Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [139]
A still frame from a newsreel taken when the plane landed in Cuba shows Sinatra, having just disembarked, in the midst of a small group of fellow passengers, all male. The faces all wear that distracted, just-got-off-the-plane look. Frank, seemingly unaware of being photographed (or simply inured to it at this point), is gazing off to the side, squinting in the tropical sun. He wears a snappy tweed sports jacket, a patterned necktie, a crisp white shirt. In his right hand is a large, squarish valise. From his posture—leaning to his left to support the valise’s weight against his hip—the bag appears to be quite heavy. Behind him and over his right shoulder is a gray-templed man later identified as Rocco Fischetti. In the left foreground of the frame stands a dark-haired man in a gray suit, cigarette in his mouth, cuffs shot, his pinkie-ringed hand partially shielding his hunched head. The man looks patently like a gangster—more specifically, like the template for a 1940s gangster lovingly re-created in Francis Ford Coppola’s movie of The Godfather. There is good reason for this—Joe Fischetti was a gangster. His big brother Prince Charlie, the man who had in all likelihood invited Sinatra on this trip in June at Mary Fischetti’s Brooklyn house, luckily (or craftily) avoided the camera.
A vast amount of attention has been devoted to Frank Sinatra’s four-day trip to Havana in February 1947, at the time in newspapers and magazines and over the years in the immense body of Sinatra literature. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the sojourn achieved mythic status—which is not to say that much of what has been written about it isn’t true. Even giving Frank the maximum benefit of the doubt, it would seem that he made some very bad decisions at a very sensitive time in his personal life and his career. This was his walk on the wild side with the Mob, with the men he had come to admire for all kinds of reasons, both inexcusable and understandable.
His Cuba trip wouldn’t have become legendary had it not coincided with the Havana conference, but the coincidence was no accident. The many attendees had known for months that Frank would be coming; they had been looking forward to it. (One account has it that a Sinatra concert in Havana was, from the beginning, a cover story for the whole gathering.) Not only was the singer the biggest star in America; he was also an Italian-American. And no doubt due in part to efficient public-relations work by Sinatra’s early supporter the affable and popular Willie Moretti, Frank was widely known to be friendly where the Boys were concerned, neither a pushover nor a pain in the ass.2
Most important, though, he was respectful.
But did respect translate to compliance—or, more pointedly, complicity? Was Sinatra’s mere association with these men a form of guilt in itself? (Many have charged that it was.) Or did his sins run deeper?
It almost didn’t matter. In the court of public opinion, Frank’s goose was cooked—a predicament he owed, indirectly, to Ernest Hemingway.
In early 1947, a thirty-one-year-old Scripps-Howard columnist named Robert Ruark traveled to Cuba to visit the writer’s haunts (Hemingway owned a villa a few miles outside of Havana) and, if possible, to meet the great man himself. While in the capital, young Ruark, who had quickly built a large readership with a lightly hard-boiled, humorous writing style that owed much to his literary idol, stumbled upon not Hemingway but the scoop of a lifetime. Fifteen years later, Ruark reminisced, in a column about the recently deceased Lucky Luciano:
A freakish accident put me in Havana one time, just after the war, when I was a rookie in the cosmic column business, and I collided with Charlie, who was conducting a sort of hoodlum’s summit with the big names of the mob …
I was young and brash and full of beans and when I ran into the aristocracy of gangland in Havana, said hoodlums being accompanied