Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [102]
To listen to his first recording from those sessions, “If You Are But a Dream,” is to hear a Sinatra who, even amid the swelling strings and lush horns and soupy lyrics, is no longer yearning but relating the sad knowledge of maturity. That patented catch in his voice, the one that drove the little girls wild, now has a world-weary edge to it. And the vocal instrument itself is deeper, with a slight rasp to its low notes.
It was Frank’s great artistic achievement, always, to give the world his best self in his music. Yet sounding more mature was by no means a guarantee of mature behavior. On election night, a week before he began laying down the fresh masterpieces with Stordahl, Sinatra went out on the town with a group of pals, including Orson Welles, and, at Toots Shor’s, got loaded in celebration of FDR’s landslide victory over Thomas Dewey. On their return to the Waldorf, Frank and the boys decided to give it to Westbrook Pegler, who was also staying at the hotel. “Let’s go down and see if he’s as tough as he writes,” Frank is said to have said. The crew trooped to the conservative columnist’s room, and Frank banged on the door.
At this point accounts diverge.
Sinatra later claimed that Pegler wasn’t there, and that he and his pals left quietly. But in a 1957 Look magazine profile of Sinatra by Bill Davidson, a man claiming to have been an aide to Pegler recalled, “Peg was inside, and he kept needling Sinatra through the door with things like, ‘Are you that little Italian boy from Hoboken who sings on the radio?’ Sinatra became so frustrated that he went back to his suite and busted up his own furniture, throwing a chair out of the window.”
Pegler reacted with outrage to the article, writing the editors of Look: “I was in my room at the Waldorf-Astoria continuously from about 11 p.m. until rising time the next morning. No person knocked on my door during that time, and your statement that I was inside and the implication that I was afraid to open the door and confront a drunkard who had come to see how ‘tough’ I might be is false, and no ‘aide’ of mine ever made that statement to your reporter.”
Look stood by its story.
Frank never went mano a mano with Westbrook Pegler, but if he’d wanted a fight with the columnist, he got one. In the aftermath of the non-incident at the Waldorf, Pegler ramped up his anti-Sinatra campaign, making it political as well as personal. Frank’s friendship with the arch-liberal and Hearst-kingdom Antichrist (see Citizen Kane) Welles was sheer serendipity. “In the company of Orson Welles and others,” Pegler wrote, “Sinatra toured the circuit of expensive New York saloons known as the milk route and spent some time at the political headquarters of Sidney Hillman, which were the Communist headquarters too. He got shrieking drunk and kicked up such a row in the Waldorf that a house policeman was sent up to subdue him, and did.”
The mention of the radical, Lithuanian-born Hillman, chair of the CIO’s political action committee, was a red flag for the Hearst papers’ Republican readers: Sinatra was not only a Commie but a Jew-lover to boot. The singer retaliated by having Pegler turned away at one of his performances at the Wedgwood Room, and the columnist fired back by writing about Sinatra’s 1938 Bergen County morals arrest.
Alarmed at the escalation of hostilities, George Evans immediately picked up the phone and tried to make nice with Pegler. The publicist reminded the columnist that Frank had been young and foolish back in 1938, and that the charges had been dropped in any case.