Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [112]
Mervyn LeRoy directed the short. The Hollywood leftist Albert Maltz wrote the script, and the New York leftist Abel Meeropol, under his pen name Lewis Allan, wrote the title song’s lyrics. The little film had great impact. It got people talking about tolerance; the liberal press ate it up. Practically overnight, as Tom and Phil Kuntz write in The Sinatra Files, an analysis of the singer’s huge FBI dossier, Sinatra became “a darling of the American left.” LeRoy, the producer Frank Ross, Maltz, Meeropol, and Sinatra were all nominated for honorary Oscars, and they took them home in early 1946.
But the right-wing press, as powerful just after World War II as it is today, smelled a rat. Weren’t Maltz and Meeropol, no matter what name he was hiding under, both not only leftists but also card-carrying Commies? (They were. And defiantly so: Maltz would become one of the Hollywood Ten; Meeropol, who’d also written Billie Holiday’s great 1939 antilynching song, “Strange Fruit”—a number so hot Columbia Records wouldn’t release it—would eventually adopt Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s two orphaned sons.) The tolerance Sinatra was preaching looked, to Hearst’s Westbrook Pegler and the America First Party’s Gerald L. K. Smith and the Knights of Columbus’s Gerval T. Murphy, among others, like a newfangled cover for old-fashioned socialism. (In fact, much of the conservative criticism leveled at The House I Live In was a newfangled cover for old-fashioned anti-Semitism: virtually everybody involved in the short, not to mention almost everyone running Hollywood, was Jewish.)
It was directly in the wake of The House I Live In that FBI interest in Sinatra perked up again. On December 12, 1945, the special agent in charge of Philadelphia sent J. Edgar Hoover a memo advising the director that a confidential informant had identified “FRANK SINATRA, well known radio and movie star,” as a member of the Communist Party. The informant, the memo continued,
advised that the reason SINATRA was discussed was because of the recent article which appeared on him in “Life” magazine, setting forth his position on racial hatred and showing SINATRA talking before a Gary, Indiana, high school group.
On November 25, 1945 a full page article appeared in the Sunday [Communist newspaper] “Worker” on FRANK SINATRA. This article was written by WALTER LOWENFELS, Philadelphia correspondent for the “Worker.”
In the Sunday “Worker” dated December 2, 1945 under “Pennsylvania News” the following item appeared: “FRANK SINATRA is going to get a gold medal and a silver plaque at the Broadwood Hotel, December 10. He will receive the first annual Golden Slipper Square Club Unity Award for his contribution to racial and religious tolerance.”
This information is being furnished for whatever action is deemed advisable.
The war was over, but the country was shell-shocked. The atrocities in Europe and the Pacific were emerging in their full horror. The U.S.A. focused on new enemies. In 1945, the House Un-American Activities Committee, having heretofore convened on an ad hoc basis, became a standing committee. And in January 1946, Gerald L. K. Smith—white supremacist, Jew hater, Holocaust denier—testified before HUAC that Frank Sinatra was acting “as a front” for Communist organizations. He spoke of “Hollywood’s left-wing cabal” and called Sinatra “Mrs. Roosevelt in pants.” It all would have almost been comical if much of America, at the moment, hadn’t been taking Smith and the like so seriously. And Joseph McCarthy, campaigning for the Senate, was waiting in the wings.
At first Sinatra brushed off the right-wing rhetoricians like so many pesky flies. “You know,” he told Walter Lowenfels, in the above-mentioned Worker interview, “they called [seventeen-year-old] Shirley Temple a Communist. Me and Shirley both, I guess.” Yet soon he was tempering his cockiness. “I don’t like Communists,” he told another reporter, “and I have nothing to do with any organization