Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [109]
The minute Sinatra stepped off the plane at La Guardia, he stuck his foot in his mouth. The USO and Army Special Services were incompetent, he told the crowd of reporters. “Shoemakers in uniform run the entertainment division,” he said. “Most of them had no experience in show business. They didn’t know what time it was.”
What was his problem? Maybe the lighting cues had been off, or a few microphones hadn’t worked. Maybe the dressing rooms had been insufficient; maybe he was still grouchy about the pope. (Or just the dirt. It couldn’t have been easy for a true obsessive-compulsive, a man who was in the habit of showering and changing his underwear several times a day, to deal with military amenities in dirt-poor North Africa and Italy.)
He later defended himself by saying that GIs had asked him to complain about how poorly organized and presented most of the shows were. There was plenty to gripe about in a theater of war, even after the big show was over. But Sinatra, who could turn irritable if the wind shifted, was the wrong person to do the griping. His momentarily silenced critics got right back into gear. “Mice make women faint too,” sneered the Stars and Stripes. “He is doing an injustice to a group of people who are for the most part talented, hardworking, and sincere. There have been, of course, the usual prima donnas who have flown over, had their pictures taken with GIs, and got the hell home.” And dependable Lee Mortimer jumped on the bandwagon, calling Sinatra’s post V-E Day mini-tour a “joy ride,” comparing him unfavorably to “aging, ailing men like Joe E. Brown and Al Jolson [who] subjected themselves to enemy action, jungle disease, and the dangers of traveling through hostile skies from the beginning of the war.”
George Evans took it all with apparent calm. Even though his heedless client had innumerable ways of ratcheting up the publicist’s blood pressure, even though Sinatra often seemed to work overtime at being his own worst enemy, the Sinatra machine looked unstoppable.
In mid-July, Anchors Aweigh came out, and it was a huge hit, with the critics and at the box office. Even the Times’s reliably crusty Bosley Crowther waxed grudgingly enthusiastic (after first giving well-deserved raves to Gene Kelly, “the Apollonian marvel of the piece”): “But bashful Frankie is a large-sized contributor to the general fun and youthful charm of the show.”
The show made big money, and Louis B. Mayer’s thin smile grew broader. He had been right about that boy.
Meanwhile, Evans and Keller plunged ahead with a new campaign. If the public was going to hear a lot of nonsense about the starlets Frankie was stepping out with in Hollywood and the ungracious remarks he persisted in making about worthy organizations like Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and the U.S. Army, the public was also going to see another side of him: Frank Sinatra was going to be a humanitarian.
It wasn’t phony. He was a humanitarian at heart. (Or at least in one of the many chambers of his heart.) He hated intolerance—first, of course, because it had smacked him personally in the face many times, but also because it attacked people he genuinely loved. Hadn’t Mrs. Golden clasped him to her substantial breast and cooed to him in Yiddish? Didn’t he love Manie like a brother? A couple of years earlier, when intimations of the Holocaust first started to emerge, Frank had had dozens of medals made up with the cross of Saint Christopher on one side and the Star of David on the other (a daring gesture in those days). He had given them out left and right.
And where Negroes