Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [110]
His feelings of compassion were purely emotional. But when he talked about them with George Evans, the publicist realized Frank was being honest. And those feelings were golden. Evans repped some of the greatest entertainers in the business, yet none had Sinatra’s capacity to become a great American. Evans talked about it with Keller, and they agreed on a strategy: they would flood out the bad with the good. They sent their boy out to thirty speaking engagements in 1945, many of them at high schools in the throes of racial tension. In the fall, Frank went to Benjamin Franklin H.S. in Italian East Harlem, where there had been fistfights among the integrated student body. The future jazz giant Sonny Rollins, then a sophomore, recalled many years later, “Sinatra came down there and sang in our auditorium … after that things got better, and the rioting stopped.”
He had less luck in early November in Gary, Indiana, where a thousand white students at Froebel High had walked out of school, smashing windows with bricks, after a new principal declared the school’s 270 black students free to take classes, play in the orchestra, and share the swimming pool with everyone else. Sinatra, with Evans and Keller along for support, walked straight into a powder keg: a tough steel town where the white students’ fathers feared that blacks had come to take away their jobs. The kids were their parents’ outriders in hate; the whole city was united in toxic fury.
But of the five thousand Garyites who came to hear Sinatra sing—and speak afterward—at the city’s Memorial Auditorium, four thousand were women and girls. (He wore a bright blue bow tie—it went so well with his eyes—and a chrysanthemum presented to him by one of the students.) And while the overwhelmingly female audience assured he would get a sympathetic hearing, the event made no guarantee of strides toward racial tolerance in Gary, Indiana. Years afterward, Jack Keller offered a stirring version of the scene:
George and I were standing in the wings, and although we had told Frank what to say, we were skeptical and pretty damned frightened as to what might happen. Frank walked out onstage and stood dead center while all these rough, tough steel workers and their kids started catcalling and whistling and stamping their feet. Frank folded his arms, looked right down at them, and stared for a full two minutes, until there was a dead silence in the room. Evans and I were nervous wrecks wondering what in hell he was going to do.
Without smiling, Frank … finally unfolded his arms and moved to the microphone. “I can lick any son of a bitch in this joint,” he said. Pandemonium broke loose as the kids cheered him. They thought he was right down their street, and from then on, it was terrific.
According to Keller, Sinatra continued:
“I implore you to return to school. This is a bad deal, kids. It’s not good for you and it’s not good for the city of Gary, which has done so much to help with the war for freedom the world over.
“Believe me, I know something about the business of racial intolerance. At eleven I was called a ‘dirty guinea’ back home in New Jersey. We’ve all done it. We’ve all used the words ‘nigger’ or ‘kike’ or ‘mick’ or ‘Polack’ or ‘dago.’ Cut it out, kids. Go back to school. You’ve got to go back because you don’t want to be ashamed of your student body, your city, your country.”
A contemporary newspaper account, under the headline GARY HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS COOL ON SINATRA’S APPEAL, gave a more tempered view of the occasion. “The audience came to hear Sinatra