana was as routine as one to Miami.
But there are several ways to interpret this journey. One is dark. According to this version, Frank Sinatra had been connected to the Mob for at least five years. In particular, he was obligated to them for one big favor. Back in 1943, when he was at the peak of the first stage of his fame, he was also being ruined financially by the terms of the release he had signed with Tommy Dorsey. The bandleader insisted on taking almost 55 percent of Sinatra’s earnings; expenses and taxes consumed the rest. Dorsey refused to negotiate; a deal was a deal, and fuck you, kid. So Sinatra reached out to the Mob. In some versions of the tale, Dolly Sinatra went personally to see Longie Zwillman at his mansion in New Jersey; in others, Sinatra made the visit himself. Zwillman was outraged at the injustice of it all and put Willie Moretti on the case. In the spirit of conciliation and compromise, Moretti walked into Dorsey’s dressing room, shoved a pistol into the bandleader’s mouth, and told him to give Frank Sinatra a release. Dorsey instantly agreed.
Most Sinatra biographers, including those who are not soft on Sinatra’s personal history, dismiss this story as pure invention. The research indicates that Sinatra obtained his release after a year of tough bargaining by his powerful agents from the Music Corporation of America (MCA) and some equally tough lawyers. Dorsey was persuaded that he could not afford the publicity that would come his way if the contract became the center of a court case; Sinatra, after all, was among the most popular entertainers in the United States. Dorsey settled for $60,000, and he and Sinatra went their separate, if unhappy ways. The myth has a certain logic and great durability. I heard it as a teenager from the apprentice hoodlums I knew in Brooklyn; it was repeated to me by cops and old reporters when I was a young newspaperman.
For whatever reason, in February 1947 Sinatra flew to Havana, promising to meet Nancy later in Mexico City. Alas, he was photographed getting off a plane with Joe Fischetti. Both men were wearing sunglasses and carrying attaché cases; they definitely looked like a pair of gangsters. They went to the Hotel Nacional, then the grandest hotel in the Cuban capital, and checked into separate rooms. Sinatra immediately found himself at the largest Mob convention since the late 1920s. The most honored guest was Charles (Lucky) Luciano himself.
It remains unclear whether Sinatra knew that Luciano would be in Havana; if he did, it should be no surprise that he would want to meet him. Charlie Lucky was a legendary figure during Sinatra’s youth and was still one of the most famous gangsters in the world. The romantic aura of the bootlegger was still attached to such men; they were not yet committed to the wholesale peddling of heroin. Luciano was then living in exile in Naples as the result of a deal worked out during the war whereby the imprisoned Mob boss agreed to do what he could to help the war effort. Or so we were told by purveyors of the myth. Luciano bragged later that he had made this deal while serving a thirty-to-fifty-year sentence for white slavery in Dannemora prison. (That sentence, by the way, was almost certainly the result of a frame-up.) Luciano claimed that he had helped secure the New York waterfront against sabotage and then set up intelligence networks for the Allies before the invasion of Sicily. The grateful Americans then cut his sentence, released him in 1946, and deported him to Naples. He couldn’t return to the United States but was, of course, free to go to Cuba. The Mob bosses — including Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky, Carlos Marcello, Joe Adonis, and dozens of others — had assembled to honor Charlie Lucky, pledge loyalty, deliver him some cash, discuss business (including a plan to kill Bugsy Siegel, who was not in Havana but preparing to invent modern Las Vegas). They would also have fun.
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.