Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [111]
This is somewhat at odds with the picture of the tough little singer facing down a roomful of hostile steelworkers. Maybe (it’s a great story) Frank did offer to lick any son of a bitch in the joint; maybe the quote was a product of Keller’s fertile imagination.2 Nevertheless, Sinatra (perhaps emboldened by the warmer than expected response of the GIs in North Africa and Italy) must be given points for going to Gary at all. And in the weeks that followed—even though the Froebel strike continued after he left—he racked up even more points, collecting an honorary scroll from the Bureau of Intercultural Education in New York (Eleanor Roosevelt, with whom Frank would form a warm bond, was the keynote speaker); the Philadelphia Golden Slipper Square Club’s annual unity award; the Newspaper Guild’s Page One Award; a citation for “outstanding efforts and contribution to the cause of religious tolerance and unity among Americans” from the National Conference of Christians and Jews; et cetera, et cetera.
Evans and Keller were thrilled. All those awards washed out a lot of nasty gossip, given the public’s short attention span. For the time being, anyway.
But it wasn’t just the high-school visits that lent Sinatra new moral substance. Over the summer, at the suggestion of former MGM production chief Mervyn LeRoy (“You could reach a thousand times more people if you’d tell your story on the screen”), he’d made a fifteen-minute movie short called The House I Live In. Sinatra plays himself in the RKO featurette, appearing first in a recording studio, singing “If You Are But a Dream,” and looking magnificent—slim, suntanned, and sleek (even shot from his bad side, though probably through gauze, by Robert De Grasse, who’d made him look so resplendent in Higher and Higher and Step Lively). His face, at this point in its development, is a long triangle beneath those sculpted cheekbones. He mugs shamelessly for the camera, acting the song, feeling the song, being the song—in short, dreaming. His eyebrows rise expressively, that beautiful mouth trembles passionately. Then he switches gears.
When he steps outside for a smoke, he encounters a gang of boys who have cornered another kid with dark hair and Semitic features.
“What’s he got? Smallpox or somethin’?” Sinatra asks.
“We don’t like his religion!” one of the gang responds.
“His religion?”
“Look, mister,” another boy pipes up. “He’s a dirty—”
“Now, hold on!” Sinatra interjects. He softens. “Look, fellas,” he says. “Religion makes no difference. Except maybe to a Nazi, or somebody that’s stupid. Why, people all over the world worship God in many different ways. God created everybody.”
As he explains it to them, he’s acting as passionately as he acted while he sang in the recording studio, only now it’s in a slightly different key—now, rather than being romantic, Frank is being kind and thoughtful and gentle but strong: ultimately persuasive. You’d never guess in a million years that this is a man with a temper so violent and unpredictable that his best friends, including Sammy Cahn and Phil Silvers, are terrified of him. The man in The House I Live In is Sinatra’s best self, twenty-nine years old and beautiful and solid and thoughtful. This self existed, not just on celluloid. Seeing him reasoning with the tough kids and persuading them, you just want to give this guy a prize of some sort.
Then, before long, he’s breaking into song again, to the kids this time. It’s the title number, a paean to tolerance. What was America to him?
All races and religions
That’s America to me.
And it was dynamite. Looking at the film (and listening to the song) three generations later, you can’t help thinking: