Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [126]
Drastic measures were called for. The publicist phoned Maxwell at her hotel and came straight to the point. She had a morals clause in her MGM contract. Frank was a married man. Her own divorce was not yet final. Did he have to spell it all out for her?
She began to weep. He was being terrible.
Evans spoke gently but firmly. This was a terrible situation. A marriage was in jeopardy, and the emotional stability of two small children at stake. A little girl going into the first grade. A little boy waiting for his daddy to come home.
She wailed over the phone.
But she was the one who could make it all right. Marilyn could walk away and face the world with her head held high.
Frank called her an hour later and got the full waterworks. When he was finally able to make sense of what she was saying, he understood that they were not going to be able to see each other anymore. He didn’t sound quite as devastated as she would have hoped. They’d figure it all out somehow. That was when she knew it was all over.
He went to the fight anyway on Wednesday night, with Mr. and Mrs. Toots and Marlene Dietrich and Joe DiMaggio. An odd couple indeed: Dietrich was thirteen years older than the Clipper and not his type at all (who was?), but there they were together, taking the evening toward its inevitable conclusion. (Later he would report, unchivalrously, that she had bad breath.) DiMag got the expected reaction at Yankee Stadium, a hero in his first season back from the war, rusty after the break but a hero anyway. Sinatra didn’t mind a bit. (He was glad he hadn’t had to take a break—he might’ve gotten worse than rusty. He might’ve gotten dead.) Nor did Frank mind being the fifth wheel: he was in oddly cheery spirits that night. He and Marlene exchanged wry looks while Joe, breathing through his mouth the way he did, gazed at the other Joe, the Brown Bomber, beating up Conn in the blinding white arc lights.
Later that night Frank called up Lana, who had stayed in town after the premiere of Postman. She was delighted to hear from him.
There were still other distractions that summer. Sinatra’s quickly burgeoning FBI file reads: “The New York Office was advised by Frances Duffy, clerk of the Local Selective Service Board #180, New York City, that she resides at 424 Second Street, Brooklyn, New York, in a home owned by Mrs. Mary Fischetti. Miss Duffy stated that Sinatra, accompanied by Charles Fischetti, visited the home of [Fischetti’s] mother and spent the evening there in about June of 1946.”
The whole scene is sweetly absurd: Miss Duffy, the timid clerk at the Local Selective Service Board, renter of a small apartment (cat, crucifixes, lace doilies) in the brownstone of kindly widow Fischetti on quiet, tree-lined Second Street in Park Slope, had clearly seen Charles Fischetti before, and was clearly of a suspicious turn of mind. Though the silver-haired gent liked to pose as an art collector and sometimes introduced himself as Dr. Fisher, he was in fact a gangster, also known as Trigger Happy or, among friends, Prince Charlie. He was the oldest and most distinguished-looking of the crooked Fischetti brothers (the others were Rocco, three years younger, and Joe, the baby of the family). First cousins to Al Capone, the Fischettis had worked as Scarface’s bodyguards during Prohibition and were now highly placed crooks in Chicago. They wintered in Miami, in a beautiful mansion in the exclusive enclave of Allison Island. There seemed no reason for Sinatra to have spent an evening with Charles Fischetti and Fischetti’s mother in June 1946, when he was in the midst of shooting a movie.
As you might imagine, there is no dearth of speculation on the subject. Some sources mention darkly that the Sinatras