Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [114]
Most of the thugs connected to the various crime syndicates around the country were built along the lines of Lansky and Luciano: small, homely men, born in poor circumstances in the Old Country or in the teeming ghettos of the American cities to which their parents had immigrated. Undernourished as children, they were street fighters: short, big nosed, scar faced, fearsome. Benjamin Siegel was something else again, far more handsome and magnetic than anyone in his line of work had a right to be. He gravitated naturally to Los Angeles because Los Angeles meant Hollywood, and Siegel was good-looking enough to be a movie actor. He made show-business connections as soon as he got to town—most notably the tough-talking Harry Cohn, founder of Columbia Pictures, fellow Jew, and an inveterate racetrack gambler frequently in need of large sums of money. The two men were drawn to each other for symbiotic reasons. For Cohn it was the cash. For Siegel it was Cohn’s ready access to actresses. Siegel had moved his wife and two young daughters west, but he was also happy to acquire a string of glamorous mistresses.
Even before Frank Sinatra come to California, Siegel’s legend loomed large. He was a star in a town of stars, possessing something no movie actor had: an aura of real danger. Bogart and Cagney and Eddie Robinson were only tough on the screen. George Raft had shady connections, but he was a lover, not a fighter. Siegel looked as good as any of them, and—it was whispered—he really killed people. Then it was more than whispered. In 1939, he was tried for the murder of a fellow L.A. hoodlum (and childhood friend) named Harry Greenberg; the newspapers covered the trial extensively, and though he got off, Siegel, who had been attempting to pass as a legitimate racetrack operator, was revealed as an authentic mobster. The papers loved to throw around his nickname, which he had come to hate. The word “Bugsy” alone could trigger the madness that had engendered the name.
When Sinatra came to town, there he was, the handsome criminal with the killer temper and the long-lashed blue eyes and clean jawline and slicked-back hair and beautiful sports jacket, sitting right across the aisle at Chasen’s, winking at him. The man who (Sinatra would have known from Willie Moretti) had personally pushed the button on Maranzano. Who had grown up with Luciano and Lansky. Who still ran the West Coast.
Which was better, to be loved or feared?
Both.
Hello, Frank.
Hello, Mr. Siegel.
Please—Benny.
Benny.
“Phil and Frank were enthralled by him,” said Phil Silvers’s first wife, Jo-Carroll, of Siegel. “They would brag about Bugsy and what he had done and how many people he had killed. Sometimes they’d argue about whether Bugsy preferred to shoot his victims or simply chop them up with axes, and although I forget which was his preference, I will always remember the awe Frank had in his voice when he talked about him. He wanted to emulate Bugsy.”
In the case of a competitor named Louis “Pretty” Amberg, Siegel covered all bases, setting Amberg’s car ablaze after shotgunning him and hacking him with an ax, not necessarily in that order.
Tough guy. Frank poses for a publicity shot in 1947, the same year he allegedly knocked down the virulently anti-Sinatra columnist Lee Mortimer with one punch. (photo credit 16.2)
17
Manie Sacks, Sinatra’s rabbi at Columbia Records, with Frank in 1944. The singer’s high-handedness in business matters caused bitter divisions between the two close friends. “Don’t friendship and sincerity mean anything to you?” Manie wrote to Frank in 1945. “Or is it that, when you make up your mind to do something, that’s the way it has to be?” (photo credit 17.1)
Throughout 1945, as Sinatra recorded up a storm in New York and Hollywood, he was building up a thunderhead of resentment against Columbia Records. Money was the ostensible cause—the singer was bearing costs, for music copying and arrangements and studio conducting, that he felt weren’t his to bear. (On the other hand, once he bought the arrangements, he owned them